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Terrarian
Do you like Terraria's modifier system? I know that I do not - it's a bland, underwhelming part of the game, an artifact from 2011 that we've all just come to accept as part of the game. But it doesn't have to be that way. Weapons modifiers could be made to actually feel impactful and meaningful - players could specialize in different modifiers, affecting their gameplay in a noticeable way. Quick and Arcane could actually be made good instead of being awful. You wouldn't have to sit in front of the goblin spamming the hammer for days on end.
Weapon modifiers:
At its core, the weapon modifier system is not fun. Nothing feels worse than gathering the resources for a weapon early game, only for it to be broken. Or spawning in with a sluggish pickaxe, crawling your earlygame progression to a halt. There is invariably an objectively best reforge, and the game progresses in such a way that the player just stands in front of the goblin tinkerer spamming the reforge button until they get the best one (or something close enough). The rest of the reforges are just filler, either providing some minor flavor or being actively detrimental. A Massive reforge, for instance, is awful - 18% size pales in comparison to the 15% damage and 5% crit of demonic, let alone legendary, which has a 10% speed and size bonus on top of that. There is never a point where it makes sense to go for anything less than Legendary, Unreal, or Mythical, unless the weapon cannot obtain those modifiers, in which case it shifts to Godly or Demonic. The improved ability to farm money and decreased reforge costs only incentivize that further.
There are 64 reforges in the game. 20 of them are objectively bad - downgrades from an unreforged weapon. There is never an advantage to taking a weak, broken, or unhappy weapon - at best, it's applied to a tool that causes it to have no effect, at worst you get stuck with one and it makes your weapon feel worse. They also bloat the reforge list and make the "standing in front of goblin" process much longer than it needs to be. I don't really see any reason they should be in the game, certainly not to the point that almost 1/3 of all weapon reforges make your weapon worse. Broken is a meme, but can anyone honestly say they the inclusion of Tiny, Terrible, Small, Dull, Unhappy, Shameful, Shoddy, and the rest actually make the game better? Much like random corruption spread from breaking altars, it feels to me more like an antiquated game mechanic that's just been grandfathered in, despite making the game less enjoyable. Corruption spread from altars, however, was removed.
Of the remaining 44 reforges, they fall into 3 categories.
Fixing Weapon Modifiers:
I think the overall system of balancing modifiers should be reworked from the ground up. Because, in truth, there is no balance. There are simply the good modifiers and the ones that are worse. Modifiers should have a noticeable impact on your weapon, to the point that a weapon with two different modifiers would feel noticeably different. To that end, I propose the following three design guidelines:
Massive- Increase to +50% size. Its current iteration, +18% size, is pointless. A 50% size increase, while comical with certain weapons, would actually be desirable - a player could feasibly make a large weapon build and would seek out the reforge to use certain weapons. They are choosing not to take a reforge that boosts damage, and it should be potent enough to justify that decision.
Savage- +15% damage, +15% speed, -15% crit. This is the first of several "critless" modifiers, which penalize crit chance in exchange for damage or speed. Savage would be quite powerful if a player dumped crit chance - not using crit boost gear, rage potions, etc. As long as a player is at a low crit chance, it is a better reforge than others. However, if they have a boosted crit chance, it averages out to a similar strength as other modifiers, perhaps even slightly weaker. It introduces an entirely new build - low crit%.
Bulky- +25% damage, -15% speed, +3% crit, +20% size, +10% knockback. This is our first "negative" reforge, and is offering a host of powerful bonuses to offset that. A bulky weapon is slow, but hits hard. It's great for high damage single-hit weapons like the Breaker Blade, which focus on one-shotting normal enemies.
Heavy- -10% speed, +75% knockback. Let's be honest, knockback bonuses are the worst modifiable attribute. Taking a penalty to your attack speed for a knockback bonus is just bad - especially when other modifiers offer the same bonus. A +75% knockback boost is excessive, and it should be, because a player is choosing to penalize their DPS to get it. It would be a great choice for crowd controlling normal enemies, but be a downgrade against bosses.
Sighted- +5% damage, +12% crit. This is a modifier with no downside - it's all-around good. It's primarily crit-focused.
Staunch- +35% damage, -15% crit. Another "critless" modifier, it embodies the concept of staunch, which is reliability. Because weapon reforges don't affect ammo, the damage bonus is slightly higher than a crit or speed bonus would be.
Frenzying- -15% damage, +30% speed. What does a frenzy feel like? Speed, recklessness, everything flying past quickly. This reforge accomplishes that. A better one would be having some sort of "accuracy" stat, where Frenzying overall improves damage but requires the player to be closer/less accurate for it to work, but that would require something more than simple percentage modifications.
Powerful- +25% damage, -15% speed, +5% crit. Much like Bulky, you're trading speed for damage, and a significant amount of it. Your weapon will feel powerful when using this reforge.
Adept- -30% mana cost. For a solely mana-cost reducing reforge, the payoff should be considerable.
Deranged- -10% damage, +25% crit chance. The modifier is wayward, deranged even, the only mage-specific modifier to provide a crit boost.
Furious- +30% damage, +30-50% mana cost, +30% knockback. Furious is tricky and I'm not going to pretend to have the balance for it correct, but it's conceptually more mana cost = more damage. The problem is, vanilla furious provides the same damage bonus as modifiers that decrease mana cost. A Furious magic weapon should deal the highest DPS of any modifer, but be much less sustainable due to increased mana costs. Mana sickness, time spent regenerating mana, or damage with magic cuffs will balance the modifier.
Zealous- +18% crit chance. A pure crit buff with no complications.
Ruthless- +25% damage, -7% crit chance, -20% knockback. Ruthless alone is pretty underwhelming - this kicks it up a notch, making it the generic "critless" modifier.
I'm not going to list every single modifier, because part of the issue is that there are simply too many. 64 modifiers is an excessive number, and a good number of them will be bloat/inferior to others. That leaves the choice to either remove bloat or accept their existence and work around them. Right now, there are even two modifiers that are actually identical - Forceful and Strong both apply +15% knockback.
The elephant in the room is the existence of Legendary, Mythical, and Unreal, which at their core are simply better. The existence of a strictly superior modifier conceptually invalidates the others. There are, in my view, 3 options:
1- Make them much rarer. Perhaps they are weighted to be far less common when reforging, ten times rarer, to the point where it is just not plausible to reforge until you get one. When they do show up, it's an incredibly rare and noteworthy event - they may even be buffed a tiny bit to make them feel impactful and cool. A legendary sword isn't a dime-a-dozen reforge, it's a once-every-few-playthroughs powerhouse. However, this runs the risk of players stubbornly insisting on reforging for it anyways.
2- Remove them. I recognize that this is likely undesirable, as Legendary is entrenched within Terraria, to the point where merchandise like the Legendary Terrarian Yo-Yo are sold.
3- Keep them obtainable through the normal system, but power them down to be in line with the other reforges (15-20% net bonuses). This is the boring solution, but would solve the problem.
These changes would significantly alter the decisions around reforging (and likely cause a small increase to overall weapon power, particularly pre-goblins). This is a good thing. The meta has completely stagnated for well over a decade, and the game could use something like this to revitalize it. Furthermore, it would allow players to specialize in different builds - mages could go for increased mana cost for a damage bonus, decreased mana cost to stop relying on potions, or greatly increased fire rate (Manic is mage's version of Frenzying). A melee player could get increased weapon size and actually have that be good. You could go for a critless build, or well-rounded modifiers that don't penalize anything. It would feel meaningful to choose your reforge, and rewarding to build around it.
And almost nothing would be lost for doing this, nor is it difficult to implement - everything I've proposed can be done by simply editing existing values for modifiers.
Quick and Arcane:
I'll cut to the chase - Quick and Arcane are bad. Just, flat-out bad. It almost never makes sense to use them. Violent is complicated, but can be worthwhile, Warding is very powerful, Menacing and Lucky are decent, Quick and Arcane are none of those things. Having a full suite of Quick accessories gives you the effect of... a swiftness potion. For comparison, it would take 2 warding to reach an Ironskin potion and 2 and a half Menacing/Lucky for a Wrath/Rage potion, and those potions are also better than swiftness potions. Quick does not boost wing mobility or running speed, either. There are far easier to obtain speed buffs.
Having a full suite of Arcane accessories gives +100-140 max mana, which is pretty underwhelming when most mages are drinking potions to recover mana. Its best impact is improving mana regeneration rate, but that's such a niche effect that it just doesn't make sense to get over damage or defense.
Fixing Quick and Arcane:
Arcane is already the odd one out of accessory reforges, since it doesn't follow the 1-4% rule. Why not change it to 4% reduced mana cost instead? That would accomplish a similar goal - reduce mage reliance on mana recovery - while being much more desirable. Combined with a reworked Adept modifier, a mage could feasibly have very little downtime to their attacks to recover mana.
And as far as Quick, make it work like a magiluminescence or Shadow armor. Allow it to increase the running speed of boots. On that note, Magi and Shadow armor actually work differently, where Shadow armor buffs wing speed but Magi doesn't, because Magi only applies when vertical velocity is zero. I suggest Quick working like shadow armor in that respect. That would be a powerful mobility boost - and that is a good thing. Quick should be desirable - each reforge should be.
The Summoner Problem:
1.2 added some fantastic things, and summon damage is one of them. Over time, it's been fleshed out to a fully-fledged class, with one core exception: Modifiers. Summoner has no modifiers of its own, despite being over a decade old. It steals mage and melee modifiers, but doesn't even benefit from most of their stats. It uses Ruthless because it's 3% better than Mythical and speed, mana cost, and crit chance do essentially nothing. The proposed reworks from earlier, also, would be unbalanced for Summoner - Ruthless becoming a "critless" modifier has no downside to a summoner.
The issue is that Summoner struggles to have reasonably modifiable attributes. And I have no particularly good ideas here, but these are some concepts of potential Summoner modifiable attributes that I don't think would be overly challenging to implement:
So, there you have it. A re-evaluation of how modifiers work and a focus on making them actually good, rather than filler to force small amounts of variety. Depth, diversity, and desirability are the name of the game. The exact numbers I gave here are not what's important - I'm sure some are unbalanced. I talk about this more in this video,
and also showcase what some of those modifier changes look like. And, based on the reception to that video, it's a VERY popular request. This suggestion was intentionally kept easy to implement (with the exception of summoner) - it's genuinely as simple as just editing percentage values for modifiers. One of my moderators made me a modified client that did this in 10 minutes. If ever there were a change I wanted to see in the game, this would be it.
Weapon modifiers:
At its core, the weapon modifier system is not fun. Nothing feels worse than gathering the resources for a weapon early game, only for it to be broken. Or spawning in with a sluggish pickaxe, crawling your earlygame progression to a halt. There is invariably an objectively best reforge, and the game progresses in such a way that the player just stands in front of the goblin tinkerer spamming the reforge button until they get the best one (or something close enough). The rest of the reforges are just filler, either providing some minor flavor or being actively detrimental. A Massive reforge, for instance, is awful - 18% size pales in comparison to the 15% damage and 5% crit of demonic, let alone legendary, which has a 10% speed and size bonus on top of that. There is never a point where it makes sense to go for anything less than Legendary, Unreal, or Mythical, unless the weapon cannot obtain those modifiers, in which case it shifts to Godly or Demonic. The improved ability to farm money and decreased reforge costs only incentivize that further.
There are 64 reforges in the game. 20 of them are objectively bad - downgrades from an unreforged weapon. There is never an advantage to taking a weak, broken, or unhappy weapon - at best, it's applied to a tool that causes it to have no effect, at worst you get stuck with one and it makes your weapon feel worse. They also bloat the reforge list and make the "standing in front of goblin" process much longer than it needs to be. I don't really see any reason they should be in the game, certainly not to the point that almost 1/3 of all weapon reforges make your weapon worse. Broken is a meme, but can anyone honestly say they the inclusion of Tiny, Terrible, Small, Dull, Unhappy, Shameful, Shoddy, and the rest actually make the game better? Much like random corruption spread from breaking altars, it feels to me more like an antiquated game mechanic that's just been grandfathered in, despite making the game less enjoyable. Corruption spread from altars, however, was removed.
Of the remaining 44 reforges, they fall into 3 categories.
- The objectively best one. There are 6 - Legendary, Mythical, Unreal, Ruthless, Godly, and Demonic, depending on the weapon. In every situation, these modifiers are ALWAYS better than the others.
- The mediocre ones. Depending on your money situation, you might stop at one of these. They're alright. The 12 are Superior, Deadly, Agile, Murderous, Nasty, Sharp, Light, Sighted, Rapid, Mystic, Masterful, and Furious. You don't want one of these, but you'd be content to settle for it, especially for a weapon you aren't using much.
- The ones that do pretty much nothing. They give less than a 10% bonus, or give a bonus for an equivalent downside, like Frenzying (+15% speed/-15% damage). There are 25 of them - the largest category of modifiers.
Fixing Weapon Modifiers:
I think the overall system of balancing modifiers should be reworked from the ground up. Because, in truth, there is no balance. There are simply the good modifiers and the ones that are worse. Modifiers should have a noticeable impact on your weapon, to the point that a weapon with two different modifiers would feel noticeably different. To that end, I propose the following three design guidelines:
- All weapons should offer a net bonus of 15-20% in "DPS" stats (damage, crit, and speed). Small exceptions will be made, but this is what Godly/Demonic offer, and is 10% less than Legendary/Unreal/Mythical.
- Weapons should be able to go well over a 15% increase to a given stat, if that stat is worth "less" (size/knockback) or if an appropriate downside is given
- All reforges should be good. They may not be desirable for every build, but each should offer something unique/desirable and be competent at that thing.
Massive- Increase to +50% size. Its current iteration, +18% size, is pointless. A 50% size increase, while comical with certain weapons, would actually be desirable - a player could feasibly make a large weapon build and would seek out the reforge to use certain weapons. They are choosing not to take a reforge that boosts damage, and it should be potent enough to justify that decision.
Savage- +15% damage, +15% speed, -15% crit. This is the first of several "critless" modifiers, which penalize crit chance in exchange for damage or speed. Savage would be quite powerful if a player dumped crit chance - not using crit boost gear, rage potions, etc. As long as a player is at a low crit chance, it is a better reforge than others. However, if they have a boosted crit chance, it averages out to a similar strength as other modifiers, perhaps even slightly weaker. It introduces an entirely new build - low crit%.
Bulky- +25% damage, -15% speed, +3% crit, +20% size, +10% knockback. This is our first "negative" reforge, and is offering a host of powerful bonuses to offset that. A bulky weapon is slow, but hits hard. It's great for high damage single-hit weapons like the Breaker Blade, which focus on one-shotting normal enemies.
Heavy- -10% speed, +75% knockback. Let's be honest, knockback bonuses are the worst modifiable attribute. Taking a penalty to your attack speed for a knockback bonus is just bad - especially when other modifiers offer the same bonus. A +75% knockback boost is excessive, and it should be, because a player is choosing to penalize their DPS to get it. It would be a great choice for crowd controlling normal enemies, but be a downgrade against bosses.
Sighted- +5% damage, +12% crit. This is a modifier with no downside - it's all-around good. It's primarily crit-focused.
Staunch- +35% damage, -15% crit. Another "critless" modifier, it embodies the concept of staunch, which is reliability. Because weapon reforges don't affect ammo, the damage bonus is slightly higher than a crit or speed bonus would be.
Frenzying- -15% damage, +30% speed. What does a frenzy feel like? Speed, recklessness, everything flying past quickly. This reforge accomplishes that. A better one would be having some sort of "accuracy" stat, where Frenzying overall improves damage but requires the player to be closer/less accurate for it to work, but that would require something more than simple percentage modifications.
Powerful- +25% damage, -15% speed, +5% crit. Much like Bulky, you're trading speed for damage, and a significant amount of it. Your weapon will feel powerful when using this reforge.
Adept- -30% mana cost. For a solely mana-cost reducing reforge, the payoff should be considerable.
Deranged- -10% damage, +25% crit chance. The modifier is wayward, deranged even, the only mage-specific modifier to provide a crit boost.
Furious- +30% damage, +30-50% mana cost, +30% knockback. Furious is tricky and I'm not going to pretend to have the balance for it correct, but it's conceptually more mana cost = more damage. The problem is, vanilla furious provides the same damage bonus as modifiers that decrease mana cost. A Furious magic weapon should deal the highest DPS of any modifer, but be much less sustainable due to increased mana costs. Mana sickness, time spent regenerating mana, or damage with magic cuffs will balance the modifier.
Zealous- +18% crit chance. A pure crit buff with no complications.
Ruthless- +25% damage, -7% crit chance, -20% knockback. Ruthless alone is pretty underwhelming - this kicks it up a notch, making it the generic "critless" modifier.
I'm not going to list every single modifier, because part of the issue is that there are simply too many. 64 modifiers is an excessive number, and a good number of them will be bloat/inferior to others. That leaves the choice to either remove bloat or accept their existence and work around them. Right now, there are even two modifiers that are actually identical - Forceful and Strong both apply +15% knockback.
The elephant in the room is the existence of Legendary, Mythical, and Unreal, which at their core are simply better. The existence of a strictly superior modifier conceptually invalidates the others. There are, in my view, 3 options:
1- Make them much rarer. Perhaps they are weighted to be far less common when reforging, ten times rarer, to the point where it is just not plausible to reforge until you get one. When they do show up, it's an incredibly rare and noteworthy event - they may even be buffed a tiny bit to make them feel impactful and cool. A legendary sword isn't a dime-a-dozen reforge, it's a once-every-few-playthroughs powerhouse. However, this runs the risk of players stubbornly insisting on reforging for it anyways.
2- Remove them. I recognize that this is likely undesirable, as Legendary is entrenched within Terraria, to the point where merchandise like the Legendary Terrarian Yo-Yo are sold.
3- Keep them obtainable through the normal system, but power them down to be in line with the other reforges (15-20% net bonuses). This is the boring solution, but would solve the problem.
These changes would significantly alter the decisions around reforging (and likely cause a small increase to overall weapon power, particularly pre-goblins). This is a good thing. The meta has completely stagnated for well over a decade, and the game could use something like this to revitalize it. Furthermore, it would allow players to specialize in different builds - mages could go for increased mana cost for a damage bonus, decreased mana cost to stop relying on potions, or greatly increased fire rate (Manic is mage's version of Frenzying). A melee player could get increased weapon size and actually have that be good. You could go for a critless build, or well-rounded modifiers that don't penalize anything. It would feel meaningful to choose your reforge, and rewarding to build around it.
And almost nothing would be lost for doing this, nor is it difficult to implement - everything I've proposed can be done by simply editing existing values for modifiers.
Quick and Arcane:
I'll cut to the chase - Quick and Arcane are bad. Just, flat-out bad. It almost never makes sense to use them. Violent is complicated, but can be worthwhile, Warding is very powerful, Menacing and Lucky are decent, Quick and Arcane are none of those things. Having a full suite of Quick accessories gives you the effect of... a swiftness potion. For comparison, it would take 2 warding to reach an Ironskin potion and 2 and a half Menacing/Lucky for a Wrath/Rage potion, and those potions are also better than swiftness potions. Quick does not boost wing mobility or running speed, either. There are far easier to obtain speed buffs.
Having a full suite of Arcane accessories gives +100-140 max mana, which is pretty underwhelming when most mages are drinking potions to recover mana. Its best impact is improving mana regeneration rate, but that's such a niche effect that it just doesn't make sense to get over damage or defense.
Fixing Quick and Arcane:
Arcane is already the odd one out of accessory reforges, since it doesn't follow the 1-4% rule. Why not change it to 4% reduced mana cost instead? That would accomplish a similar goal - reduce mage reliance on mana recovery - while being much more desirable. Combined with a reworked Adept modifier, a mage could feasibly have very little downtime to their attacks to recover mana.
And as far as Quick, make it work like a magiluminescence or Shadow armor. Allow it to increase the running speed of boots. On that note, Magi and Shadow armor actually work differently, where Shadow armor buffs wing speed but Magi doesn't, because Magi only applies when vertical velocity is zero. I suggest Quick working like shadow armor in that respect. That would be a powerful mobility boost - and that is a good thing. Quick should be desirable - each reforge should be.
The Summoner Problem:
1.2 added some fantastic things, and summon damage is one of them. Over time, it's been fleshed out to a fully-fledged class, with one core exception: Modifiers. Summoner has no modifiers of its own, despite being over a decade old. It steals mage and melee modifiers, but doesn't even benefit from most of their stats. It uses Ruthless because it's 3% better than Mythical and speed, mana cost, and crit chance do essentially nothing. The proposed reworks from earlier, also, would be unbalanced for Summoner - Ruthless becoming a "critless" modifier has no downside to a summoner.
The issue is that Summoner struggles to have reasonably modifiable attributes. And I have no particularly good ideas here, but these are some concepts of potential Summoner modifiable attributes that I don't think would be overly challenging to implement:
- Tag Damage- The clearest choice for whips. This would be a flat value. A whip could trade tag damage for speed or range - for summoners who don't enjoy whipstacking, a slower modifier with a heightened tag damage bonus could bridge the gap.
- Minion Crit- The framework for this exists in the form of the Morningstar, Kaleidoscope, and those two old one's army armors. Essentially, a bonus effect would be applied to the whip debuff, enabling minion critical hits.
- Size- Much like Melee, range is a key issue with summoner whips. A range improvement would be highly desirable - or, whipstacking-oriented summoners could go for reduced range but increased speed. Higer risk, higher reward.
- Minion count- Throwing it back to the old spider staff, the number of minion slots consumed by 1 summon could be adjusted. This is messy, but it is an option.
- Minion size- A much cooler variant, make minions bigger. Everybody likes big frogs.
- Minion speed- Improved attack rate for ranged minions and an improved ability for melee minions to track targets, essentially.
So, there you have it. A re-evaluation of how modifiers work and a focus on making them actually good, rather than filler to force small amounts of variety. Depth, diversity, and desirability are the name of the game. The exact numbers I gave here are not what's important - I'm sure some are unbalanced. I talk about this more in this video,
