Expansion Quests Ranked By Difficulty

[Stradivarius]

This is a thread about your opinion on the difficulties of each xpansion pack in terms of how the quests are built, the difficult of the enemies (through all the various settings), and length/puzz/complication of the quest.

This is in reference to a fresh player doing each quest for the first time.

From most difficult to least difficult.

1.) Saltmarsh (heroic especially)
2.) Sharn (both H and L)
3.) Isle of Dread (both H and L)
4.) Feywild (both H and L)
5.) Ravenloft (especially L)
6.) Shadowfell
7.) Menace of the Underdark/FR stuff.

[Bartholomew456]

Can't speak to the rest becuz I don't own it, but assuming Epic...

MOTU:
Eveningstar chain: Fairly standard on EE at/around level.
Sschindrilynn chain: A little difficult on EE. The most egregious example of this is the necromancer quest, especially the end fight where you hit red alert automatically and get swarmed by zombies and driders and drow.
Demonweb chain: Difficult (EE) but for all the wrong reasons. Reclaiming the Rift makes you fight the end boss with a massive HP penalty (if soloing). More experienced players should do fine but you're pretty much two-shotted if you're a firstlifer. Trial by Fury is a massive pain just to navigate.
CITW: I suppose, just standard raid stuff. Lolth draining spell points can be really painful though.

Shadowfell:
Wheloon chain: I barely remember anything other than the final quest. I don't even think I ran it on epic.
Storm Horns chain: Mostly average difficulty on EE, except for Breaking the Ranks, which is very difficult, what with spell wards everywhere on the edges, no time to disable said spell wards, long waves of enemies with almost no breaks, and 1 shrine only. The Shadar Kai spam at the end is the absolute worst.

Sharn:
Sharn pt 1: LH, so I'm assuming *very* difficult on LE, while also not being particularly enjoyable. Just Business is the most difficult one here, from the terrible flying combat mechanics, to the 10,000 explosions per second bomb bats, to the goblin end fight. A wholly terrible quest.
Sharn pt 2: LH, but a lot more enjoyable (and somewhat easier) than the first chain. Although I suspect that's also because I run them fairly frequently for loot so I'm actually familiar.
PN: A lot of coordination needed, but not actually a particularly difficult raid. The elemental batteries and the minotaur can be pains, but I've never even had anything close to a party wipe playing it. Moving parts required but still simple enough to run PUGs on LH.
THTH: Oh boy. The trash hits for upwards of 1,000 damage on LN. A sunburster is pretty much mandatory. Of all the raids I've played, this was the hardest. Once we went in with a smaller party (about 7 people) and got wiped really quickly when the skulls came out.

[HailBlazR]

All content is easy these days, but I will say that Failwild is significantly more challenging than other level 5 quests and has some of the worst quest design in any expansions. Whether it's the stupidly large hallways in Frosty Reception, stupid Witch Hunt, or everything about Needle in a Feystack, it's just rage inducing, even if it's not too difficult. Mob density is also ridiculous for its level. Failwild is the most obvious example in recent memory of a pack where SSG clearly did not playtest anything.

I guess Sharn and Shadowfell can be kind of challenging for their level if you're soloing, but that's fine. They're mostly well-designed quests and they have no instances of dumb quest design, outside of arguably Shadar Kai assassins.

[DaviMOC]

From epic/legendary standpoint:

1) Shadowfell was super hard for me back when lauched. Shadar-kai started spinning chains and only the ranged was left standing (what a surprise). "Thrill of the hunt" not only for the shar-da-kai mobs but the boss was mostly only defeated by parties using the safe spot on ranged weapons. Storm honrs, "Breaking the Ranks" had a very intense peaks of difficulty but even the other ones was very hard.

2)I missed Ravenloft launch but even after Sharn release, when I got It i found quests pretty puzzle intense and long. Combat were ok challenge but it gets hard by party weariness on long quests.

3)Sharn got a balanced challenge my only issue with that was "best laid plans" and that broken tatical detonation spam with no saves even so was easy to overcome on groups.

4)Feywild got ok challenge nothing to say about it.

5)I wasnt here when Menance was launched, joined when level cap was already 25 and was pretty easy when I arrived.

6) Saltmarsh was easier than Menanace maybe because this time I was already well stabilished in the game.

7) IoD is the easiest expansion pack I ever played without any of the gear offered by it. No super labyrint like quests such as amber temple and invitation to dinner, no mobs with broken abilities like tactical detonation, no super quests with end bosses that can eat 1h+ of gameplay on a wipe such as WGU but also its the less enticing expansion for me. I dont care about the characters, the levels arent very detailed. Very few new props and the quest are small to medium duration at max but the dinossaurs and the return to not flying ships are cool. The only challenge I find on IoD is actually drop rate, since Ravenloft drop rates seems to go lower and lower.

On heroic :

Was very hard to do saltmarsh at level but its fine nowdays, feywild got a difficulty bump. Shadowfel its ok but not worth doing on heroics IMO. Ravenloft and sharn seems ok to me and I didnt play IoD on heroics yet.


I wanted to consider the lauch time of those expansions as with time the older ones just get easier and easier making the comparison pointless.

[Seph1roth5]

This is a thread about your opinion on the difficulties of each xpansion pack in terms of how the quests are built, the difficult of the enemies (through all the various settings), and length/puzz/complication of the quest.

This is in reference to a fresh player doing each quest for the first time.

From most difficult to least difficult.

1.) Saltmarsh (heroic especially)
2.) Sharn (both H and L)
3.) Isle of Dread (both H and L)
4.) Feywild (both H and L)
5.) Ravenloft (especially L)
6.) Shadowfell
7.) Menace of the Underdark/FR stuff.

I think you need to make 2 different lists, one for heroic one for epic. Because saltmarsh is easily the hardest at heroics (for new people) because newbies won't have gear or experience to deal with all that. I'd put ravenloft higher as well because it's a lot of undead with their immunities.

[parttimewarrior]

It really depends on a character. Even at first life, a small party of a vanguard pally + spellsinger will brutally murderize everything in their path on any difficulty (excluding reaper, but if you're lucky with equipment you can probably try R1 for some quests as well).

I've no experience with Saltmarsh and IoD so far, but of the rest I'd name Shadowfell the easiest one if not for the Thrill of the Hunt quest (the final battle is a huge pain, especially if you're soloing). Breaking the Ranks could pose serious problems as well, depending on your build.
Sharn is not that difficult enemy-wise, but some quests are just plain tedious. Still nothing too extreme if we exclude the raids.
Underdark is actually pretty demanding for a first lifer. Lots of difficult enemies (drow poison is scary as hell), traps, spell wards, locked doors, save-a-lot-of-civilians mechanics etc.
Feywild is pretty easy on Heroic, but very difficult on Legendary. It also includes a couple of the most annoying quests in the game (Witch Hunt and Needle in a Fey Stack). Wake Me Up Inside isn't much fun either.
Ravenloft is kind of unbalanced - there's a couple of easy quests but there's also An Invitation to Dinner which has two of the most difficult fights in the game excluding raids. Sealed in Amber is no walk in the park either and even Death House could be difficult if you can't disarm traps and have no evasion.

Thus, ranked from the most difficult to the least difficult in my opinion (not counting the raids):

1. Ravenloft
2. Feywild
(switch these two for legendary difficulty)
3. Underdark
4. Shadowfell
5. Sharn