Difficulty describes how challenging a Habit, Daily, or To Do is for you to complete (e.g., painting your house is harder than brushing your teeth). The levels of difficulty are trivial, easy, medium, and hard, with easy being the default assigned to all new tasks. A higher difficulty results in greater rewards when a task is completed, but also greater damage when a Daily is missed or a negative Habit is clicked.
Players might want to change the difficulty of their tasks if they feel that certain tasks should be rewarded more if completed or punished more if not completed.
Setting the Difficulty[]
Difficulty settings for Habits, Dailies and To Do's are found below the Checklist when you edit a task (click the task or the "edit" option in the dropdown to edit the task). The difficulty of tasks from active challenges or shared task lists can not be altered except by the challenge creator/group leader.
Difficulty Options[]
A task's difficulty can be set to trivial, easy, medium, or hard. The difficulty sets a base rate for task reward and damage which is then modified according to the number of task checklist items, random critical hits, and player Stats. For drops, the reward rate is further adjusted according to Achievements and diminishing returns. These base rates take the relative values of .1 (trivial), 1 (easy, default), 1.5 (medium), and 2 (hard).
The same base rates do not necessarily apply to damage dealt by bosses during quests. Missing trivial Dailies will cause bosses to do only one tenth the damage of missing an easy Daily to the party, but missing medium and hard Dailies will cause no extra damage to the party.
A task's difficulty does not affect how much damage the task does to a quest boss.
Easy[]
All newly created tasks begin on the easy setting by default. If a player feels that the task is easier or harder than usual or will take less or more effort, they can adjust the difficulty to one of the other choices.
Easy tasks reward or damage the player at a rate of 1, i.e., they set the reference rate for reward and damage because easy is the default difficulty setting.
Trivial[]
Trivial tasks grant rewards or cause damage at a rate of 0.1. For example, a To Do set to trivial will give one-tenth as many rewards as would have been received if it had been set to easy. Trivial tasks make a good fit for large checklists and tasks that are meant mostly as reminders.
The player loses less health from trivial Dailies and Habits if the player does not complete the Daily or clicks on the "-" option of the Habit.
If the player is on a boss quest and does not complete a Daily with a difficulty of trivial, the boss will do one-tenth as much damage to the party as it would have done had the task been set to easy or medium or hard.
Medium and Hard[]
Medium tasks reward at the rate of 1.5. Hard tasks reward at the rate of 2. For instance, a To Do set to hard will give twice as many rewards as would have been received if it had been set to easy. If a player feels that a certain task has been tougher than normal or has been put off too long, they should feel free to increase the difficulty to medium or hard as an incentive to overcome the obstacle.
The player loses more health from medium or hard Dailies and Habits if the player does not complete the Daily or clicks on the "-" option of the Habit.
If the player is on a boss quest and does not complete a Daily with a difficulty of medium or hard, the boss will do the same damage to the party as it would have done had the task been set to easy. I.e., the medium and hard difficulty settings do not make any difference to the damage caused by a boss. The same is true for damage done to the boss by the player: harder tasks do not deal more damage to the boss.
Information for Developers
Difficulty is called priority in the code.
As described above, damage caused by a boss is reduced if a missed Daily has a trivial difficulty. It is not increased if the difficulty is medium or hard. This is, as far as we can tell, simply because we forgot to include priority when we were writing the damage-from-boss code. We realised this after the trivial difficulty was introduced. We then changed the code so that trivial would cause much less damage-from-boss, because players were expecting that. We did not change medium and hard to cause more damage-from-boss because players would have been used to how much damage they were taking from their Dailies and causing them to suddenly take a lot more would have been unfair. At some future time, we might introduce separate mechanisms for controlling earnings and damage from tasks, and if so, we'll allow the medium and hard damage setting to do more damage-from-boss than easy.