All in all, balance and progression are entirely up to Diverman. And same goes for vanilla Terraria. You don't go complaining to the devs that copper and tin armor is useless do you? In any game, there are bound to be things that might end up useless and underutilised. But that does not detract from their value. They are there to add spice to the game and a great degree of freedom to players who wander off the beaten path, and appreciate the mere variety and diversity of content. Don't forget die hard collectors or people that are entirely new to the content, where every discovery is a new adventure.
How much game content or mechanics is up to the developer, and how fun or useful they are is entirely up to the player.
Once again, for the people not paying attention, copper and tin
aren't useless. Not only is copper the base tier you start the game with, but both are abundant at surface level. They are well balanced to the point in the game at which they become available to you...
and that is the entire basis to my complaint. Most content in Thorium, particularly in Prehard, is
not. Generally speaking, it lags one or two tiers behind the level of progress needed to get it. I use Sandstone as an example, because it is currently the most glaring example. Ice is pretty poor too, but has decent effects, and aside from RNG (a problem shared with Petal) is easier to farm for (and arguably available sooner) if you have the patience.
To get Sandstone, though, you must farm Iron, kill antlions for their mandibles, survive at least one night to harvest stars for arcane dust, find a demon altar, kill a boss, and obtain an anvil to craft the equipment - whether by purchase, craft, or found while spelunking. In return, you get equipment that is roughly sidegrade to the
base starting equipment you get for free with a new character. Since you will need multiple flares to get a full set, you could just advance to Iron instead, and it would probably be quicker. All that time and effort could be better spent on advancing to literally any other tier past Copper and Iron, and be better spent.
In short, the work to make use of the equipment does
not present an option for an alternative play style. It presents an option for deliberately holding yourself back and delaying your progress. It is, in short, a handicap. For the armour, this
almost works, due to cool abilities. For the tools and weapons, it's a no-go. Not only are they only debatably better than starting gear, the weapons in particular are straight up outclassed by the items dropped by
the very boss you must farm to make them. If you make the full Sandstone set, and don't have a better weapon than the Sandstone Scimitar (and bow, if you're on Expert) by the end of it, then file a bug report because something is seriously wrong with your RNG.
That's not a quibble, that's a genuine design flaw.
Oh, my last point was just in regards to developers in general. You've shown to be quite receptive and inclusive with all you've contributed to this game and its community.
This is really the main reason I take issue with the criticism coming from Kefke.
If you've got a problem, take it to PMs, buddy.
However, I absolutely can speak with authority here, both as a designer, and a player. I'm not talking about subjective opinion. I'm talking about strictly objective values - stats of items, time to tier, and level of progression needed to advance. Those aren't arguable. They're
facts, and the
facts are, that the time and effort needed to get an awful lot of the content in this mod is not proportionate to the level of character advancement the player sees in return, and in most cases it would take a
very minor tweak to fix. Very small bump in stats here, an increased drop chance there. Maybe, in some extreme cases, locking Vanilla progress markers to the completion of Thorium tasks. My point is that, on the whole, the problems here are minor, but noticeable, and the most aggravating part of them is the sheer
minimal amount of necessary effort that isn't being taken to fix them.
