Journey's End 1.4.4: Balance Feedback and Discussion Thread

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I think the sanguine staff is too rare, on average I'll have a 50% chance of getting a dreadnautulus if I spend all night fishing during a bloodmoon, and this is with a sonar potion ignoring everything else that bites the hook. When you defeat dreadnautulus there's only a 20% chance of the staff dropping, that means it will on average take 10 bloodmoons to obtain one. The only way to summon a bloodmoon manually is by killing bloodmoon enemies which have a low chance of dropping a bloody tear, but if you spend all night fishing then you have almost no chance getting one of these.
I think it might help if the Chum Caster was added to the drop table of all Hardmode Blood Moon enemies. It really makes a difference towards speeding up these encounters, despite having a lower fishing power.
 
A couple of things I think would be nice to be changed/reverted is the fix with pumps being able to duplicate liquids. The bucket method is already in and as far as I am aware being left in. Fluid Mixing stations were really neat and cool devices to build and now they no longer work. If balance is the issue add in a "Spout" that uses one of the botomless buckets to make infinite liquids.

The Flower boots Bait and hay changes to be reverted back to 1.3.5.3 behaviour fishing is already tedious and if I really want a bunch of good bait I can essentially just get unlimited master bait so I dont really see the point in the change especially with the cool farms that can be done with hoiks and the boots.

Yall added a lava bucket and sponge why not finish the trifecta and add in a honey bucket and sponge? Better yet why not make them there own combo item allowing the placment/removal of Lava Honey and Water all at once kinda like a grand design but for liquids.
 
I entered hardmode and thus did my usual routine of hallowing the areas where my NPCs lived to guard them from corruption spread, only to find that none of my NPCs are happy with the biomes they live in anymore other than the ones who specifically like hallow. Shouldn't say... the Dye Trader still be happy with a desert even if it's hallowed, especially since the desert pylon still works in it? This seems like an oversight to me, especially for a biome that you're encouraged to spread to fight back corruption (until you get the Steampunk NPC that-is).
 
I entered hardmode and thus did my usual routine of hallowing the areas where my NPCs lived to guard them from corruption spread, only to find that none of my NPCs are happy with the biomes they live in anymore other than the ones who specifically like hallow. Shouldn't say... the Dye Trader still be happy with a desert even if it's hallowed, especially since the desert pylon still works in it? This seems like an oversight to me, especially for a biome that you're encouraged to spread to fight back corruption (until you get the Steampunk NPC that-is).
Yeah, that sounds pretty annoying.
 
So I don't specifically remember using the staff of earth in previous play throughs, I remember it being a very "meh" magic weapon in in the past, but I remembered it got buffed in 1.4 in my master mode play through this last week, and it seems to have been over buffed a little bit. To the point where no other post golem crowd control weapons outshined it except for razorblade typhoon (barely, and mostly because it had good single target/could be fired from any angle) and last prism. Every time I got a weapon I thought should do better, like the likewise buffed charged blaster cannon on perfectly flat ground, I just felt disappointed using them, as the staff of earth was just providing insane numbers during invasion events, solar eclipses and the OOA T3, without any of the downsides of weapons like charged blaster cannon.

I don't have a specific idea for how to nerf it back a little bit, but right now it really felt like it was overperforming by quite a lot. From Golem through solar eclipses, martian invasions, pumpkin and frost moons, I didn't feel compelled to put it away until I got razorblade typhoon, and honestly I'm not convinced razorblade typhoon even beats it on dps, which just doesn't feel right.


On another topic, I saw discussion earlier on the bee keeper and night's edge. It's to my understanding that the problem with buffing bee keeper is that it encroaches on night's edge's territory for being one of the best pre-hardmode swords, and that we can't buff night's edge without making breaker blade pointless, and we can't buff breaker blade without making the hardmode ore swords useless... all of which is understandable, and I think maintaining that progression is the right way of going about it, but I think nerfing the bee keeper was the wrong direction to take a fix for this. Honestly, none of these weapons are even really viable in master mode to begin with, not even now with buffs they have received, especially not the hardmode ore swords, which I cannot remember a playthrough in which literally anybody crafted. These weapons don't do enough to keep things away from you with their slow swing speed, even with high knockback, as tight spaces and multiple enemies cannot be kept at bay with so few hits, and the confusion debuff the bee keeper applies isn't consistent enough to matter, especially considering the small size. Additionally, the DPS and burst potential these weapons provide isn't nearly high enough to justify going close range against expert or master level enemies over the safety of attacking with yoyo's and sunfury during these stages of the game. Any value that the bee keeper provides against EoW should also not really be considered heavily, as anyone who can kill queen bee is more than capable of killing EoW without queen bee's equipment anyway. (Also...beenades.)

I've been of this opinion for a long time already, but all of these weapons need buffs. A little bit of swing speed and autoswing would go a long way for almost all of them, and make them good keep away weapons for early hardmode until you can upgrade to better stuff. Pretty much every sword without a projectile past the very earliest parts of the game is near pointless right now unless they can one shot enemies, keep them away really well or do insane dps under specific circumstances (fetid baghnakhs), which they aren't even close to doing on higher difficulty levels right now. Spears keep away better with better kill potential, flails are better crowd control with more range, and yoyos just have so much better range without much cost by the time you reach hardmode, swords just don't provide anything special at all right now.
 
I think it might help if the Chum Caster was added to the drop table of all Hardmode Blood Moon enemies. It really makes a difference towards speeding up these encounters, despite having a lower fishing power.
Was completely unaware of the chum caster's effect, I don't have one on my current play through though and its a bit rare, guess I'll stop skipping wandering eye fish and zombie mermen.

it's a bit odd how the only other fishing pole with a special effect (the hotline fishing rod) has its effect stated while the chum caster doesn't.
 
So recently I did a master mode playthrough with a friend as a summoner and well... it was pretty difficult to say the least. Most of my problems were because of whips and their lack of range. It seems a bit ridiculous that the squishiest class gets very short melee range whips. This is very apparent when trying to fight a very fast boss where you're trying to keep your distance or risk being 2 shotted. For some of the bosses I had to use guns or bows to be able to at least hit them without dying instantly.

So here's my suggestion. Double the range of all whips. Or perhaps maybe just the HM whips. It makes sense for whips to be shorter range in pre-HM lest they be too powerful, seeing as nearly all weapons in pre-HM are short range, but once in hardmode a lot of the bosses start getting harder to fight for a summoner and keeping distance is the way to win.

Other alternatives include adding a whip accessory that increases whip range and summon damage(maybe even autoswing?) Perhaps scaling whip range off of number of minions or add a whip range modifier to summoner armor to prevent whips being abused by other classes.

Increased whip range would also help with minion AI during boss fights as being too far from the boss causes minions to not attack them. Allowing me to summon tag bosses from afar would help the minions stay targeted towards the bosses.

All in all I really really like whips but it's the range (and lack of autoswing) that makes it very difficult to use as an active main weapon.
 
So recently I did a master mode playthrough with a friend as a summoner and well... it was pretty difficult to say the least. Most of my problems were because of whips and their lack of range. It seems a bit ridiculous that the squishiest class gets very short melee range whips. This is very apparent when trying to fight a very fast boss where you're trying to keep your distance or risk being 2 shotted. For some of the bosses I had to use guns or bows to be able to at least hit them without dying instantly.

So here's my suggestion. Double the range of all whips. Or perhaps maybe just the HM whips. It makes sense for whips to be shorter range in pre-HM lest they be too powerful, seeing as nearly all weapons in pre-HM are short range, but once in hardmode a lot of the bosses start getting harder to fight for a summoner and keeping distance is the way to win.

Other alternatives include adding a whip accessory that increases whip range and summon damage(maybe even autoswing?) Perhaps scaling whip range off of number of minions or add a whip range modifier to summoner armor to prevent whips being abused by other classes.

Increased whip range would also help with minion AI during boss fights as being too far from the boss causes minions to not attack them. Allowing me to summon tag bosses from afar would help the minions stay targeted towards the bosses.

All in all I really really like whips but it's the range (and lack of autoswing) that makes it very difficult to use as an active main weapon.
Whips single target dps isn't the best and because of the fact their damage falls off the more enemies they hit their crowd control isn't good either, whips primary purpose is as a secondary weapon you pull out occasionally to boost your minions, and then switch back to your main weapon. If you throw ichor in the mix then there's really no reason to use only a whip since ichor is basically just +10 summon tag damage to your main weapon. Whips are still good for stacking even more damage on top of ichor, but again are never a weapon you should use exclusively.

There already is an accessory that gives whips auto swing, the titan glove and its derivatives.

Don't lock your summoner to only using summoner weapons, you don't epect the other classes to not take advantage of their 1-3 free minion slots just because they 'don't fit their class' so don't expect summoner to be at its best when only using summoner weapons.
 
Whips single target dps isn't the best and because of the fact their damage falls off the more enemies they hit their crowd control isn't good either, whips primary purpose is as a secondary weapon you pull out occasionally to boost your minions, and then switch back to your main weapon. If you throw ichor in the mix then there's really no reason to use only a whip since ichor is basically just +10 summon tag damage to your main weapon. Whips are still good for stacking even more damage on top of ichor, but again are never a weapon you should use exclusively.

There already is an accessory that gives whips auto swing, the titan glove and its derivatives.

Don't lock your summoner to only using summoner weapons, you don't epect the other classes to not take advantage of their 1-3 free minion slots just because they 'don't fit their class' so don't expect summoner to be at its best when only using summoner weapons.


While I agree with most of this, The biggest issue is how squishy summoners final armor is. The Vahalla Knight set is a good alternative set with 68 armor, but I still think the stardust armor is far to low at 38. In my opinion 48~54 would be more appropiate.

As for the whips, more range would be the best buff for it. While it does gain range from negative speed modifiers, its still too short of range on the last 2 bosses. So if anything give some of the hard mode whips and a bit more range by default, and the last whip the most range of any other.
 
While I agree with most of this, The biggest issue is how squishy summoners final armor is. The Vahalla Knight set is a good alternative set with 68 armor, but I still think the stardust armor is far to low at 38. In my opinion 48~54 would be more appropiate.

As for the whips, more range would be the best buff for it. While it does gain range from negative speed modifiers, its still too short of range on the last 2 bosses. So if anything give some of the hard mode whips and a bit more range by default, and the last whip the most range of any other.
Buffing the Stardust Armor would be nice.
 
While I agree with most of this, The biggest issue is how squishy summoners final armor is. The Vahalla Knight set is a good alternative set with 68 armor, but I still think the stardust armor is far to low at 38. In my opinion 48~54 would be more appropiate.
An extra 16 defense barely does anything in the end game where attacks normally do over 100 damage. Stardust is supposed to be glass cannon armor and if you want more defensive options you can always replace the chest piece with valhala. The stardust dragon was the only thing that could compete with the phantasm in 1.3, and now summoners have access to the terraprisma which is even more insane.
 
An extra 16 defense barely does anything in the end game where attacks normally do over 100 damage. Stardust is supposed to be glass cannon armor and if you want more defensive options you can always replace the chest piece with valhala. The stardust dragon was the only thing that could compete with the phantasm in 1.3, and now summoners have access to the terraprisma which is even more insane.

Its quite a bit when your considering potion use with it. However I'm more in the line of using a full set over mix sets when it comes to armors in this game. Besides sentry summoner is pretty good suprisingly.
 
I think would be nice to be changed/reverted is the fix with pumps being able to duplicate liquids. The bucket method is already in and as far as I am aware being left in. Fluid Mixing stations were really neat and cool devices to build and now they no longer work. If balance is the issue add in a "Spout" that uses one of the botomless buckets to make infinite liquids.

they aren't fixed they're reverse bugged.... these pumps now delete liquids...

idk why at all this was touched as nobody seemed to be negatively bothered by that interaction?
and i also can't understand why some other things mentioned here used to make a kind of a farm got basically removed?

the only 2 downsides i felt with the update currently.
 
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Back again, with other things that should be looked into:

* Chain Guillotines. Poor range, bad DPS, directly outclassed by Yoyos since they work almost exactly the same way but they have much better stats. They are the worst Biome Mimic drop right now since they don't do anything well.

* Unholy Trident is still far from being worth the grind. Projectile is pretty slow and the hitbox is smaller than it looks, and its DPS isn't even that good. There is also the thing that it's a super boring weapon design-wise; just a trident that shoots glowing tridents. I think it would be funny and much more interesting if, much like the enemy that drops it, the thing could have a ridiculously high base damage and then be balanced around that.

* Shadowbeam Staff is another pretty bad weapon, especially compared to the other two Dungeon Staves now. You need to line up a bunch of weak walker enemies in order to use this to its "best". In other words, it's only usable in Pumpkin Moon waves 1-3, because every other scenario will have much stronger enemies that will overwhelm its pathetic DPS. Removing the damage falloff that it for some reason got back in 1.2.3 would help, but that wouldn't really be enough to make it good.

* I don't know how hard this would be to implement, but Moon Lord's Eyes should not lose all debuffs applied to them every time they close. Daybreak and Betsy's Wrath sound like they would be pretty good weapons for the fight, but since ML is constantly blinking their debuffs off then they are just really bad until the Core is exposed.

* The Fragment Wings should not require Luminite on their Recipe on Expert Mode. Not only do we have Empress' Wings now, which are pretty much on the same level since their ability to accelerate to super speed is incredible, ML's Bag drops the objective best pair of Wings in the game making the Luminite ones just a vanity option in comparison.

Also, ML is hard. An indirect nerf like this would be welcomed.

* Soaring Insignia is busted. Infinite Flight time is really cool and it's a perfect ability for an Expert exclusive drop, but a Frog Leg effect on top of that is too much for mobility. I wouldn't just remove the ascent speed bonus, but definitely lower it to 20% or 25%.

* Magic quiver got 2 different upgrades now, both of which do so little to improve it that it's obvious the intention is to stack the increased arrow damage. Now here is the thing: The Magic Quiver is a rare drop. It takes a while to farm for just one, so expecting players to get three is ridiculous. The drop rate should definitely be increased to be the same as Marrow's if not higher.
 
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* Magic quiver got 2 different upgrades now, both of which do so little to improve it that it's obvious the intention is to stack the increased arrow damage. Now here is the thing: The Magic Quiver is a rare drop. It takes a while to for just one, so expecting players to farm for three is ridiculous. The drop rate should definitely be increased to be the same as Marrow's if not higher.
So... why is the fire gauntlet still a worse mech glove? The only excuse I've heard is that it's like that because of accessory stacking but now we basically have 3 copies of the same powerful accessory, and one of them even uses the magma stone...
 
Can solutions potentially get the same treatment?
Getting the opposite solution or just getting the evil ones can be a bit of a pain, unless you want to waste a solar tablet on it.

Was told no on this when it came up for discussion.

On the other hand, is it that much of an issue if a player could craft a Key of Night/"Key of Blood/Flesh?" out of Souls of Night?
(As in, making it available in both worlds since the drops were supposed to be interchangeable)

You can get naturally spawned alt-world Big Mimics in underground biomes, just no way to force spawn them.

Fossil renewability

I'm brainstorming here within the limitations of my scope, will have to think carefully to get it approved.


Gem Robes
I've seen the Gem Robes mentioned in this thread and how they can give you a very powerful combo if paired with either magic legs.
I haven't fully thought about it's stats but I did want to mention that I wouldn't mind if the Robe was split into two armor pieces (Robe & Pants) just like the Spectre Armor (completely unrelated to healing or anything the like)
That way it could be a proper set, have uses in vanity and maybe be an alternative early mage/Glass Cannon setup.
Unfortunately that would require new items and I'd recommend splitting up the stats as well as adding a few points of defense to the leg pieces.

Anything likely to change with the Gem Robes combo is likely to take the form of a nerf, if anything. I don't imagine that other sets will be buffed to match it if it is that far out of line.


A friend of mine just told me a story about how he made a Master Mode world where the dungeon spawned on top of the desert, making it so that he hardly had an underground desert. I think worldgen still needs a bit of tweaking. If it can't be tweaked, it would be nice if right after world creation, the game showed the player a complete map of the world that went away once the player enters the world for the first time. This way, a player can see if the worldgen screwed them over without having to waste time progressing to the point where they're able to find that out for themselves.

I'd be curious to see this world, I've generated thousands of worlds this update and I don't think I've seen this.

But I've got a fresh 150 new worlds today to check out, so maybe I'll see one.

Was completely unaware of the chum caster's effect, I don't have one on my current play through though and its a bit rare, guess I'll stop skipping wandering eye fish and zombie mermen.

it's a bit odd how the only other fishing pole with a special effect (the hotline fishing rod) has its effect stated while the chum caster doesn't.

The special bonus is mentioned in the tooltip.

they aren't fixed they're reverse bugged.... these pumps now delete liquids...

idk why at all this was touched as nobody seemed to be negatively bothered by that interaction?

I don't believe pump liquid duping was deliberately impacted. We had some negative gameplay impacting liquid duplication that had to be fixed, and it might have inadvertently impacted this. However, I would say that bonus duplicating from pumps was not a protected bug . . . so if it is fixed in the course of fixing other bugs, that's okay to me. But it shouldn't be deleting other liquids. I'll have to investigate it, but if you could provide more detail in a forum bug section report, I would appreciate it.

* Magic quiver got 2 different upgrades now, both of which do so little to improve it that it's obvious the intention is to stack the increased arrow damage. Now here is the thing: The Magic Quiver is a rare drop. It takes a while to farm for just one, so expecting players to get three is ridiculous. The drop rate should definitely be increased to be the same as Marrow's if not higher.

Stacking the increased arrow damage is not the intention. Would it solve your concerns if we made the stacked damage capped at only one? These were meant to be minor replacement upgrades to the Magic Quiver.

Unholy Trident

I don't think forcing the weapon to conform to the enemy's projectile is a good basis for design direction, that's more just a meme than anything else. I'm not saying its necessarily in a solid enough place yet, but it got an effective 30% DPS increase with a corresponding mana cost reduction to keep its mana consumption stable. We can buff it again from there if needed, but I don't necessarily think making it do 160 damage is a good idea just because it matches Red Devil damage.
 
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Stacking the increased arrow damage is not the intention. Would it solve your concerns if we made the stacked damage capped at only one? These were meant to be minor replacement upgrades to the Magic Quiver.

One of them turns the worst arrow in the game into the second worst arrow in the game, and the other is identical to the original in Singleplayer and I'm not sure if it's even that useful in Multiplayer. If the stacking were to be removed, then these two will need a small buff otherwise they would just end up being reskins of the Magic Quiver.
 
One of them turns the worst arrow in the game into the second worst arrow in the game, and the other is identical to the original in Singleplayer and I'm not sure if it's even that useful in Multiplayer. If the stacking were to be removed, then these two will need a small buff otherwise they would just end up being reskins of the Magic Quiver.
The magic quiver was already an endgame viable accessory it didn't really need a buff.
The magma quiver just gives you a nice 'light up caves a bit while exploring' since people like to use the endless quiver when just wandering around.
I'm doing a multiplayer run right now and one of my friends is using the stalker quiver while I use the flesh knuckles we'll see if aggro manipulation is any good.
 
One of them turns the worst arrow in the game into the second worst arrow in the game, and the other is identical to the original in Singleplayer and I'm not sure if it's even that useful in Multiplayer. If the stacking were to be removed, then these two will need a small buff otherwise they would just end up being reskins of the Magic Quiver.

If Magic Quiver is viable, I don't see how Magic Quiver + Minor Bonus is non-viable. You just swap out the Magic Quiver for one of them if the circumstances call for it.
 
If Magic Quiver is viable, I don't see how Magic Quiver + Minor Bonus is non-viable. You just swap out the Magic Quiver for one of them if the circumstances call for it.

It's not that they are bad upgrades, it's more that removing the stacking would be a bad idea. Even if it wasn't the intention, it's fun to have small upgrades like these just to allow stacking multiples of one item, so if that use were to be removed a large reason of why people would want to upgrade their quivers will be gone. Right now I'd just leave them the way they are, I'd just consider raising the Quiver drop rate a bit.
 
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