Journey's End 1.4.4: Balance Feedback and Discussion Thread

[Rocketjay]

I think that would be just as bad, if any thing they should make new Luck, based items that aren’t associated with things people like to build with.

I should've also posted on my comment that the negative effects of luck should be removed.

I don't mind that they remove luck altogether though.

 

[Ruin]

At the same time, it is a useless weapon just like the rest of the post Moon Lord drops. After you defeat Moon Lord, the game is basically over. So I don't see the issue.

The issue is that it's not useless. While yes, boss progression is over, there's still post-game grinding/bossing for completionists, Wave 15/20 Pumpkin and Frost Moon, and Tier 3 OOA which a good amount of people consider harder than Moon Lord on higher difficulties.

The simplest solution to me is to just remove "Melee" from Zenith, as I saw WatcherCCG suggest. Make it deal either non-class damage or "true" damage that benefits from all damage modifiers. Not that the thing needs to be stronger, but just in the interest of fairness.

 

[WatcherCCG]

The issue is that it's not useless. While yes, boss progression is over, there's still post-game grinding/bossing for completionists, Wave 15/20 Pumpkin and Frost Moon, and Tier 3 OOA which a good amount of people consider harder than Moon Lord on higher difficulties.

And mods. I know there will be hundreds of us who take Zenith into Calamity to give Yharon and Calamitas what for.

 

[Linux_Forever (Yvanoff)]

And mods. I know there will be hundreds of us who take Zenith into Calamity to give Yharon and Calamitas what for.

Mods are not a concern though. The vanilla game doesn't have to balance itself around mods

 

[11clock]

The issue is that it's not useless. While yes, boss progression is over, there's still post-game grinding/bossing for completionists, Wave 15/20 Pumpkin and Frost Moon, and Tier 3 OOA which a good amount of people consider harder than Moon Lord on higher difficulties.

The simplest solution to me is to just remove "Melee" from Zenith, as I saw WatcherCCG suggest. Make it deal either non-class damage or "true" damage that benefits from all damage modifiers. Not that the thing needs to be stronger, but just in the interest of fairness.

I am always finished with my playthrough right after beating Moon Lord. Grinding for completion sounds terrible. Old One's Army wasn't in the game the previous time I played it, so no input from me there. The moon events make a bit of sense, though. Those are highly replayable and fun to do even after you are done with the game.

 

[WatcherCCG]

The vanilla game doesn't have to balance itself around mods

Not what I was saying. Zenith is the reward for finishing the vanilla game, a weapon you can then take into new lands (content mods) and use there. It's a typical thing in games with mod support for the last gear tier in vanilla to be used by players as their first tier when going into mod content. This would be especially true for Calamity and Fargo's Mod, both of which are balls-to-the-walls hard in their respective Revengeance and Eternity modes. Triply so given the two mods can interlink.

 

[Ruin]

@Linux_Forever (Yvanoff) @WatcherCCG
I agree with you both on this. The vanilla game (of anything) should never make it's balance decisions around mods. Mods can easily change stuff anyway. But how I interpreted WatcherCCG earlier was more a "this cool thing now has a use outside of the normal game" rather than suggesting it should be changed to accommodate.

@11clock
That's fair. I rarely play past ML myself, but it'd still be nice to mess with for at least a few more hours before shelving the character.

 

[Coolqwerts]

Oh and let's not forget the venom debuff is virtually useless from the venom staff if a 143 enemies are immune to the venom debuff.

 

[Top Gun]

First of all, huge thanks for making this discussion a thing. Seeing a developer have a direct conversation with fans regarding balance suggestions was enough to get me to register and join in.

I want to add my voice to the horde expressing a distaste for the torch luck mechanic. The fact that I had no idea that "luck" was a concept in the first place until stumbling across a few threads, not even after regularly looking up new 1.4 info on the wiki, says a lot about how buried and obfuscated the mechanic is. And that wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem if it was a purely positive-effects mechanic, or if bad luck was related to more obvious things like killing ladybugs or NPCs dying...but I genuinely do not see any benefit to having torches of all things affect drop rates (and even worse, damage output!). In the several years I've spent playing Terraria, I've never had any interest in crafting colored torches; it's hard enough to manage inventory as-is without cluttering it up with duplicates of the same functional item. But hearing that the most ubiquitous item in Terraria, the item that pretty much every player crafts by the hundreds without giving it a second thought, can actually harm your playthrough in some way? Yeah, that's...not cool. That goes double for people playing on older maps who may already have thousands of torches laid down across a particular biome and are now faced with either replacing them all, or just eating the penalties. At the very least, leave plain old neutral torches out of the system.

Speaking of inventory management, I can sort of see the rationale behind changing how vanity inventory slots work, but all it's done from a player end is produce inconsistent behavior and add a minor annoyance. As stated above, it's hard enough managing inventory in this game, and the ability to hotswap accessories with a simple right-click was a godsend when it was introduced. There are many accessories like the yo-yo or fishing gear that I might only use in limited situations, and the fact that I can now right-click them one way but not back the other makes for a frustrating experience. There seems to be little rhyme or reason as to which accessories count as "visible" and which don't, which makes the change even worse. I hope that this is something that can possibly be reconsidered.

About NPC happiness...again, I get the intention here, and the ability to unlock pylons as a fast-travel reward is a compelling incentive. But just like in the case of torches, the fact that there are negative penalties imposed for playing the game I've always played it just rubs me the wrong way. To be frank, I don't really have much interest in building anything of note in Terraria. I know many people do, and that's fantastic, but I'm far more invested in the exploration and combat then producing any sort of intricate builds. (That may change if I start a Journey playthrough, since building something complex without being able to disable mob spawns is a non-starter for me.) If I want to keep building my Soviet gulags of plain wood right at spawn, as I've always done, I shouldn't be slapped with a harsh financial penalty for doing so. Terraria has always been about allowing the player to progress through the game as they choose, but between this and the luck mechanic, it genuinely feels like there's a sentiment of, "Do things our way, or else!"

And finally, I know this probably goes beyond the scope of this thread, but could we please, please get some protection for the poor Jungle? I was hoping against hope that 1.4 would finally prevent it from getting inexorably swallowed by evil biomes, or at the very least give us something like a dark green Clentaminator solution to be able to restore it, but nope, it's still the same old dig-Hellevators-and-pray method. The way the Jungle behaves is the main reason why I don't smash Demon Altars anymore, because I'm worried about random evil biome bits spawning right in the middle of it and utterly trashing it. (And now Hardmode crate fishing will be much harder, but I'll bite that bullet.) Honestly, it makes no sense to me how after all this time, the Jungle is the one biome that can be irreparably destroyed in Hardmode. The ice and desert biomes get their own good/evil variants, and even the ocean is a simple Clentaminator spray away from purification, but the Jungle just gets shafted. If we can't get this changed, could we at least get some sort of explanation as to why this remains the case?

 

[The Owler]

Bee Keeper was the best phm sword back then, no doubt about that. But when its only real rival was Muramasa since every other PHM sword was bad (and probably still is, but I haven't seen if 1.4 added new ones yet), are you sure nerfing it instead of buffing the rest was the right choice?

I know this has literally nothing to do what you were saying (though I can agree that the Bee Keeper is absolute trash right now), I'm sure you might have something to say about torch luck as well (yes, I'm going on about it, I know, I know).

 

[An Easter Egg]

One more suggestion regarding torch luck. I don't know if introducing it is feasible, but I figure it's worth mentioning. How about giving smart cursor the ability to auto-swap torches? So instead of having to manually take down hundreds of wrong torches you placed before you knew about their effect, you could just turn on smart cursor and replace them much more easily. Even if the negative effects are removed (here's hoping), this would make it much more reasonable to replace them with appropriate torches later for the luck bonus.

 

[Bry]

It still has plenty capable regenerative abilities. The core behind the reservation is the fact that free-healing is a detriment to commitment principles already present in the game, which service to add complexity to the simple nature of an always-active hurtbox game. Notice "always-active hurtbox" and you get a clear picture as to why free-healing is already a problem: there's no incentive not to do it. Passive play is a part of the process and encouraged by the time-to-kill-centric nature of the enemy design, so the second you can play it safe is the second you're getting rewarded immensely and invalidating a lot of other compromises such as the dichotomy between Philosopher's/Accessory Availability, risk assessment vs future proofing, and even the most egregious of them: offensive versus defensive, which is already a weighed scale because "time-to-kill-centric" gameplay already heavily incentivizes active engagement to begin with. Occam's Razor comes into picture here, and let me tell you, it's not a pretty painting on Defenses' part. This is the problem behind the regeneration itself and why building around it is a lot more of a problem than the "heavy amount of regen" that was just an addendum/supplement to something that was already problematic to begin with.

That being said, I really wouldn't discredit the suggestion that health regeneration on part of getting struck would be a bad thing. It's a good upend on crisis assessment and keeping your cool and can help to build good habits on suppressing panic, not to mention even on Normal mode, getting hit by most anything is a disadvantageous state to begin with. The most I could think of in terms of it becoming a problem is players willingly hurting themselves on lower-end enemies to gain such a boost with a low net-cost, but that's already a core component of the Panic Necklace to begin with and is rewarding of a player who's able to use ingenuity, not to mention I doubt health regen off of honey could even be used in i-frame machines.

On that note, saying that Panic Necklace is "archaic" when it services a bridge of gap on distancing on hit is honestly extreme. I can see the statement applying fine to Star Cloak and its kin, but Panic Necklace is still perfectly serviceable and is only really held back by in-engine movement speed caps or the like in a context where versatility is usually a fair bit more important than damage. Even on essential three for Pre-Hardmode end-game (Obsidian Shield; Frostspark; Monster Tooth), you've still got more than enough reason to run Panic Necklace, especially in cases where overlapping hitbox = bad. Hardmode already gets a lead-in with a boss specifically built to test you on this and its sub-mechanics as a result, so even if you are running it into hardmode, it's a perfect case of taking off the the crutches, which a player deserves to get punished by. If you really wanted to stick to your guns on it being archaic as a result of the getting hit portion, the best case of rebalance would be per @slendyproject's suggestion just a bit up (though rip the engineers using XNA).

uh
thanks for the thesis

The Panic Necklace is good and I love it, but the only tinker it gets is with b e e b l e s, so you can't really use it outside of PreHardmode. A sad, indeed.

 

[J Bame]

I know this has literally nothing to do what you were saying (though I can agree that the Bee Keeper is absolute trash right now), I'm sure you might have something to say about torch luck as well (yes, I'm going on about it, I know, I know).

There is nothing I can say about it that hasn't been said by someone else already. It was poorly thought out and honestly it feels like it had a rushed implementation EDIT: Apparently not. See below. This is not the right place to rant about it though, this is almost exclusively for Item balancing.

 

[Rocketjay]

WTF is this ?

If that is really the case, that has got to be one of the most pettiest things that I have seen a developer do in a video game.

 

[White_Shadow]

Pre-hardmode summoner is still greatly lacking, for many reasons. One is that the new weapons are totally RNG based. Couldn't we craft the Vampire Frog staff out of caught frogs and other blood moon materials? There is no new Pre-hardmode armor set, which means you certainly can't play summoner from the beginning in Expert and Master because it's locked behind the Queen Bee, and it's a bit difficult in Normal as well. Switching from Pre-HM to post-WoF, the Terraprisma is stupid hard to get, and you might as well not try in Master. The Sanguine Staff is locked behind a random drop from a mini boss. The Blade Staff is once again RNG based, from an already rare enemy. Combine that with the stupid new torch luck, and you might as well not bother trying for it. Can we get less RNG please? A new summoner armor in Pre-HM is desperately needed as well.

EDIT: The Desert Tiger Staff is pretty cool, though, y'all did a great job with that

 

[Heroman3003]

Maybe he should have never released this game to public if the only way to play it is one he likes and everyone else is wrong.

 

[Adapting]

Pre-hardmode summoner is still greatly lacking, for many reasons. One is that the new weapons are totally RNG based. Couldn't we craft the Vampire Frog staff out of caught frogs and other blood moon materials? There is no new Pre-hardmode armor set, which means you certainly can't play summoner from the beginning in Expert and Master because it's locked behind the Queen Bee, and it's a bit difficult in Normal as well. Switching from Pre-HM to post-WoF, the Terraprisma is stupid hard to get, and you might as well not try in Master. The Sanguine Staff is locked behind a random drop from a mini boss. The Blade Staff is once again RNG based, from an already rare enemy. Combine that with the stupid new torch luck, and you might as well not bother trying for it. Can we get less RNG please? A new summoner armor in Pre-HM is desperately needed as well.

They are extremely underwhelming, I also don't understand why we can't just hold down to consistently whip rather than clicking over and over. It's extremely annoying when doing bosses with a bunch of health.

 

[Bry]

WTF is this ?

If that is really the case, that has got to be one of the most pettiest things that I have seen a developer do in a video game.

Aaaand that confirms what I thought about Red's process. No wonder so much went wrong.

 

[Coolqwerts]

Redigit exposed

 

[WatcherCCG]

WTF is this ?

If that is really the case, that has got to be one of the most pettiest things that I have seen a developer do in a video game.

This is likely some troll's bad idea of a photoshop joke meant to derail the discussion. (Not accusing you of making this, mind you.) Let's not get wrapped up in what is likely an attempt to kill this thread, friends.