Midcore, commonly requested kind of content for FFXIV… But does it exist?
Savage, then Unreal, then… FRU Blind: https://youtube.com/live/QFOScE14kCE
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Music Used:
FFXIV Dawntrail – Starless Skyline
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:27 (1) Isn’t it a Gaming Mindset?
03:40 Difficulty is somewhat Subjective
05:20 (2) Is the Casual Content actually “Midcore”?
06:43 (3) Casual and Hardcore are wide enough there is no space for Midcore
11:00 (4) “That doesn’t count because I don’t like it!”
14:15 Content isn’t Permanently “Hardcore”
15:53 The Long Awaited Midcore Content!! Or What?
16:59 Meiwaku
18:11 Many Players DO Find Their Own Challenges
18:54 Is Midcore Content Actually A Thing That is Missing?
19:52 Outro
20:32 Fun Fact
source
I don't know, I'm playing in JP region and Extreme is pretty midcore to me. Queue in with random players and expect to clear in 1-3 pull if we stuck and it get to 15 minutes there is a vote abbandon avaliable and most of the time it get voted and people just carry on requeue it again.
I think the midcore or not is more on the mindset of community around the player about that content than the difficualty itself and it will shape player opinion on it even before they try it. For example, I played GuildWars 2 regularly before FFXIV and the first time I played FFXIV, I actually avoided Crystal Tower Raid (it wasn't mandatory back then) becuase it has "raid" in the name and the mind set from GW2 community back then treat raid like a "hardcore only club" (slightly better now). So when I saw "raid" I just went with "oh it's for hardcore" and didn't even tried it until fc mate brought me to do T1 with them and I think it's synced but due to it's a max ilv synced and power creep in level 50 skill, we cleared it with no problem. And they also brought me to many ARR extreme synced.
So fast forward to today Extreme Trial become the most normal thing ever to do after we complete MSQ. How normal is it? well, most people I've met in my server did Extreme synced at some point in their journey. And I also get pulled by FC my mate multiple time to do EX that I haven't prepared anything or only prepare partially. Like in EW I took my time to clear MSQ and took me like a week and half or so and then my FC mate just pulled me to do EW EX1, even though I have lower than minimum ilv gear and they just said "Don't worry about it" and that wasn't the first time or last time that happened. So, Extreme is pretty midcore to me. It's something that serious enough that we need to prepare and practice for it, but not so serious that we only want to do with highly competent group. Just a somewhat functional group and it's fine. And it wasn't just my FC, After my first FC fall apart I was in the scouting for FC period and I visit their house and found them gather together for something and when I said hi they just asked me if I want to join e5s practice run with them since they lack one slot and then we cleared it. Such a wild experince (I didn't join this FC though since friends from first FC create new FC and asked me to join them)
to me, 'Midcore' seems like a WoW colloquialism for 'Add a heroic style difficuilty between normal and extreme/savage.' with respective adjustments to gear ilvls as well.
Using the current tier as an example, Crafted and Normal mode would remain 710, A mid-core difficulty and base tome would be 725, Savage and augmented tome would bump up to 735 across all items with the weapon being bumped to 740, with .5 Extreme weapon being bumped to 730.
As a former WoW player, something that has really Intimidated me and put me off considering Savage for the most part is that typically savage raiders have said 'oh savage is even harder than mythic in WoW.' And from the few i have actually done that were older content, i would say that Normal mode is arguably easier than normal mode in WoW (Significantly in part due to the player count), but savage and even some extremes are certainly comparable to Mythic in terms of difficulty. This is certainly in part due to the extreme jump in personal responsibility in Savage. Comparing to heroic in wow, while yes, there is certainly a jump in responsibility, it's not something that couldn't be fixed by another player if you mess up catastrophically. Recovering a mechanic might be as simple as someone else sacrificing themselves, rather than the whole raid exploding
Adding a new difficuilty between normal and savage would also allow them to do away with one of the biggest complaints i hear about more recent Savage fights in that the first half of the fight is teaching new mechanics, a mid-difficuilty would allow them to introduce these combinations in like a 1-2 combo instead of all at once that when executed correctly would still feel like the savage fight, but would allow more mid-core groups a bit more flexibility. Then this would allow Savage to go straight into mechanics rather than teaching them to the players.
8:12 I'm sure you, me, and plenty of others can attest. Even though it's very rare in occurrence. That even the most casual of content can, and will be wiped to. Or fail outright. Every time you queue for dungeons, you roll the dice, and sometimes you roll a natural 1 and the people in your party, whether it be in a low level dungeon or an expert roulette. Somehow manage to claim the trophy of being the worst players you've ever seen.
I had the unfortunate experience of being witness to what might be the worst dungeon run of all time. It was the Amaruot dungeon, before the Hades fight. And I'm fairly certain I saw the worst level 80 Drk of all time. This was during ShB so he had played the story to get to this point, he didn't skip. He had no clue about what any of his buttons did. His reaction time was the slowest I've ever seen. Literally couldn't get out of aoes. And almost no amount of coaching seemed to help. He simply couldn't stay alive, or keep aggro. This is the one and only time I have ever seen a dungeon fail because the time ran out. YES THE TIME RAN OUT IN A DUNGEON. And when I mean I was really trying to help, I mean really trying. He was in discord with us, sharing his screen so we could better see what to give him pointers on. Nothing really seemed to help. I have no idea how he made it as far as he had in the game.
So next time you think you aren't good at the game, just remember that there is always someone worse. What the vast majority of us would consider the most casual of content. There are the few out there that somehow manage to turn the casual content, into savage content.
Obligatory comment before watching the video: Extreme isn't midcore, it's low end hardcore content. Any fight you actually need to memorize isn't midcore. Last time the game had midcore content was bozja CEs.
It is me. I am midcore.
As a newer player, the closest to what I'd consider midcore among the content I've experienced would be the Ultima Weapon Extreme (especially when run with mil). It's harder than any standard story content, but doesn't really have any tricky mechanics (apart from maybe the orbs) that you'd need to be aware of before the fight, so you can clear the fight without any advance preparation or particular strategy being mandatory simply by playing well and not doing too many mistakes.
Yeah, I'm a hardcore gamer, I grind guildheists all day for commendations 💪😎
In the loosest of terms, I viewed it in the lenses of general difficulty, or expected difficulty. Anything that is very old content is irrelevant, most people look at it in terms of current on content when discussing.
First me, casual is just MSQ, or things like variants where you can get through without knowing your kit, easily. Harcore is fights that take genuine preparation for and learning/progging, such as Savage and Ultimate. Ex, I consider closer to 'midcore'. Still takes a bit more than casual to complete, you somewhat have to have an idea of your job you are playing, and have to learn mechanics with less grace for mistakes, but doable with mistakes. Yes there is variance in all these, but it is a broad starting point.
Why Chaotic just doesn't feel good to me initially? I was not expecting proper savage difficulty in terms of grace for mistakes. Individually, and even at an 8 man level, the mechanics are nothing too crazy, but with everything happening at once it can get overwhelming. I went in expecting something around lower EX difficulty, and got more. Based on where in the patch cycle, I expected 'catch up fight for people who are less inclined for proper savage's and it was 'savage players get another savage fight' instead.
While I clear Savage purely in PF normally on two characters each tier. I was just not that interested in another fight I had to push myself quite that much. I like fights where I have to at least apply myself, but I did not want another full on savage fight with a 24 man debuff.
I have usually thought these casual, normal and hardcore more of a player types. Casual just logs in a game, plays whatever looks nicest to them and doesnt really consume much game related content outside of game.
Hardcore players think much more of what is meta and spend hours upon hours learning their rotations to a second and watch guides or theorycraft outside of game. Normal player just somewhere there between, plays what class they like and might watch occasional guide to get some basic idea how to play their job.
I think a lot of the confusion is around people conflating casual/midcore/hardcore PLAYERS with casual/midcore/hardcore RAIDERS. If you raid at all you are probably already in the hardcore PLAYERS bucket. I would say the definition that makes the most sense to me is: Casual = Easy difficulty, done once and not needed to be grinded. Midcore = Easy moment to moment difficulty but expected to grind. Hardcore = Hard difficulty and expected to grind.
I actually have a definition of midcore that doesn't really fall into any definition that you really described (or at least, didn't seem to). "Content that is flexible enough to accommodate multiple skill levels".
That said, while I mention that it's about skill levels in execution, the reason why it's so often requested is really about experience in the game. People already put in a lot of time into FFXIV just to get to max level. Asking people to invest more time into the game is a tall order. At the same time, because these people already put in so much time into the game, they have enough experience that you can't just give them braindead content. So while we often can point out smaller definitions like "Clearable in a single night" or "Grindable content", these miss the actual main issue, which is that there's just not enough choice in terms of finding difficulty that makes sense for the player at hand, especially with FFXIV where the gameplay style tends to be "do it right or suffer".
Which returns to my definition of "content that is flexible enough for multiple skill levels". This is usually the easiest way to solve the issue.
(Sidenote: The experience thing I mentioned above is also why you don't really see it talked about in a lot of circles outside of FFXIV and WoW. MMOs are in a unique position where there's so much investment involved just to get to end-game that it strains people's abilities to invest more. The same phenomena of more flexible content in other games just gets filtered out as "git good scrub" or "This game's just not for me" type of discussions instead)
Hmm, no mention of Blu Mage………how sad.
Excellent vid, especially Reason 3 and the Conclusion.
I would argue that with recent experiments by the design team, we are approaching a discrete limit in the difficulty space. Take the recent Chaotic Phase 1 (ignore tiles phase completely for sake of argument) and place it on a line graph of difficulty. Add the Alliance raids, with Crystal Tower way down on the easy end, things like Nier on the harder end. Now, pretend you're a game designer, and you get the feedback of "Nier raid is casual, but COD Phase 1 is hardcore. Make something midcore, dammit!" Can you mentally envision what an entire NEW category of fights between those two difficulties looks like? Speaking for myself, I cannot; I can only envision a somewhat harder Alliance raid, or a somewhat easier COD Phase 1.
Similarly in the 4man space, we have Story dungeons, Deep dungeons, and Criterion dungeons. Can you envision a difficulty between Story and Deep? Can you envision a difficulty between Deep and Criterion?
8man is ironically the least explored space. We do have Story trials, EX trials, Savage raids, and Ultimate raids, but most dissatisfied people seem to immediately push EX trials into hardcore. There isnt really a difficutly between Story and EX 8man, whether that warrants dev time or not is another discussion.
People asking for midcore without defining midcore, is not helpful. Say that you want content for a group of X players, that is easier than Y but harder than Z. Because, a discrete space needs to exist between Y and X, for the designers to be able to make it!
The challenge decreasing over time with gear is a great point further complicating this. Especially in fights that put the hard mechanics at the end, like raining cats in m1s. That fight is much easier even at 730 vs 710, so even though it is still a current high end duty, it’s an easier one now. I think this is a nice design to add additional challenge for serious week one raiders while offering a sliding scale of difficulty over time facilitating clears by less dedicated raiders without completely trivializing the fight.
Difficulty is so incredibly subjective, you really can't separate a players' level of skill from how hard they find content!
So many people I know don't notice how their expectations adjust as they get more skilled at the game. I've watched people go from only msq to savage raiding, and also people who tried out extremes and determined 'nah, not for me', and the people who've gone on to savage will call the new alliance raid 'interesting but easy' whilst those who haven't found it 'hellishly hard' – and granted, some of that is the groups they were in, but it's also the expectation you come with – I find savage/extreme players are used to 'get hit by things, wipe, try again' whereas dying (or even getting hit by) mechanics in the normal mode is often considered a point of failure. So for my friends who've reached savage, that we could figure out the fights without wiping completely meant they were 'easy' – for those who haven't, that they died in the fight meant it was 'hard'.
When I'm foggy-brained or distracted, I want the 'easy' versions where I can just clear – other times, I'll be happy (and satisfied) to truly flex my skills.
I have to spend a lot of time when inducting new players into extremes reassuring them that causing a wipe or merely dying or even missing a gcd isn't a fatal flaw, it's a completely normal part of the process at that level of content.
I also remind myself of how frustrated and hurt I was by struggling with 'In from the cold' I was completely taken out of the story by how punishing it was, even after moving to 'super easy' mode. For context, I'd played white mage and red mage up until that point and only gone through story and job quests, no real side content (like deep dungeons). I later (after levelling most jobs to 90 and doing some extremes) went back to try to understand why I had such a hellish time with it, and realised – it was that I had no intuitive grasp of facing direction when I first tried. I don't recall if I was doing it before or after they added the circles for the enemies, but I had no clue about walking or avoiding sight lines*, so when trying to stay equally far from all enemies… I just ended up aggroing all of them. I understood after that they'd clearly *tried to train me for this with all the 'sneak after someone' duties, but I stayed so far away in those that I didn't make the link until after I'd visited eureka as to how to avoid aggroing the enemies. So when I went back to re-try it, on normal difficulty, and it was… pretty easy, I very much internalised how dramatically experience affects the difficulty you perceive.
I don't mentally consider myself 'hardcore' even though I probably should – it's my main hobby, I cleared savage (and reclear each week…) and the chaotic but haven't been brave enough to take the step to ultimate. I still do island sanctuary each day too (which is a different kind of hardcore 😛 )!
My partner on the other hand would definitely be casual. He re-subs to the game for a month when new story comes out, does each duty once, and then moves on to other things. If 'normal' content was much harder, he'd probably give up on the game as 'not designed for his level of play' anymore.
Honestly, I think ffxiv does a really good job of having a good range of difficulty – I loved Mr. Ozma's interviews highlighting how Ex1 is designed as a toe-dip into harder content (whilst still being allowed to be a bit interesting), and what I've learnt from friends is that Ex3 is where it starts to jump in difficulty a bit (ie body check time!)
I started Arcadion savage at release with a static, and am now taking a new set of people through it. It's definitely easier to prog at this point, but I still wouldn't do it if it wasn't a set of people I'd trained up on extremes first!
I also observed how much 'slower' the fights feel as you get used to them. mechanics which are unbelievably fast when learning gradually become more and more rhythmic and doable as you learn it, and this makes the fight itself feel 'easier' just because it's familiar now.
I do think maybe the 'midcore' cravings are mostly craving 'variety' – one of my friends specifically wants non-linear dungeons, or gimmic variants of dungeons (sastasha, but no healing! or something). People are hyped for more field operations. I'd personally like to see more usage of the 'temporary bonus' they have with chaotic/light farming – perhaps in combination with gimmic runs (eg 'levelling roulette without a tank for X clusters' (not sure what a good reward would be but it feels doable)) – I love the mogtome events precisely because they make us go to a variety of content and often end up in different ways (7-dps P1n was so much fun)
For me? Bozja is a good example, but content with mechanics that feel closer to an EX level in difficulty than normal, has reasons to repeat it, and most importantly, you can hop into it quickly. I think grindable is a reasonable way to put it. I can do this content with friends of varying skill levels. Someone dies? Not a huge deal. Harder content, little commitment if you don't want there to be.
My definitions for content difficulty would be like this:
Casual: A single player can stop wipes.
Medium: Healers/raisers dying or DPS checks not being met causes a wipe.
Hard: One player can cause a wipe.
If only we got Jeuno extreme or something instead of chaotic cod. Take Jeuno the first walk, but make it tougher with more team based mechs (the healer check, towers, spread, and stuff was great more stuff like that). Simple mechs to pull off, but does require some cooperation and some body checks. CoD p1 is basically high end midcore.
For me i dont really enjoy extreme/ultimate whatever i dont find it fun to play the same raid and do the same dance until you get to the mechanic that keeps wiping, especially when its current content where gear is on the line, and you have to clear MULTIPLE times
Timely given the firestorm on the forums
Midcore players themselves is combination of a lot of things:
1- fast learner, good at role, unstable irl sched = cant raid consistently.
2- good at role, kinda slow learner, have all the time in the world to prog all day.
Etch…
Dedication also counts, how far can they go and study out of raid sched.
Knowing your own capability:
how long can you raid? 2h? 4h? 6h? Before you loose focus and start to mess every pull.
Do you know how fast can you learn and do take that consideration when progging?
All I know is that Dawntrail was a barren wasteland if you're a casual player when nothing but hardcore raids keep getting pushed out *for 6 months straight*, and that a lot of players would have been better off not buying the expansion at all until April 2025 at the earliest, and that's still a "big if" because they might decide the new Field Operation has to be Savage too like they did with Chaotic.
I know I certainly felt ripped off buying Dawntrail, doubly so when none of the new 90-100 skills did anything noteworthy for most of the jobs, VPR & PCT weren't really great for me, and female Hrothgar somehow got released in a LESS finished state than the male ones. This was the first expansion I was around to pre-order, and I feel scammed.
What is easy and what is hard? It all comes down to how an individual player see it. I myself consider the new Chaotic Alliance to be quite easy once you learn the fight, but often there are players there, who are struggling. Those players may think it is hard content. Just an example.
I feel like especially the reward system of ff does not incentivize much of putting in a little more effort and getting rewarded for it, you very much either take the time to read guides or you could just get through with just hitting your shiny buttons. Content where you should plan for stuff like that is not really the kind where you would get along without knowing your every button is also the content where you need to know what the boss does beforehand, and ultimately there rarely is a good reward for it. Mounts are at an incredibly low drop chance on the newly released tiers, and if I offered you to play some content, and after 100 times you did it you earned the prestige from it, if you are not good at it immediately you might not be interested in taking on a challenge that the game devs intend for you to beat up to 100 times. Or you need to beat 4 tiers of a raid that have meticulous guides online that these feel pretty much impossible to beat without, and that throw you right in with the wolves (and for some reason feel pretty disconnected from their normal versions). And the reward, as nice as a mount is, is not something you can show off especially in main cities, where mounts are not allowed, but people hang all the time. And if you intend to show off some cool weapon you got from clearing ultimates or grinding a relic, you cannot change that on the fly like a mount or minion choice, you either are showing off constantly, every time you draw your weapon, or you leave it in your dresser unused. Minions strike a fair balance in the game, using them to show off achievements would fit perfectly I feel, and with them already being in the category of „very grindy“ in treasure maps and dungeon drops, I think they would fit neatly in that category of showing off that mounts simply cannot do with the limitations the city hubs of ff impose.
I think midcore as a descriptor of content is honestly worthless, since it's a descriptor of player investment. Anything that "midcore players" do is "midcore content." Hot take: an Ultimate could be midcore content depending on the way you approach it. People keep asking for "midcore content" when often what they mean is "normal difficulty content that has a compelling reason to engage with it." You hit the nail on the head when you say that this appears to mostly just be people asking for some kind of grindable content. When someone starts out in FFXIV, all the content is so new that simply experiencing it for the first time is a compelling enough reason. But as people become more familiar with the game, sink more hours into it, consume more information about it, they become so numb as to require an incentive to engage with the content, something this game is notoriously poor in regards to.
Extremes in JP are considered "midcore content," but here in the English speaking playerbase, we consider anything that requires "outside studying" to be "hardcore" content. I find this is more a mentality problem than anything else. If we were to assume that the average "midcore" player is reasonably familiar with the way the game telegraphs mechanics (ie: can do most "casual" content in the game with few to no vulnerability stacks or deaths) and has some amount of familiarity with their job and rotation, then they have all the tools they need to be able to do Extreme level content without watching a guide. The longer I play the more I realize that the gap between "normal" and "extreme" was never actually as large as I thought it was.
If we're being technical, we might consider anything with a DPS check or Hard Enrage as definitively falling out of the "casual" category… but, then again, the normal mode versions of A3, A12, O1, and O3 all have DPS checks. Any phase that is "fight adds while boss bar charges" is, technically, a DPS check. They're not HARD DPS checks, but they are DPS checks.
FFXIV is home to many a casual static that meets once or twice a week to do whatever the current high-end content is at their own pace. I'd consider such players to be just as midcore as the fishing enthusiasts, marketboard warriors, and daily roulette checklisters. Which makes everything from crafting to duty finder to savage valid "midcore content" in my eyes. In which case, there's plenty of "midcore content" in the game. But people warp the definition of a nebulous term around their own perspectives and I think what you say at the end about players "outgrowing" content that once satisfied them is very insightful. It's a very "big fish in a little pond" kind of vibe. (sorry for yapping. I'm a yapper)
I think "content for me" being midcore sounds accurate. When I tell people I want midcore content, I just mean I want content that is not stupid easy, but not too hard that I have to use a meta or playstyle I don't enjoy because it's optimal.
I think a lot of people are missing in the discussion is that people want more than just battle content to drop around the same time as Battle content. Something more than just PvE to beat monotony