Is your only barometer for “difficulty” “I didnt affect my party”?
I think this is our fundamental difference here. Let’s take an easy extreme (just a theoretical easy extreme) and removed mechanics that required interaction with other players so at most you kill only yourself. At most you dying contributes to the enrage. Is there really “punishment”; not really because the healers are overflowing with mana. does that mean there isn’t difficulty; in my opinion there is still difficulty because I failed the mechanic and died and i myself want the joy of doing the fight flawlessly even if if I messed it up it wouldn’t affect anyone else anyway besides the enrage
If you think that anything that makes it so that the only punishment falls on yourself constitutes a lack of difficulty then that’s fine; it’s a perfectly valid stance to have. But it’s not the stance I have.
I’d like to not be put to sleep in content that sits somewhere around a ozma without group punishment (which yes ozma has 5 defined phases don’t worry I can call ozma you don’t have to explain him to me) because he is still relatively mechanically fast, doesn’t have tells and does a lot of damage if you don’t have 5/2 or are in defensive. 9 extremes out of 10 have at least one if not more body checks and at least one mechanic that is solved with a standardised start. There is a range that exists where you pretty much don’t kill the party without a defined strat but is harder than an average normal raid (if shiva was the easiest normal rather than the hardest this would be more in what I’m asking for)
You are right my argument for NA is subjective cultural differences but this entire debate about midcore is borne from exactly that cultural subjectivity