What is Midcore? Why does it matter?

[Zairava]

I think we need to make a distinction between difficulty and time. I see some in here saying more time investment raises the content to Mid, but if that's the case then there is an argument for the MSQ itself to be Mid. I know quite a few RP players who never finish the story purely because of how long it is.

If it's about difficulty then it can be a combination of mechanic complexity, mechanic abundance, and general punishment level.

For me personally I don't consider Bozja to be welcoming because of both the abundance of death and punishment of it; regardless if the group I'm in succeeded at the FATE or not. Even if we win, if it's too hard it can still be a wall for an individual in my opinion.

Dying is fine, if you remove that factor it removes the entire premise of making the content feel like an actual challenge for the player to overcome. Punishment upon dying (such as loss of exp) is something that is archaic that I can agree should be removed moving forward

[R041]

I think we need to make a distinction between difficulty and time. I see some in here saying more time investment raises the content to Mid, but if that's the case then there is an argument for the MSQ itself to be Mid. I know quite a few RP players who never finish the story purely because of how long it is.

If it's about difficulty then it can be a combination of mechanic complexity, mechanic abundance, and general punishment level.

For me personally I don't consider Bozja to be welcoming because of both the abundance of death and punishment of it; regardless if the group I'm in succeeded at the FATE or not. Even if we win, if it's too hard it can still be a wall for an individual in my opinion.

It's not the sum of played time, it's the per-session limits. MSQ has a few bits that lock you in for an excessive amount of time, but 99% of MSQ can be done in bursts of 15 minutes.

Midcore to me is a mix of hardcore gameplay with session limitations. The group part of my issue really comes down to having to organize and coordinate, which can significantly frontload that time. If you gave me harder dungeons I could just queue into, and forced me to actually pay attention to mechanics or we wipe, then I'd consider that a form of Midcore - Because it's quick, but deathly engaging. You wouldn't throw those into Casual MSQ though, because they're too punishing for the story-enjoyers, and that's okay.

[LittleImp]

I think body checks is one of the issues. Bozja didn't have all these body checks. But the mechanics did kill you if you did them wrong. We could all resurrect eachother and use Lost Actions, but because of the fact the mechanics could all 1-shot us, it was still possible for there to be a full wipe.

Personally, this is pretty much exactly what I think of when I think of 'moderate' difficulty in FF14.

Individually punishing, but requires a more substantial 'critical mass' of individual mistakes to snowball before it actually instigates a wipe. I find this kind of content particularly fun with a random group of varied skill-levels, because it can be fun to clutch and do some mass-recovery play. Back in Stormblood I used to queue into some of the Ivalice 24 mans chasing this exact kind of chaos.

Certain Bozja CEs and 24 man bosses (mostly from SB era) captured this feeling reasonably well.

[Zairava]

I think body checks is one of the issues. Bozja didn't have all these body checks. But the mechanics did kill you if you did them wrong. We could all resurrect eachother and use Lost Actions, but because of the fact the mechanics could all 1-shot us, it was still possible for there to be a full wipe.

And if you were one of the few survivors, all those dead people could look at you in awe. The one person there who could actually do mechanics as you walked all over their bodies dodging mechanics and carrying them through it. Maybe it would inspire them to become like that.

I also don't like how in alliance raids everyone just follows where the others go and survive, not because they know the mechanics, but because they followed everyone else. I would prefer for mechanics not to be something you can just follow others for, because mechanics that are hard in isolation become easy if you can just follow the one person who did all the maths. There were some mechanics in Shadowbringers where you couldn't just follow people, such as the "walk a certain amount of steps" mechanic in DR.

This near exactly are my thoughts as well.

There should be threat, and you should be killed from doing mechanics wrong (it doesn't need to be one shot, but it should be able to kill me after 1-3 hits), but it shouldn't be the reason everybody else dies too.

Being able to follow to what essentially boils down to someone being a safety dorito is something that commonly bugs me. If the encounter already makes it possible for that to be a thing, it just enables people to be lazy and removes the satisfaction of actually learning the encounter on your own. There needs to be more mechanics where you can't just follow somebody and be fine.

[NanaWiloh]

Midcore content is casual content

change my mind.

My mind is busy and has no time for your mind. So I hope you dont mind if I dont change your mind.

[Xirean]

Being able to follow to what essentially boils down to someone being a safety dorito is something that commonly bugs me. If the encounter already makes it possible for that to be a thing, it just enables people to be lazy and removes the satisfaction of actually learning the encounter on your own. There needs to be more mechanics where you can't just follow somebody and be fine.

I partially agree with this. Being able to see/follow someone can help you learn the mechanic yourself. Success can be a better teacher than hard punishing failure.

This is actually part of the reason I don't like Bozja's stat gains at the end as well as the actions. They bring the content back to what feels like normal XIV. Which just makes me question why it wasn't always that way. It feels like fake difficulty purely for the sake of seeing dead bodies.

[ValkyrieL]

All the rules you have, puts it at casual levels. You see modcore don't exist despite what others will tell you, if you asked me that do savage/ultimates....everything you want is casual/*braindead* content and can never be engaging to me. If you asked someone that don't do savage + you might be able to convince them that is midcore...but anyone at savage level will simply not agree.

[Jeeqbit]

(it doesn't need to be one shot, but it should be able to kill me after 1-3 hits)

One of the problems I find with a lot of content is that it's too lenient and it takes more than 1 hit to kill you.

A content that I really like is hunts (especially S ranks). There were some really deadly hunts when they released, such as Forgiven Pedantry where the left-right mechanic just destroyed people (even tanks at first). At release, Pauldia was also pretty deadly because people couldn't read the telegraphs and got lots of vulns, then got finished off by the raid-wide. Oh and Tyger was fantastic where even if you tried to escape the head mechanics, it 1-shotted you with its behind.

Okina used to destroy people even late into Stormblood because it had a donut aoe and nobody except me hardly knew about it. Pale Rider had a reflect mechanic so everyone ignored it and died to their own attacks.

That's the sort of stuff I like. 1-shots, but everyone can rez and the good players can shine as they walk all over the bodies.

[R041]

All the rules you have, puts it at casual levels. You see modcore don't exist despite what others will tell you, if you asked me that do savage/ultimates....everything you want is casual/*braindead* content and can never be engaging to me. If you asked someone that don't do savage + you might be able to convince them that is midcore...but anyone at savage level will simply not agree.

Can you even hear us down here, on top of that mountain?

[Berkin]

All the rules you have, puts it at casual levels. You see modcore don't exist despite what others will tell you, if you asked me that do savage/ultimates....everything you want is casual/*braindead* content and can never be engaging to me. If you asked someone that don't do savage + you might be able to convince them that is midcore...but anyone at savage level will simply not agree.

Well idk, I can see Bozja fitting in with all those rules and it had content engaging enough for me to be complaining now that we don't have it.

I do think that there's a little too many rules in the OP that I disagree with but arguing what's midcore is just semantics at this point and it's subjective. I'm just acting out of my personal experience that with Bozja gone there's just no content for me to wind down and have fun in this game after raid, so all that's left for me is doing whatever prog/reclear is scheduled and logging off.