We've had a bit more time to try out the fae realm and make lvl 80 sets so I've come up with a few more things to say:
Firstly, I'd like to take back what I said about the midge barters locking gifting being annoying. I still think there are a lot of non-worthwhile barters such as the phoenix feather one, phoenix beaks, pixie dust and a few others I'm probably forgetting but I don't mind it as a mechanic so much anymore. Probably partly because there's new stuff to be unlocked with royal jelly so I have a reason to do them again, but also the initial rush has worn off and fewer honeycomb runs are happening. Before I would call you crazy if you wanted to farm bees for the hour or so it would take to get all the stingers for 1 barter compared to getting 10+ royal jelly in a honeycomb run in a similar amount of time, but with fewer runs happening it's not as realistic to use them as your only source of jelly anymore.
Secondly, I think damage scales too well from lvl 70 to 80 with the high damage skills such as fire magic, archery and hammer as well as the epic attack damage from skills such as druid, psychology and mentalism. Essentially the combination of increase in base damage, multipliers, flat additives etc all combined is too much for the dps skills but also the increase in base damage especially with the epic attacks is significant.
To be more specific, I'll talk about my build, hammer/mentalism, which I have focused to be an almost entirely pure dps build. At lvl 70, using max-enchanted yellow gear I could manage to hit roughly 4.5k with my pound to slag ability, using adrenaline wave with extra crushing damage mod, discharging strike and latent charge beforehand with the +epic attack damage mods and the extra damage to enemies with 66% or over rage too.
Now at lvl 80 with the same mods but a higher lvl and still missing the boots, which have a pound to slag damage mod, I'm able to hit 8k. The problem is that the fae realm elites for the most part have around 20k hp which is about the same as some of the mobs in gk, yet I can now deal 3.5k more damage with a single skill. When I group for the bounties, I feel lucky if I manage to get 3 abilities off on a single elite before it dies. I know this is because they're probably designed for groups of 3-4 so I'm not asking for every mob in the fae realm to have 40k hp, but in reality if a group can fill to 3 or 4, it normally fills all the way to 6 since the first few players are the hardest to get. The only exception to this is maybe the phoenixes since with 16k hp they can be relatively easily duoed and I would say they should be easy since they essentially gate fire magic research for 70+. The honeycomb mobs with 40k hp are much more reasonable and I think for the mobs in the new dungeon this is a good number OR player damage should be retuned a little bit.
Specifically to hammer too, you will nearly always benefit from the extra damage when the rage meter is 66% filled. Even my lowest damage skill - leaping smash with 1000 damage is enough to completely fill an enemy's rage meter and that's with only 1 of the mods that increases the rage I generate.
This is not a universal problem, my other main build ice magic/battle chemistry doesn't have unfair scaling in my opinion, but it also has no epic attacks and few damage combos and I think it only becomes a problem when it's everything combined.
I think elite damage is actually well balanced now with the new combat refresh. I use leather armour and the full heal helps improve survivalability a lot on my dps-focused build, without being op and allowing me to solo elites like they're nothing. I tried to do something similar a while ago by modding reconstruct and throwing it into my build as a single heal, but I generally found that modding it wasn't worthwhile since it could only heal for a bit over what I would take from 1 attack anyway. The combat refresh used to be the same as this but now I would say it is very useful and just what was needed.
I still have power problems, but I also don't use cloth armour, partly because fae mollusc slime is too difficult to gather in large quantities compared to the ease of leather but also because I already made my leather set before this update and I'm not going to make another entire set. I wouldn't say the power problems are game-breaking for me though, rather I see them just as the tradeoff for hammer's dps, which all-in-all means it's probably in a good spot right now.