Journey's End 1.4.4: Balance Feedback and Discussion Thread

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Before: 1.3.x.x
After: 1.4.x.x
Blocks merging is a huge problem that I am currently having that can't directly be solved by just replacing the stone slab with stone slab accent. my problem also applies to sandstone slab which are shown in the images as painted white. Regrettably, they blend the boreal wood, palladium columns and (not shown in the images) glass.

I have a standard for my builds and with this patch, they have been ruined.


It's ridiculous that the status quo that has remained since the introduction of the slab blocks has been phased out for no good reason.

Please make this right.
 
Whats up with the biome requirements? I was building something that involved multiple biomes and couldn't get it to work, and I'm now finding out today that the requirements for seemingly every biome went up. Jungle requires 140 instead of 80 tiles (not that bad), crimson and corruption need 300 now (again not that bad), and hallowed went to 125 (also not bad). But desert, snow, and mushroom biomes all require a whopping 1500, which seems like an absolutely insane amount of blocks to me, especially since most people build a glowing mushroom biome every playthrough for the Truffle. I sort of understand not wanting the player to build a biome unless its a full sized biome and not just a square of tiles for getting unique drops, but being able to manipulate things like the biomes to gain the rewards you want was one of my favorite parts of the game before.
 
Stop punishing the player for placing wrong torches.
Also give for biome torches saying: "Placing this torch in X biome will increase your luck"
So, without negative luck it wouldn't punish players for no good reason, and with the biome torch tooltips, you can see a reward for placing the biome torches in the right place.
 
Stop punishing the player for placing wrong torches.
Also give for biome torches saying: "Placing this torch in X biome will increase your luck"
So, without negative luck it wouldn't punish players for no good reason, and with the biome torch tooltips, you can see a reward for placing the biome torches in the right place.
That feature has been removed now
 
I doubt this is in the scope of things you can do, but since luck is an unlisted stat maybe it could get an info accessory similar to fishing power, which is also an otherwise unlisted stat.
Pretty simple addition, especially if you just tack it onto the travelling merchant, just needs a good art idea.

As for the mechanic itself, I actually like it. Removing the negative torch luck was my only gripe (I would have been fine if biome-specific torches carried a penalty still), and I'd like to see it more fleshed out if it got an informative accessory.

I'd also like to see luck capable of more...aggressive influence, both positive and negative, but only if you have the information accessory, and in the form of a debuff similar to the honey buff (permanent while you have it, gets a cooldown when removed). Having mild effects without the accessory is fine as superstition-encouraging nudges, and having it as a full-blown drop influencer when you know it's real adds a new angle to reducing some of the grind with rare drops or other events.

Maybe it could be:
  • Dull Necklace
    • Sold by the Travelling Merchant (similar to the others he sells)
    • Gives a vague idea of luck (maybe just "good", "bad", or "none")
    • Applies a "superstitious" debuff, increasing the luck range to -1.0 - 1.2
  • Gemstone Necklace
    • Made by using all 7 types of gem on above
    • More specific luck info (0.25 interval perhaps)
    • Applies a "foreboding" debuff, increasing the luck range to -1.3 - 1.5
  • Pearl Necklace
    • Made by using all 3 types of pearl on above
    • Gives exact luck value
    • Applies a "???" debuff (couldn't think of a third name), increasing the luck range to -2.0 - 2.0
The ranges might be a bit extreme, so maybe to attempt to balance it out, the information and debuff only work if actually equipped, unlike other information accessories. If it requires a slot, it could also increase luck slightly.
It could also just be a single-tier item, or it could also require hardmode items for the higher tiers.

I also think luck shouldn't influence combat at all, outside of potential health/mana drops (assuming those are influenced) and the potential accessory slot being eaten for the increased range.
 
I think the post plantera whips need a buff, they're basicly inferior to the death sickle and paladin's hammer. Even if you do a high damage summoner build all you get is roughly the same dps against a single target, however as soon as you try to start crowd controlling the whip loses damage for each additional enemy it hits making them way worse than competing melee weapons.
It's hard to argue for the boost to summons because melee weapon can use the ichor flask which effectively gives every melee weapon '10 summon tag damage'. The Kaleidoscope is especially underwhelming since your summons at that point will fly off and murder everything before you can even think about pulling out a whip, and its single target dps isn't very good so it it's still bad against the few bosses/minibosses that survive your summons.
 
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Hi, I have to say that I am loving this update so far. Of course with all new things there are issues:

The first MAJOR issue I have ran into is the crimson taking over my jungle. Straight into hardmode my crimson started to spread into my jungle. This seemed fine at first until i realized that it was turning the mud into dirt. It started to take over the entire above ground jungle and started creeping into the underground. In fear of our jungle being completely eradicated, my friend brought a clemtaminator from another world. To our horror it just turned our jungle into a surface forest biome. This really bothers me because we would have no way to stop this unless we cheat or defeat a mechanical boss, and in master mode it takes a while to get to that point. We could also block swap all the dirt with mud but that doesn't sound fun at all. I really wish that either crimson and corruption didn't infect mud or there was a crimson or corruption mud variant that can be turned back into jungle grass with green solution.

Another small issue that I have found is sometimes when I am attacked my summons won't help. They just sit there and look at me funny. Perhaps this is just a glitch but it would be nice for them to prioritize enemies attacking you if they aren't preoccupied.

One other small thing that bothered my friends and I while playing was the dungeon. It seems like more of a nuisance than a challenge now. The crumbling blocks almost require you have a dangersense potion and you almost have to have 2 people (one mining and one protecting) to even explore a little bit. I feel like it would be much better to have the crumbling blocks for traps and secret rooms but not for main dungeon progression.

Again, thank you so much for putting as much time as you did into this update and I hope you continue to balance and make this update nearly perfect.

TL; DR: My jungle can be taken over by crimson and I can only get it back by block swapping with mud, summons sometimes don't do anything, the dungeon isn't as fun anymore.
 
Me and a few friends have been playing a Master Mode world and since we started our world on the day 1.4 released, we have had around 6-7 (maybe more) goblin invasions.
It's been really annoying, as since we are still in pre-hardmode, and so they take a pretty decent amount of time to get rid of them.

I'm not entirely sure if we're experiencing a bug, or if the invasions likelihood of ocurring was increased.

Thanks for your hard work on this update, it has been very enjoyable, we just had this one issue that was just irritating.
 
Ok, I was about to say most of the problems with the NPC happiness system, But I think that this post explains the problems better than I can.
So, as an outspoken critic of this feature when it was just hypothetical, what is my take on it?

I surmised that getting Pylons would be tedious. That you'd have to build a house in a biome, send an NPC who likes the biome there, and then you can purchase a Pylon. Which is a lot of work just to get the thing, but you can at least build two houses there and transfer someone else there so that you can set up a Pylon right away.

What I didn't predict was how expensive it would be. Oh sure, in early Hardmode, 8.5 gold may be easy to come by, but pre-EoC, when you're still exploring the world, that's a rather huge expenditure. One you have to make twice, since you need at least two Pylons (of different types) to be useful. Fortunately, Nymphs drop lots of gold, so that plus selling a few redundant accessories did the trick.

The happiness system is actually worse than I thought. I kind of expected the developers to prevent happiness deadlocking from happening, but... they didn't.

What is a happiness deadlock? Well, maximum happiness (and therefore, the full 25% price reduction) requires 3 things:

1) Living in their preferred biome.
2) With exactly one NPC within 25 squares.
3) Who is a person the character "loves" (technically it can be "likes", but you'll "only" get a 23% price reduction).

If you violate any one of these (or have 5 or more NPCs within ~120 squares), then you can't get the full 25% price reduction. A happiness deadlock is what happens when you have two NPCs that sell stuff, one of whom loves the other, but the other hates that character's preferred biome.

Oh, and the penalty for being in the wrong biome is a whopping 50% cost increase.

Enter the Goblin Tinkerer and the Mechanic. The GT's preferred place is underground, but the Mechanic hates being underground. But they each have the other under "loves".

Therefore, if you want to get the GT's best prices, you need to move the Mechanic to a place where she will give you her worst prices. And vice-versa. And since there's a good chance that you'll be spending money with both of them over the course of the game, this is going to get really annoying really fast.

In a well-designed version of this feature, you would be able to find a stable arrangement of characters that would give you the best prices, clusters of characters who prefer the same biome and prefer people who also prefer the same biome. But that's not actually possible given the particular set of character preferences.

The feature is not just annoying in concept. The implementation of it seems to be designed to make you either accept a non-optimal price, or make you shuffle people around a lot just to get the optimal price from a particular character. The feature is double-annoying.

And no, you can't just say "go play in Journey mode and dupe up some money".
Why do so many of the features in this update think that punishing the player severely for not "playing the game properly" is a good way to motivate them?

Especially in a sandbox game?

I just hope that you guys get rid of the negative aspects of this feature like torch luck, because there are zero reasons to do this.

There is already an incredible incentive to using the happiness system (Dropped prices and Cheaper/Early teleportation)
 
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Eye of Cthulu could use a bit of a buff. Right now on Expert it hits so low that having Platinum armor and an ironskin can have it only killing a 200 hp player after 10 to 12 hits at it's strongest and only if they don't heal. With just standard healing potions this goes up to a whopping 18 hits with over 6 having to happen during potion sickness. Even with the minimum requirements for it to spawn on its own it still takes 6 to 9 hits for it to kill you, or as many as 14 with more than five all happening during potion sickness if you have just an ironskin and standard healing potions.

This doesn't even factor in natural regeneration, any level of Well Fed, a band of regen, Campfires, Heart Lanterns or the additional 5 defense someone could reliably get with a shackle and a warding yoyo string.

If the intended time to fight the Eye is as soon as it can spawn naturally it could stand to gain a bit of extra damage so people have to actually dodge it a bit more. If the intended time to fight it is with full gold or platinum gear then it could stand to have a sizeable buff or the higher tiers of ore armor could use a slight nerf. Probably the second considering it's possible to reach 38 or 42 defense purely with craft-able equipment and potions, Food, a Bast Statue, and a prefix-less Shackle before you fight a single boss, meet the Goblin Tinkerer, or even fish for the first time and still have an extra 3 or 4 accessory slots to use.
 
Hey, loving 1.4 so far, however, there are quite a few things that have been dampening my enjoyment of the game (and no, its not just the pain of master mode.)

First, Worldgen
Worldgen in 1.4 is...far from perfect. Because of the way the UG Desert is protected, world evils always spawn in the most inopportune of places, intersecting with jungles or spawning right next to your spawn location. It would be great if there were some work done on this so that world evils spawn in less awful places.
Also, there seems to be a LOT fewer cabins, hives, and giant mahoganies in the UG jungle. It's beginning to feel like a ghost town, with only a small few chests and shrines In all the jungle's I've seen, and no giant mahoganies. What makes this even worse is that you can still get items like seaweed and staff of regrowth from these valuable chests.
Finally, the UG desert is not fun to explore. It's covered in antlion larvae and instakill cacti, with a very low number of chests to make it worth the effort. It makes exploring this biome a chore.

Those Useless Treasure Items:
We all know the feeling of opening a treasure chest to find seaweed, a staff of regrowth, or even a flare gun. Well, 1.4 added even more items like that. Introducing: the encumbering stone and the treasure magnet. These two largely situational items take up space in 2 of the most valuable chests in the game. Shadow chests are few and far between, and now one of the most common items inside them is a useless magnet. On top of that, lava fishing for the items you want takes hours because of how unbelievably slow lava fishing is. I suggest making these items a bonus item in chests so players can get the item from these chests and get the items they want.

Blood Moon Fishing
Blood Moon Fishing, to me, is very time-consuming and not worth the effort. First, you wait around for a blood moon. It finally happens, you start fishing, and you manage to kill the 4 or 5 mermen/wandering eye fish that you catch. Because of the absurd 1/45 drop chance of any item from these enemies, you get nothing out of it. You also get no way to summon another blood moon, since bloody tears are also absurdly rare. So you wait around for years until finally you get another blood moon and repeat the process. Now let's make the hypothetical even worse. You're playing as a summoner in expert mode! Now, you're essentially stuck with no way to progress your weaponry until the queen bee. I suggest lowering the drop chance of these items drastically and perhaps providing some way to get a bloody tear outside of blood moons (or make them less rare!)

Fishing (In General)
Because of the decreased effect of higher fishing power, treasure is rarer than ever, and getting new rods and bait only marginally improves your fishing gains. Combine this with the necessity of fishing, in the likely case that you couldn't find an item you need due to fewer cabins and you have a tiresome 2-hour fishing session on your hands. I don't understand this change, especially since you can no longer open pre-hardmode crates to get hardmode ores. Seems like overkill

Finally, the Zenith Recipe:
I only have one problem with the recipe so this one will be quick. The enchanted sword. Enchanted sword shrines, as you know, are quite rare. And there's always the chance you'll get terragrim from one instead, which cannot be used in the recipe. I'm aware you can fish for this weapon as well in 1.4, but that's still very time-consuming. I would either make enchanted sword shrines guaranteed in a world and include the ability to use terragrim in the recipe, or bring back 1.3.5 fishing, which is unlikely.
Also, Finch AI is braindead and it doesn't seem anything was done to improve minion AI as the devs said they would.

These are my gripes with 1.4, I hope you take some of them into consideration.
 
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Have any of you spawned directly inside the crimson/corruption when generating a world w/out a seed you found online? I want the chances of spawning in those biomes to increase.
 
The first MAJOR issue I have ran into is the crimson taking over my jungle. Straight into hardmode my crimson started to spread into my jungle. This seemed fine at first until i realized that it was turning the mud into dirt. It started to take over the entire above ground jungle and started creeping into the underground. In fear of our jungle being completely eradicated, my friend brought a clemtaminator from another world. To our horror it just turned our jungle into a surface forest biome. This really bothers me because we would have no way to stop this unless we cheat or defeat a mechanical boss, and in master mode it takes a while to get to that point. We could also block swap all the dirt with mud but that doesn't sound fun at all. I really wish that either crimson and corruption didn't infect mud or there was a crimson or corruption mud variant that can be turned back into jungle grass with green solution.
This is not new — this is exactly how it worked since 1.2. And about "no way to stop it" part: i'm a big advocate of conservative approach. And by "conservative" i mean bombing entire thing until it doesn't touch the Jungle. Preferably done right before entering Hardmode, especially on Master difficulty.

Edit: however, judging by what i have read in various places, new worldgen might have messed it up enough to make effects of Corruption/Crimson spread in Jungle more pronounced. If it's true, i'm all for it if you ask me. But spread mechanic probably should be altered somehow to make adjustments for difficulty levels.
 
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Why do so many of the features in this update that punishing the player severely for not "playing the game properly" is a good way to motivate them?

Especially in a sandbox game?
I've been trying to hold my tongue on this one, but it seems others have noticed it too.

I think that maybe, maybe, someone on the dev team decided that the game should be progressed in a specific way and all others routes should no longer yield worthwhile rewards. Ex; Reaver Shark, Meteorites, Torch Un/Luck, Happiness, Fishing.

Previously, with the Reaver Shark being available instantly, I often didn't even use it because I actually like Pre-Hardmode progression. It's my favorite part of the game. But to take away something like that? It just doesn't make sense. People should be able to skip if they want to. It's a nine-year-old game and none of the important new additions, save for maybe the Void Vault, are Pre-Hardmode.

Meteorites only really gave you access to the Space Gun and a set of armor roughly equal to Gold Tier in defense. It being moved forward makes it much less useful (Phaseblades are a novelty) and much more likely to be outclassed before it's even available. Plus banning the use of explosives? That's just petty. Those things are a chore to mine and clean up.

Torch Unluck was fixed, but the idea of using the "correct light source" just baffles me. Why would should that remotely matter? Why not move this mechanic to Campfires or some other decoration?

Happiness: For the most part, I don't mind this system. The Pylons are a neat addition and the smattering of new dialogue with NPCs is a cool way to get to know them. It makes you feel like they're different people. However, the penalties should be outright gutted. You shouldn't be forced (don't even pretend that the massive price inflation is "optional") to build a bunch of separate housing in specific biomes, with specific NPCs just to not be paying a massive mark-up. Plus some combinations are doomed from the start (Mechanic and Goblin, sadly.)

Fishing... ugh. I've never liked it, but it has it's uses. Mainly, for me, to collect alternate ores/bars or rare accessories. It was already a nuisance to increase your fishing power, but to make it less useful is pointless. You're just making the people who want to use it for progression take more time doing so, the end result is still the same.

I'm not posting all of this as if Leinfors has the ability (or maybe even intent) to address these issues, but I see no better place to put it.

I over-all enjoy the new update and am thankful that you're responding here Leinfors. I just can't wrap my head around why people were pushed into someone else's idea of progression.
 
I think it would be cool if the Jungle mimic was finally implemented, along with some other biome mimics. Especially if they dropped something with fetid baidie9ejfoefio/Daedalus stormbow levels of power
 
I think it would be cool if the Jungle mimic was finally implemented, along with some other biome mimics. Especially if they dropped something with fetid baidie9ejfoefio/Daedalus stormbow levels of power
what is a "baidie9ejfoefio", exactly?
 
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