What's the difference between the Normal and Apocalyptic difficulties?

Darksiders 2 doesn't seem to have any in-game info telling me exactly how the game difficulty will increase if I choose Apocalyptic instead of Normal difficulty. I've seen games handle this in a variety of different ways, such as upping monster health/damage, lowering drop rates of things like healing potions, or even sometimes entirely changing what types of enemies you see, like in Ninja Gaiden.

What specific effect does upping the difficulty have in this game?

Solution 1:

From what I've gathered, health and damage of enemies is significantly increased. (In some cases, up to twice the amount)

People seem to be having quite an easy time with the game, as long as you upgrade your weapons and focus on avoiding attacks.

If you are worried about the difficulty, you can always beat the game on normal. If you can collect all pieces of Abyssal Armor on one save, it carries over on the second playthrough.

Difficulty also affects the acquisition of specific achievements/trophies, such as defeating the game on Apocalypse difficulty.

Solution 2:

When I clicked on change difficulty, it prompted me that changing the difficulty mid-session will result in being rewarded based on the lowest difficulty selected. So my guess is the drops will change if you select a harder difficulty, however I'm not certain because it may mean that choosing difficulty mid-session will result in rewards based to the lowest difficulty you've selected (**easy/normal/apocalyptic respectively*) in the start*.

Solution 3:

As the difficulties increase enemies have more health and do more damage and are more aggressive. The restart health and wrath recharge are different as well; so when you die in easy you start with more health and wrath, and on apocalyptic you revive with what you had. Nightmare difficulty is the same as apocalyptic but with only 1 life, so when you die that is it.