Assault Battle: Places of Power too difficult?

Nihilus really skews the difficulty calculation on this one. It'd be nice to know what the developers intended, because with him it's so trivially easy and without him it's very difficult.

They advertise it as being Very Difficult, so maybe this is what they intend? In which case Nihilus' leadership ability is their way of rewarding people who have advanced that far into the game.

As I said, it's hard to tell because one character makes it such an insane outlier.