Quote Originally Posted by R041 View Post
At a minimum, I think we need to fix or make a new Synced Wondrous Tails.
You know, I'd love if we had that. Running unsyc'd solo just for the weekly stamps is fine and all (I do it myself when I'm running out of time), but I wish it had a good incentive to run that old EX/Savage content sync'd. Maybe changing WT would be too much of a hassle, so I'd think it could be something else, that is not messing with the Unreal mode either.

To my experience, I think the closest we have for midcore in Endwalker are the EX trials if I consider that the mechanics are slightly easier than Savages. We need something like that, but with less time involved. I thought that maybe V&C would fill that niche perfectly, but in practice the Criterion difficulty is Savage levels, while the actual Savage is even beyond that.

There's also one thing intrinsic to XIV's encounter design that may play a big factor on the devs not able to be successful delivering midcore, and is the fact that what is hard about an encounter is puzzle solving, not performance checks unless you're prog enough to clear the fight. This kind of difficulty threshold has a limited 'shelf life', because once you memorize whatever it is, it becomes trivial, whereas a performance check (like what happens for average players in WoW's Mythic+'s midcore range) is dynamic because it depends on more personal stuff like your class, gear, etc. It may facilitate a more toxic environment, but in a vaccuum it feels more interesting that how XIV handles things.