I was thinking something like Portal Gun fall speed, which would be a hell of a lot faster than Empress Wings + Pillion, but as a cost, you would get basically no horizontal boost unless you wasted *another* accessory slot to use it with wings and insignia.
I mean, it's not a pre-Hardmode version. This is a specific synergy between Star Cloak and Honey Comb, with the Honey Comb otherwise working like its preHM version if there's no Star Cloak to pair it with. In practice, this combo isn't broken at all because 1) it completely replaces your primary weapon, 2) you deal non-negligible damage to yourself over time, 3) it can't be used in midair, 4) it only targets the middle of the screen, and 5) it stops working briefly if anything else damages you since you get more than 8 iframes. Plus, bees are not renowned for having the best movement speed.
The idea isn't really to make it a sidegrade to wings, but just to make it better than it is now. Like I said in the first post, I want to try to keep these suggestions simple since development on the game is nominally ended. That said, those suggestions would be nice, but I think that just making it negate fall damage would already give it a niche, since it would be the only wing-type accessory to grant infinite flight on its own. Yeah there's the Soaring Insignia, but that takes up an extra accessory slot.
It needs to be static immunity not local immunity. If it was changed to local immunity, every bee could hit a single enemy at the same time and damage would increase massively. Static immunity works more like global immunity, only allowing one bee to hit each enemy at a time. My piercing fix plugin makes bees and wasps use static immunity and it seems to preserve balance while resolving most of the issues.
They already have a need to to make alternate bee projectiles for magic and ranged damage types to fix existing bugs. I don't think they want to tackle these problems, but to resolve all the issues at once would need significant enough projectile changes that adding one more projectile would not be that far out of scope.
Ah okay then static immunity was what I meant, I get them confused a lot. Thank you for the correction.
I've been running a few tests, and I've come to the conclusion that for most practical purposes, movement speed bonuses do almost literally nothing. Movement speed mainly determines how quickly you move on the ground; it has practically no effect on air speed. Every air speed test I ran with Orichalcum Helmet/Gi/Shinobi Infiltrator Pants ended up basically the same as if I were naked. Or when using Vortex stealth, for that matter. If you squint really hard, you might see a tiny difference on horizontal air acceleration, a difference that instantly disappears after equipping a Soaring Insignia. Not that acceleration has any effect on the time it takes to get from point A to point B, since maximum air speed is the same either way.
I've seen So many people trying to fix hive pack, but it just... doesn't have a point. After all, if you stripe all of the fancy stuff out, it's just a plain non-percentage damage boost that relies on your fire rate, which also gets less and less useful the further you gets in the game, only works well on weapons like minishark, and not even megashark, and for weapons like these, there is a high chance that armor pen might do even better. In my opinion, expert items need to be unique and at best, situational and useful in situated places, which applys to most of them. Ever heard of something called "bee enchantment"? It is an accessory added by Fargo's Soul Mod. It spawns bees that only hit once (so no iFrame) with a high chance of about 25%, while each deals 100% of the non-crit damage of the hit spawned it, but can only spawn upon piercing hits. It makes early powerful support for piercing weapons, which is both unique, situational, and useful if you used it right. Of course, there is a 100% chance it is overpowered in 1.4 (cough cough, buffed razorblade typhoon/nightglow), but you know, you can always nerf it as needed.
Uh... the Hive Pack only affects bee weapons and Honey Comb and its tinkers, which become useless after the WoF. Why are you talking about the Minishark and the Megashark? Also the Hive Pack converts friendly bees into more powerful bees, it isn't a non-percentage damage boost.
The idea isn't to help when fighting, it's to speed things up when you're walking around your base or building or doing all the non-fighting things you'll spend most of your time doing after beating the Moon Lord. I specifically said this in the first post. It's a QoL improvement, not a difficulty adjustment.
The point is to make the Hive Pack viable beyond the tiny portion of the game where it's viable currently. That's all. I'm not trying to make it viable right up until Moon Lord, just longer than it is right now. I'm also not trying to overhaul its mechanics completely, since these are meant to be relatively small suggestions that are easy to implement. Even if all of these suggestions were implemented, some of the items listed would still be not very good, but the point is to push them toward ideal balance as much as possible while requiring as little time from the devs as possible.
The stake launcher completely out classes the elf melter, it come from an easier event has almost twice the dps, more range, pierces more, has less damage falloff, and has cheaper ammo. Giving the elf melter a flat 16 extra dps come nowhere close to fixing this.
Soaring Insignia adds 2 mph to your ground speed, Celestial Starboard doesn't add anything.
Really elf melter that thing is good for ke
Must be the combination of them. I swear after I equip Insignia I get an annoying amount of ground speed and acceleration.
idk what it is but the Starboard has nothing to do with it. Wings never have any effect on your ground movement, and the Starboard is no exception. I just tested it myself to make sure.
The Insignia increases all acceleration, I think it even affects fall speed. It's got nothing to do with the Starboard.
How is this thing too strong? Here's a few around its tier I'd say are roughly as strong:
Nano bullets need to bounce once before getting any sort of 'homing' effect at which point they lose 1/3 of their damage, which negate thier higher base damage advantage.