The Enormous Gap Between Casual and Hardcore Content

[Atelier-Bagur]

I always see content difficulty this way:

Casual - Theres little to no player responsibility and agency. Performance isnt as punishable for clears and most likely you can turn your brain off for most of the time. (Dungeons, Trials, most Alliance Raids)

Midcore - Must know most every mechanic and perform to the best of your ability. Cant 100% turn your brain off and mistakes can be more punishing towards the whole encounter. (Most EXs and some Alliance Raids)

Hardcore - Every player must know every mechanic, their role, the dance and perform optimally or risk wiping the encounter even by single mistake. Player responsbility and agency is extremely high. (Savage and Ultimates)

I havent done Criterion so I dont exactly know if it falls into my Hardcore criteria but I assume it does considering the amount of feedback I hear.

[Renathras]

Am I alone in believing these things a problem?

Not at all.

I agree with you that EW has made the Extremes more in the Hardcore category (body checks, body checks everywhere) other than ZodEx (RubEx wouldn't have been but for the massive whombo combo towards the end immediately followed by a body check advanced Limit Cut), and you aren't alone in believing the gap is a problem. Ex2 (Hyd) at level, Ex3, Ex4, Ex5 due to the 5-6 mechanics that all come at you at once towards the end, and Ex6 due to Gales 2 and 3 and multiple body checks were all closer to what 2nd boss Savage fights historically have been. ODDLY, P1S was easier than HydEx other than maybe Fourfold chains. Which was just weird. (Haven't done Ex7 yet to judge it, personally).

Even in the widely praised here Zepla video where she laid out her concerns for the game right now, one of her chief concerns was also this lack of stepping stone between the MSQ/normal difficulty stuff and Extremes, and that content is mostly either casual but with low replayability or hardcore/elite, with the midcore being kind of crowded out as the traditional midcore content has been made into hardcore content, too, and the more grindy/replayable midcore content of yore like Eureka/Bozja/Deep Dungeons are either missing (Eureka/Bozja) ore more hardcore (Orthos).

And it's a total missed opportunity that Criterion Dungeon - despite explicitly being designed to have multiple difficulties, comes in MSQ/Normal, Savage, and Ultimate. Somehow, they left out the Hard/Extreme setting.

.

But short answer: No, you are not alone in believing this is a problem. Even major content creators have been talking about it.

EDIT:

I'd argue if there are bodychecks that are extremely hard to recover from, then that content is more hardcore (savage-like).
I would put Golbez in here for his meteor mechanic, but not the rest (have not tried to the new one). I'd say that most extremes are midcore though if and when they are recoverable, albeit, less optimized. When they aren't, then it's more hardcore just because there's a bodycheck which expect you execute the mechanic precise. Bodychecks are savages ways of creating that artificial difficulty. So that would make Golbez a savage lite (a savage with a few less steps).

Basically this.

I think the only real exception to my above list might be Ex4, since I remember the enrage being REALLY lax. Like the mechanics were hard and fast, and there were a few "soft" body checks (like the two tank flares + party stack, but if one person who WASN'T a Tank was down, the rest of the party could survive with enough mitigation splitting the 6 person stack with just 5 people), and the two man circle BS that they seem to love this expansion is a body check, but as long as you don't lose all your resers, you can still recover since the later mechanic (the colored Mario Kart business) would adjusted down if you didn't have a full 8 people, giving your healers time to raise people during that period, and the lax enrage meant that you could do this and still get the clear.

Ex4 was more frantic than Ex5, but as long as your healers didn't die and/or you had at least one living SMN or RDM, it was far easier to drag a party to a clear than Ex5 where losing people during the three mechanic combinations (the stack/spread/expanding boxes, the death pizza stack/spread thing, and/or the advanced Limit Cut business) would lead to a wipe. And the worst part of that was it was late in the fight, meaning you'd get all that way before finding out how many people couldn't do it. My clear on that I just sucked it up, went RDM, and brute forced the body checks with mass resing.

Zodiark really didn't have any body checks that were unrecoverable. Hydaelyn KINDA did when it was current content, but not so much once people overleveled it (losing a healer at a bad time could cause problems with the Light Party stacks, though a lot more parties died due to Chackrams than anything else early on). Endsinger was just a pretty complex fight early on. Barb's main issue was that it did a lot of damage and required a lot of movement, but if you could survive the mechanics, the enrage was lax enough that the body checks were more "soft" than "hard" body checks as they didn't necessarily end in a wipe if you could get some raisers through them. Rubi had a mass of mechanics all backloaded with arguably three body checks (stack, pizza, Limit Cut), and Golbes has several two person circles, both meteor/flare/tower/knockbacks, Gales 2 and Gales 3, and I think probably the ice wall safe corner...which is a lot of body checks for an Extreme fight. Not necessarily in terms of damage output or enrage, but in terms of body checks, Golbez could easily be Savage level.

Exactly. Some are just too punishing. You do one mechanic wrong (like one out of 8 people) and everyone dies. Personally, that's just artificial difficulty for the sake of it. Keep that to ultimates. It's more fun to mess up but being able to *recover* from it. As a healer I just do my thing and then we wipe because that's how it's designed. In a real midcore fight you would be able to die, raise and heal a lot and still (maybe) make it. And a lot of ex fights just don't fulfill that criteria.

It's kinda weird, but the 8 man Normals at this point are closer to midcore content than most of the Extremes have become since the latter have shifted to being more hardcore content/Savage level at this point.

Should they add a new "Hard" tier in between?

Yes, and I've been saying this myself for a while now.

[Renathras]

Why do people insist on being so coddled and handheld each step of the way to Savage or Ultimate?

The game shouldn't be hand holding your way through up to ultimate content.

Who is asking to be hand held to Ultimate content? Or even Savage?

People are pointing out the difficulty/learning curve of content in this game is a flat plane ending at a sheer cliff that leads upwards to a small landing before an even steeper cliff to a plateau above.

Who is asking for hand holding or coddling to "Savage or Ultimate"?

[ValkyrieL]

Savage 1st two floors are always a joke, if you think they are very hard than sadly you are just bad, the difference between floors 1/2 and final floor is wider....I'll admit that this current 2nd floor was more challenging than any floor in recent memory and probably on par/harder than previous 3rd floor

[Ivtrix]

Calling p1s hardcore content is a disrespect to hardcore content

[Eastwall]

I know it sound stupid, but where is pvp?

I guess it is because it is hard to define? You can get really sweaty matches, but at the same time you can reverse boost yourself into a recruit bot lobby. So pvp can't be defined in any category

[Nokuushi]

The game is terrible teacher. It won't teach you how to play your job, and you need that for EX and up. As long as we won't get tools to improve, showing you what you did wrong and what you should do. This game casual and hardcore gap will be same. There is nowhere in this game to improve. You need thrid party tools or go outside of game to seek help from discords, youtube or reddit. That's terrible game design.

[DPZ2]

The game is terrible teacher. It won't teach you how to play your job, and you need that for EX and up. As long as we won't get tools to improve, showing you what you did wrong and what you should do. This game casual and hardcore gap will be same. There is nowhere in this game to improve. You need thrid party tools or go outside of game to seek help from discords, youtube or reddit. That's terrible game design.

And yet, it is the design of almost every video game out there.

Don't know anything about First Person Shooters? Git gud or go away. Don't know how to deal with JRPG menus? Git gud or go away. Never played an action RPG before? Git gud or go away.

The task of learning "How to play your job" is the same in an MMORPG as it is in most other video games. We play the game and figure out what works. We watch Youtube videos and read online articles. Or not.

A major problem with MMORPGs is that you have to play with other people who (a) you do not know (b) may not be as skilled as you (c) may just be jerks.

You don't have that problem with a single-player or cooperative action RPG, or a JRPG. You tend to figure out which of your friends to avoid suggesting a round of play in the game they're miserable at. Those friends may be great for games like Songpop Party, and useless when playing League of Legends.

You can mitigate the random people by playing in a defined group. If you don't have that luxury (and you certainly may not have that luxury in any particular game), you play to the best of your abilities and carry on.

[remiff]

I don't think there's a huge difficulty gap between extreme and some savage content, it really depends on the specific fights,
however, for the latest tier bosses, they are often much more challenging, but that's somewhat the intention of that content.

On the other hand, I find that the so-called "casual" content is way too easy, and there isn't really a "normal" mode in the game anymore.

Current dungeons/raid 8/24 are a walk in the park, and mechanics almost never result in KOs, and AoEs and bosses are hardly punishing anymore.

What I consider "normal" content is certainly the bosses in Ivalice raids or the bosses in Bozja Southern Front (including Delubrum Reginae), which means content that can be completed without relying on the Party Finder and that is not a free ride when encountered for the first time,where KOs are still possible.

For me, it's not more extreme, savage, or ultimate content that the game lacks, but precisely this normal content that has become virtually nonexistent.

I agree that the extreme content isn't very abundant either, but there's a bit more of it now with the addition of the variant/criterion dungeons.

Unfortunately, content that requires Party Finder organization isn't "that popular" either.

I believe the difficulty gap issue stems from the fact that the current story content MSQ/8/24/etc,... is on the "Super Easy+++++" mode, and there is absolutely no normal difficulty left in the game that doesn't require a Party Finder group
– essentially something between the "Easy+++++" and extreme.

[CaedemSanguis]

Elite:
TOP
DSR

Hardcore:
Criterion Savage (both Rokkon & Sil'dih)
P12s
P8s
"Maybe P4s"

Midcore:

Every Pandaemonium Savage except P12s&P8s
Criterion
Ex's

Casual:
Everything else

I dont see the problem