Incredibly interesting but questionably balanced

Apotheosis is an incredibly ambitious mod, and does actually manage to achieve many of its goals. The elites and invaders help break up all enemies feeling the same and can add more interest to combat.

I honestly really love the conceptual idea of socketing gems, a way to imbue gear with abilities you can find through exploration and combat. I also really like the fact mobs have more variety added through elites (although I will get into the issues I feel there are with the execution of this later). This mod is a treasure trove of interesting concepts and ways to improve systems in the game, however it fells like this mod would be better if it thought about how these would interact with other mods.

My issues with this mod start at the balance, but in my opinions hint at some deeper issues when this mod is viewed from the standpoint as a small side addition to many packs as it is often treated. As a mod that is often treated as a side mod, this mod does a lot of things in questionable ways, for example the elites/invaders can often be so fast it's incredibly difficult to escape them, or have so much regeneration it is almost impossible to kill them with your gear at the time. This, in my opinion, often draws from the intended experience of the pack/game because it interrupts the players focus, forcing them to deal with some threat when they may have just been trying to build or explore.

On the other hand, for combat focused packs which are designed to make a player try to become as powerful as possible and feel as 'cool' as possible, this mod does really work, however I feel this is a narrow scope for the usability of the mod. This leads on to understanding how this mod is balanced, because it isn't balanced around vanilla gameplay, it is balanced around taking everything and scaling up both damage and health in roughly equal proportions. While this can make the player feel powerful, and lead to cool moments, it often makes other mod's content get overshadowed as spells become underpowered or modded bosses become trivial. This is fixable with configuration, but out of the box as it is in many packs it can be a large issue.

You should try this mod, maybe in a small pack or in a combat/RPG pack, but please, don't shove this into any old pack and expect the balance to work. I recommend this mod to those that don't mind sinking their teeth into config files to make sure their mods work correctly together.