i may have a solution

You want to make enemies powerful enough to evoke the sort of fear, awe, and dread suitable for their power. And i think players want it too, but in the fog of things we really lose out as players in the cost at the end. We get higher into levels and it could take an hour at least to win back that experience just to get a cheap shot by the big beam of a blackblood elite you couldn't even see. frankly, i wonder how armor builds even survive those if they aren't dodging around for 30 minutes waiting for an opening. But i digress. That what i mentioned before is an entire hour of our lives we can never get back. it's a devil's trade, because it's only when you get older that you realize how important that time can be. Thus dying is not a learning experience for us as people. It's a mechanic for your teams to buy time so we can always be kept just far enough from the goal to make it meaningful. I fully embrace this and the time i spend productively on Path of Exile. But in games that penalize with experience loss the cost is too high. So i have different proposition on how to get the same effect, but in an adaptive way that still has the effect of us ever reaching for godhood, while not costing us time that we can never get back. instead of penalizing us by remo0ving experience completely, instead slow exp growth temporarily in a way that scales with how often we die in a certain time frame. then you are encouraging players to use more than one character, do other things, the grail is always just a mile more ahead, players don't need to pay for it with their lives, and you can make some enemies even stronger because the price of defeat is less palpable.

or just make us drop our soul and we have to complete the map or something to retrieve it with lost exp. That sounds more like a game to me than pure torture.