Quote Originally Posted by Azurarok View Post
I personally think of it by how much each party member's responsible for the clear.

Hardcore, starting with Extremes from ShB onwards, generally expects everyone to do the dance right. Mistakes made by any individual usually blatantly penalizes the entire party. There's much less room to make up for the mistakes, and that naturally makes it a time sink, so the investment becomes more necessary.

Midcore, which I see as things like Bozja's CEs, CLL, and DR normal, can put just as much strain on the individual and punishes them hard, but typically only slows down the run, not kill it entirely with a body check or hard enrage. A few good players can drag the rest of the team across the finish line if it comes down to it.

In that sense I think normal content can sit around that Midcore line when they're still new, but they quickly become outgeared within the same patch, to the point mechanics become regularly skipped and some bosses may not even get to do much more than their tutorial phase. Chaotic falls under Hardcore for me.
The problem with that argumentation is, that the supposed "midcore" content is only "midcore" for a few key people, i.e. tanks / healers and dps that can rezz. Everyone else can just kick back and isn't really responsible for anything beside a faster clear time. And if there is one thing all the discussions about the low skill of the player base and the amount of dps that don't AoE in SB+ content have demonstrated, is that "other people's time" is not something that is worth anything to a majority of the playerbase. The whole point of failed mechanics penalizing the whole party and hard enrages is precisely to equalize this disparity in responsibility. A dps not doing the mechanic correctly => not enough damage to clear enrage => dps needs to do the mechanic properly like everyone else, not watch netflix on 2nd monitor while everyone else is doing all the work for them and they just get all the rewards anyway.

I mean, the duels in Bozja are 1v1 encounters, surely, that should be a "midcore" player's wet dream, right? Just the midcore player, the boss, no one to rely on but one's own skill, no one that could mess with the attempt. Except that means there is also no one to carry said "midcore". And despite there existing cheese strat, in the hundreds of hours I spent in Bozja, the number of people that would fall into the "midcore" category skill wise that have attempted the easiest one (Gabriel) I observed were around 2. The rest of the "midcores" were just people who spend time in the area, but still died to nearly every CE. Red Choctober, the big carrion bird, the laser tree, the math robot, the spidertron. Every single one of them regularly flooring 30 ray people.