Arelith

I don't mean in terms of reward, I mean in terms of difficulty.

Years ago, I ran the aboleth, and it was a grueling slog; an amazing, difficult dungeon, we burned through dozens upon dozens of kits, even on a full party of mid and high epics. We ran out of supplies by the time we hit the bottom floor, we were worried we wouldn't make it. We had to employ tactics. It was AWESOME.

Today I ran it with three epics, a mid teen, and two low teens. We didn't use much in the way of kits, the dungeon was easy, the loot was lacklustre. Even on the third and fourth floor, chest loot was what you could expect to find from the Quaggoth raider camp. Is there no tier for difficulty or is it just THAT random?

The aboleth are actually signifigantly less of a threat than the blackguards, priests, and assassins of the floors above them, and I think it can be boiled down to the NPCs. 60% of what we fought seemed to be oozes and slithering trackers.

Trackers are very binary. Either they wreck your shit, or you yawn and crush them. With enough AC, they are zero threat. Most of the encounters felt like we blitzed the bipedal mobs, and then boredly smacked the trackers as they split, and split, and split again. The only encounters we had any close degree of trouble with, was with lots of blackguards, assassins, and fewer priests. The priests do this thing where they blind the party, and then next round hit you with a dispel and remove that blindness.

But the Aboleth were just kind of... there. The AoE scream burst thing works, but their AB is pretty bad, their HP is laughable. In the lore, Aboleth are supposed to be this race of terrifying mind destroying, slaving despots, but the ones on Arelith fall far short.

Make stronk, make scary. Rebalance them to account for the power creep.

Its not clear what lvl range the lower floors are for.

I'd say it's better to just remove aboleth from that area entirely and replace it with harder, but more relevant, spawns than the floor above.

I thought the Aboleth were pretty tough. Strong physical attacks, mass haste, and the psionic mindblasts that whe hasted are doing an AoE ~60-70 dmg burst with knockdown 2x a round if unmolested.

In contrast I found most oozes and the bipedal enemies completely worthless. The Arcane oozes are awful b/c Spell Brach on hit, and Trackers either kill you in one round or are just annoying to kill because of splits that often flatfoot your PC.

Seems like many of the older tough dungeons got toned down. I know the Viper monastery is a yawn fest now. The Aboleth's use to be something almost everyone was terrified of, so much so that few people would venture there. Now their KD burst was really the only thing that was worrying.

I've soloed that dungeon with my Pal, the Aboleth are challenging if you're alone to be honest. If you are in a party, yes, it's very easy. But that's like most of the end-game dungeons if I'm not mistaking, so ... Well.
I strongly disagree when you say the upper floor is harder though. The upper floor is a joke.
As for trackers ... Those one are just annoying and uninteresting, takes hours to kill and aren't anything close to a threat.