Having more party members in Zorbus can really make a huge world of difference.
I think that's probably why i found Zorbus insanely hard previously, because i was playing with low spirit characters, that could then recruit only 1 party member at max (as unmodded spirit is what set the max amount of recruits in your party) , and most of the time with said party member dying i often had to play a solo character until i ran into a new potential recruit.
And solo characters are very often running into unwinnable situations as it's rare to not run into multiple ranged enemies (and worst running into magic users as their offensive spells hit much harder than bow/slings and can summon more uglies while crippling your character in webs/slime/poison) or enemies much stronger than your character in melee (that you can workaround somehow by using those small damaging ranged attacks from bows/slings and dark area to run into range again).
Having more party members even the odds and turn impossible situation into winnable ones without forcing you to run away so much to ambush enemies in smaller groups, it's also more fun as you can actually run into large scales fights with lots of magics, arrows, bullets and weapon slashing between your troops and theirs.
My aasimar leader archetype is still very much alive, sadly lost a lot of previous party members (one of the magic user that i customised with equipment was a killing machine, sadly lost it in a very difficult battle as blinking away didn't saved her as she landed into more monsters) that i had to replace with new encounters.
At some point i equipped most of the +search items i could and found the secret door in the trading plane (i had also killed every non-recruitable npc there so i could visit everything and get everything from the shops for free) There was a couple difficult enemies in the new area but the worst was a Nightwalker , i had met one previously in the dungeon but maybe this one was powered up at that point but it was extremely resilient and was hitting very hard (good i had that nice health surge ability) .
It was surprising because it took a lot more difficulty to take that thing out than the named enemies that were in that area.
Post battle was rather disapointing as i found nothing better in the loots and coffers than i and all my party members had before (probably bad luck). Oh at least there was the lot XP that was worth it i guess.
My current team managed to take out my first ancient dragon.
A bit before my team reached level 20 (the XP sharing special skill is really good so i could advance relatively quickly in levels despite my army), and after checking all the items that ancient dragon was guarding, it was all crap with at most +1 only modifiers, looks like the good luck in surviving is eating all my luck in finding actual better items
Still tons of fun to play "army general" with an aasimar leader archetype, much more fun than every character i tried previously.