Game Mechanics Suggestion to Smooth Progression Between Plantera and Moon Lord

Banana3pai

Banana3pai

Plantera
Hello, I know this new update is small and you guys won't add big changes like new bosses, or events, or big worldgen changes, things like that. But I have something really important to say, at least for me, and I don't know if it would be easy or hard to do.
I've seen that within the past months you've both noted and asked for input on many details, inconveniences the community has expressed the game has, and you've said the team would look into some balance aspects of the game (paladin's hammer my beloved), and it is here that one concern has been bugging me for a long time.

TL,DR:
  • The concern that post-golem weapons and armor become outdated too fast has been lingering for years in the community.
  • This problem arises from the fact that killing Golem triggers the Cultists to spawn, and they are too enticing to kill too, making the Moon Lord Rush inevitable for anyone who doesn't know the optional bosses.
  • I want the Cultist to take a bit longer to summon and for them to NOT spawn the pillars creating this Moon Lord rush, so that it gives the game more breathing room for forgotten optional events and bosses to be discovered and played as a decent challenge before Pillar weapons and Moon Lord armor trivialize them.
  • A way to achieve this could be by forcing the player to charge the Mysterious Tablet the cultists are bowing to by "sacrificing" enemies in the dungeon. This forces the player into exploring the dungeon which gives ectoplasm which can be used to summon the Moon events.
  • This prolongs the players' stay in the outskirts of the world, giving more chances of:
    • Feeling the need to suit up for the dungeon itself.
    • A Martian Probe spawning and detecting the player or the post-plantera version of the Solar Eclipse triggering.
    • Killing a lacewing by mistake.
    • Farming and using post-plantera weapons.
    • Wanting to get the biome keys.
  • Apart from all this, making the summon of the Lunatic Cultist a boss not tied to the "Pillar Rush" would give the dev team the perfect oportunity to give it its own drops, which I suggest that instead of more weapons which get outdated again they could be a set of accessories, one for each class. Or maybe vanity. Or his flying robes. Anything to make people want to fight him more than twice.
  • Now that they are separate, give the cultist another drop to summon the pillars.


Now the long explanation:

I've noticed that, after thousands of hours and playing with many friends, once Plantera is defeated we now end up rushing to face the Moon Lord; we don't give much thought to Golem, nor we stay in the post-Plantera dungeon much if at all (only if someone is playing a caster for the ectoplasm and not even always). We now leave the Pumpkin and Frost Moons for after Moon Lord, and instead we go right away to kill the Lunatic Cultist, get the best endgame weapons from the Pillars, and in the end the general sentiment is "let's kill the Moon Lord now that we are already here" which means we get the best armor and moon lord drops too. This means that most weapons and armor that were designed as endgame gear before 1.3 rolled out have such a small window of time where they are viable that they feel terrible to invest time and effort in obtaining.
All in all, I think the addition of the Lunatic Cultist, the Pillars and the Moon Lord, although very fun and I would say the perfect Finale for the game, undermine the excitement, progression and grind that was here post-Plantera before 1.3.

That's it, those are my concerns. I don't know if I have the solutions especially for a "small update" that is already in a testing stage... And you guys have decades of dev experience, so I feel like I'm overstepping here, but if I'm allowed to keep rambling just a bit more please bear with me:
  • First of all, the gameplay loop if you fail to kill the Moon Lord or Lunatic Cultist is both too straightforward in a way, and too long in another; if you die to them the only requirement to try again is waiting a day at no cost. This makes people, including me, more willing to rush this event. On the other hand, the loop takes time to complete, while the loop itself already includes a way of shortening it by using the Pillar fragments to make a sigil to summon the moon lord directly. I'm sure this was made on purpose, but please consider my words.
Instead I suggest the following:
  • Make it so the player needs to "charge up" the Mysterious Tablet with souls by killing monsters inside the dungeon as sacrifice, the same way the Pillars lose their shields (this also introduces this mechanic to the player before spawning a menacing pillar next to one of their NPC houses). It doesn't need to be a large quantity, but any amount would make any player think what they want to do. Only after the Tablet is charged do the cultists spawn, and you can then summon the Lunatic Cultist. This way you make players want to explore the dungeon before killing the Lunatic Cultist, it will make post-Plantera weapons much more satisfying to use, and it opens up the possibility of farming the Lunatic Cultist, which brings me to my next point.
  • The adrenaline rush you get when the Pillars spawn and you MUST kill them to free your world is fun, but I think the game would benefit from separating the spawn of the Pillars from the death of the Lunatic Cultist by making him drop an item that spawns them instead. This way you accomplish three things: the cultists can spawn again without the Pillars and Moon Lord in the way (and maybe finally give the Lunatic Cultist proper drops wink wink), with the ectoplasm from the previous point the players have another breathing window to maybe consider playing against the Pumpkin Moon and Frost Moon, and again it gives the player more time to enjoy what today are very short-lived weapons (and sometimes even armor too).
  • I'm not implying the removal or change of the Celestial Sigil, as it still serves a necessary function in directly summoning the Moon Lord.
I think this would solve most of the problems I see without even giving any other drops to the Lunatic Cultist but the pillar-spawning one. But now that we are at it... Once one kills Golem, there are very few extra accessories that weren't available before him (sun stone, eye of the golem, ninja drops and rifle scope). If the objective is to not make the previous weapons outdated instantly, the best drops the Lunatic Cultist could have apart from vanity and equipment are accessories. What accessories I have no idea, but this is the end of my very long rambling.

Thanks for being patient with me, and thanks for reading.

Terraria progression graph.png
 
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Literally everything would be fixed if golem and lunatic cultist were harder. Golem got “buffed” but he is still easier than plantera. If the player had actual struggles against golem and lunatic cultist, they would actually go for the effort to do the frost moon/martian madness. Pumpkin moon always has a place for summoners because of the accessories and armor, yet the other invasions around this time do not give anything good besides weapons or mounts, which are not worth it.
 
muovd🌳 said:
Literally everything would be fixed if golem and lunatic cultist were harder. Golem got “buffed” but he is still easier than plantera. If the player had actual struggles against golem and lunatic cultist, they would actually go for the effort to do the frost moon/martian madness. Pumpkin moon always has a place for summoners because of the accessories and armor, yet the other invasions around this time do not give anything good besides weapons or mounts, which are not worth it.
Click to expand...
No matter how many things the devs do to Golem, it won't matter. Most players either have his entire AI memorized and easily adapt to buffs,
think he's a joke and thus refuse to accept defeat, memorizing his AI within a half dozen attempts, or are generally good at Terraria but have no natural talent when it comes to Golem.
Buffing Golem again would only make this problem worse.
 
Green_Metaknight🐿️ said:
No matter how many things the devs do to Golem, it won't matter. Most players either have his entire AI memorized and easily adapt to buffs,
think he's a joke and thus refuse to accept defeat, memorizing his AI within a half dozen attempts, or are generally good at Terraria but have no natural talent when it comes to Golem.
Buffing Golem again would only make this problem worse.
Click to expand...
Specifically on ftw he was actually a good difficulty, to the point where i had to make obsidian skin potions to stop his on fire debuff (as summoner) and had to farm for rod of discord to fight him outside of the temple, even then he still took me a couple attempts, cultist is still a joke though idk how to fix him beyond way more hp and maybe a bit quicker
 
Green_Metaknight🐿️ said:
No matter how many things the devs do to Golem, it won't matter. Most players either have his entire AI memorized and easily adapt to buffs,
think he's a joke and thus refuse to accept defeat, memorizing his AI within a half dozen attempts, or are generally good at Terraria but have no natural talent when it comes to Golem.
Buffing Golem again would only make this problem worse.
Click to expand...
That is why a whole rework is needed, or an actual good buff that changes the gameplay like on ftw/zenith seed
 
muovd🌳 said:
Literally everything would be fixed if golem and lunatic cultist were harder. Golem got “buffed” but he is still easier than plantera. If the player had actual struggles against golem and lunatic cultist, they would actually go for the effort to do the frost moon/martian madness. Pumpkin moon always has a place for summoners because of the accessories and armor, yet the other invasions around this time do not give anything good besides weapons or mounts, which are not worth it.
Click to expand...
I don't see how making the Lunatic Cultist and Golem harder would solve this issue. Hey, I think them being "harder" without making them just deal more damage or have more HP would be a healthy improvement, but it wouldn't solve the core issue, and I think that just relying on the players thinking "I feel I need to get stronger gear" is a flawed approach.
 
Banana3pai said:
and I think that just relying on the players thinking "I feel I need to get stronger gear" is a flawed approach.
Click to expand...
It is not, as you can beat the Wall of flesh as soon as you get good enough gear. People beat wall of flesh as their first boss with dynamite. The only requirement is having enough DPS to kill the wall before the end of the world, and not dying of course
 
yeah I agree, I'm not even very good at ðe game & I beat gollem 5 times in a row because ov spare sumoning items, lunatic cultist haz ðoze dragons I guess but still pretty eazy
 
Sinsel said:
Specifically on ftw he was actually a good difficulty, to the point where i had to make obsidian skin potions to stop his on fire debuff (as summoner) and had to farm for rod of discord to fight him outside of the temple, even then he still took me a couple attempts, cultist is still a joke though idk how to fix him beyond way more hp and maybe a bit quicker
Click to expand...
I agree with this, but it wasn't the fireballs that made it hard. It was simply that he was a lot more agile. Genuinely I think they should increase Golem's speed by a lot and make the average size of his arena bigger. Not as fast as he gets in FTW, of course, but still faster. He does a lot more damage if you can't dodge like you always do.

I do agree that making Golem and Cultist harder would improve the between-time of Plantera to Moon Lord. You'd feel more pressure to find better gear, so you'd do the Pumpkin/Frost Moon and spend more time in the Dungeon.
 
I'm going to update the post with a graph of my argument so the idea is more condensed:
  • The concern that post-golem weapons and armor become outdated too fast has been lingering for years in the community.
  • This problem arises from the fact that killing Golem triggers the Cultists to spawn, and they are too enticing to kill too, making the Moon Lord Rush inevitable for anyone who doesn't know the optional bosses.
  • I want the Cultist to take a bit longer to summon and for them to NOT spawn the pillars creating this Moon Lord rush, so that it gives the game more breathing room for forgotten optional events and bosses to be discovered and played as a decent challenge before Pillar weapons and Moon Lord armor trivialize them.
  • A way to achieve this could be by forcing the player to charge the Mysterious Tablet the cultists are bowing to by "sacrificing" enemies in the dungeon. This forces the player into exploring the dungeon which gives ectoplasm which can be used to summon the Moon events.
  • This prolongs the players' stay in the outskirts of the world, giving more chances of:
    • Feeling the need to suit up for the dungeon itself.
    • A Martian Probe spawning and detecting the player or the post-plantera version of the Solar Eclipse triggering.
    • Killing a lacewing by mistake.
    • Farming and using post-plantera weapons.
    • Wanting to get the biome keys.
  • Apart from all this, making the summon of the Lunatic Cultist a boss not tied to the "Pillar Rush" would give the dev team the perfect oportunity to give it its own drops, which I suggest that instead of more weapons which get outdated again they could be a set of accessories, one for each class. Or maybe vanity. Or his flying robes. Anything to make people want to fight him more than twice.
  • Now that they are separate, give the cultist another drop to summon the pillars.
 

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Last edited:
Banana3pai said:
I'm going to update the post with a graph of my argument so the idea is more condensed:
  • The concern that post-golem weapons and armor become outdated too fast has been lingering for years in the community.
  • This problem arises from the fact that killing Golem triggers the Cultists to spawn, and they are too enticing to kill too, making the Moon Lord Rush inevitable for anyone who doesn't know the optional bosses.
  • I want the Cultist to take a bit longer to summon and for them to NOT spawn the pillars creating this Moon Lord rush, so that it gives the game more breathing room for forgotten optional events and bosses to be discovered and played as a decent challenge before Pillar weapons and Moon Lord armor trivialize them.
  • A way to achieve this could be by forcing the player to charge the Mysterious Tablet the cultists are bowing to by "sacrificing" enemies in the dungeon. This forces the player into exploring the dungeon which gives ectoplasm which can be used to summon the Moon events.
  • This prolongs the players' stay in the outskirts of the world, giving more chances of:
    • Feeling the need to suit up for the dungeon itself.
    • A Martian Probe spawning and detecting the player or the post-plantera version of the Solar Eclipse triggering.
    • Killing a lacewing by mistake.
    • Farming and using post-plantera weapons.
    • Wanting to get the biome keys.
  • Apart from all this, making the summon of the Lunatic Cultist a boss not tied to the "Pillar Rush" would give the dev team the perfect oportunity to give it its own drops, which I suggest that instead of more weapons which get outdated again they could be a set of accessories, one for each class. Or maybe vanity. Or his flying robes. Anything to make people want to fight him more than twice.
  • Now that they are separate, give the cultist another drop to summon the pillars.
Click to expand...
Bro, you really need to make this a mod if the devs don't add this in 1.4.5
 
honestly I feel like the better fix is just to make cultist harder (golem is fine in its current state imo)
if it's more difficult to start the endgame, then you are incentivized to gear up before starting it
the progression (in my opinion) should go like:
plantera -> (optional) solar eclipse/dungeon to gear up for golem -> golem -> (optional, but less so)
pumpkin moon/frost moon/OOA t3/martians/duke/empress to gear up for cultist -> cultist -> pillars -> moon lord
 
Banana3pai said:
Hello, I know this new update is small and you guys won't add big changes like new bosses, or events, or big worldgen changes, things like that. But I have something really important to say, at least for me, and I don't know if it would be easy or hard to do.

I've seen that within the past months you've both noted and asked for input on many details, inconveniences the community has expressed the game has, and you've said the team would look into some balance aspects of the game (paladin's hammer my beloved), and it is here that one concern has been bugging me for a long time:
I've noticed that, after thousands of hours and playing with many friends, once Plantera is defeated we now end up rushing to face the Moon Lord; we don't give much thought to Golem, nor we stay in the post-Plantera dungeon much if at all (only if someone is playing a caster for the ectoplasm and not even always). We now leave the Pumpkin and Frost Moons for after Moon Lord, and instead we go right away to kill the Lunatic Cultist, get the best endgame weapons from the Pillars, and in the end the general sentiment is "let's kill the Moon Lord now that we are already here" which means we get the best armor and moon lord drops too. This means that most weapons and armor that were designed as endgame gear before 1.3 rolled out have such a small window of time where they are viable that they feel terrible to invest time and effort in obtaining.
All in all, I think the addition of the Lunatic Cultist, the Pillars and the Moon Lord, although very fun and I would say the perfect Finale for the game, undermine the excitement, progression and grind that was here post-Plantera before 1.3.

That's it, those are my concerns. I don't know if I have the solutions especially for a "small update" that is already in a testing stage... And you guys have decades of dev experience, so I feel like I'm overstepping here, but if I'm allowed to keep rambling just a bit more please bear with me:
  • First of all, the gameplay loop if you fail to kill the Moon Lord or Lunatic Cultist is both too straightforward in a way, and too long in another; if you die to them the only requirement to try again is waiting a day at no cost. This makes people, including me, more willing to rush this event. On the other hand, the loop takes time to complete, while the loop itself already includes a way of shortening it by using the Pillar fragments to make a sigil to summon the moon lord directly. I'm sure this was made on purpose, but please consider my words.
Instead I suggest the following:
  • Make it so the player needs to "charge up" the Mysterious Tablet with souls by killing monsters inside the dungeon as sacrifice, the same way the Pillars lose their shields (this also introduces this mechanic to the player before spawning a menacing pillar next to one of their NPC houses). It doesn't need to be a large quantity, but any amount would make any player think what they want to do. Only after the Tablet is charged do the cultists spawn, and you can then summon the Lunatic Cultist. This way you make players want to explore the dungeon before killing the Lunatic Cultist, it will make post-Plantera weapons much more satisfying to use, and it opens up the possibility of farming the Lunatic Cultist, which brings me to my next point.
  • The adrenaline rush you get when the Pillars spawn and you MUST kill them to free your world is fun, but I think the game would benefit from separating the spawn of the Pillars from the death of the Lunatic Cultist by making him drop an item that spawns them instead. This way you accomplish three things: the cultists can spawn again without the Pillars and Moon Lord in the way (and maybe finally give the Lunatic Cultist proper drops wink wink), with the ectoplasm from the previous point the players have another breathing window to maybe consider playing against the Pumpkin Moon and Frost Moon, and again it gives the player more time to enjoy what today are very short-lived weapons (and sometimes even armor too).
  • I'm not implying the removal or change of the Celestial Sigil, as it still serves a necessary function in directly summoning the Moon Lord.
I think this would solve most of the problems I see without even giving any other drops to the Lunatic Cultist but the pillar-spawning one. But now that we are at it... Once one kills Golem, there are very few extra accessories that weren't available before him (sun stone, eye of the golem, ninja drops and rifle scope). If the objective is to not make the previous weapons outdated instantly, the best drops the Lunatic Cultist could have apart from vanity and equipment are accessories. What accessories I have no idea, but this is the end of my very long rambling.

Thanks for being patient with me, and thanks for reading.

TL,DR:
  • The concern that post-golem weapons and armor become outdated too fast has been lingering for years in the community.
  • This problem arises from the fact that killing Golem triggers the Cultists to spawn, and they are too enticing to kill too, making the Moon Lord Rush inevitable for anyone who doesn't know the optional bosses.
  • I want the Cultist to take a bit longer to summon and for them to NOT spawn the pillars creating this Moon Lord rush, so that it gives the game more breathing room for forgotten optional events and bosses to be discovered and played as a decent challenge before Pillar weapons and Moon Lord armor trivialize them.
  • A way to achieve this could be by forcing the player to charge the Mysterious Tablet the cultists are bowing to by "sacrificing" enemies in the dungeon. This forces the player into exploring the dungeon which gives ectoplasm which can be used to summon the Moon events.
  • This prolongs the players' stay in the outskirts of the world, giving more chances of:
    • Feeling the need to suit up for the dungeon itself.
    • A Martian Probe spawning and detecting the player or the post-plantera version of the Solar Eclipse triggering.
    • Killing a lacewing by mistake.
    • Farming and using post-plantera weapons.
    • Wanting to get the biome keys.
  • Apart from all this, making the summon of the Lunatic Cultist a boss not tied to the "Pillar Rush" would give the dev team the perfect oportunity to give it its own drops, which I suggest that instead of more weapons which get outdated again they could be a set of accessories, one for each class. Or maybe vanity. Or his flying robes. Anything to make people want to fight him more than twice.
  • Now that they are separate, give the cultist another drop to summon the pillars.
View attachment 428392
Click to expand...
I woke up this morning not expecting to read an essay
 
muovd🌳 said:
Bro, you really need to make this a mod if the devs don't add this in 1.4.5
Click to expand...
The thing is, making mods is hard, and the whole idea is a "small" change to make the game more organic ESPECIALLY for newer players that don't use the wiki that much. Making it a mod will obviously expose what they need to do and defeats the purpose of this.
 
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