In my experience, it is not Skolas, but the team that determines the ease of the encounter. Post-patch, I have brought through several people who have never completed Skolas and was able to beat him in the first attempt. The encounter consistently took only 15 minutes to complete. But these were people who communicated and listened to instruction. They moved when I advised them to, we passed the essence consistently, we divided up to deal with mines... And in the end, they received the ciphers they so badly wanted. However, there is one team I played with that made the encounter absurdly difficult. Neither of my teammates had mics, so communication was impossible. They weren't aggressive in letting me, or one another know when they needed the essence taken. They often split up during rotations, which caused unnecessary deaths. One of them wasn't even using heavy. I found out later that he had not opted to bring any synthesis to the fight, something I would have advised him to do had we been able to talk to one another. It took around 20 minutes just to break the servitor bonds. We wiped shortly after diffusing the first set of mines. Note that this isn't meant to say that not having a mic is a problem. One of the easiest Skolas runs I have ever been in was with two people with no mics. We never had to speak to one another throughout the whole run and finished it with absolute ease. Because they both knew exactly what to do. Everything was done instinctively. We acted as a unit and everyone understood their responsibilities inherently. Due to these experiences, I would say that the ease of this encounter is determined by your fireteam. Maybe when the burns were active, you could argue that it was too easy to die, with enemies being able to one-shot you instantly. But with these new modifiers, I have found it to be much easier to bring even inexperienced players in, so long as I had the means to direct them.