Is there no medium difficulty content or am I just too stupid?

[Rolder50]

I do agree with this. I personally see Extreme Trials as the point where you do need some coordination to go through the content, but nothing too major/savage-like. But when I said this to my friends who do play Savage and clear Ultimates, they tell me Extremes for them is on par with playing through Alliance Raids. They're too easy and they don't consider them medium at all.

Part of the problem is that there is only one Extreme that is "Current" at any given time. Two at the start of an expansion. And that's hardly anything.

[JamieRose]

FFXIV Instance Difficulty Curve

[KageTokage]

Savage is a weird case because the difficulty is insanely variable on everything leading up to the final fight with the easiest fights arguably being easier then relevant extremes.

[Ayche]

It is all puzzles. Sometimes the community just "gets" certain mechanics faster than others.

[Deveryn]

It is all puzzles. Sometimes the community just "gets" certain mechanics faster than others.

Sometimes they agree on one strat faster. There's also the fact that some people just take some time to lock in one mech / strat or another, despite understanding it.

[Denji]

Savage is a weird case because the difficulty is insanely variable on everything leading up to the final fight with the easiest fights arguably being easier then relevant extremes.

See: How people felt P3S was harder than P4S.

[FenyxRising]

Hi there WoLs o/

So I started with 6.1 and did pretty much alle the non-extreme non-savage content.

So then I asked myself, what else could I do besides professions, RP, Saucer, Housing and all the other stuff.

Next step would be to get into a static for extremes and savage raids and I did. About 3.5 Weeks I tried raiding with a static and it was honestly fun. But not because of the content, because of the people.

I have to say im overwhelmed by the difficulty spike you get, when you go from normal content to extremes and savages.

Its like, normal EW content is a 20, Extremes are a 85 and Savage is straight up to 95 to 100.

Where is the middle ground? Am I just too dumb? I need a flow chart for the current tier extreme and for P7S I need a brain transplant.

I also tried the criterion dungeon with a nice FC group, and we had fun but we couldnt get anywhere besides wiping for 90 minutes on the mouse.

I fall asleep during normal content and get a stroke from the higher content, which makes me sad because i kinda dont fit in anywhere.

I completely sympathize with your position, even hardcore players sometimes don't want to raid hard content all the time and want something to destress without being bored, so medium difficulty content is good for everyone, but sadly we have so little in EW. By the way Zepla mentioned your post in her video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2-CV9cKC1s

[Raven2014]

but yeah, Midcore is not in the game at all

What the heck is EX contents then?

[tsuchii]

You're not stupid nor imagining it.
There's literally no midcore content in this game. Either mindnumbingly easy to ultra-complicated fights. No inbetween.

The only thing I can think of that is close to it is soloing Variant Dungeons and the Masked Carnivale which offers a bit of difficulty harder than normal content but not as hard as Extremes+. I think this is one of the things Square should work on. Casual easy stuff don't retain players and group-forced difficult content is just what it is: group content. So if you don't have a group or you like torturing yourself with pick up groups, you pretty much miss out on the rest of that content.

[R041]

Thanks for bumping this - I was actually looking for it.

What's frustrating about these type of discussions, is that we all see 'Casual' and 'Midcore' as difficult to really mull over as a group, because we all have our own experiences and definition of what those mean exactly. I think we need to look at what 'Casual' and 'Midcore' can contain, and not what they are exactly.


Ultimately I think we're missing out on a lot of natural player engagements with EW due to how all of the systems have been designed and presented. So the Casual/Midcore, although technically exist.. Have been short lived, and are very lonely experiences. Pushing every engagement to Discord where we'll need to wade through a cliquey chat isn't the same as natural player engagements.

A lot of players in the MMO space are looking at Hardcore WoW right now because they're presenting a refreshing experience that allows for at-will casual gameplay, with opportunity for difficult challenges that offer random natural player encounters. Those player encounters seem more authentic and have a higher chance of developing friendship.

We're severely missing that right now, so to me EW barely feels like an MMO. We can still do old Relics, Eureka, and Bozja - But we all know it's not even remotely the same experience as they were around their release cycle. Anything that requires I look for a Discord to engage in something, automatically removes casual friendly from my eyes. What was fun about Eureka and Bozja, is even if I might not want to do a specific challenge at that moment, I can still have fun watching them all fail mechanics, learn the fight, and help res at the end. There's just more authentic player engagement to be had there. Hunt Trains aren't that. Dungeons aren't that. Raid, FATEs, Variant, POTD, IS.. Aren't that. Those don't tick both natural and challenging. It's only strictly one or the other.

It seems like SE is almost pushing all encounter efforts to small instances and outside communications like Discord, by design. Makes me a lil sad.