Journey's End 1.4.4: Balance Feedback and Discussion Thread

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...Moving back to raw stats on equipment, haha....

I started this message to say that I thought that the Desert Tiger Staff felt a little underpowered for being a post-Plantera weapon, but after taking an afternoon to work my way to Plantera with a Journey Mode character to do some testing, I think the actual problem is that the Sanguine Staff that I was comparing it to is overpowered. The tiger is comparable to the pygmies and deadly spheres (though it can have some problems hitting faster flying enemies due to its small size), but the bats are still better. The next jump up from both weapons is the Raven Staff, which is a huge leap, despite being unlocked after having a run around the Dungeon, where the tiger is located -- at the moment, I don't see any reason to use any of the five staffs (Pirate, Optic, Pygmy, Tiger, or Sphere) between the bats and ravens -- they exist only as consolation prizes if you can't get a Blood Moon. The differences in how they play (mobs vs single target, flying vs grounded) aren't different enough to be a matter of preference, I think.
 
It's not balance really but .... Dead Man's Chest for all chest types when? As someone who didn't play much the last couple of patches, I thought Trapped Chests functioned like Dead Man's Chests until I actually tried to use one. Trapped Chests are dummy chests, but DMCs are still real chests but can have wiring attached. To only have that for gold chests feels a bit weird. Also it would be nice if they were compatible with Block Swap on regular chests. (I assume people tell players to disable Block Swap on adventure maps now so...)
 
...Moving back to raw stats on equipment, haha....

I started this message to say that I thought that the Desert Tiger Staff felt a little underpowered for being a post-Plantera weapon, but after taking an afternoon to work my way to Plantera with a Journey Mode character to do some testing, I think the actual problem is that the Sanguine Staff that I was comparing it to is overpowered. The tiger is comparable to the pygmies and deadly spheres (though it can have some problems hitting faster flying enemies due to its small size), but the bats are still better. The next jump up from both weapons is the Raven Staff, which is a huge leap, despite being unlocked after having a run around the Dungeon, where the tiger is located -- at the moment, I don't see any reason to use any of the five staffs (Pirate, Optic, Pygmy, Tiger, or Sphere) between the bats and ravens -- they exist only as consolation prizes if you can't get a Blood Moon. The differences in how they play (mobs vs single target, flying vs grounded) aren't different enough to be a matter of preference, I think.
I agree, but I think the reason it’s better is because of the a.i.

The bats never miss, and they don’t have to catch up. All of the staffs have glitchy targeting and sometimes will not attack at all until they catch up to you, which hinders their usefulness. If the summon minion a.i. was fixed for the other weapons, it would be more worth it to use them. (Although I agree stats wise sanguine is a bit powerful. Daggers are really strong too but you need proper setup to make them strong)
 
I agree, but I think the reason it’s better is because of the a.i.
AI changes to some of the summons have been a little... painful. They get stuck on blocks now so much.

For reference, I tested eight of each summon on Golem, Twins, and Skeletron Prime in Master Mode. The flying stuff all mostly did okay with targeting the bosses (for the twins, I played with targeting twins individually and only the Pygmies had trouble hitting one and not the other), the tiger's big problem was that if I was near the ground, it would sometimes pounce, miss, and then have to land before going back to try to hit again. As long as it hit it just sort of bounced around doing damage which was just fine. It has problems with crowds as well, but I expect that from a single summon -- I don't need it to be the best, I just want it to be a worthwhile option.

I think it actually has one of the better AIs (in fact, I'm gonna try it out as my main summon for exploring in caves and stuff for a while, I think it might do well there), it just needs a bit of a damage buff. Ravens, though... oh my god. I usually use 2-3 of them to take out mobs while I build and now they just get stuck in buildings and stuff constantly. It's miserable.
 
I previously made another comment where I said that Bomb Fish are pointless due to bombs and gel being so easy to get. Well, to add to this, you can get free bombs from bomb statues, which autostack so you can do whatever and come back an hour later and have a full stack; and you can get free gel from slime statues, and now with the 1/4 second timer it is absurdly fast.
If Bomb Fish are to compete with free, they need a good buff.

Apart from that: Fossil Armor is weak and incredibly difficult to get. The incredibly low defense combined with the incredibly modest bonus makes it a no-go.

Swinging a flail in a circle is really fun, but it has disappointing damage AND knockback.

Also, it is out of the scope of this thread, but biome infection is done really badly. Losing the jungle and mushroom biome is awful, and to prevent it some you need to spend lots of time digging. It also ruins the biomes of npc houses, and it made one pylon useless by infecting the whole area with crimson. Luckily TEdit has a beta for 1.4, else I would have simply abandoned my world.
 
I previously made another comment where I said that Bomb Fish are pointless due to bombs and gel being so easy to get. Well, to add to this, you can get free bombs from bomb statues, which autostack so you can do whatever and come back an hour later and have a full stack; and you can get free gel from slime statues, and now with the 1/4 second timer it is absurdly fast.
If Bomb Fish are to compete with free, they need a good buff.
<snip>
There's a simple, obvious fix there: Give bomb fish the power of sticky dynamite. I might actually bother to fish them up if they did that.
 
Also, it is out of the scope of this thread, but biome infection is done really badly. Losing the jungle and mushroom biome is awful, and to prevent it some you need to spend lots of time digging. It also ruins the biomes of npc houses, and it made one pylon useless by infecting the whole area with crimson. Luckily TEdit has a beta for 1.4, else I would have simply abandoned my world.

This was honestly my first concern when I saw the pylons/NPC happiness system. With how you have to spread out your NPC homes now, corruption/crimson spread becomes a huge concern and you'll have to build barriers around every single "town" just to keep them safe. Especially activating Hardmode is pretty much bound to wreck one or more of your towns with the V.
I also don't like that the Corruption/Crimson can still spawn in the middle of the Jungle, but the Desert, where it wouldn't matter whether it gets corrupted, has protection from the evil biomes spawning in it in world generation. Hell, you might even want the Desert corrupted because there's exclusive enemies in the corrupt variant.
Hell, even the area around the Dungeon seems to be protected, since there were no worlds among a few dozen I made that had an evil biome spawn near it, even though that would literally be my most preferred spot for an evil biome.
I can't even count how many worlds I had to generate just for there to not be a Corruption/Crimson right in my Jungle from the start. Considering my very slow playstyle, I don't even bother with such worlds since half my Jungle will be converted by the time I get to Plantera. Just delete and try again... and again... and again.
I wonder if these very restrictions to the spawns of evil biomes are what causes them to spawn right in or right next to the Jungle so often. They just wouldn't fit into the world any more otherwise.
 
This was honestly my first concern when I saw the pylons/NPC happiness system. With how you have to spread out your NPC homes now, corruption/crimson spread becomes a huge concern and you'll have to build barriers around every single "town" just to keep them safe. Especially activating Hardmode is pretty much bound to wreck one or more of your towns with the V.
I also don't like that the Corruption/Crimson can still spawn in the middle of the Jungle, but the Desert, where it wouldn't matter whether it gets corrupted, has protection from the evil biomes spawning in it in world generation. Hell, you might even want the Desert corrupted because there's exclusive enemies in the corrupt variant.
Hell, even the area around the Dungeon seems to be protected, since there were no worlds among a few dozen I made that had an evil biome spawn near it, even though that would literally be my most preferred spot for an evil biome.
I can't even count how many worlds I had to generate just for there to not be a Corruption/Crimson right in my Jungle from the start. Considering my very slow playstyle, I don't even bother with such worlds since half my Jungle will be converted by the time I get to Plantera. Just delete and try again... and again... and again.
I wonder if these very restrictions to the spawns of evil biomes are what causes them to spawn right in or right next to the Jungle so often. They just wouldn't fit into the world any more otherwise.
I corrupt my desert as a matter of course. Very little downside - you don't lose any drops, gain some valuable ones, and get easy access to underground evil in the open areas of the underground desert biome.
 
Hey, I've started a new world recently on journey mode and I've been trying to go for a completionist route, get every single item in the game and meet their respective duplication thresholds. This has brought to light quite a bit of issues I have with said thresholds, and especially some item's rarities or availability. So instead of raw item stats I'd like to start a discussion over that, since some items are just unreasonably grindy.

Sure, some of these might be a bit overpowered for the average player's eyes, but journey mode was sold as an accessibility pick, so I feel lowering the bar for some of them might make the game more fun for the people that need it (as well as compulsive hoarders like me). This first post will be focused on normal mode since I haven't progressed too far into hardmode quite yet, mainly due to the grind and also because I suck, but if this reaches some success I'll come back and share my findings on hardmode.

>Sandstorm in a bottle/Pharaoh vanity set/Magic Carpet
While you only need one of each they are EXCLUSIVELY spawned inside pyramids, and are not available through oasis crates. That has resulted in me having to create 5 other worlds just to get both the set and the bottle, and *I still didn't get the magic carpet*. That's really restricting in my personal opinion.
Suggested fix: Including them in the oasis crate pool

>Biome crates
So from my experience fishing with crate potions, fishing potions, the fiberglass rod and golden worms as bait - I've found that these are stupidly rare. Maybe it's just my particular setup but they felt just as rare as golden crates. Now, golden crates requiring 10 of them to duplicate is fine, seeing they are available everywhere, but to have to fish 20 of each biome crate to unlock all of them for duping (Due to having both pre- and hardmode variants) is just an unreasonable time sink. For comparison, by the time I ended the oasis crate grind I had around 134 regular crates, 70-ish iron crates and 9 golden crates.
Suggested fix: Either make them more common or lower the threshold to around 3 for duping

>Jungle Grass Seeds
While breaking jungle grass isn't particularly difficult, not only does it have a crazy low drop rate but you're also having to walk around in the jungle for extended periods of time. This was the only grass type that really proved to be an issue, even mushroom seeds were significantly easier to obtain due to the layout of them as well as the chance to get them from mushroom trees. It *might* be because I'm doing this on a drunk world, meaning I have a very small jungle, but it's still worth noting.
Suggested fix: I feel only requiring 10 or even 5 would be far more reasonable than 25

>Cascade
While this one isn't grindy or unreasonably difficult to obtain, it's just that I believe you cannot get it at all if you enter hardmode? I might be wrong on this one, but still, I don't feel you should be able to just miss out on a weapon like that.
Suggested fix: Adding them to the hardmode obsidian crate pool, or even the shadow locked chest things you can get from the crates pre-hardmode

>Living Loom, Finch Staff, other living tree loot unavailabe elsewhere.
After actually getting a world without even a single living tree in a previous playthrough it really makes you realize just how many items are just flat-out unobtainable unless you luck out with worldgen. All of them can't just be shoved into fishing crates, but I wouldn't mind seeing certain NPCs selling them or some becoming mob drops (Witch Doctor and Dryad could easily be selling a living loom for example, and the finch staff could be a rare drop from bird critters)

>Terragrim
Terragrim
Suggested fix: Maybe a Journey-Exclusive crafting recipe? Likely available post-skeletron/early HM?

>Skeletron and Wall of Flesh treasure bags
Not too bad considering skeletron only requires you to wait 3 in-game days and the WoF can be done on another world to avoid completely blighting your world, they are still worth mentioning just in case changes to journey mode aren't particularly focused on balance or have a low grind tolerance.
Suggested fix: Only requiring one of each isn't necessary, but appreciated

I do have a very relaxed playstyle so those were the only one I *personally* found worth mentioning.
 
While this one isn't grindy or unreasonably difficult to obtain, it's just that I believe you cannot get it at all if you enter hardmode? I might be wrong on this one, but still, I don't feel you should be able to just miss out on a weapon like that.
Suggested fix: Adding them to the hardmode obsidian crate pool, or even the shadow locked chest things you can get from the crates pre-hardmode
Or have the Hel-Fire fulfil the Cascade's duplication requirements (as it's basically the same weapon, but upgraded for Hardmode).
 
So, I thought of a way to make the hornet staff a bit more viable. This would probably be a bit of a controversial change, but here's what I think could work.

What if the Hornet Staff was moved to before Queen Bee?
I believe the problem with it now is that by the time you kill queen bee, you already probably have the imps. Perhaps moving the staff to bee available before Queen Bee would make it more viable? If its pre-boss, it would give you a better option for the early bosses too. The crafting recipe could have something to do with hive and stingers or something. If the problem then arises that Queen Bee doesn't have any summoner weapons (although I think the armor is fitting enough) a new summoner weapon could be added in the form of a bee whip as a queen bee drop, that could release bees on impact or something. There are only 2 prehardmode whips so maybe this could help with that too.
This could be done by making Bee Wax drop from jungle Beehives when they are destroyed.
 
I think Pylons should still be active during the Lunar Invasion event due to how the event works relative to the other invasions

You spend the whole game setting up infrastructure that lets you get around the world easier, and the one event that requires you to go pretty far out in your world will deny you access to this infrastructure for it's entire duration.

Just doesn't sit well with me personally
 
I was wondering if you guys could Buff adamantite armor because I think it's unfair that we get a lower tier of armor and we can't do anything to change cause it's random. Titanium armor is way stronger than Adamantite. It's just my opinion but if someone says otherwise I won't hold you to it
 
I was wondering if you guys could Buff adamantite armor because I think it's unfair that we get a lower tier of armor and we can't do anything to change cause it's random. Titanium armor is way stronger than Adamantite. It's just my opinion but if someone says otherwise I won't hold you to it
Titanium is better but I wouldn's say it's 'Way stronger', the overpwered setbonus has been moved to hallowed armor and replaced by a medicore one. The raw stats of adamatite vs. titanium is extremely similar.
 
(all only tested in master rmode)

Zenith OP
Zenith is way to strong. If you got this weapon you will be able finish each boss and the max level of each event with ease independent of you other gear/class. Other weapons get stored to chest. They have no usage anymore. No more challenge left open. You can play the next game. Before this you need at least some tinkering about good item combination and/or arena to beat lvl 15/20 of the moon events.
Feels like one of those overpowered weapons added a mod.

The Black Spot/Flying Dutchman Mount too good
At the time you can get it it's already stronger than most mounts you get later on. It has the max mount speed, it can fly and also deals damage. Big size and small acceleration does not compensate it in my opinion. It makes (mini)-boss fights much easier. Furthermore it is not very hard to get (if you know about it).

2nd Phase of Martian Saucer too strong/fast
If you dont have any flying mount or fast wings (e.g. bc you dont know about those -> flying dutchman) those are hard to kill because they move too fast. There are strategies without fast flight but those are tedious or need special other gear or some preparation in general which you might not have at this time of first occurrence. (but preparations possible for next master playthrough)

Master mode difficulty ratio of bosses and normal enemies too small
In my option bosses are too weak compared to normal enemies or some event/mini-bosses in master mode. Especially Wall of Flesh and hardmode bosses Plantera, Golem, Duke Fishron, Lunatic Cultist, Moon Lord need to get stronger in my opinion (or/and normal enemies weaker).
Fishron felt much weaker than at expert in 1.3.5.3.
The event enemy martian saucer killed me more often than all bosses combined (bc I had no flight mount). Not that often but still more than bosses I got killed by the Goblin Summoner (got the event at start of hardmode). Least percent damage to enemy and character death at first occurrence: Blood Eel.
This was experience of first playthrough in master mode without wiki (or watching other playing). Preparations might help in future playthroughs.
 
The Black Spot/Flying Dutchman Mount too good
At the time you can get it it's already stronger than most mounts you get later on.
Instead of nerfing the Black Spot (which would suck), they should just buff the UFO mount to make it faster, more maneuverable, and most importantly, allow it to go in water (why on earth it can't already is a mystery). On the maneuverability front, it should be able to more instantly change direction without losing speed, like UFOs are famous for, but if that's too much for a simple balance change then just a speed buff would suffice.
 
I found it hard to dodge Duke Fishron in Master Mode with the Black Spot, but the UFO Car Key was more nimble. I'm not sure that the Black Spot is better than the UFO, I think it just has its own useful niche.
 
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