Weapons & Equip Court Fool's Folly: a sword that can essentially one shot many enemies.

[TheGuideIsEvil]

The Court Fool's Folly is a sword that can be gotten in Pre-Hardmode. It is a sword that is multicolored; one side is pink, and one side is red. The hilt has belts on it, like a motley hat. Finally, the tip of the blade has a unique hook on it. The Court Fool's Folly can be bought from the Travelling Merchant for approximately 1 platinum after Skeletron is defeated.

The Court Fool's Folly weapon deals exactly 15 damage per swing, which is somewhat middling. The Court Fool's Folly auto swings rather decently, but its main problem prevents it from being always lethal. After all, the Court Fool's Folly really lacks supreme damage. The trick and motif of the weapon is that the Court Fool's Folly has a 1 in 35 chance to deal exactly 20x the base damage of the weapon in a single swing. This makes it possible to deal about 300 damage in said swing.

With the Legendary modifier, the right melee gear, and proper strength potions/boosters, the Court Fool's Folly weapon can deal upwards of 1000+ damage in a single lucky swing. However, the rare chance of it occurring means you really have to be lucky. The DPS, beyond that, is slightly mediocre.

The natural critical chance of the Court Fool's Folly weapon is 10%. This mostly applies to non power strikes, but given the rare chance of 20x damage, this makes those power attacks potentially deal up, or even more than, SIX HUNDRED DAMAGE. Combining the base chance of 1/35 for 300x damage, with the 1/10 chance of a critical strike, gives you a 1/350 base chance to deal 600x the damage.

Increasing your critical strike chance will NOT increase the chance of you getting the bonus, but only the chance of a critical.

The risk of this weapon is getting killed by enemies while trying to get the bonus, since the base damage of the weapon is so crap.

The weapon glows when the boost occurs.

Tooltip: Seldom deals an astronomical amount of damage

 

[DiamondFire🪓]

Wait, so consuming the Galaxy Pearl, an incredibly subtle luck increase of 0.03, would make the RNG go from 1/40 to 1/30? By that logic, a lantern night would make it almost guaranteed.

 

[TheGuideIsEvil]

Wait, so consuming the Galaxy Pearl, an incredibly subtle luck increase of 0.03, would make the RNG go from 1/40 to 1/30? By that logic, a lantern night would make it almost guaranteed.

Oops, my bad, though it increased more.

It would go up to 1/37.

Like the concept?

 

[DiamondFire🪓]

Oops, my bad, though it increased more.

It would go up to 1/37.

Like the concept?

I guess, although the weapon would still be incredibly weak for its tier. This would perhaps work better for post-skeletron.

 

[TheGuideIsEvil]

I guess, although the weapon would still be incredibly weak for its tier. This would perhaps work better for post-skeletron.

I would likely have to reduce the damage scale, then.

 

[DiamondFire🪓]

I would likely have to reduce the damage scale, then.

300 damage at a 1/40 chance is actually somewhat balanced for post-skeletron, especially considering how you never said it has a projectile. WoF has 8,000 HP on classic. This would take an average of over a thousand hits. Probably make luck not affect it though. I don’t support.

 

[TheGuideIsEvil]

300 damage at a 1/40 chance is actually somewhat balanced for post-skeletron, especially considering how you never said it has a projectile. WoF has 8,000 HP on classic. This would take an average of over a thousand hits. Probably make luck not affect it though. I don’t support.

Ah ok.

How about it deals 15 damage consistently, and can deal 20 times the damage (so three hundred) at a 1 in 35 chance WITHOUT being affected by luck? And sure, it can be sold at post Skeletron for 1 platinum by the Traveling Merchant.

Its critical chance is now a 10 percent chance.

Pre Hardmode makes this kind of middle ground, but the damage boost makes this weapon kind of work in Hardmode.

A Broken Hero Sword applied to this weapon makes the True Court Fool's Folly, which throws a reversed projectile (travels to you) from a certain range of it. It now deals a base damage of 30 damage, and has a 1 in 25 chance to deal 20 times the damage, at 600 damage as a base. The True Court Fool's Folly critical chance is now 20 percent as a base, which can make this deal 1200 damage as a base when the power strike occurs. Projectiles deal about 45 damage. It also swings faster.

 

[J Bame]

Striking Moment stocks going up

Ridiculously unrealistic setups aside, this never works. You will never find yourself using a weapon that doesn't do any damage almost literally 99% of the time and isn't even that strong when it does get to do something. A better way to balance this is to give it proper stats and make it like, a 1/10 chance to deal 10x damage. This is the only way you can keep the gimmick in a usable item. But then that leads us to our next problem:

It's a sword. Swords need range and above average DPS to be good. A weapon with this gimmick would naturally have low stats, combine this with the range weakness of a sword without an aura and you get yet another bad true melee sword.

 

[TheGuideIsEvil]

Striking Moment stocks going up

Ridiculously unrealistic setups aside, this never works. You will never find yourself using a weapon that doesn't do any damage almost literally 99% of the time and isn't even that strong when it does get to do something. A better way to balance this is to give it proper stats and make it like, a 1/10 chance to deal 10x damage. This is the only way you can keep the gimmick in a usable item. But then that leads us to our next problem:

It's a sword. Swords need range and above average DPS to be good. A weapon with this gimmick would naturally have low stats, combine this with the range weakness of a sword without an aura and you get yet another bad true melee sword.

Fair complaint.

Fine, how about this? Critical attacks simply do undecuple (11x) damage. Base damage of the sword is now 20, so you can get base 220 damage during power strikes. Natural crit chance is 15 percent. If you want range, it could be swung like a boomerang, covering a medium range, and when power strikes occur, it pierces multiple enemies.

 

[Orchamut]

For reference, maybe compare it to the Orange Zapinator, a pre-mech Hardmode weapon that does a fair 100 damage with its normal shots, and has a 1/50 chance to deal 10x that much damage, and this is all on top of being able to gain several other perks and best of all, the weapon isn't even a close-combat weapon.

 

[Aceplante]

ah, I was wondering why this sounded familiar. I previously posted an idea for a hallow themed "chaos sword" that did a random amount of damage per swing, and the feedback I got was that this would only really be useful in bossfights where the damage averages out anyways. Otherwise, you sometimes do a lot of damage (and one shot some enemies you may have already been able to anyways, and the extra damage didn't matter) and sometimes get screwed over by dealing next to no damage to a strong enemy you needed to kill quickly. So the conclusion was we could make it super cool to use at least, with random effects making it a sword version of the zapinator.

I guess what Im saying is that true RNG based weapons like this are probably a bad idea, as some have already concluded in this thread. Youve already suggested a decent base damage completely reworking the original idea.

Edit: lol as I was typing this both the zapinator and the exact aforementioned point were brought up

 

[TheGuideIsEvil]

ah, I was wondering why this sounded familiar. I previously posted an idea for a hallow themed "chaos sword" that did a random amount of damage per swing, and the feedback I got was that this would only really be useful in bossfights where the damage averages out anyways. Otherwise, you sometimes do a lot of damage (and one shot some enemies you may have already been able to anyways, and the extra damage didn't matter) and sometimes get screwed over by dealing next to no damage to a strong enemy you needed to kill quickly. So the conclusion was we could make it super cool to use at least, with random effects making it a sword version of the zapinator.

I guess what Im saying is that true RNG based weapons like this are probably a bad idea, as some have already concluded in this thread. Youve already suggested a decent base damage completely reworking the original idea.

Edit: lol as I was typing this both the zapinator and the exact aforementioned point were brought up

I'll try to focus. Thanks for the critique, folk.

How about instead, it does the following. I'll be for real.

It could have a combo system; the more hits you do WITHOUT being hurt, the more it stacks. Each hit that you do gives a multiplicative/additive boost up to six in a row; so 15, 30, 45, 60, all the way to consistently dealing about 90 damage per strike, as long as you are not hurt. It could instead be a boomerang instead of a sword, so it has range.

Being hurt breaks the combo. This way, it's not RNG, but you earn the bonus.

However, critical chances could potentially make the weapon start out dealing 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, all the way up to dealing 180 damage.

With the right gear, it can be quite potent.

 

[Big Sammich]

Fair complaint.

Fine, how about this? Critical attacks simply do undecuple (11x) damage. Base damage of the sword is now 20, so you can get base 220 damage during power strikes. Natural crit chance is 15 percent. If you want range, it could be swung like a boomerang, covering a medium range, and when power strikes occur, it pierces multiple enemies.

It still wouldn't be good. The weapon would be extremely unreliable, and your DPS would still be terrible. It's a fine novelty/joke weapon, but definitely not something anyone would seriously consider.