Yeh, went from like level 32 to 70 to see how much I would have to grind to actually win the fight, she still oneshot hood in a tankier archtype, I played catchup a bit and then she threw 3 storms in a row and nuked the team. At which point I realized that I was going to be spending the rest of the god damn year grinding exp and dropped the game. Wtf kind of difficulty spike is that if I am supposed to be able to trust the difficulty markers on the quests?
Sierra Lee is known to enjoy trolling people in her games, so it could be that she put a trap in the game for people like you who cheat.
For example it could be that if you went above level 40, which is the max level in this game, this would trigger something.
Something like the bosses becoming unbeatable.
Or perhaps the game is simply not optimized to deal with anything above level 40.
At any rate this game is very well balanced, so if you can't defeat something then you may be missing gear or skills or something.
Or maybe you just suck.
I don't remember ever having trouble anywhere except the arena, and even there just a tiny bit of trouble.
So this game can definitely be completed without cheats.