I like the difficulty, that is introduced to the Nether with this mod, but the straddler is just annoying. Whenever you enter a basalt delta, there are at least 5 of those mobs shooting at you and you can't kill them fast enough because of their extremely high health pool. So you just have to deal with being shot at from all sides and falling into lava all the time.

All other mobs from this modpack have some tactic, that makes them managable, but the Straddler is just an infinitely respawning pest and the only way to handle them is to avoid basalt deltas altogether. Might be that this gets better as soon as we get full diamond gear, but IMO the nether should be doable in enchanted iron gear.

More info for balancing evaluation:

• The server is on hard difficulty
• We are currently wearing enchanted iron gear
• We are usually traveling in groups of 2 to 3 people

Propesed Fixes:
Either...

• Drastically reduce Straddler spawn rate (something like drop bear would be perfect)
• Increase Straddler reload time
• Drastically decrease Straddler health/armour
• Remove Straddler completely

Use the shield it helps a lot

Unfortunately that's not an option when you try to build a Nether highway and the straddlers are constantly spawning on the bridge section you already built. They also don't seem to have any requirements for spawning apart from the usual full block condition.