[DarQraven]

I only have experience with Descent, but I can say that it's pretty great.
To address your concern of long playtime: yes. It is a long-winded game.

I have found that some experience with the game (or an experienced overlord) and proper organisation of the game pieces helps a lot, though.

We use some sort of hobby/sowing box with some 20-30 compartments in it to store all the chits, markers and tokens Added cost: 3 euros. Benefit: at least 30 minutes shaved off of game time (eliminates looking for potion token in giant stack of tokens on table, etc). This also makes setup and tear-down times significantly shorter.

Another thing is that the duration of the quests decreases quite a bit after the first playthrough. Quest 1 took us 5 hours the first time, only 3 the second time (both due to more comfort with the rules and not fussing too much about easily surmountable challenges).

The game is perfectly playable in shorter quests though. If you look at the Fantasy Flight website, there's a user-created quest database and many of those only take two hours.