FAR TOO MANY NERFS

1. It's not fun. Getting the reavershark is relatively easy, yes, but you still have to do some exploring to get a decent fishing rode and baits, make your way to the ocean and fish. The power it gives was a bit unbalanced, sure, but it was natural regardless, and took some effort to get it.

How exactly was it "natural"? Can you honestly say that, if they never added the Reaver Shark in 1.2.4, you have expected a 100% pickaxe to be received randomly from fishing?

The thing is, the current Reaver Shark is still a pretty strong, pretty early pickaxe. Yes, you can't skip all pre-Hardmode progression, but you can skip some. Your effort will still be rewarded, just not as much.

If I were to cheat the game by providing myself a new pickaxe, I might as well give me a Light pet too like the Fairy and some other stuff. Unless it's a outfit purely for roleplay purposes to look however you want (specially for things like multiplayer or youtube/stream content), then I'd rather not bother.

Didn't you start this post off talking about "freedom to play however you want"? We can all decide for ourselves which parts of the game we want to experience and which we want to skip. The Reaver Shark nerf doesn't change that.

It's only in calling one way a "cheat" that you promote one solution over another. You're not using a world editor or some mechanism outside of the game.

2. Speedrun purposes.

Speedrunners will adapt. Yes, there will be more randomness, but they'll adapt.

Also... Terraria isn't a good game to speedrun. And I say this as someone who watched the AGDQ run of it.

avoiding "contaminating" your world too much by smashing altars. What to do now?

You can fish them up after starting Hardmode. Yes, this means that the infections will be spreading while you're fishing up a bunch of crates. But those need to be contained anyway.
 
I think some tweaking was needed, but i also prefer them making certain things just being harder to get - like Reaver Shark, instead of nerfing it to the ground.

But i have a question about Crates. I always though their purpose wasn't so much about "skipping" tiers, but about avoiding "contaminating" your world too much by smashing altars. What to do now? It may be ok in Normal mode, but for Expert\Master mode then you get those ores whole your world will be "corrupted". It will be very hard to keep Jungles and other bioms intact.
You can still skip breaking altars with crates, you just have to fish them after hardmode.
 
You can fish them up after starting Hardmode. Yes, this means that the infections will be spreading while you're fishing up a bunch of crates. But those need to be contained anyway.

Well, yeah, but previously you can get some stuff quick from crates and go checking and clearing areas that were in danger fast. Now, by the time you can get there from your base, it would spread a lot more. Basically you'll be at the mercy of RND so it won't put corruption right in the middle of the jungle. I wasn't a fan of this mechanic before (at least they could keep Jungle out of it, IMO) and now it will be even more annoying as i don't like racing against the time, and especially not in the sandbox games.
 
The thing is, the current Reaver Shark is still a pretty strong, pretty early pickaxe. Yes, you can't skip all pre-Hardmode progression, but you can skip some. Your effort will still be rewarded, just not as much.

I strongly disagree. It's worse than a gold/platinum pickaxe now, as I said earlier, which are much easier to get than the shark, thus making it pretty useless now. They can all mine the same things and take the same amount of hits for each block, but the Reaver Shark has the slowest tool speed of the three.
 
How exactly was it "natural"? Can you honestly say that, if they never added the Reaver Shark in 1.2.4, you have expected a 100% pickaxe to be received randomly from fishing?

The thing is, the current Reaver Shark is still a pretty strong, pretty early pickaxe. Yes, you can't skip all pre-Hardmode progression, but you can skip some. Your effort will still be rewarded, just not as much.



Didn't you start this post off talking about "freedom to play however you want"? We can all decide for ourselves which parts of the game we want to experience and which we want to skip. The Reaver Shark nerf doesn't change that.

It's only in calling one way a "cheat" that you promote one solution over another. You're not using a world editor or some mechanism outside of the game.



Speedrunners will adapt. Yes, there will be more randomness, but they'll adapt.

Also... Terraria isn't a good game to speedrun. And I say this as someone who watched the AGDQ run of it.



You can fish them up after starting Hardmode. Yes, this means that the infections will be spreading while you're fishing up a bunch of crates. But those need to be contained anyway.
At this point it seems like you are arguing just for the sake of arguing instead of adding anything to this. I'm not arguing against how you use your freedom nor am I ever refusing how you or anyone else play the game. Start a new playthrough with pre-made stuff if you want, that's not the point being made. It seems like you don't even use the tool in the first place so you are simply arguing against what other people decide to use for their own personal purposes, lol.

"Also... Terraria isn't a good game to speedrun. And I say this as someone who watched the AGDQ run of it."
You are not the one to decide that, though. I'm not even talking about "professional" speedrunning or whatever, just personal enjoyment. Terraria is one of the few games that I know by heart and am moderately good enough to do some speedrun runs for fun. Not running against records or anyone professional, just figuring out how fast I can skip through stuff. There are other methods and people can easily adapt, that is correct. There's more treasures in the game now and you can probably gather enough to grab a gold/platinum pickaxe out of them while raiding the jungle for materials for the Jungle Set, for one. But that's even more rng going into something that never harmed anyone and has been there for years to the point where it was basically a stable part of the game.

Like.. if this balance change was made back into 1.3 then sure, I guess? But why now? Like I said, the odds of anyone coming across this without knowing about it at the point in the game where it truly makes a difference is small, unlike the meteor from smashing the orbs. This is a deliberate change to slow things up, and.. for what?

I strongly disagree. It's worse than a gold/platinum pickaxe now, as I said earlier, which are much easier to get than the shark, thus making it pretty useless now. They can all mine the same things and take the same amount of hits for each block, but the Reaver Shark has the slowest tool speed of the three.

Also, this, very much this.
 
In terms of mining being slow early game, I always spend the first silver or gold I find to upgrading my pickaxe. You also barely need to mine by just exploring natural caverns underground. I don't have an issue with the mining speed since by focusing on upgrading the pickaxe first, it is only slow for like the first 30 minutes or so into the playthrough.

I find the early game one of the best parts and don't understand why people want to skip it. I almost always fully upgrade to silver or gold armor before taking on the eye.
 
I think most of the nerfs are deserved.

Reaver Shark was just too good. Skipping whole swaths of content starting from the very beginning of the game is ridiculous. And hey. They gave you the Chisel. Have you found a Chisel yet? That thing is pure awesomesauce. I have a Gold Pickaxe + Chisel and that combo mines faster than the Reaver Shark ever did.

The Crates were absolutely ridiculous, and I say this as a person who used to abuse them to all crap and back. But really is there THAT much difference? Fish the crates in Normal Mode vs fishing them in Hard Mode. It takes like.... 2-3 game days of solid fishing (build up a supply of crate potions and get the GFR and accessories before offing the WoF) to get a full suit of Tier 3 hardmode armor + anvil + furnace. In fact, if you have a Crimson World, now's the perfect time to try for a Bladetongue! Which is what I usually end up doing, or heck even the Toxikarp isn't a bad weapon for early hardmode.

The Stormbow + Holy Arrows was out of this world ridiculous, I have NO idea how that got through QA testing. Did none of the QA Testers go "Hmmmm, let's try Holy Arrows with this thing!"? I find that weird.

The Baghnahks are also something I understand. Being able to kill a hardmode boss in 10 seconds is bad, mmkay?

I heard the Amazon got nerfed, but again... that seemed a bit too good to be honest. It was such a ludicrously powerful weapon if you could manage to get one before the EoC. It was all you needed until quite a bit later.

So I agree with the nerfs. Sorry to burst your bubble. I think they were needed. There was just far too much cheese going on with some of these items being too good for when you were able to find them.

It's not a good thing to have 1 item overshadowing 10 other items that you'd find after it, because it made entire sections of the game pointless.
 
I agree with pretty much all of the nerf, SPECIALLY the Reaver Shark
If I want to skip to hellstone now I'll just farm Eater of World segments/Brain's Eyes to get a demonite/crimtane pickaxe early. It skips most ores anyways, but it's more fun and challenging than just getting a fish, and can be done from the first day if you get some bombs and grenades... and maybe a hook, cloud in a bottle and boots to dodge long enough to kill some segments/eyes.
 
I think the Reaver did deserve a nerf, yes. But its now useless. It should at least mine ebonstone.

Also, Madzai, you can still fish crates up. You just need to do it in hardmode now for those crates to reap hardmode ores.
 
Reaver nerf is expected, but to put it in to dirt tier? I don't think it really need that much nerf. Make it mine a lot faster than gold/plat pickaxe is a pretty good deal. At least you can mine stone faster and that is what people who like to dig n' explore really need.

Stormbow is ..... okay now I guess, but I don't understand about Baghnahks. Its very risky to use effectively... may be I miss something... co-op with mage to heal?
 
Buffs and nerfs are often a hot topic in games. Some players may see things as being "too broken" or "too unusable" in the game, while others are just happy to abuse it. It's more of a question of when buffs and nerfs are plausible. And that can be an incredibly hard thing to determine. It can also be very opinionated. While not all buffs and nerfs may be ideal, I can usually understand why they occur. And so far most of what's happened has seemed like a good thing.

I won't talk about all of them though; I want to focus on the Reaver Shark. That seems to be the biggest fish in this pond (pun 100% intended :dryadtongue:). I think the issue with the Reaver Shark was mainly all it could provide for you. When fishing first came out, they needed to introduce incentive. Without a reason to fish the players would just ignore the mechanic. So they introduced some potions that required fish, some potentially nice weapons, a way to get ore without exploring, and things like that. This was done because fishing takes time, just like exploring takes time. If you spend all your time fishing, only to then still have to spend even more time exploring, who would fish? It was meant to give the players an alternate form of progression, and that's what it did.

The problem with the Reaver Shark is that it gave so much progression that other forms of progression became obsolete. Pre-hardmode wasn't really a "progress your own way" at a steady pace anymore. Instead, pre-hardmode turned into the following three steps: Start game -> go to ocean and fish Reaver Shark -> go to hell and mine Hellstone. There became no real incentive to play that part of the game any other way. Why spend time doing any other pre-hardmode progression or boss challenges when you can just immediately get Hellstone armor and weapons? It wasn't that the Reaver Shark simply provided an alternate form of progression; it's that it provided too much progression for how little effort it took to obtain it.

The overall progression of Terraria has been mainly based around two things, getting items and fighting bosses. And this is regardless of whether or not you fished for those items or explored for them. You'd have to kill EoW or BoC to get access to better pickaxes, Skeletron for the dungeon, WoF for Hardmode, etc... But the Reaver Shark just let you skip most of it. This isn't the only time progression has changed either. When Plantera was introduced, it was easy to just skip past her. Then they changed it so you have to beat all the mech bosses before she shows up, then beat her before you can get things like Shroomite and Spectre bars.

How you acquire items to fight bosses, then beating said bosses, is pretty much the core of forward progression in Terraria. And you can still acquire many of those items by both exploring and fishing, that hasn't changed. This is even more evident in pre-hardmode. The focus of growth in pre-hardmode is more about exploration, and bosses are just used to unlock some things. Whereas the focus of growth in hardmode is more about acquiring drops. But a pickaxe that let you skip all of that was just too good. I'm honestly surprised it took them this long to change it.
 
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What they could have done with the Reaver Shark is they could have made it "hit" twice per swing like later hardmode pickaxes, but yet keep it as being unable to mine ebonstone/obsidian/hellstone.

This would make it the best pickaxe to dig up dirt and stone with, but yet not let you skip progression.
 
I just thought of a possible solution to the Reaver Shark: Move it to hardmode and make it as strong as mytrhil. My reason is, it would still allow people to skip some stuff, and it would make sense. In pre-hardmode, you can pick gold from the start, but in hardmode you have to go through cobalt and mythril to get adamantite, and basically nobody bothers making cobalt and mythril stuff other than the drills and the mythril anvil, unless it's for cosmetic purposes. With Reaver Shark being available when you enter hardmode and able to pick all hardmode ores, you allow players to skip some tedious stuff, while still having them explore the caves for adamantite and a bit of mythril for the anvil, and they still have the option to fish for hardmode crates if they want.
It would also be an incentive to use the new Pylons to set up a beach town in pre-hardmode or to try and get the Magic Conch so you don't have to travel the more dangerous world in hardmode to go fish the Reaver Shark.
If there's already a different way to skip mining for hardmode ores, why not add a different one and make Reaver Shark fans happy? And since the hotfixes already updated some spirtes you could even give it a cooler look to fit its new placement in progression.

Just to be clear, I'm not against the Reaver Shark nerf a all, I just think that now there's no point to it at all and it could as well not exist if it stays as it is.
 
Ok but they did my boy Fossil Armor dirty and made it so it has less defense than iron armor? I am still salty about it, not to mention it's effects are kinda garbage, it is still super difficult to get both the extractinator and survive long enough to collect enough sturdy fossils, not to mention they made the bone javelins and bone throwing knives a lot worse too. It's not like fossil armor was super broken before either I just don't get it.
 
Ok but they did my boy Fossil Armor dirty and made it so it has less defense than iron armor? I am still salty about it, not to mention it's effects are kinda garbage, it is still super difficult to get both the extractinator and survive long enough to collect enough sturdy fossils, not to mention they made the bone javelins and bone throwing knives a lot worse too. It's not like fossil armor was super broken before either I just don't get it.

It's not a nerf; it's a shift. It's defense is not too different from the standard ranged armor defense relative to similar tier melee armors. Consider:

A full set of Molten Armor (late-pre-hardmode melee) gives you 25 defense. A full set of Necro Armor (late-pre-hardmode ranged) gives you 16 defense.

A full set of Gold Armor (early-pre-hardmode melee) gives you 16 defense. A full set of Fossil Armor (early-pre-hardmode ranged) gives you 8 defense.

The ratios aren't quite the same (66% vs. 50%), but the idea is similar: you get a bonus to ranged attacks, but at a significant defense penalty.

Now personally I think Fossil Armor is bad. Not because of its defense (though I wouldn't mind seeing a small buff) but because of its bonuses. OK sure, a 9% crit chance is basically a 10% damage boost over time, and its even better against bosses that have high defense. But 20% chance to not consume ammo, early game? Seriously, who cares? Wood arrows are dirt cheap (moreso if you can work the happiness system), and even the more powerful versions are fairly plentiful. Also, unlike later in the game, you don't have the firing speed to make that ammo consumption really matter.

It'd be better for the set bonus to be a flat ranged damage increase.
 
Why is everyone so butthurt about the Reaver Shark no longer being able to mine hellstone? You can literally make a pickaxe that can do that immediately after beating the EOW or BOC.

Because they believe the Reaver Shark should allow them to skip the prep-work normally needed to fight those bosses. Namely, mining up some ore/fossil/gems/whatever to get the weapons/armor to win the fight. With the Reaver Shark, you can skip all that, go straight to the Underworld, get Molten armor, and then you can go back and easily win those fights.
 
Why is everyone so butthurt about the Reaver Shark no longer being able to mine hellstone? You can literally make a pickaxe that can do that immediately after beating the EOW or BOC.

This and it is probably faster as well now to just farm the EoW. In Fact it has probably always been faster. :confused:
 
Why is everyone so butthurt about the Reaver Shark no longer being able to mine hellstone? You can literally make a pickaxe that can do that immediately after beating the EOW or BOC.

I never used it to skip anything. I just liked that it was a good pickaxe and saved me from making a Nightmare/Deathbringer and Molten Pickaxe after beating those bosses and simply because it was the fastest pre-HM pickaxe.

I don't mind that it was nerfed, but I do mind that the Reaver Shark is now a useless items beyond the novelty of being able to mine with a fish.
It should either get a drastic boost in its mining speed to give it the niche of mining really fast, but being unable to mine anything special, or it should go back to its original mining power and be only obtainable post EoW/BoC. Both options give it a purpose without breaking any progression.
 
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