MistaAnderson
Terrarian
The problem right now is that due to the game design of Terraria, it's difficult to do what you're asking for without just simply hashing all values to be higher.
For instance, platforming is no longer an issue. Wings + Hookshot is everything you need to avoid letting the environment be a falling hazard, and you can navigate anywhere.
Due to invincibility time + healing combo, you are capable of facetanking just about any boss and horde.
The only way difficulty is being increased now, is by increasing enemy damage. That means balancing, so you give the player better armor and DPS inflicting gear. You're just changing the values in all areas to be higher, achieving virtually nothing but moving things up another tier.
If invincibility time is removed, you can't facetank high DPS enemies. Period.
If invincibility time is removed, rapid-fire actually serves a purpose in enemies, and they can trade off "high damage numbers" in favor of high frequency fire. More variation.
If invincibility time is removed, you can't use cheap tricks like dungeon spikes to stay immortal in every battle.
Take a look at other games out there of the Terraria-esque nature. Plenty of them allow you to take damage from rapid fire, have no invincibility time but simply cap the amount of damage you can take from any given "damage source". Invincibility time isn't in every game out there.
And it's not like the games who don't have it, cause you to instantly die due to the fact that you're taking damage every frame, and playing at 120 FPS makes you take 120*30 if 30 is the damage.
Invincibility time is sometimes a lazy way to avoid proper damage frequency calculation, and it causes problems in the long run, like the ones with healing.
If you don't understand how healing and damage works in a larger gameplay perspective, you're gonna have major issues and need to balance all other things to compensate for these mechanics not being properly implemented. Like in this case, where the game has turned into a simple race between healing fast enough, and taking high enough damage.
Due to quick weapons like the Razorpine, and the fact that you can set up Nimbus and other elements to constantly heal you, you can pretty much heal at an extreme pace. Lowering the health output you receive per healing "cloud" does not help.
It just punishes those players who fight fairly and without pro skill, who suddenly discover that they're receiving too little HP to survive.
This is, again, why lowering the amount of HP you can receive does not help. I told @Cenx this, I asked her to just simply cap the frequency you heal on to like 3x a second. She said she she had already tried that, afterwards I went and facetanked Frost Moon and proved that I healed far more than 3x a second on my Twitch livestream.
I'm not blaming her, we might as well have been miscommunicating, but my point is the game balancing. If you can't take damage in varying frequencies from varying sources (The code to achieve this can be very round, and not what it sounds like, by the way) you will essentially resort to the simplest method possible: Universal invincibility towards any damage, which is what's currently in place. This makes room for a ton of exploitation, temporary immortality and issues with healing that isn't frequency capped.
Honestly, if temporary immortality was removed, even healing wouldn't need much of a nerf if you were hit by more than one enemy. Sure, you can survive one Pumpking. Can you survive five?
Cause currently, it doesn't matter how many pumpkings are inside you. Might as well be 50 and that'll just give you more points and loot, the difficulty is capped to "whoever manages to get a hit" while you're still vulnerable, and how high that DPS is. Or actually, not DPS, just simply Damage in one hit. Currently, that guy is called dungeon spike, and his damage output is poor.
I probably don't need to tell you that while you can upgrade damage output, introducing more powerful versions of the immortality necklace won't be doable without major cutbacks on all other stats. And then people will abuse that too.
This is why you need to do damage debounce per damage source, and not on the player itself. So that a machinegun can still hit you 20 times a second, but standing inside a zombie will not damage you that insanely fast.
Standing inside 2 zombies will damage you per individual zombie, because they are individual sources of damage.
An individual mob can damage you in multiple ways though. Imagine walking into a spiky mob that also fires things, like a spiked slime. You need to take damage for both types of attacks independently.
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