Journey's End 1.4.4: Balance Feedback and Discussion Thread

[MrD108]

Brain Scrambler is a very interesting mount to get during the Martian Invasion, but unfortunately very rare, because it only drops from the Scutlix Gunner, which unfortunately turns into a regular Ray Gunner after Scutlix's death, which blocks the acquisition of the Brain Scrambler (and the Scutlix Gunner banner). There are two solutions to this:
1. Make Scutlix Gunner remain Scutlix Gunner after Scutlix's death, not Ray Gunner.
2. Transfer the acquisition of Brain Scrambler to Scutlix itself.

 

[ED209]

Make the Magma Stone and it's tinkers work on whips; it seems odd that flasks do, but the stone doesn't. As whips are effected by melee boosts, it makes sense to include it.

 

[MrD108]

Add Lucy The Axe lines for cutting cacti and palm trees (and maybe fighting enemies). For example:

Cacti - "Wait, this is probably not a tree"
Palm trees - "There is no vacation from cutting a tree"
Enemies - "They are not trees ..." , "We will cut them like a seedling"

 

[Flubman]

Could you please make it so that Terraspark Boots can be crafted with Hellfire Treads? As it is, Hellfire Treads seem more like a trap than anything else. Sure, they'd lose the cool visual effect, but the conveniences of the Terraspark Boots easily outweigh that.

 

[Shyguymask]

Sounds exactly like Duke Fishron. To add to this, both Queen Slime and Duke Fishron are optional bosses that aren't required for progression. You can just skip them if you find them too hard, the only thing you miss out on is extremely good loot. It would be another thing if Queen is required to spawn the mech bosses or has material required for crafting the Drax.

Edit: If everyone wants to talk about difficulty spikes, Expert Skeletron is a helluva time.

Edit2: Now that I think about it, Slime staff definitely needs to be a Drop from King Slime. Queen Slime has one for her loot drops and it makes her ver worthwhile. King Slime is so easy to skip and most of his gear isn't good enough to justify beating him. Slime staff can also get a slight damage buff, I-frame fix, and AI fixes to go along with this.

Expert Skeletron is very overrated difficulty wise and half of the fight can be solved by mostly circling (cursed skill projectiles). He's actually almost as easy as King Slime and Eye of Cthulhu when you have on-tier equipment and know basic dodging skills.

 

[ED209]

1. Make all summon items as fast as the Raven Staff, I can see a reason to have such slow use times on the summon weapons
2. Now that summoner is its own class, does it really need mana to summon minions?
3. Make the Wizard sell the alchemy table

 

[Lurrae]

2. Now that summoner is its own class, does it really need mana to summon minions?

The only reason I can see is to prevent abusing the system by just constantly re-summoning minions over and over, but even then, that's something that works more with sentries than summons. I think having sentries retain their mana cost, while minions can be summoned for free, would work well and separate summoners from mages even more than they already have been. Maybe there is some reasoning behind it that I'm unaware of, though.

 

[Alfieboris🌳]

Make the Wizard sell the alchemy table

You can fish it up in the dungeon.

 

[J Bame]

The only reason I can see is to prevent abusing the system by just constantly re-summoning minions over and over,

Except that... Mana Sickness only affects Magic Weapons, so you could literally spam them for infinite mana with no drawback.

 

[mathbrush]

As long as the thread is open...here are some thoughts:

-I know Psycho Knife and Fetid Baghnakhs receive only a percentage of melee speed increases. What if Phasesabers and phaseblades got a damage nerf but received extra attack speed from melee speed increases? (like 1.5x or 1.25x). It would give them a unique mechanic and give a use for melee speed modifiers, while not being OP since melee swords aren't good in Hardmode and in pre-hardmode low damage struggles against Queen Bee and Skeletron. It makes sense thematically since they're swords made of light.
-Red really seems to like making special world seeds, and they're a lot of fun. A water world seed would be great for making the water accessories more useful (Merchant could sell a basic starting accessory like breathing reed).
-One youtouber named Phantasm does a lot of videos where they play through the game with different weapons, rating bosses by difficulty and fun. They consistently kill the eater of worlds with a minecart between two bumpers, with the minecart doing all the damage with no real challenge, rating the boss as 0/10 fun. I think the Eater of worlds should receive reduced damage from minecarts.
-The Thunder Zapper is fast, but it has low damage, no pierce, and uses a lot of mana. I think one of those should be changed, and in tests I conducted, reducing the mana usage of Thunder Zapper increased its usefulness significantly. That change alone will make it better against mobs and bosses without messing around with the niche of this weapon.

 

[MrD108]

Red really seems to like making special world seeds, and they're a lot of fun. A water world seed would be great for making the water accessories more useful (Merchant could sell a basic starting accessory like breathing reed)

You mean the whole world except spawns and almost all caves flooded with water? A layer of several bubble blocks separating the caves from hell? Increased chance for water accessories?

Such a secret seed?

 

[HammerHoovy🌳]

Could you please make it so that Terraspark Boots can be crafted with Hellfire Treads? As it is, Hellfire Treads seem more like a trap than anything else. Sure, they'd lose the cool visual effect, but the conveniences of the Terraspark Boots easily outweigh that.

Hellfire Treads should just be removed from the game or turned into a completely different accessory than what it is now with very different effects and that doesn’t use the Lava Waders in its recipe. The vanity effect can already be activated by placing Flame Waker Boots in a vanity slot anyway. I think that the Hellfire Treads were probably created by the devs before they decided to make Terraspark boots a thing since Hellfire Treads have a lower item ID than Terraspark.

 

[MrD108]

I think that the Hellfire Treads were probably created by the devs before they decided to make Terraspark boots a thing since Hellfire Treads have a lower item ID than Terraspark.

As if Leinfors had confirmed it once before, it was the ultimate Lava Waders accessory back then.

 

[whoneedsnamestbh]

I think we can get into the topic of enemies a little bit here. There’s a few non-boss enemies I want to bring up that would hopefully be easy to fix.

-Snow Flinxes only spawn in the snow biome on non-frozen tiles. This didn’t matter when they had no importance, but now they do, and their spawn mechanics are weird and unintuitive. I’ve seen a lot of players on Terracord struggling to get flinx gear because this mechanic isn’t inherently obvious. They should probably spawn regularly, perhaps with a slightly lower spawn rate to compensate.

-Giant Antlions have way too much defense, most preHardmode weapons will be reduced to 1 damage. Tomb Crawlers aren’t much better there either. They honestly have HM amounts of defense, and I doubt it would hurt anything to tone them back.

-Jungle Creepers as a whole were a bit overbuffed in 1.4.1 in my opinion. Web Spit in the UG jungle is already lethal, and they hit like a train on top of that. But the most annoying detail is that they have more defense than Giant Tortoises. I wouldn’t mind if they were toned down a bit in damage and defense.

-Clown damage is wack. In Normal Mode, they deal 200 damage, which is… fair enough, but in Expert they’ll deal 400 and in Master they deal 600, which is almost guaranteed to be a one-shot kill. I’ll suggest 200 / 300 / 300, or 120 / 240 / 360. Something along those lines. Just don’t forget about chattering teeth too if this is changed.

-Enemy bullets in general have to be a bit more visible. Frost Moon has the right idea, but Pirates didn’t seem to get the same treatment, and it’s also really bad on Snowman Gangstas. It often feels like I’m being hit out of nowhere by Pirates.

-I think Wave 15 of Pumpkin Moon could be toned down a little bit. It’s pretty easy to reach with on tier gear, and the amount of minibosses is absolutely overwhelming. Either that or Pumpkin Moon should progress slower.

-Necromancers are unfair. I don’t expect a telegraph is in scope for their laser, so the next best world might be to make them wait longer after teleporting for attacking so you can realistically interrupt them and keep them from getting a free hit.

-Skeleton Snipers are hard to detect, basically impossible to dodge and are probably going to one-shot kill you. My idea has always been a red laser sight leading toward the player when they’re preparing a shot, but I imagine that’s out of scope, so I’ll suggest a velocity nerf instead.

 

[The Star Breaker]

A few ideas i had for making certain swords more diverse:

• Give slower, huge melee weapons knockback immunity while swinging them (something like a poise mechanic)
• Give some swords flat armor penetration.
• Give some fast "light-weight" swords, Phaseblades and Phasesabers, and katana-like weapons a modified parry / deflect, where they don't need a shield but neither get any defense. (This is out of scope but being able to parry projectiles would be cool)
• Bats and hammers increase their knockback, armor penetration or something else with each swing to a certain cap.
• Charging/holding attacks (this is out of scope)

 

[Xurkitree1]

l-Red really seems to like making special world seeds, and they're a lot of fun. A water world seed would be great for making the water accessories more useful (Merchant could sell a basic starting accessory like breathing reed)

Unles water loading physics is massively optimised this isn't particularly likely to happen, as much as I'd like to have underwater combat scenarios. Too much water kills the world load speed, and this scales up with world size. I should know, i tried making a water world once.

That being said, i am hoping for 'Not the bees' style seeds for Snow and Desert biomes as well. Snow especially would be a nice change of pace.

-One youtouber named Phantasm does a lot of videos where they play through the game with different weapons, rating bosses by difficulty and fun. They consistently kill the eater of worlds with a minecart between two bumpers, with the minecart doing all the damage with no real challenge, rating the boss as 0/10 fun. I think the Eater of worlds should receive reduced damage from minecarts.

This wont actually help since you can pull similar cheese with the Slime mount an a ceiling. Or a hook and a Flail. Combining slime mount and flail nets like 800 peak dps according to the DPS meter. You just need decent defenses and regen. Works on Master.

Also having melee weapons gain extra benefits from melee speed modifiers is an interesting Avenue of balancing subpar weapons we haven't really explored. It'd make them scale rather well for a while too.

 

[ED209]

You can fish it up in the dungeon.

But it takes ages. The Wizard is late-game enough that it wouldn't make it too OP, as we've usually got enough ingredients to spare by then.

Except that... Mana Sickness only affects Magic Weapons, so you could literally spam them for infinite mana with no drawback.

But there's no point, once they're out, they're out. Plus, once the maximum have been summoned, re-summoning them would be counter-productive as they emerge from the player, meaning that they're farther away from the mobs, depending on the minion type.

 

[Leinfors]

But there's no point, once they're out, they're out. Plus, once the maximum have been summoned, re-summoning them would be counter-productive as they emerge from the player, meaning that they're farther away from the mobs, depending on the minion type.

There are some scenarios where the act of summoning the minion itself can be mechanically advantageous. For example, summoning a contact damage minion directly on an enemy. Some enemies with slow attack cycles will "instantly attack" the moment they are summoned as well, which allows some spammy use of resummoning.

This isn't exactly intended functionality but it would take a lot of work to change all of the examples, and you could still summon on an enemy. In 1.2.4, I once killed Queen Bee exclusively with a Slime Staff by summoning it on top of her repeatedly for the entire health bar. (That was terrible, by the way)

 

[Alfieboris🌳]

But it takes ages. The Wizard is late-game enough that it wouldn't make it too OP, as we've usually got enough ingredients to spare by then.

That makes sense and I guess that the alchemical table isn't that OP.

 

[Flubman]

I'm watching Chippy's review of 1.4 on Switch. Why can't the PC version show numeric health and mana with Fancy or Bars like the Switch version does? Why can't we have both the prettiness of these alternative UI options and the utility of being able to see the actual numbers?