Hey everybody. I wanted to chime in here after talking to the dev team. A couple of points on the difficulty that is experienced right now:
There's currently a bug where the enemy AI doesn't properly register your scaling. To be blunt: They think you're low (on health, not skill. We all know you're doing your best) and the AI should try to pressure you when this happens. We're looking at fixing this as soon as we can and this should decrease the amount of rushing you're experiencing (for those NPCs that are not rushers).
We're also aware that survivability sometimes doesn't feel great and we're looking into some possible changes. This is not a bug and more of a question of balance, but we wanted to mention it.
We're looking to increase your protection (how often enemies can hit you) when sprinting and / or going cover to cover in an upcoming patch as well. This should help the feeling that running away to re-position is basically a death sentence.
Thanks for your continued feedback on difficulty and the details on the different experiences you guys are having. It makes it really easy for us to bring this topics to the dev team and also really easy to understand what you like and dislike about the combat.