Or maybe I'm understanding them wrong. I've had a few offenders, but the most recent one was the quest where you are required to manually mutate the Varkids at the Tundra Express. It said the recommended level was 13, but I was off faffing about with other quests, so I didn't get around to it until I was level 16. Well, I thought, this should be simple enough.

I was a bit put off when I saw that the Varkids were levels 13-15, but I counted my lucky stars on doing other quests first to pump up my level. However, the Badass Varkids that come as a result of the mutation are level 17, and can kill me in a matter of seconds. So how is level 13 a good level to go in to this mission, when the basic enemies are at least level 13, and the Badass variants are at least 17, and can take down a level 16 with a breath?

Someone please tell me there's a trick to understanding how difficult a quest is going to be beyond the level recommendations. Whenever I run in to one of these way-too-hard quests, it really kills the pace of the game and bogs the whole experience down. Is this just a point where I should open my game to the public for ten minutes, and then close it off when the quest is complete?

I think it's a bit unbalanced when your doing it solo, but if your in co op it's pretty spot on. But if you die twice trying to get though a quest, just go onto another one or just grind a bit, thanks to the badass ranking system it at least makes grinding feel like your achieving something

Yeah that one was a little messed up. It's the only one I can think of though. Are there others like this that you noticed?

I had a bit of trouble with the mission medical mystery when I was solo other then that I've been fine

That is about the only instance that i can think of when that level disbalance happens. All the other quests are fine. Later on if you do all the side stuff you will be over leveled for quests in general, so that issue becomes completely moot.

@chilibean_3 said:

Yeah that one was a little messed up. It's the only one I can think of though. Are there others like this that you noticed?

Like @laussica said, Medical Mystery messed me up pretty good, too. But it sounds like this is the only quest that's unbalanced to such a degree, so that's no problem. Time to grind, I suppose.

I felt like that Mutant Varkids mission was fucked regardless. The mutants were hard to deal with and I think I'd been, like, an 18 or something by the time I went in for it.

The Caustic Caverns were pretty rough, too. Mostly because the game throws dozens of those goddamn Crystalisks at you all at once.

I found that mission to be a pain in the ass more so because i couldn't reliably get the varkids to transform
 
@HistoryInRust: Im playing as a siren and i have the singularity skill. So i would phaselock the mutant and then he'd catch on fire and so would all the lil varkids that would get sucked in and then i had a longbow tesla grenade that just electrocute the shit out of anything that's near it. The sheer amount of numbers and colors that fly off of enemies when you have them in this set up is nothing short of amazing. 
 
The cystaslisks are a pain but that was until i got this jacobs pistol that has a blade that does 100% melee damage. So all i need to do is literally hit them once in their crit spot for the crystal to break. 3 hits and their dead. Super easy.  and that's before i consider phaselocking them to make it even easier.

I noticed this too when I was playing. My theory is that there's something jacked with the level scaling and quest tagging in the game. Basically it seems quests are tagged based on your level when you pick them up, however zones are scaled the first time you enter them (or maybe some other trigger, but they are definitely scaled at some other point). There also seems to be an innate difficulty to quests so you can have quests that have lower level tags, yet they are more difficult than higher level ones.

Basically the issue boils down to how they made the game more open-worldy this time around and allowed people to choose different paths, leading to the necessity of scaling difficulty. One thing I found that might be a clue though (not confirmed) is the XP reward of the quest. I believe it will give a better indicator than the actual level tag of the quest.

Yeah, I just died a whole bunch on the flying bastards. Feels really unbalanced but I managed to do it (I'm currently Level 14 Commando)

I had my turret upgraded with rockets by the time I did this quest (think I was level 16). That made it really easy. Rocket turret destroys everything. I just had to learn not to lay it down before the thing hatches or else it will kill the guys in the cocoon.

I play Zer0 and I had no problems with this particular quest. Then again I have a really good shotgun (still use it) and combined with the deception crit bonus the badass varkins couldn't do shit.