tModLoader Calamity Mod

What would you like me to create more of?

  • NPCs (enemies, house NPCs, etc.)

    Votes: 1,170 19.5%
  • Bosses

    Votes: 2,450 40.8%
  • Items (Accessories, Weapons, etc.)

    Votes: 1,581 26.3%
  • Vanity (furniture, armor sets, etc.)

    Votes: 438 7.3%
  • Mineable Stuff (Ores, Blocks, etc.)

    Votes: 372 6.2%

  • Total voters
    6,010
Why even bother playing if you just want to dupe an OP item then beat the final boss ridiculously fast
Again, the quantity of available ammo isn't really the point. It's the game value of the ammo. Terraria doesn't normally assign money value to damage so directly (except with the coin gun, but I'll get to that), but just so we have some numbers to work with, let's pretend they did.

If Bullets Were Bills
Let's say that if each musket ball does 7 damage and the Arms Dealer sells them for 7 copper, then each point of damage is conveniently worth 1 copper. So now let's look at this gun that does a percentage of the enemy's health, rather than a discreet amount of damage. Again, for easy rounding, let's say the bullets do 5% of the enemy's health.

Against the Desert Scourge, which has roughly 4,000 health, the gun does 200 damage. In this theoretical example, then, each bullet, which we'll call OPA (Overpowered Ammo) from here on, is worth approximately 2 silver.

But then let's look at Yharon, who has 4 million health. Still doing 5% damage, the OPA will deal 200,000 HP worth of damage. In this case, our ammo is worth a theoretical 20 gold each.

So we already see a massive discrepancy in values between fighting an early boss versus fighting a late boss. If the ammo is priced to be viable against an early boss, then it's far, far too cost-effective against later bosses. If it's priced to be viable against late game bosses, then it's worthless against anything before that boss due to cost inefficiency.

The Coin Gun Case
Now of course there is a weapon in that sets a precedent for money equaling damage. The coin gun, which is one of the highest DPS weapons in the game in the vanilla game, decided long ago that one platinum is worth 200 damage! So even within the niche of money-powered weapons, there's a competitor that was already balanced for vanilla and it does a discreet amount of damage. No matter what you're shooting at, whether a slime or the Moonlord, the Coin Gun does 200 damage per platinum.

So supposing we could obtain the Coin Gun at the same time as we can obtain OPA, it's very easy to examine the competitive values of the guns. Let's look at the Magnum OPA, which we'll round to 5% damage again for easier math.

Again, it does 200 damage to the Desert Scourge, but each bullet costs 6 platinum. Compared to the Coin Gun which does the same damage for 1 platinum, the OPA is 1/6 as efficient at the job and is therefore totally unsuitable.

Against Yharon, the OPA is doing 200,000 damage per shot, or approximately 33,333 damage per platinum. Compared to the Coin Gun, OPA is 167 times more cost effective in spite of being a pre-hardmode weapon. So where does OPA break even and fall in line with vanilla balance?

Well, it never quite does fall into parity with the Coin Gun, but the closest point is when fighting Cryogen, at which point OPA is doing 1,680 damage (or 280 damage per platinum) against Cryogen's 42,000 total HP. After this it begins to tear away from the Coin Gun, becoming more cost effective as the game goes on.

The Coin Gun can be acquired at the start of hard mode, so the only thing saving it from immediate obsolesce is its DPS now. Its damage per platinum is inefficient against OPA from the second you an acquire the Coin Gun. So again, because I like round numbers, if you compare the Magnum to the Coin Gun, the Coin Gun fires three times faster. So at what point does the DPS of OPA exceed the Coin Gun?

Well, it varies a lot because bosses start appearing in pieces or aren't "organic" after Cryogen, but by Duke Fishron OPA is both substantially more cost-effective than the Coin Gun and it's also doing more DPS. Granted there are upgrades to the magnum for some reason, so in reality an upgraded OPA likely overcomes the Coin Gun a little sooner, or at the least simply flattens Duke Fishron all the better.

So, Balance?
If all the above should illustrate anything, it's not how to price the bullets, nor is it about how to restrict access to the bullets. It's that percent damage will reach a competitive point at some specific section of the game, and then gradually grow more powerful from there on. You can't really balance that, because OPA will only be balanced at the specific break-even point where it's competitive with other weapons of the local tier. So if you wanted the gun to be balanced at around that discreet tier, why would you use percent damage at all? Why not just give the weapon damage that's competitive for the tier?

I personally suspect the only reason we're seeing percent damage emerging in the mod is because Fabsol is bored, is having a difficult time arranging new bosses, and is trying to shake things up with new weapons. But he can't merely add normal weapons, because then they'd only be competing with all the weapons that already exist at those tiers, so instead he's thrown in this odd, floating weapon that kills 5% of a boss per shot.

Okay so after the update, mod randomly working now. It is actually kinda sad how happy I am right now.
It's not exactly random! The Planetoids update broke the game by expanding the size of the world gen, which caused out of memory exceptions for slower memory cards or for people running multiple mods. The latest update rolled that back, so until or unless things get more bloated you'll be able to play Calamity. I strongly recommend keeping a backup of this mod version (or whatever version you like the most) in case a future update causes problems again.
 
Once you have gotten to cryogen it is incredibly easy to farm pirate invasions with a battle potion and water candle- lots of platinum is easily obtainable

This item is already overpowered; how can ammo be sold for any amount to make it balanced
 
Once you have gotten to cryogen it is incredibly easy to farm pirate invasions with a battle potion and water candle- lots of platinum is easily obtainable

This item is already overpowered; how can ammo be sold for any amount to make it balanced

Then this only leads to one option to make this reasonable. Just remove the weapons. These are at a point in which they cannot be "fixed."
 
Not entirely sure why all of the posts are suddenly only addressing the OP guns, but here are a couple possible solutions to the issue:

1- Limit the weapon's usability during a boss fight, some counter system like SCal's would do.

2- Make the ammo a drop from an enemy. This particular enemy's stats and AI would always be considered difficult during all stages of the game, making it so that the player cannot farm it while it's easy, and then power through the rest of the game with the farmed ammo. EDIT: And remove the ammo from the shop, obviously.

3- Just leave them as they are, nobody's forced to use them. My favorite solution, as I like being given choice, instead of being told what's OP and what's not. *cough**cough* meteor set, daedalus, cholrophyte bullets *cough**cough*.
 
I think they could stay, just need a higher price to use, and I don't mean a monetary one.
Like I suggested before, having damage% ammo in your inventory could slow your movement speed to discourage you from using alot of it at once.
 
Once you release a weapon into the mod, the genie has been let out of the bottle, so to speak. If you delete it from the files now, people will know they lost something, and that's upsetting regardless of how bad the thing was.

The way this kind of content usually goes in a professional game is that it gets nerfed over and over until nobody uses it. It's already got the caveat of not working on "organic" enemies. If the price winds up so high that it's a waste of money no matter what you use it on, even Yharon, then at that point the weapon's pointless and as balanced as it's going to get - i.e., not game-breaking.

I think Keemo has the right idea.

The main takeaway is that Calamity adds overpowered and ridiculous equipment anyway, so it really has no place trying to restrict access to vanilla material.
 
Honestly, it's a little depressing to me that a set of weapons so flawed can be introduced after a weapon that genuinely did this sort of thing correctly.

The Coldheart Icicle does the fixed percentage damage-type deal effectively, dishing out a perfect 2% of any entities' health bar out in terms of damage, ignoring defenses and resistances. In a way, this could be seen as overpowered to begin with, as it would take exactly 50 hits on any boss to kill it without fail. However, the drawback is that it is a shortsword with no other special effects or particles whatsoever, meaning you have to force yourself to get close to the enemy. The tradeoff is simple, balanced and appropriate: high risk means high reward.

These guns have none of that whatsoever, beyond a simple monetary cap that can be broken with little effort with both exploits and consistent grinding for money.

I find it rather sad that such a great example of how to make something like this fair is just tossed aside as how the developers of this mod should have made these weapons work in place of a blatantly overpowered set of weapons that turn the mod into a bit of a joke in terms of difficulty when taken into account. All you need are these weapons and the highest defense armour you can get, and you win, due to them being classless weapons.
 
These guns have none of that whatsoever, beyond a simple monetary cap that can be broken with little effort with both exploits and consistent grinding for money.
Money in Terraria is, and always will be redundant. The best of the best this game has to offer is always locked behind a challenge and these guns are, hardly not.
Another idea this could be balanced in a unique currenancy type. this has been done in other mods perfectly fine like GRealm's hoard NPC who offers interesting and useful items for a price of angler-level quests. Or Sacret Tool's Ashalite equipment that "honestly requires far too much farming but the idea is there" require you to fight a boss.

Being able to buy the ability to take off a solid chunk of an NPCs health with no risk what-so-ever for using the weapon is.
Again.
you don't see this done **anywhere else, ever**
When I first saw this weapon, I honestly didn't believe Fabsol added something like this, I couldn't buy a weapon that could be used to deal percentage damage to bosses existed.

I think the easiest solution is to just, remove the ammo from shops. Perma-restrict how much you can ever have in a game so players use it very wisely. And add more risk to balance the reward.
 
When loading the world in multiplayer, in the new biome (Sunken Sea) there are no new mobs and mini boss, only piranhas, jellyfish and other standard mobs. The solo is fine, new mobs there. I tried to load the world in the multiplayer and on a dedicated server. I also tried to create the world through the game and through a dedicated server. Same (solo is fine, multiplayer without mobs).
My mods, if that needed:

Calamity Mod (no calamity music) v1.4.2.1
Calamity Mod Music v1.4.2.1
Item Checklist v0.5.2
Vex's Hotkeys v1.0.0.1
Recipe Browser v0.7.1.2
Magic Storage v0.4.3.3
Boss Checklist v0.2.1
 
The truth is a new biome for what I know but its generation is curious we can say. Also I think it will happen the same as the (Sulphurous Sea) because when I put it for the first time it did not have so much content. But in the end They put (boss, enemy, itens, and that is the entrance to the abyss.) Well I left the topic. But I think they understood me
 
Generation is fine....i think... In solo everything fine, mobs, mini boss, music, crystalls, environment. But if I load the same world in multiplayer - music, crystalls, environment is there, but without mobs and miniboss.
 
Yeah, same bug here, no Sunken Sea mobs spawn in multiplayer but spawn fine in single, even on the same world. Hopefully they can fix this, because the biome is beautiful!
 
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