Hey, glad to hear that you guys are going to manage the difficulty a bit better. IMO, I always end up at a roadblock at around difficulty 50-75, never even reaching higher due to multiple factors I'll mention in a sec. I was tinkering a bit, and maybe you could do stuff to make the game even more complex, and in turn offer ways to make it easier, like...
- Having an incentive for coloring the floor, separate from the Dolls' skills. Just like in Splatoon, bytes could both suffer the penalty for treading through the player's color and also covering the surrounding area with the player's color when defeated. The fact that covering the ground does not affect bytes intensifies the problem of having too much ground to cover back, moreso when Byte Rush is in effect. This gives some breathing room to the player and ups the importance of coloring the ground with your own.
- Decrease the spawn rates of Gygabytes. I have noticed this in further difficulties where I kill a couple of keyboard warriors, and then the arena ends up with 2 more on 2 separate locations, having lasers focused on me again, or ending up taking down some impersonators and spammers, and then seeing bashers pop up outta nowhere 1 second after. Again, no breathing room that forces the player to dump their entire energy mag to dispose of them again, and if they don't, they get swarmed, clinged on, and possibly destroyed. You could argue it's lack of priority, but really, what's priority when you have 2 bashers and 2 spammers on your tail while cornered? Did I mention the keyboard warriors yet? You could also argue that this would decrease the bit count for the firewall, but you're also getting plenty enough from destroying bytes, and there's plenty of them to go around, so having too many of them isn't as bad as too many Gygabytes.
- Either bumping the damage of certain weapons, having a shooting gallery/training room, or influencing what weapons there are in the rotation. Since I know letting the player choose their weapons is a no-go (and would make subsequent battles boring), having RNG for weapon choices suck. Too often am I stuck with either the range variants or the power spread variants, and they're not exactly the best IMO. You can skip the rotation by getting into the arena, then quitting the game, but that wastes time. If there was a system to influence what weapons you would get or have an area for trying them first and get a feel for them, then jump in before the 2 plays expire for that weapon rotation, then it could leave some control to the player. I am aware the practice mode is a thing, but you're still left with the things the rotation leaves you, so if you wanted to try out a weapon you have not seen before (or even unlocked in the gallery), tough luck, wait some more :/
- Leveling skills? Maybe? This one may be more experimental, but say that after leveling up a Doll, you could also increase its base atk, def, nrg, etc, through skill points. This might sound redundant and probably minuscule, but could also provide some team composition and personalizing what you want each doll to be. All out on offense? Sure! Speedy on foot? You got it. Energy reserves for days on end? Why not? On top of it, you're already adding a special benefit you're getting from the cards. Not only the stat-ups, but the unique behavior/perk/upgrade you would not get from the base stat-ups from skills. It would not remove the importance of cards and allow both to exist.
...ok, I'm a bit biased on that last one since I'm a sucker for character progression, whether it's bland or complex, but in short, some suggestions I've thought about when playing to make the experience (hopefully) better. Loving the game so far, absolutely dig the style and dialog, it wears its heart on its sleeve very well.
Cheers!