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Wouldn't consider myself an amazingly good Terraria player or anything but have been playing off-and-on for just under 4 years with now over 520 hours experience. Having played up to the Expert endgame now in multiplayer averaging 3 to 6 people, Expert mode feels pretty much spot-on in a multiplayer setting right up until the last 1/3 or so of Hardmode. The one and only thing I think is a little nonsensical about pre-Hardmode is the massive discrepancy between pre-Hardmode Crimson and Corruption worlds, since the Worm Scarf is quite literally infinitely better than the Brain of Confusion; you know there's a problem when one becomes obsolete almost instantly and the other is borderline essential even into the endgame.
Also, Beenades being craftable opens up some
serious cheese potential if you can kite around and kill a Queen Bee early, which given her fairly predictable AI isn't too hard; we killed the Queen Bee before the Eater of Worlds on our server and were able to use the dropped Beenades to farm the Bee (summoned with Abeeminations of course), use the wax to craft even MORE Beenades and then cheesed the EoW with Beenade spam laughably easily. It died from full health in what felt like seconds to three players spamming them after we managed to craft a few hundred.
The two things above aside, and with the Beenades being only a minor concern at worst, pre-Hardmode Expert feels fantastic even in multiplayer. Damn near spot-on.
The addition of throwing armours was cool and all but it still feels underwhelming and the fact that it stops at Fossil armour makes it feel a little superfluous. The Bone Glove requires too much grindy dungeon farming to really feel inviting to use and the fact that only two throwing armours available require either King Slime grinding or an Extractinator meant that even though I wanted to try it out I eventually decided to just skip it entirely. I feel like at a bare minimum the vanity set dropped by the Hoplite could also be made a throwing set to match the Javelins he drops.
Also, brief side-note; making Treasure Bags drop in this client-side, one-per-player manner was a stroke of genius and an absolutely wonderful addition to multiplayer. Less grinding, more likelihood everyone gets what they need if people share, no loot-hogging. Perfectly done to the point where I'd honestly like to see the same thing done in Normal mode, minus the Expert-exclusive accessories.
The Demon Heart is absolutely god-tier. A really truly
rewarding reward and makes Expert mode a little more... y'know, possible. Also allows for a lot more potential for cool builds, especially now that we finally have an update where builds like Melee DPS don't feel
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e.
Enter Hardmode. The start once again feels spot-on, but once you get to the meat and potatoes things get a little sketchy in places. The difficulty at this point feels like it fluctuates up and down constantly with odd spikes at seemingly random points; the Golem is piss-easy and Plantera is a kinda half-challenge but nothing special while all three of the Mechanical bosses are very difficult, with the Destroyer's damage being a little over the top almost to the point of sheer frustration. Also, the Mechanical Minecart feels like a pretty underwhelming reward for beating all three mechs; while the cross-map mobility it gives you if you take the time to build cross-map rails is pretty sick, it kinda feels like it could easily have been a full drop from one of the three with the other two giving their own drops. This is doubly true when the Golem's Shiny Stone and Platera's Spore Sac are both super cool, useful rewards that really feel worth the effort of the fight.
Fishron is almost perfect and the Expert drop is sick. No complaints apart from the fact that the invisibility towards the end of the fight feels a little cheesy; making such a fast boss even MORE of a pain in the
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to keep track of makes the fight feel a little bit random.
The Frost and Pumpkin moons aren't too bad if properly prepared, apart from the later waves where the ridiculous bullet hell just becomes sheer tedium which is no fun to even attempt, much less try to actually progress in. Barely brushing against the Greek Fire from the Mourning Wood that is literally covering 2/3rds of the screen takes significant chunks out of my HP as a full Warding tank? Aaaaalrighty then.
Martian event isn't too bad, much too bullet hell-y and the damage dealt by the Saucer laser is a little overkill when combined with their movespeed in the enraged form. Certainly not impossible to just kite and kill by any stretch but having to kite around such a fast miniboss in a wave event with so much crap on the screen already and it flitting between people it wants to target feels irritating.
Cultist fight is SUPER fun, the most fun boss fight in the entire game in my opinion! My big gripe with it, however, is the completely nonexistent reward. Getting only the Manipulator doesn't really have the same "wow" factor of getting some cool boss-specific gear out of it. Make him drop some actual gear so that such a fun and challenging fight is rewarded with something less underwhelming and this one feels perfect, lads. Fantastically done. If this is done, maybe also implement some way to fight the Lunatic Cultist that doesn't trigger the Lunar event such that players can farm the drops they want without it being a pain in the
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. A boss summoner crafted with Dungeon drops, perhaps?
The Nebula and Stardust pillars aren't too bad, the gravity debuff in the Vortex pillar is rage-inducingly frustrating and feels far too easy to get completely stunlocked by, the Solar pillar is fine apart from the frankly absolutely stupid damage dealt by the Crawltipedes. Given their frequency of spawning and movement speed, dealing over 200 damage to full Warding + Beetle Armour feels poorly thought out at best and makes the Solar pillar feel like a sheer war-of-attrition chore more than an engaging or enjoyable experience. Don't get me wrong, the Solar one is certainly possible and doesn't necessarily feel
imbalanced per se, but something can be balanced and still not be even slightly fun to play against.
I don't even know what to say about the Moon Lord in Expert multiplayer. With 4 players using endgame gear with maxed-out modifiers, 500hp (600 with lifeforces) and
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tons of potions/buffs we still eventually just gave up. The fight is tedious, drawn-out and after getting the Heart down low and then all getting killed from full HP in a matter of seconds and causing the boss to despawn we all agreed that trying again was an exercise in futility. Don't get me wrong, it's possible; if we'd spent another half hour or more fishing, farming and preparing the veritable buffet of potions required and retried we likely could've beaten it, but knowing that to get all of the gear we wanted for four people we'd likely have to do the entire bloody thing with the Cultist fight, all four pillars and the unnecessarily long Moon Lord all over again multiple times we quickly came to the conclusion that we'd rather do literally anything else. I'm also not quite sure how I feel about the Spectre Hood and Vampire Knives being useless in this fight; balancing a boss by effectively removing a weapon and an armour bonus from the game for the duration of the fight feels a bit cheesy.
Can't comment on the game post-Moon Lord because as stated above we haven't gotten there yet. We're a bunch of Terraria diehards so we probably will spend hours making a giant super-efficient arena for him, farming potions etc. and try again because we want dem drops but I'll probably have to mute myself in Mumble while we do it so my incredibly frustrated complaining about the fight doesn't lower morale, which speaks volumes as it's the only fight in the game to ever have that effect on me. No, I do not by any means consider that a good thing and no, I do not expect to have fun with the Moon Lord fight, nor with the inevitable five or six more times we'll have to farm it for gear.
Overall, up until around mid-Hardmode, Expert mode multiplayer is great! Rewards good play, gives seriously awesome rewards for the extra difficulty for the most part and really adds a whole new dimension to and breathes new life into the game. However, as has been said many times earlier in the thread, Hardmode has some serious bull towards the end which smacks really badly of the age-old Terraria problems of a) too much grindy downtime between everything, b) often crossing the line between fun challenging difficulty and frustrating unfair-feeling difficulty and c) trying to be a bullet hell game in places when the game's mechanics really don't suit it (though this last one I will freely admit is no more than my personal opinion, but a lot of long-time players I know agree).
Keep up the amazing work guys, but I personally definitely feel that the Expert lategame in multiplayer (and in singleplayer too, by the sound of some previous posts) needs some serious tweaking still.
Now, miscellaneous tiny gripes.
Either make someone sell Wormhole potions or make them less time-consuming to craft please. They should be expensive, but it's borderline essential in the Expert multiplayer lategame to have stacks and stacks of them and Specular Fish take FOREVER to farm. Making them appear in pots and chests is a nice touch and all but it's nowhere close to the reliable supply that is needed by the endgame. The Alchemy table was an awesome addition to somewhat mitigate this so props for that, but the RNG nature of it means it can never truly be relied on.
Why on Earth does the Jungle Mimic only drop potions when the three other giant Mimics drop extremely useful and fun gear? Feels random and nonsensical.
Mentioned already but seriously please make the Cultist actually have some drops apart from the cool mask. I know the main point of him is to trigger the Lunar event but for such a challenging (and fun!) fight, no rewards felt really underwhelming.
More than one new enemy in Hardmode Goblin Invasions please! The Summoner is cool and so are his drops but only having the one makes the event feel like no more than an occasional nuisance once all three of his drops are obtained.
Please, for the love of god, make the Psycho Knife's invis override the aggro-pulling effects of the Turtle and Beetle Armor such that you actually don't get targeted. Unless I'm just getting unlucky with my positioning or don't quite understand the item yet it feels like a seriously awesome concept that doesn't really work in practice right now if you're actually using the armour that makes most sense with it and it makes the weapon feel kinda lacklustre.
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