I've heard that before, and I didn't find it overly difficult (on Insane difficulty level; I didn't try the Heart of Fury mode though, which is supposed to be even harder).

It is a bit hard to say because party creation may affect the difficulty quite much. I used lots of times to create a "perfect" party, rerolling umpteen times for each party member until they got very high ability points etc. If I had just taken some of the pre-designed characters instead, I presume it would have been much harder for me.

But still, I considered e.g. Baldur's Gate 2 considerably harder, even though I ended up playing BG2 in Normal difficulty. I just remember some demi-liches from BG2 with their instant kill spells, dragons that just blew you away, bosses with very high magical resistance, and annoying vampires which you had to counter with certain two spells.

With Icewind Dale, it was more about just coping with masses of enemies at the same time, not that bad. The expansion though had one very hard boss encounter if I recall right, but after you realized that you shouldn't care about his minions at all, but just rush with everyone to kill the boss himself => cakewalk (the minions disappear when their boss dies).


That reminds me: I always found the Butcher mid-boss, and the Diablo itself, aggravating in the first Diablo game. Mainly because there didn't seem to be any tactics involved, all you could try to do is to keep hitting them hoping that you don't run out of HP and mana before them. I'm surprised I had endurance to beat them.