Well, I finally managed to complete the challenge portals, and they are indeed harder than your average exploration due to fact you can encounter above level cap enemies...If only you didn't had abilities like mind control, the unique lava worm with its instant recruit ability, and in earlier cases, healing nets, it would be the hardest challenge the game has to offer, but it is simply drawn out - you expect to use things like max level potions and such to keep up against it, but in reality, all you have to do is to capture a few above cap characters, use fusion fodder to propagate it, and mushroom essences to further get copies of such stats, and fuse characters with all traits and levels you need to make busted stuff that can keep up with its challenges. But of course, the nice part of it is the fact such places spawn bosses but without their boss tag, which means they can be recruited without mind bender artifact, though their level difference forces to use the aftermentioned skills/items in order to get one, but once you do, everything becomes much easier. Like commander can duplicate an unit of yours, without items but with all traits intact, skyworm can instantly kill anyone as long it has an action point left after attacking, krakens can summon extra fodder in water maps, lavafish is both durable and strong caster and mushroom cores provide a durable addition to mushroom parties. And that's on top of encountering things that are otherwise exclusive to other places like robots, special hybrids and so on. Still, they are a good portals to keep to get such characters, but when it comes to increasing challenge level, unstable ones are the way to go.
Now on things related to balance changes - solar orb got its damage reduced from 15 to 10, which I suspect is due to upgrade system making them very, very good weapons that scale well with upgrades, reaching 45 at 5 levels, already very good compared to its disadvantage, now it only gets 30 - still good, but it was designed for finishing off injured enemies to make up for its otherwise damage reducing disadvantage.
Robust trait reduces damage to 25% instead of 20%, so it means 4 hits instead of 5 without healing, but it is still busted due to fact it makes low health characters with regeneration trait and other things viable in the first place, especially with etheral which takes in damage first after reduction.
Familiar and hatcher were reduced to 8 and 6 respectively, but I suspect the latter doesn't allow for 100% hatching on the same day without using consuming upgrade for hatchery. Still a good change since they aren't easy picks when you have a lot of characters to manage late game, due to breeding already making a lot, even on gacha modifier.
Dating changes are the argubly the best changes, turning from something that isn't easy and has a lot of thinnings to make the best overall deck, to 3 seperate ones, fit for different situations and utilizing their best strengths to each, alongside different passives you can put to make them more flexible or more strong on their priority.
The new element, lightning is the most busted element when it comes to effective power, with electrocute skill able to clear entire parties on average sized maps, as long you connect fodder like pylons or wisps to them, making them much better than meteor storm skill that only deals half damage to all, and when not counting that, the ability to convert stamina from lightning damage into an action point, on top of halving said damage to all from its evolved spirits passives, it is the element that is meant to destroy hordes of enemies and giving extra actions to your characters.
Pylons have an additional quirk - creator can gene extract them and summon them as regular characters without their passive, just like the glow fairy/fly which become really strong with shadowform/etheral and mana transfer abilities, but pylons can have decent health growth through traits and recover health via regenerating trait/life steal/mana drain, which if done enough, results in essentially immortal characters, who can only lose to instant kills like consume ability, sky worms and such. Still, offense wise they are quite lacking, so relying on them will not result in quick fights, especially their lack to use items which also give extra power in general.
The archive trait, earned from 350% bonus diffilcuty achivement, is like knowing but cheaper - it allows you to summon any character from the gallery once, ranging from unimpressive to very strong once leveled up, including things that otherwise cannot be gotten like horror, which entangles every enemy each turn, a huge help in challenge portals for obvious reasons.
Challenger achievement unlocks itself, which means low level challenge portals that you can use on advancing modifier to farm low level bosses for fusion reasons, whenver it is good or otherwise I doubt for its base cost of 8.
Overall, those new patches changed balance for a bit, though the challenge portals are a bit different thing entierly - things that rely on breeding will be outdone by fusion by a major margin, and so do spiecies team bonus based teams, due to fact you will rely on such characters a lot, especially using impure hybrids to keep up with such things. Succubus assassin has it rough due to lack of party members, and so will the small/no elite parties.
