I dislike this continual trend to make new monsters more and more difficult. All it does is separate the gap between who can and can't kill something. What is the purpose of making something harder? After about 5 minutes, something will definately get boring to kill. In under 1 minute, it could be considered too easy to kill (if it is supposed to be a boss-style monster). But why should it simply be about the killing? What about a puzzle or a hunt?
I would be surprised if any of the encounters would prove too difficult for a party of 5 to 10. Will it be difficult for less? Sure. Is this a bad thing? No. In fact, they need to start making serious monsters serious again so that there is a lot less opportunity to gain "high-end" stuff from solo grinding. Like, say, the Stygian Dragon.
As far as making stuff harder, there really is a finite limit as to how hard they can make something before it's impossible for someone to get through it even in a group, and at that point, they exceed the usefulness of whatever creature is in question, because aside from EM and game-wide events, people are highly unlikely to mob together in any sort of fashion.
There are several RP guilds on Europa that I would imagine have a hard time dealing with newly added content simply because of their restrictive rules (where they disallow certain items and equipment). I don't necessarily agree with this type of handicapping, but the point that this makes is why should you have to have the best items in the game (which collectively make you look generic and ugly) just to be able to "do" the new content?
Well, as far as this is concerned, they've sort of made their own sub-ruleset (which has always struck me as very silly, but I guess every RP circle does it to some extent). In this case, they're sort of saying, "We don't expect to defeat everything in the game, and some stuff WILL overpower us." That's sort of their choice.
You absolutely do not NEED the best items in game in order to survive. That's really a bit of a stretch on ANYTHING that's in UO at all.