I was playing on hard for about 25 hours and doing alright, cautious but fun. Now I can't get past a certain key story point since I keep getting wiped, completely. No matter the party. So I decided to switch to normal and start grinding out some levels. Now I'm getting completely wiped on rifts and certain parts of a map. What is going on?

Did my game glitch? On hard I would die from 2-3 shots form an arrow. Even on normal as a mage I, every single archer/ranged targets me even with tanks. Getting kind of ridiculous. Do I have to go further in the story and my character jumps to some super saiyan level or am I missing some amazing armor or crafting?

Are the enemies you're fighting within your level range? Just because you can access a rift doesn't necessarily mean you're strong enough to handle it. Beyond that normal shouldn't really be that hard.

Make sure you're keeping your equipment up to date and make sure you have a sword and shield warrior for tanking and a mage with barrier and there shouldn't be much you can't handle.

Sounds like you just might be fighting enemies that are too high level for you. If you're getting targetted by enemies you might want to change your party to have Cass or Blackwall roll with you, since they have skills for pulling aggro.

And if they don't do so on their own, you can manually make them attack whoever's attacking you, or change their behaviour so they always attack who's attacking you.

If the enemy has a red skull on it, its much higher than you and you should run away.

Try going to a different map. Even if you can close some rifts on a certain map doesn't mean you can close them all. What I've been doing is going to area doing whatever I come across and when I find someone to tough I just leave and go somewhere else. I have been doing most story missions towards the high end of recommendation, and haven't had many problems.

In addition to the other tips here, go through your active quest log and finish all of the quick and easy ones. I'm playing on hard too, whenever it's obvious that I need to level up a bit I will always start by looking through all active quests and cleaning up all the ones that just require that I return to someone or do some quick task.

I'd also recomend crafting gear. At least for your tank character. The stuff you craft compared to the stuff you just find a bug tends to be a ton better. Always keep your party well geared.

@kenobi: there are parts of the maps (usually the far sides of it) that have sudden boosts in the difficulty level because the ennemies are suddenly higher level. This just reflects the fact that you should come back and visit this par tof the map later usually in connection with some quest. when ennemie are more than 2 levels higher sthan your party, even on normal you will take massive damage and inflict stupidly low damage. I ran into my first Revenant in the fellow Mire and got one shot as a warrior with full Barrier+ full guard + full health in one hit of the sword O_o....I rapidly ran away from the map and came back 2 or 3 levels later and the poor thing was utterly destroyed without even damaging me...The damage scaling in relation to level is insane in this franchise.