Zepla: The Players Endwalker Left Behind

[Supersnow845]

Oh, I couldn't care less about muh barse, even if someone were to call me out it just would be a silent "okay, and?" and I'd be on my merry way. I know not everyone is like that, but for me how the job is actually designed mechanically is far more important, potencies could always be adjusted.

(For the record, this is not me saying I don't care about my overall performance. I can tell if I'm doing something wrong and whether someone corrects me or not I aim to improve it)

Sorry that was my bad only the dispel part was actually in relation to your comment, the rest of it about discord is as more just general for the current direction of this thread, I should have made the distinction

[Remember_The_Name]

I think the biggest thing this thread shows is we all collectively don’t agree on what midcore actually is

Well, I think the upper level of midcore is content that can be done with small PF engagement and LFG on-site (f.e. all bozjan raids, CE's, world bosses, NMs). Basically the stuff that you can hop into with minimum preparation, thorough coordination, food/pots, elaborated guides, marker assigments and all other good stuff.

And the lower level of midcore is...hmm. I think, HW and SB Alliance raids looks good (before they were inevitably dumpstered by ridiculous Ilvl sync and nerfed like Orbonne). Stuff can kill you if are not careful, wipes CAN happen if many players failed, etc. But, once again, they are very quickly reduced to casual level thanks to insane Ilvl bloat.

I cannot count Nier and The Twelve raids midcore, becuase hot damn they are undertuned. (with notable mention - Red Girl from Nier 3. She still slaps surprisingly well comared to the rest of the bosses being a snoozefest). A lot of sparkles, explosions - but nothing threatening.

In summary - Midcore is a type of content that actually requires players to rub their braincells together and use their tool kit wisely. And mechanics makes you think instead of simply zerg-rushing the boss. But the punishment is much less than extreme/savage. There is room for mistakes, but not to a silly level like casual duties.

But yeah, the definition quite vague. You can easily PF some old extremes (especially with Echo stacked) in an hour or spent whole evening bashing head against Golbez (this fight is indeed hardcore)

I personally do not find BA to be hardcore content both in the form it’s in now and when it was originally being progged

BA is a weird case. It is actually not that difficult to be claimed hardcore, but it requires preparation and organization in order for everyone to make it through. And said room for mistakes ranges from "good enough" to "Black Holed out of the instance, lmao". And it requires you to be in voice for a proper coordination.

BA is indeed a hardcore but on the lowest level. To me it feels like an easier 40-man from old WoW. You listen to raid leader, don't do stupid stuff - this is a clear.

Bethesda hallway

LOL, what is that part?

[Supersnow845]

This video is objectively speaking, wrong.
The way she describes the casual player is awful. The leap between easy/normal content and extremes is not big. Each fight teach you as the battle goes on (Golbez is a good example), you don't need a static to clear extremes. Savage is a different thing, they do more puzzles and positioning than extremes. It's more complicated to clear Savage in party finder.

Tbh if you reached lv90 and have no main or any idea of your rotation, you need to explore more. Variant/criterion content can be great for training. We have dummies for a reason. The game does what it can do to stimulate your progress. She said "the game doens't teach you about your rotation", what else do you need? lol

As i said, weird video, feels like she started to play ANY GAME last week.

This one was made just to pay her bills.

I’m a long term player who regularly clears savage and I am confident in my skills as a player

I am not ashamed to admit I literally could not figure out MNK’s rotation without a guide, the tooltips were an absolute mess that made no sense to me

If I wasn’t a player who had to know what my rotation is before I even look at the roulettes what would I do press random buttons and receive no feedback I was doing my rotation so badly wrong it’s almost laughable

I on the whole agree with this video less than the previous one but the point about this game not teaching you a decent rotation (hell it doesn’t even define GCD and oGCD or healing magic for healers) is 100% in point

[CidHeiral]

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there is some small amount of midcore content in the game, but it's a pain to identify it. We most certainly can't rely on the fight difficulty labels.

The problem is if you were to poll the player base you would get many varying opinions on what is too easy, too hard, and just right. So who is correct? You can't make a separate difficulty level for every preference imaginable. At some point people have to just suck it up and make the leap or admit they're not as "midcore" as they think they are.

That being said I do agree there is an overall lack of content around the Extreme level, which I would define as midcore. If they took the middle difficulty of criterion dungeons and tuned it down a bit that could fill that gap.

[Lauront]

That being said I do agree there is an overall lack of content around the Extreme level, which I would define as midcore. If they took the middle difficulty of criterion dungeons and tuned it down a bit that could fill that gap.

Yup I'd agree with all that. The big issue for me with extremes is they can feel quite repetitive once you've cleared them. There seems to be quite some variation in how people view the relic zone but I think whether you call it midcore or casual or whatever, it did provide a lot of content to engage with alongside a social experience; do agree with comments that it was weird to exclude DR from the DF system, but again it's that sort of thing they can iterate and improve on with the next zone, coupled with figuring out more ways to encourage people to do them once they cease to be current content. If the criterion dungeons were aimed at a difficulty better suited to midcore and you had the relic zone, and a revamped DD style (people had some good ideas for this from scanning the bigger thread), I think you'd have a nice suite of content with some challenge to it, outside of savage raids.

We really need more content that starts from the premise "you know all these mechanics from the standard fight; let's string them together faster and harder" without introducing whole new mechanics you need to practise with a team.

[...]

I would love to see a harder-but-not-savage version of things like the dungeons and alliance raids, so you can run it instead of the standard version once you're confident with the mechanics. Incentive can just be more loot in the chests.

What I suggested in the video is some content where you get tokens according to your individual performance. Something that doesn't stop or reset when you wipe, but rather gets delayed, while still rewarding trying to finish fast.
Some kind of "Survival" trial that has EX and/or Savage difficulty mechanics that you can learn by ramming your head against it until you figure it out. You died 17 times? You get 5 tokens. You didn't die? you get a 25 token bonus. The boss was killed too slow? No bonus tokens. You get your individual score tokens exclusively. Boss killed fast? +10 token party bonus.

Something that has rewards priced like the Gold Saucer: Some cheaper mounts, minions and emotes for newbies (like the 3k rewards from the Saucer), scaling in pricing to things like the 4 million mount from the Saucer for more dedicated players. Rewards that reward handsomely playing well while also providing a sense of progress and scaling for people that are still trying to get better.
A game mode that you can hop in at any time, completely disregarding Discord servers and Youtube tutorials, and say "I'm gonna go in and get some progress done" regardless of whether or not you ate every mechanic or if [The Ultimate Legend]������Lily Rainbowo������|Balmung decided that using a healing spell was a 0.073 DPS loss.

Fond of these ideas as well. The first one, regarding an optional higher level of difficulty of the same instance is something I've been wanting for ages. With the wider rollout of trusts in MSQ content it did seem like a good time to bring in optional modes like that.

[Iscah]

The two things I hate is feeling like I'm making no progress and feeling like I'm a burden to others while I'm learning, so what I'd consider my ideal "midcore bridge" has to be something that I can repeat until doing it is second nature, but that having me still learning wouldn't be a detriment to others.

What I suggested in the video is some content where you get tokens according to your individual performance. Something that doesn't stop or reset when you wipe, but rather gets delayed, while still rewarding trying to finish fast.

I like that idea, and I think that's perhaps also a good place to draw the line between "medium" and "hard" – the mechanics are more challenging but you can also just keep stumbling through and seeing more of the fight, and your personal failure isn't going to mean the end of the fight.

(This is what puts me off deep dungeons in particular – the huge time investment just to arrive at one try on a hard fight that you can't even re-attempt without going through everything again. I wonder if they could do something like "boss simulations" that you can try any time for zero reward/progression – only unlocking them once you've seen the real thing at least once, but then you can learn the fight without going through the slog.)

For example, If I were looking at Number XXIV, I would probably have it with just standard towers, but then have another mechanic, such as a tether mechanic going on in tandem with this, e.g., have 2 pairs of players tethered to each other, first 2 players are resolved by spreading, and the other 2 by stacking. It could be that the combination of all 3 of these doesn't necessarily kill, but is then followed up with a stack marker to occur shortly thereafter.

Near and far tethers might be a bit unintuitive, unless they mark them with inward and outward arrows or something.

Though the new fight is totally built around handling attacks in tandem – it shows you attacks A and B separately and then you do a complicated A+B, which I don't think is any less difficult than the older "stand in the towers" mech, and one of the elements still uses the towers. Though I agree it could do with doing them more quickly one after the other, and less downtime between elements – maybe if it went through the three elements and then progressed to one great big "everything in sequence" attack? That could be fun.

Or as I was saying in my previous post, harder versions of dungeons could use the same skills but more rapid-fire.

(Though I think the main disappointment of remaking that fight is flavour text, specifically the loss of his "glory to the Empire!" bit at the end of the fight.)

[Sindele]

The problem with Extremes in my opinion is, in increasing order of importance, 1) inconsistency in designed difficulty, 2) poor telegraphing of what Extreme difficulty is to unfamiliar and nervous players, 3) SE's abject failure to account for non-JP community behavior - and I put a lot of weight on #3 here.

For the average NA/EU player, Extremes are usually going to be your first serious brush with people demanding study ahead of time, people demanding specific strategies without explaining them, people regularly stroking out at people "underperforming" (which may or may not include actual underperformance), people pulling up the ladders for entry requirements, people pulling all kinds of shenanigans to scam other people into carrying them, and a few other derangements besides. The difficulty may not be a very high step in the curve, but the shift in mentality might as well be a cliff if you're not expecting it and not familiar with it - especially with how laissez-faire people are in basically all other forms of content. There is no common, communal gradient of expectations. And they've done very little to even recognize the problem, much less try to build that ladder. We can surely speculate on why - I'm sure you can guess my opinion from the content of this post - but there's no way to argue that they're doing their best in this regard.

[SargeTheSeagull]

The problem with Extremes in my opinion is, in increasing order of importance … 3) SE's abject failure to account for non-JP community behavior - and I put a lot of weight on #3 here.
.

What do you mean? How do extremes work on JP servers? I know they use duty finder for them but beyond that

[Sindele]

I'm sure someone with more personal experience could provide more useful elucidation (or just pick at the threads of what I'm paraphrasing), but the big points in my estimation:

* A greater communally known expectation that you either have experience or have at least read a guide before queueing in - I'm not a huge fan of these expectations, but they're still a relatively known factor for the community before you start doing that level of content; ask any two NA players on whether you should watch guides before doing any content and you may well wind up with three different answers (and a death threat);
* Strat macros for everything, often with fixed positions - I know this has been making the jump more and more in recent years, but IME it's still very inconsistent in NA;
* Less insistence on 'going my own way' - the macro typically sets the script, and if it's clearly trash, it falls apart after a pull or three; in NA you're more likely to run into people who will immediately argue with your strat, argue with their position ("I'm always East though"), etc. regardless

There's certainly a tendency for people to stereotype and mythologize the experience to the (heh) extreme, but even avoiding that it's hard to deny that there are also observable cultural differences that make the gap larger for a fresh NA player by comparison. The social minefield that is NA PF play is drastically unlike anything else in the game if you don't have previous MMO experience.

[Elissar]

I on the whole agree with this video less than the previous one but the point about this game not teaching you a decent rotation (hell it doesn’t even define GCD and oGCD or healing magic for healers) is 100% in point

The game has a guide even to tell you what a gauge is. Recently they updated skills UI to make it clear what order you are supposed to use. You can always practice in dummies. Your next options in rotation literally shines in your hotbar. Honestly, i think FFXIV does too much, the next step is a bot that play by yourself.