What is Midcore? Why does it matter?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Steps of faith was different, the fight was terribly designed and you hit its fail condition like 5 minutes before the enrage but if you failed it you couldn’t wall yourself

Basically in the original version you had to hit the dragon with both of the dragon killers. This happened at about 4 minutes into the fight, if you missed either of them (because the execution of said mechanics was wonky and unintuitive you basically just had to stand there and wait for him to walk all the way to end of the arena and destroy the last barrier which would cause a wipe

Chrysalis is a better example of an older trial being a legit challenge for people when it was on content because it was well designed and had some interesting mechanics, steps of faith was always terribly designed

Chrysalis is actually really easy. People still don't understand how it works, but it's easy.

There's one set of orbs you don't have to pop, because they spawn the sprites.

You pop sprint and Def and offensive cds before getting sucked in the middle, and you don't need the lb3 to kill the tear.
But people fall back on that as a crutch every time. Oh well.

As for savage being midcore, it is. And I say this as someone who has not cleared the tier yet because p12s is kicking my statics collective ass. If it was hardcore content, it would take hardcore statics longer than a day or two to clear it. Simple as that.

Eureka is not midcore. It's the definition of casual content. Same with bozja.

[Berkin]

What defines "Midcore" is arguably one of the biggest issues about implementing midcore content. Since by the very vast majority of the playerbase's skill level, Alliance raids like orbonne would theoretically be "midcore", despite being ultra easy for anyone with even the slightest skill levels. Here's a thought experiment: Square has endless terrabytes worth of statistics on their playerbase, they know the skill level and what would content design would fall under various tiers of difficulty contrasted to the overall skill level of the playerbase as a whole. Perhaps in their mind, they have in fact, been implementing "midcore" content this entire time, based on the statistics of the very low overall skill of the playerbase, since that's where the data says "midcore" would land with the average skill expression of the playerbase when taken as a whole.

TBH you don't really need to categorize content to see that there's a big gap in difficulty between stuff like normal/alliance raids and extreme trials/early savage floors that's not present anywhere else in the game. That gap used to be bridged by Bozja and could have been filled by Criterion if they didn't skip straight to savage difficulty for w/e reason.

You cited Bozja/Eureka as closest to Midcore, but for someone like me, they sit wholly in the casual range without "close to" being even a consideration. Every CE is brain dead easy to figure out, Dal/Castrum are both slow motion easy fights, literally the only piece of contents in either of them that i would define as 'midcore' would be Duels, BA & DRS (which are all plagued with accessibility and ease of access issues).

This is also such an insane take to me, it's like saying you can't enjoy playing Mario anymore after beating Super Meat Boy. I always had fun doing CE's unless it was the 50th time doing so, and having cleared TOP 10x never changed that opinion, if anything I appreciate it more considering how badly designed that fight was. But I digress, to each their own after all.

[Supersnow845]

Chrysalis is actually really easy. People still don't understand how it works, but it's easy.

There's one set of orbs you don't have to pop, because they spawn the sprites.

You pop sprint and Def and offensive cds before getting sucked in the middle, and you don't need the lb3 to kill the tear.
But people fall back on that as a crutch every time. Oh well.

As for savage being midcore, it is. And I say this as someone who has not cleared the tier yet because p12s is kicking my statics collective ass. If it was hardcore content, it would take hardcore statics longer than a day or two to clear it. Simple as that.

Eureka is not midcore. It's the definition of casual content. Same with bozja.

That’s exactly what I’m saying, you can’t judge savage being midcore based on the fact that the 5% statics clear it in a day, if you look at the way the playerbase skews, what content people engage in and how difficult people find content based on who engages with it then middle of the road extremes are about the hardest you could still call midcore content

Ultimates (especially the EW ultimates) have really shifted the window for what people who engage with them think is the average of the general playerbase

[Shurrikhan]

For example, all three terms (Casual, midcore, hardcore) can be invoked to describe different levels of savage+ raiding groups, and tend to be based on time commitment, skill-level and ambition. Yet, when we're talking about the full scope of the game, the terms are almost always applied instead based on what types of content someone is interested in. This creates a lot of confusion, willful and otherwise, wherein people aren't operating with shared definitions of the terms they're mutually using.

I'm not sure why that'd be considered especially problematic, let alone unique. The same occurs with most words covering spans of a given spectrum. Their referents are contextual and half the time signal things tangential to those spectrums anyways.

"I play Savage casually" makes plenty of sense, even if we can also say "I prefer casual content" and understand that any but perhaps the very easiest of Savage fights are probably not intended referents (especially if on-patch).

[Shurrikhan]

The distinctions ARE important, and absolutely matter - think of WoW's Warlords of Draenor (WoD) expansion. It's near universally disliked for a number of reasons, but a big one is that the only things to do in it were really PvPing and raiding. There is that "The one thing it DID do well was..." argument, which is the raids. But that was it. Catering to one part of the community to, effectively, the disregard and cost of the entire rest caused a massive collapse in player numbers that was, at that time, unheard of for WoW.

...This claim seems a bit odd. There was a greater difficulty range on grindable outdoor/auxiliary content, especially at the start of the expansion, than in Mists or Cata (though I would have liked to see a continuation of the Brawler's Guild, there were new additions to scratch similar enough itches) and unless attempting to full on no-life rep grind or the like there was about as much available to do/grind as in previous expansions. The Legendary Ring questline was a step down from the Legendary Cloak questline of MoP, but not really in terms of time available to be sunk in so much as just the storytelling surrounding it.

WoD's main issues were just (A) newly/comparatively low content output overall, (B) player activities that were highly resource-intensive to add but created few enjoyable play-hours especially relative to dev time required (Garrisons, Shipyards, etc.), and, perhaps most importantly, that it (C) impaled itself on its own hype (or, failure to deliver on certain promises or implied degree of quality-times-quantity).

In more objective/contextualized retrospectives, WoD tends to rate higher than it did at that time, even if not as highly as it did in nostalgia waves during the worst-perceived patches in Shadowlands; much of its overall problems was just that it promised too much for what it could actually put out.

[DiaDeem]

Eureka is not midcore. It's the definition of casual content. Same with bozja.

I don't think you understand what midcore even means.
We're talking about content that doesn't put you to sleep, requires a certain level of commitment, has a long progression system you can get invested into, and it's something you can do for a long while in the game.

Casual content doesn't require any of this. You don't commit to anything, there's no real long term progression, and there's nothing inciting you to ever come back if you don't want to. Roulettes, MSQ Dungeons, MSQ Trails, etc.

Difficulty doesn't define what kind of content you're doing, rather how much commitment that content requires from you. Of course difficulty plays a part, but it's hardly the only thing.

I'm curious. Do you have your completed Elemental Armor?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I don't think you understand what midcore even means.
We're talking about content that doesn't put you to sleep, requires a certain level of commitment, has a long progression system you can get invested into, and it's something you can do for a long while in the game.

Casual content doesn't require any of this. You don't commit to anything, there's no real long term progression, and there's nothing inciting you to ever come back if you don't want to. Roulettes, MSQ Dungeons, MSQ Trails, etc.

Difficulty doesn't define what kind of content you're doing, rather how much commitment that content requires from you. Of course difficulty plays a part, but it's hardly the only thing.

I'm curious. Do you have your completed Elemental Armor?

Nope. I hated eureka. Haven't even finished a relic in there. It's still casual content tho. The weapons were ugly imo, and so was the armor. No reason to do it and none of my friends were really into it either.



There's no real commitment to it. You never have to go back if you don't want to.



I've done potd to 200, hoh to 100. Haven't done the latest deep dungeon because I just haven't had time.



I did every bozja relic. It was very casual. Worked on it bit by bit over the years it was relevant before endwalker released.



EX trials require very little commitment and the time investment isn't much either. Less than a stint in eureka.

[DiaDeem]

Do you have your completed Elemental Armor?

Nope.

Yeah, I figured..

[TaleraRistain]

It was a mistake to reduce the "casual" floors in the later deep dungeons to 30 while we only ran 21-30 for the gind.

They essentially removed the deep dungeon from the broader mass and made it an harder content where you need a fixed party over several days. Not approachable.

Also by removing the 100 casual floors they also removed the 1-100 solo achievment which probably was midcore content. 1-200 is too hardcore for most players.

Agreed 100%. I was really disappointed in how brief HoH was and when they brought DD back with Orthos I was hoping we would see PotD style again with much more of it accessible to drop in and out of instead of the majority being fixed party floors.

[Supersnow845]

I would love if they made deep dungeons are roulette, expanded the casual floors to 1-50 on HOH and EO and 50-100 on POTD and made a random set of 10 floors a completion for the roulette

Field content could be shoved into a roulette aside style “daily achievement for roulette level bonus achieved by picking a random set of say “kill 3 Zadnor CE’s or 5 pagos NM’s” even do field content is unapologetic about being non roulette content, deep dungeons feel like roulette content that’s not on a roulette (for at least the casual floors)