Is there a new update that made Illuminate a lot more unfun?

Not real criticism. I want to see if everyone kind of feels the same way.

When I try hard, I play difficulty 10, but most times I rather play 7-8 to have a really chill time with friends and finish the entire map with samples. Especially with all of the balance updates in recent months, almost everything is playable at 7-8 difficulty and it allows us to be really creative while relaxed.

That changed with today for Illuminate for some reason. Maybe there are a lot more Watchers and they detect further/call more often? Maybe it's the elevated overseer being much more accurate? I feel like every creative loadout I run just has one big shortcoming, either unable to deal with shields, not able to effectively deal with multiple tripods with accuracy in a chaos, or lethal ammo economy issues, so on and so forth. It kind of feels like old high difficulty Bot missions from a long time ago, where I feel like I always have to run close to optimal builds even at 8.

This honestly speaks highly of how much good work Arrowhead has done to make everything feel powerful and fun generally, but today for me it feels like going one step towards that old direction I don't love. Just a thought. Let me know if you feel the same.