I done the higher maths paper last year and was the most horrendous thing I've ever done. Paper one was just a normal paper but paper 2 was really weird; the layout and the types of questions. The recurrence relation with the sin totally threw me, couldn't even prepare for it or anything. Question 2 was hard for being question 2. They usually don't really go into hard problem solving until question 4/5 but 2, c'mon!!
I don't think anyone can really make a judgement on this years paper, maybe only if its the same writer(s) then you might assume it will be just as hard