What is Midcore? Why does it matter?

[Supersnow845]

A lot of Coil was easier than a lot of normal fights today. It was easy to get started in Coil. I think people have been sleeping on how much more difficult the game has become. Groups and Link Shells just fell on your lap if you could press buttons and commit to a schedule, even if it's 2 hours on saturday and sunday... but even Coil had its own gatekeeping, Ceruleum Processing Plant was super lonely and sad compared to Wineport.

In HW, fflogs became a thing, cross world PF became a thing and killed the desire to form FCs and Link Shells, people didn't stay on groups that showed promise, people starting asking for logs and shit, getting statics was way harder, groups just didn't form organically like in ARR. Navigating the current hardcore community is quite exhausting.

Which coil fights were easier than current normals (T3 doesn’t count)

1 was around an easy extreme, 2 got gear cheesed but used to be around a mid extreme it only for allagen Rot and it’s tight enrage, 4 was kinda a joke, 5 was a full savage fight, 6 besides leaf storm being cheesed was a regular savage, 7 was evil, 8 was a normal savage, 9 was a difficult savage, 10 was very hard for a first turn savage, 11 was a normal savage, 12 was a control fight so something incredibly rare these days, 13 was a regular savage

[Ririta]

Which coil fights were easier than current normals (T3 doesn’t count)

1 was around an easy extreme, 2 got gear cheesed but used to be around a mid extreme it only for allagen Rot and it’s tight enrage, 4 was kinda a joke, 5 was a full savage fight, 6 besides leaf storm being cheesed was a regular savage, 7 was evil, 8 was a normal savage, 9 was a difficult savage, 10 was very hard for a first turn savage, 11 was a normal savage, 12 was a control fight so something incredibly rare these days, 13 was a regular savage

I'd say First Coil Turn 1, Turn 2, Turn 4, Second Coil Turn 1 and Turn 2, Final Coil Turn 1. Iffy on Melusine and ADS but honestly, all it would take for a random DF group to kill them nowadays would be for somebody to speak up. All of those had fewer mechanics than today's normals. If people can dodge all the crap that Athena or Themis or that Vampire dude throws at them without getting hit once, they would totally silence ADS and pass Rot, spread out for Heat Lightning and then stack if they didn't get hit, kite an add into the boss, or step in thorns if they're marked.

I'm not snobbing on Coil, if anything I miss its innocence, but the game has evolved a lot. It doesn't looks like it because we've been doing this years, but the mere concept of Erichthonios doing a room wide cleave while you need to look for the color that he's shining and having to DPS all at once would've blown most old Coil raiders away I think. Like, we killed Rafflesia's bulbs because moving to a place that has no thorns was too gigabrain...

Snip

I'm just trying to explain why "everybody did Coil" like Lyth proposed. As somebody who was there, I felt like my experience could add some value to this topic. Honestly it's quite bizarre that you saw that as a complaint.

[Supersnow845]

I'd say First Coil Turn 1, Turn 2, Turn 4, Second Coil Turn 1 and Turn 2, Final Coil Turn 1. Iffy on Melusine and ADS but honestly, all it would take for a random DF group to kill them nowadays would be for somebody to speak up. All of those had fewer mechanics than today's normals. If people can dodge all the crap that Athena or Themis or that Vampire dude throws at them without getting hit once, they would totally silence ADS and pass Rot, spread out for Heat Lightning and then stack if they didn't get hit, kite an add into the boss, or step in thorns if they're marked.

I'm not snobbing on Coil, if anything I miss its innocence, but the game has evolved a lot. It doesn't looks like it because we've been doing this years, but the mere concept of Erichthonios doing a room wide cleave while you need to look for the color that he's shining and having to DPS all at once would've blown most old Coil raiders away I think. Like, we killed Rafflesia's bulbs because moving to a place that has no thorns was too gigabrain...

I feel like you overestimate DF

allagen rot would rip DF apart, the PF strat of stacking the party together and letting rot pass amongst the group only worked because of gear bloat it was supposed to be handled like nisi melusine’s phase pushes would kill parties harder than haukke hard, if you didn’t have the party coordination to cheese leafstorm then it would be a mess (assuming you actually had a party awake enough to kill the bees on the honey mechanic), T10 has wildcharge, that heat lightning into wildcharge when the arena is shrinking is no joke of a mechanic

I’ll at least say the fights you mentioned probably lean more towards extreme than savage but they are definitely beyond most DF groups, this is to say nothing of 5 8 9 11 12 and 13

[Renathras]

So this is the problem that a lot of people on this thread are trying to hash out, because everyone will have a biased outlook on what their hard/mid "core" content looks like. If I were to take 7 of my friends and set a schedule to do hunts every, say 16 hours and we do all of them together, does that make us a hardcore static?

I think the difference is whether it is required or not.

Hunts can sometimes be soloed. Back when the Elpis maps hit, our Elpis A ranks were constantly dead since several of the map spawns were near them, leading to them getting killed outside of train schedules. You don't need a coordinated and skilled group to kill hunt marks. Organization there is optional.

Now, clear GolbEx with both healer 2 man circle partners dying all the time so both healers are constantly killed in Gales 2 and Gales 3 and the meteor shower mechanics (I think both of those also have the 2 man circles) so that your healers are constantly killed with no way to save themselves. How's do you get the clear?

Oh, you abandon that group and start another? Or have to grab some friends? Or get people on voice comms? Or keep adjusting your PF requirements? Or get people who have already cleared it to carry you? Or only run it in the first week or two to get your clear before all the HARDCORE PLAYERS have got their clears and stop running it in parties still trying to get their clears?

Yeah, that kinda makes it hardcore content.

While it very much is true that the definitions of content are different, an encounter with around half a dozen body checks, a lot of overlapping mechanics, and some mechanics that give you ~+/-2 sec to get into position before you WILL die, and has several of these during the encounter, often following (or concurrent with) body checks that WILL wipe the party if anyone is out of position or dead? Yeah, that's not "midcore".

ZodEx is midcore, possibly on the easier end of it (IF you have a good danger dorito; if not, snakes eat people for lunch).

HydEx is midcore.

GolbEx is NOT midcore. Anyone who thinks it is is a hardcore player and doesn't realize it/doesn't realize how out of touch their definition of midcore is.

I'd say...

Mhm, this.

Most of the Coil fights are easier than their modern same-number (of 12) fights in current content, with few exceptions. There are some that were substantially harder, and more akin to current, but there were a looooot that were far easier. As you say, P1S's mechanics would have blown people's mind if that had been 1Coil.

I’ll at least say the fights you mentioned probably lean more towards extreme than savage but they are definitely beyond most DF groups,

So is GolbEx. So that's not really saying much. They're still apples-to-apples easier than present content.

[Ririta]

I feel like you overestimate DF

allagen rot would rip DF apart, the PF strat of stacking the party together and letting rot pass amongst the group only worked because of gear bloat it was supposed to be handled like nisi melusine’s phase pushes would kill parties harder than haukke hard, if you didn’t have the party coordination to cheese leafstorm then it would be a mess (assuming you actually had a party awake enough to kill the bees on the honey mechanic), T10 has wildcharge, that heat lightning into wildcharge when the arena is shrinking is no joke of a mechanic

I’ll at least say the fights you mentioned probably lean more towards extreme than savage but they are definitely beyond most DF groups, this is to say nothing of 5 8 9 11 12 and 13

I'm not sure, for example Imdugud is the kind of boss that technically requires no communication whatsoever, outside of which tank's adds to kill first, the fight kinda played itself. ADS is interesting because it was so punishing and it would require somebody to bark orders and put down markers on people's head, but the mental stack was quite low. Like, the "you have 1 job" meme... Oh, on phase pushing, it was post echo but I found Melusine and Rafflesia surprisingly smooth in DF. But I guess people being there means they've beaten Twintania, which created a filter. Maybe this "filter" makes me biased.

But yeah, those other fights were way more difficult.