We've got along quite fine with most of the battles on previous islands, and if we didn't, we just went somewhere else for the time being and returned once we had gained a level or so. We also explored every corner of these islands and did every side quest we could find, so I would have expected to be a bit "overleveled", if anything. But in the Arx part it seems rather difficult to find a fight that matches our level, there are lots of overwhelming boss-type ones, few regular ones, and our progress has come to a crawl. Like, we finally find the time to play for two hours, once a week or so, and it's all wasted on long tough battles that in the end we fail to win, so we have to reload. The game kind of plays like a puzzle now, where we have to find out in what strict order to tackle the encounters so that we gain enough xp to level up and get better chances at all the more difficult battles. I wonder, is this the normal, intended experience, or are we missing something?

I've been playing DoS2 with my girlfriend the same way as you: all side quests done, all map explored, so we have got almost every possible experience point in our way.

Then we reached Arx some days ago and we experienced what you say, battles are more challenging now, even if our level is the same as for the enemies. It seems like all battles had a mini-boss in it, and we had to repeat most of them or simply lose it, reload, and go another way to avoid that fight for now. It is annoying because after 100 hours into the game, I don't feel like repeating a lot of fights...

We will keep exploring the city and gaining experience from exploration and quest related conversations, to see if those battles get a bit easier...