I feel like some of the sword changes feel counterintuitive.
See, a lot of people complained there wasn’t enough true melee and too much dependance on the projectiles. 1.4.4 aimed to fix this, as is clear by the more short-range buffs to the early weapons technically adding projectiles but they feel more melee than a beam flying through the sky. However, the nerf to their base damage kinda acts against this change, and the starfury received no nerf at all, so it tears apart the competition. Its star does much more than the blade’s base damage, so there’s little point using it. It actually is more powerful since you can better direct its projectiles vertically now. Given how easy it is to get, it was literally my first sword after platinum, the others that are arguably harder to get dont really compare. The light’s bane is fine, it just cant quite go against the starfury, but i guess its good. Id buff the projectile damage a tad but thats it. The enchanted sword feels pointless. Starfury does what it does better and its easier to find. It makes finding the enchanted sword easier, but at that point dont bother. The beam is slow and its damage is all around worse. Plus the beam has no pierce at all, while the starfury gets one pierce and tile piercing. the blade of grass is way too weak with how tough it is to survive the jungle without shadow armor or better. The blade has significantly worse damage than other weapons at this point and the leaf only piercing an enemy or two really hurts it. Its still just worse than the starfury. The muramasa seems good enough, but again, starfury better.
Two ways id fix this, first one is bring back the locks on the sky chests so these honestly busted items once again require you beat skeletron to access them. Theyre just so strong and i dont feel like it gives the other weapons a fair shot. Second, buff the blade and only the blade damage of the other swords and give the enchanted sword weak piercing and some speed. The enchanted sword just doesnt hold up really. Also nerf the star damage so it does only a little more damage than starfury’s blade, not like twice it.
Now, the next sword that suffers from the counterintuitive tweaks is the Terra Blade. Honestly this has such confusing tweaks that contradict each other. So the massive swing radius might encourage you to get closer, but the new base damage sucks, its the second lowest its ever been. The projectile now has increased damage and fires way faster, and pierces infinitely, and is way bigger. The cost? Pierce damage fall off, i guess. Im gonna be real this just encourages melee speed builds for the projectile instead of using the blade’s new reach. This might be argued to be to use it for crowd control, but why do we need another crowd control weapon? We have tons of those. The Terra Blade is an icon, basically named after the game and was long generally agreed to be the best melee weapon until the moon lord. It should be a boss shredder. I think the damage of the projectile and the blade should be swapped, furthering its melee functionality and somewhat countering its new projectile focus. Thats really the only change id make. Bring the base damage back to 115 and have the beam do only 95-100~ and after three pierces it quickly drops to 20. This would encourage you to get in close to use the blade and balance out the projectile’s insane speed. Its a sword, it should be used as such. I really like the shifted functionality of the beam, but its high damage compared to the blade’s low damage feels contradictory to making the blade bigger. There’s not really a point to doing that when the blade sucks now. The beam is where all the damage is, though even that feels a tad underwhelming to someone who was good at aiming it previously.
Also, ive heard summoner got some kinda harsh nerfs, but my area of expertise is melee, so id ask some summoners about it and get their thoughts, not mine.
Anyway if you read all that, thanks, if you have any thoughts or criticism definitely feel free to go off, and if a dev read all this, thanks for being so great at listening to us, and thanks for still putting in so much care into this incredible game.
Also, I agree with the sword balance on this. Starfury became SUPER busted in 1.4.4, and some of the melee nerfs to weapons like the Blade of Grass were a bit odd. However, I'm not sure if bringing back the gold chest locks should be done or not. On one hand, it provides the player a new sword to obtain post-skeletron that has great viability for its stage, however in the same breath you can still get the Night's Edge, which i'd say still out performs the Starfury hard here, especially with the new pierce it gained with the sword slash.
Perhaps instead, just nerf the projectile damage back down from ~2x damage to just 1x? it would encourage getting closer in on enemies and would actually give the other swords which can be obtained in the same tier a better niche and more of a chance to compete. If this is too harsh of a nerf, then maybe consider a sword size buff like the Bee Keeper and Light's Bane got, just increase the size of the sword a bit to make up for lost damage so it's easier to get in with the weapon without risking too much. Hell, you could maybe consider making the Starfury a magic weapon again! Might be interesting to experiment with, but definitely still think the prior change is better overall.
Blade of Grass definitely needs a sword damage buff though, it's nerf absolutely tanked the weapon, and while it did gain a bit of speed, i still think it's current damage is pretty pitiful. Maybe +5-7 more damage would do it some better?
Light's Bane is so close to being good too, it's got the projectile going for it and everything, but it still just doesn't have the damage output. Give it a small buff to it's damage, and I think it'd be perfect where it is.
*obligatory Volcano is a bad name change for the Fiery Greatsword comment, not much else to be said i just really dislike the name change*
Terra Blade is also in a really weird spot. I think With3r's proposed changes are a good idea here though, cause the weapon feels even more like a ranged weapon than it did before now.
On the topic of summoner though, it honestly wasn't hit too hard. Obsidian armor definitely is a lot more balanced now, having been nerfed so heavily (which was deserved, in all honesty) and lots of the whips have had their damage reduced. It's definitely a lot less OP now though than before, but I welcome the nerfs. The only change I was disappointed with was with the Tiki armor...
I feel like they should've doubled down on the Whip buffs and just reworked the armor into a whip-focused set instead of just giving it some range buffs and that's it. Either that or the Spooky Armor, cause in any case the Spooky Armor set still basically replaces it instantly, so it would give the set a more interesting niche, and if balanced correctly would be a nice alternative, like the Obsidian Armor is now to the Bee Armor.
Unfortunately I have not seen this topic for a long time, because I had a question after the release of the 1.4
Why? What enemy was it weak against? Compared to what weapon was it so weak that it needed to be buffed?
It was probably just not performing as well as most other ranged weapons in the post-ML category. Plus, why not? The only real case it ends up mattering in is with mods, and if it's that big of a change they can always just change the weapon as needed. It's what Calamity does with the Zenith, so if it's that big of a deal they can do it with the S.D.M.G. too.
