People Enjoy hard Games

[NanaWiloh]

Having recently unlocked the EW alliance raids, I'm honestly surprised how easy and undertuned they are. They're awesome raids visually and musically with a few neat mechanics, but they're so easy to face roll and they're so predictable.

More people die to the 2nd boss of the 1st Ivalice and almost everything in the Nier raids than both EW raids combined. In fact, I've seen more people die to the first boss of WoD than anything in the EW raids.

I really hope they add some more difficulty with the 3rd one.

Their not really undertuned as you are just late to the party. Most people have ran them to death and out gear them. Last time I was in the most current EW alliance(second one) the 2nd boss went down so fast made my first kill of them look slow. As for older raids people have a bad habit of afk running them or just not caring enough to pay attention.

[Shurrikhan]

While doing content later along will make it even easier, let's not pretend that AR2 was threatening even on release day. Ran it twice within the first couple hours of release for a grand total of one wipe.

(And even that was actually recoverable; the tanks just felt it'd be more fun starting it over as less a cluster, since of the 7 to die to back-to-back mistakes near the start, 5 were healers.)

The mechanics were more intuitively telegraphed and the damage less than in previous raids.

[ChrysOCE]

While doing content later along will make it even easier, let's not pretend that AR2 was threatening even on release day. Ran it twice within the first couple hours of release for a grand total of one wipe.

(And even that was actually recoverable; the tanks just felt it'd be more fun starting it over as less a cluster, since of the 7 to die to back-to-back mistakes near the start, 5 were healers.)

The mechanics were more intuitively telegraphed and the damage less than in previous raids.

But you still got A wipe

[Shurrikhan]

But you still got A wipe

An intentional one, but yes. Which is more than any of my LS or FC mates saw at its release.

[Supersnow845]

Aglaia was fun day one, especially the second boss because of the unique arena and nobody knowing what to do, the first boss everyone also thinking you’d get knocked with the platforms was another big source of death

Euphrosyne had zero cryptic mechanics, how many ways did they dress up chariot/dynamo and half room cleaves

[Lyth]

Most games are designed to cater to a range of skill levels. If you take a game like Elden Ring, which was mentioned in the OP, you can trivialize any encounter that you're stuck on simply by going elsewhere, levelling up, getting better gear, and then coming back. What makes fights challenging is the risk of failure. It's that knowledge that a single misstep in pattern recognition could reset all your progress. You'll frequently find on your first playthrough that systematically clearing out every boss significantly drops the difficulty later on, simply from being to tank more hits. It's not as intimidating if the boss can't oneshot you. That's why some people go back and do it again without levelling, going for those frame perfect parries with buckler and club.

FFXIV isn't an exception to this either. There's a lot of content that is designed to be clearable as long as at least one or two people in your group know how to do it. Story content, Exploratory/Relic content, Variant and 'Expert' Dungeons, 24p 'Raids', and even 'Extreme' Trials are really pitched at a difficulty level that pretty much anyone can do with minimal effort. And the reason for this is simple. People complain when you gate too many experiences and even rewards behind actual challenges. Grinds are more popular substitutes for difficulty because you get to be special and retain a degree of exclusivity, but you don't really have to exert yourself to get it.

Most of the 'midcore' challenges in this game start with Savage Raids, simply because there is individual responsibility to clear fights. You can't get carried through mechanics that you don't know because of raidwipes and attendance checks. You could argue that standard Criterion and complete Deep Dungeon dives fit around this difficulty level as well, although you could be carried by a solo-capable player through the latter. All of these are very clearable through PF, and if you want to make it more challenging for yourself, just aim to clear the tier earlier when there are fewer drops to soften mitigation and dps checks. Schedules and time commitments are not a limitation for this, and you can clear on your own pace without commitment to a static. There's no reason why players who are looking for a moderate challenge can't engage with this content.

Players almost never like to directly admit that content is too difficult for them. It's always 'I don't do that because it's too frustrating/time consuming' etc. It's what you aren't saying that constitutes the most important feedback on difficulty. There definitely is a subset of the playerbase that does consume Savage and Ultimate content a bit too quickly for the pace at which they are currently put out. But I don't think that's representative of the average participant in this thread, judging from the comments.

[ChrysOCE]

Most games are designed to cater to a range of skill levels. If you take a game like Elden Ring, which was mentioned in the OP, you can trivialize any encounter that you're stuck on simply by going elsewhere, levelling up, getting better gear, and then coming back. What makes fights challenging is the risk of failure. It's that knowledge that a single misstep in pattern recognition could reset all your progress. You'll frequently find on your first playthrough that systematically clearing out every boss significantly drops the difficulty later on, simply from being to tank more hits. It's not as intimidating if the boss can't oneshot you. That's why some people go back and do it again without levelling, going for those frame perfect parries with buckler and club.

FFXIV isn't an exception to this either. There's a lot of content that is designed to be clearable as long as at least one or two people in your group know how to do it. Story content, Exploratory/Relic content, Variant and 'Expert' Dungeons, 24p 'Raids', and even 'Extreme' Trials are really pitched at a difficulty level that pretty much anyone can do with minimal effort. And the reason for this is simple. People complain when you gate too many experiences and even rewards behind actual challenges. Grinds are more popular substitutes for difficulty because you get to be special and retain a degree of exclusivity, but you don't really have to exert yourself to get it.

Most of the 'midcore' challenges in this game start with Savage Raids, simply because there is individual responsibility to clear fights. You can't get carried through mechanics that you don't know because of raidwipes and attendance checks. You could argue that standard Criterion and complete Deep Dungeon dives fit around this difficulty level as well, although you could be carried by a solo-capable player through the latter. All of these are very clearable through PF, and if you want to make it more challenging for yourself, just aim to clear the tier earlier when there are fewer drops to soften mitigation and dps checks. Schedules and time commitments are not a limitation for this, and you can clear on your own pace without commitment to a static. There's no reason why players who are looking for a moderate challenge can't engage with this content.

Players almost never like to directly admit that content is too difficult for them. It's always 'I don't do that because it's too frustrating/time consuming' etc. It's what you aren't saying that constitutes the most important feedback on difficulty. There definitely is a subset of the playerbase that does consume Savage and Ultimate content a bit too quickly for the pace at which they are currently put out. But I don't think that's representative of the average participant in this thread, judging from the comments.

Wait, savage is midcore?

[Supersnow845]

^i think this encapsulates a lot of the problems the casual playerbase has with the high end playerbase and why a thread like this gets so much pushback (and do note I lean far further towards high end playerbase than casual)

No matter your personal opinion of what percentage the active playerbase actually engages with savage almost nobody would say that anywhere approaching a majority would call savage “midcore” content (even jokingly easy savage fights like P1, about the only savage fight that may get the title is O1 because for some reason O1 is literally just the normal version with no AOE markers), savage is definitively high end content along with ultimates (and maybe some harder end extremes like the WOL or king thordran), calling savage midcore distorts the increase in average difficulty of non savage content that people who engage in savage are after

I think most people would consider an acceptable definition of midcore content to be

Easy end of midcore- orbornne monastery and Tower at Paradigns breach
Middle of midcore- TA and the Diablo armament
Top end of midcore- some of the easy dorito’able extremes like the dark inside and out scaled old extreme content like BA

Anything easier than orbonne would be casual content, anything harder than BA or the dark inside would be hardcore content

[Lyth]

I can't say that I've ever heard of Trials, Relic grind content, or 24p content described as 'midcore' before, outside of this thread. It's not like you're going to spend any time actually 'progressing' through it. If that's how you define it, there's really no difference between 'midcore' and 'casual' content.

I'd guess that many longstanding players have at least dipped their toes in Savage at some point in their time playing, and I've encountered plenty of very casual-minded players who have cleared a 'then-current' tier at least at some point. There's just this popular misconception that you have to commit to a static to be able to do it. This may have been true historically, but PF is much more standardized nowadays. Unless you've got a group of equivalently committed and equivalently skilled players (the basic requirement for any functional static), you're probably better off learning at your own pace through PF. It's amazing how accessible the content has become in current PF, at least in this expansion.

The same is true for Criterion as well, but I do think it needs a bit more incentivization to keep it active in PF for longer. This may also be a nomenclature thing as well, since a lot of the more laidback grind content uses over the top suffixes like 'Expert' and 'Extreme'. The surprise of running into unmarked challenging content for the first time was probably shocking and off-putting to some, and so the dungeons have unfairly gained a reputation with regards to tuning. I'd expect the clear rates to be higher than Savage Raid content if the same target audience actually went after it.

[RitsukoSonoda]

IMO one of my issues with these discussions is how casual and hardcore are constantly being used to describe skill levels when they originated and should still be used to indicate a person's playtime tendencies. Skill levels run a full gambit regardless of how much a person plays the game. You have casual players who spend very little time in the game but maintain a high player skill level which allows them to easily jump into any content without issue. And on the other end you also have people who spend 40+ hours a week in the game that spend most of it floor tanking and being a punching bag when they aren't an actual tank role job.

By design the game is very casual friendly when applied to the original meaning of the term. With things like Duty Finder and Party Finder it's very easy for players with limited time to hop right into content in most cases. People labeling "Casual Gamers" as the people who only have 1 braincell are likely part of the reason the content of this game has been getting systematically dumbed down every expansion following HW.

Not everyone is going to figure a new mechanic out by seeing it once. There's no issues with getting hit by it a few times. However there is a line to be drawn and it essentially separates those who learn from the experience whether it takes 1 time or 100, and those that just refuse to learn at all. And the latter TBH needs to stop being catered to as it's holding back the former. The end result being the nearly non existent learning curve to upper skill level content as they've just about turned it into a cliff face by lowering the content that should have the incline to reach that higher level.