Just did it for the first time, I'm sorry but maybe the group wasn't optimized enough? But this was just punishing to the point of not being fun. The old Ghyl quest was a lot more enjoyable and hard at the same time. Pretty please revert it?
I would want it to stay and to say that not every quest needs to be spam-able. It's cool to have some that are there to offer a higher degree of challenge, plus it's not like you're missing anything by omitting it.
Good points to both, I was drunk and salty, please don't mind me
This quest is really challenging and rightfully so, Ghyl are beasts. I think it would be really fun to do this with a well optomized group.
At the moment there is a lot of +1 or higher weapons which makes it pretty inadvisable for certain types of character.
My suggestion would be just lower the amount of +1 weapons the enemies use, unless you want it to be as hard as it is now - if so I'd say leave it as it is.
After all the second part is optional.
Could replace +1 weapons with weapons that do -2 damage but add a 1d6 negative energy. Would allow them to hit through dr without bypassing it completely. Although, I've never taken the quest so take the post with a grain of salt.
I'd like to suggest that allowing resting between ghyl part 1 and 2 might be a good way to balance out the difficulty of these quests. Part 1 generally takes long enough that any turn/level spells/buffs will expire either before or early on within part 2 which amplifies how difficult part 2 is.