Having some sort of challenges involving gods (andmastering their abilities) is sort of necessary IMO. It could make a huge shift in the structure of the learning curve. The way it is now, one of the reasons the game is hard (to get into) is that it takes a while to master the gods since they are kept obscure by the story structure. Getting rid of this layer of "fake difficulty", and thereby letting people figure out what they have at their disposal with more ease would cetanly lead to having an easier time figuring otu the most optimal difficulty curve for the actual dungeons.
A good example of this "fake difficulty" phenomenon from my expirience was how the game changed from suspiciously difficult to a complete steamroll the moment I took a couple of test runs to actually figure out how exactly old GG worked. I seriously wasn't aware that a very, very fundamentaly broken feature was at my disposal for months and the instant I became aware of it... well, other vets know what happened...
I wrote about it quite a while ago, the lack of "gods" tutorial of some sort was part of the "why is this game hard to test/balance properly" list along with overbuffed features being taken for granted and the structure of end game challenges being unintuitive and applicable everywhere...
I could elaborate on this if peoplehave doubts or if I was unclear.
