Update 1.3.0.3 and Moon Lord

Status
Not open for further replies.
Well, I've fought and beat the Moon Lord a few times on Normal using melee (with a few Stardust Cells as backup). I didn't make it to the Lunar Event until 1.3.0.3, and my first time through I went in with Vampire Knives-- I did fine against the Pillars (Nebula killed me once) because I was used to dodging, but got my rear handed to me by the Moon Lord while I tried to figure out why my Vampire Knives were mysteriously nonfunctional (there REALLY needs to be more of an indication that the Moon Lord is arbitrarily blocking lifesteal, so people with Vampire Knives and Spectre Hood don't die horribly because they thought their equipment would actually work).
After Googling to find out what was going on, I went for the "run away, teleport to Nurse, rinse and repeat" strategy, and managed to win barely. I didn't have enough Luminite for Solar Armor, and had gotten the Lunar Flare, so no real reward to help with the next fight. Also, it was boring and tedious, and I wasn't sitting through that again.
Third time through, I built a box, filled it with Honey, Campfires, Heart Lanterns, and six Heart statues (brought from my 1.2 worlds) on timers. I proceeded to tank him while spamming the Solar Eruption. I needed a few Super Healing potions, but I was also wearing offensive Beetle Armor and full Lucky accessories (Celestial Stone, Destroyer Emblem, Mechanical Glove, Cross Necklace, Charm of Myths). If I had focused on defensive gear, I could probably have done without the potions or without the statues.
After that, I got a Rainbow Prism Staff, and enough Luminite for Solar Armor. It's been smooth sailing from there on out, but still boring fighting through the Lunatic Cultist and the four Pillars, just to reach the Moon Lord.

Basically, no matter how I approach the Moon Lord, it just isn't fun. Running away forever while keeping it off screen just feels cheap, and the box o' healing removes the need for skill. Also, the slog just to get random loot is annoying-- I've made all four sets of armor by now, but have only gotten the Lunar Flare and the two sentry summons.

Speaking of which, the loot is pretty disappointing. The Lunar Flare eats mana to quickly for me to want to use it as a mage (and from what I know, is almost completely outclassed by the Star Wrath). The sentry summons are nice, but don't really feel all that powerful in practice (though having both makes the Pillars go by quicker). And from what I know about his other drops, the weapons seem very uncreative, especially compared to the Pillar equipment. Most of the Pillar equipment is something that hasn't really been seen before, or only rarely, but the Moon Lord drops include Terra Blade v2, Flairon v2 (now in yoyo flavor!), Starfury v2, Megashark v2, double-barreled Rocket Launcher, and Blizzard Staff v2.
 
People don't think it's fun?
Sheesh. Three of my friends and I have been having a blast fighting the entire lunar event over and over.
The entire thing, including the Moon Lord is great. It was very challenging before we started making the better weapons and armor, but even now, fully geared like gods it is still fun.
If you don't think it's fun, play with a friend or two and keep your magic mirror in a chest.
Just because you can cheese it doesn't mean you have to.
Nothing is fun if you don't want it to be.
 
People don't think it's fun?
Sheesh. Three of my friends and I have been having a blast fighting the entire lunar event over and over.
The entire thing, including the Moon Lord is great. It was very challenging before we started making the better weapons and armor, but even now, fully geared like gods it is still fun.
If you don't think it's fun, play with a friend or two and keep your magic mirror in a chest.
Just because you can cheese it doesn't mean you have to.
Nothing is fun if you don't want it to be.

Everything is fun when you play with friends. Time passes quickly in the presence of good company.

it's less fun when you're trying to farm the Moon Lord for drops, solo. It is a bore having to fight the Cultist and the Pillars before the Moon Lord. Especially when you have to do it so many times just to get all the loot. Even more if you want to complete all the end-game armor sets.

Oh, and have fun farming enough Luminite for Luminite Bullets. After all, you only have to kill the Moon Lord a few hundred times to obtain a decent supply. It's not that hard. /s

I used to think it was fun, too. But that was before I got my fifth Rainbow Crystal Staff in a row.
 
I think going solo on the Moon Lord is hard, but once you get some good armor and drops (like the Last Prism, I mean wow), the fight goes from "hard" to "tedious". I do wish it dropped a little more Luminite, since fighting it over and over again just isn't fun, especially since you have to beat the cultists AND the pillars again, making it a very time-consuming farming method, especially for completionists like me that want to have every armor set.
 
People don't think it's fun?
Sheesh. Three of my friends and I have been having a blast fighting the entire lunar event over and over.
The entire thing, including the Moon Lord is great. It was very challenging before we started making the better weapons and armor, but even now, fully geared like gods it is still fun.
If you don't think it's fun, play with a friend or two and keep your magic mirror in a chest.
Just because you can cheese it doesn't mean you have to.
Nothing is fun if you don't want it to be.

People are generally not saying the Cultist or Pillars are not fun, but they got sick of doing all that to get to Moon Lord, who is not fun. No matter whether cheesing is used or not. The final battle seems badly designed, limiting the way players can fight it. If it's the final battle, shouldn't it be the place where all you did in Terraria pays off? All you learned? But no, most gear is rendered useless, most approaches learnt fighting other bosses, except cheesing, are rendered useless. It doesn't end on a high note.

Doing anything with 3 other people can make things fun. I enjoyed the crappiest movies in existence because I watched them with a group of friends, but that doesn't make them fun or good movies.

Besides not everyone has friends to play with (at all or that just don't play Terraria). And why should we require to play with someone else to have fun in this game ?

At no point, anyone in the thread, said that the boss isn't fun because they cheese it.

Why would we not want it to be fun? You think we are in this thread because we're bored or have nothing better to do but criticize the game?
 
Last edited:
The Lunar Flare eats mana to quickly for me to want to use it as a mage (and from what I know, is almost completely outclassed by the Star Wrath).

The Lunar Flare's biggest advantage, I'd say, is that it's the strongest magic weapon that can ignore walls. Try clicking at the bottom of the screen in an area with lots of blocks and you'll see what I mean.

In practice, the high cost of the magic weapons tends to be offset by the frequency at which enemies drop Mana Stars. Collecting the Mana Stars is a lot less of an issue with the Celestial Magnet.
Also, the buffs provided by the Nebula armor are incredibly potent at the third level. One of them is a mana regen buff. See where I'm going?
 
The battle against Moon Lord is boring and tedious, even with friends. Once my friends and I had defeated Moon Lord, there was silence. No joy, nothing. The boss is so tedious that once you defeat it, you never want to again. We took our treasure bags and never fought it again. The loot is disappointing and the fight is brain numbingly bad. It's just not worth fighting the boss. Heck, I had a blast fighting King Slime back in my noob days. All the other bosses except Moon Lord were lots more fun and dropped loot miles better than what drops now.

To sum it all up : The fight is easily cheesable, making it boring, repetitive and defeating the boss leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction; Champion Of a Terraria Achievement you say? Bah, not even that cheers me up. ~o_O
 
The battle against Moon Lord is boring and tedious, even with friends. Once my friends and I had defeated Moon Lord, there was silence. No joy, nothing. The boss is so tedious that once you defeat it, you never want to again. We took our treasure bags and never fought it again. The loot is disappointing and the fight is brain numbingly bad. It's just not worth fighting the boss. Heck, I had a blast fighting King Slime back in my noob days. All the other bosses except Moon Lord were lots more fun and dropped loot miles better than what drops now.

To sum it all up : The fight is easily cheesable, making it boring, repetitive and defeating the boss leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction; Champion Of a Terraria Achievement you say? Bah, not even that cheers me up. ~o_O

Did you try to solo it without cheesing it?
No?
Go do that.
 
I still maintain that the Moon Lord feels so tedious and boring to fight because of the sheer amount of effort you have to go through to summon it in the first place. Not only that, after observing the Cultist's high-level magecraft and being awed by the sheer presence of the Pillars, the Moon Lord seems a bit... underwhelming. Its AI also seems to be very similar to the Skeletrons, making the Moon Lord fight essentially Skeletron Prime without the time limit. There should be a lot more oomph to the Moon Lord.

For one, he needs more attack variety--specifically, ones based on heavenly bodies. I'd say to let him summon meteors, but that might be too annoying if said meteors could destroy terrain (and player builds).

Another thing might be to make him drop more Luminite. A lot more Luminite. Enough to craft a whole armor set with wings. The Moon Lord is supposed to be a final boss, so having to kill him fifty times is a bit counterintuitive. Or, he could leave behind his corpse, which could then be mined to obtain Luminite Ore. It would give the new end-game Pickaxes' a little more use other than being a combination Digging Claw + Picksaw. The increased pickaxe power is there for a reason, right?


By the way, is anyone else seeing parallels between the Lunar Event and Mega Satan from TBoI:Rebirth?
 
Last edited:
Its AI also seems to be very similar to the Skeletrons, making the Moon Lord fight essentially Skeletron Prime without the time limit.

I kinda noticed the Skeletron similarities.
In fact, if you think about it, Moon Lord has some common elements with a few bosses.
The eyes, when separated, are marked as "True Eye of Cthulhu".
He has an exposed brain, and the second phase has him reveal a heart as his weak point. Brain of Cthulhu, anyone?
His first phase has the targets as a head and two hands, like Skeletron.
And he's got a tongue that attaches to you, like the Wall of Flesh. Different purpose, but same concept.
The only thing I can think of for the Eater of Worlds is the structure of the exposed spine has a similar image to it.
 
And yet it feels nothing like fighting any of the other bosses. It should have felt like fighting all the mech bosses at once, if it's a mash-up of them, but I'd rather fight the mech bosses (with level appropriate gear) at once than Moon Lord, since that is actually enjoyable and gives a sense of achievement at the end.

I personally would prefer if it was more like the previous bosses. As pointed out the idea seems to be there but it's badly executed.

Defeating Moon Lord is an accomplishment similar to doing homework or tax forms. It was hard, tedious, you pulled through but you're at most maybe glad it's over, but mostly tired and looking to do any other activity. That's not how a boss fight should feel, and that's not how a game should feel.
 
Defeating Moon Lord is an accomplishment similar to doing homework or tax forms. It was hard, tedious, you pulled through but you're at most maybe glad it's over, but mostly tired and looking to do any other activity. That's not how a boss fight should feel, and that's not how a game should feel.

You forgot the logical conclusion to that comparison.
You finished it, but you know you're going to need to do more of it later.
 
What I don't like about the Moon Lord is as thus:

1). It takes too long to spawn him for another try. You have to kill the Cultist Leader, who drops nothing except the crafting station you probably already had. Then you kill all that crap to take the 4 pillars down. I note that nothing drops any MONEY to pay for all the reforges on these new weapons. What's with that? And then FINALLY, the Moon Lord pops... automatically, whether you're ready for it or not. You barely have enough time to get to the place you want/need to be to start fighting him.

2). Better Armor is locked behind beating him. Most Powerful Boss in the game, right? You have to beat him to get anything new armor. Meanwhile, I'm still using Beetle Armor that I've been using since Golem. I'd like some new armor.... oh wait, I have to kill the strongest enemy in the game to get anything better. There are, what, 3 weapons for a melee person between Golem and Moon Lord, outside of a few accessories from HM Dungeon? lol. Daybreak, Solar Eruption, and Stardust Dragon Rod. I haven't seen anything else that could possibly help me kill the Moon Lord that I didn't already have.

3). You get nothing if you lose against him. He despawns. Poof. Sucks to be you. That's cute.

So... here are my suggestions:

1). Nerf his speed a little. You should be able to actually dodge his crap that he's throwing at you. I've tried, and I couldn't, and I've read wiki and it sounds like that stupid unicorn mount is the only possible way you can actually keep ahead of the stupid thing. Oh, and building several thousand block-long bridge to boot. So basically he's WoF 2.0, right? Allowing us to actually dodge the stuff he shoots at us would go a long way to making the fight reasonable. Once you get his heart exposed, you just start taking damage from unknown sources you can't even SEE what is hitting you (what, with the total darkness thing they got going on and all). It is "oof oof oof oof oof splat" and "wtf hit me?" kinda crap that I hate. Outside of the unicorn mount, it doesn't look like you have any hope at all at actually staying away from him without cheesing him with teleportation. We basically replaced Vampire Knives with Teleporters and the Nurse. That's better, how?

2). Make him drop at least a tiny amount of Luminite when you kill the eyes on his hands and head, kinda like how the Brain and the EoW works. That way, if you try and try and try and can't do it, you at least have the hope that you could actually make a suit of armor that might let you do it. Right now, I've tried him twice now and it looks like I either need the infinite flight mounts (I've found ONE Martian Probe, and it doesn't look like any more want to spawn and of course the key didn't drop) or I get to "look forward" to building a ridiculously long bridge in the sky and using the unicorn mount, because I already have the most powerful stuff I can possibly use, thanks to most of the stuff being gated behind him. Meanwhile, I'm STILL wearing that old beetle armor. I wish I could upgrade my armor here at some point, right? Nope. Gotta kill the most powerful enemy in the game before you get any new armor. What I'd actually NEED that Armor for... lol, who knows? Seems kinda pointless IMO.

And above all...

3). CHANGE HIS SPAWN METHOD. Seriously. Make it so that you can craft an item that summons him out of the 4 Fragment Types. I can foresee how this is going to go, I'll have 200+ of the fragments and no Luminite and I'll just end up getting tired of having to kill the junk that does not drop anything over and over and over and over and over and over again each time I want to try the Moon Lord. Give us a way to shortcut past the pillars once we've already faced him. I dunno, maybe 3x of each fragment makes a Moon Tablet or something that summons him straight away.

Oh, and...

4). Make each pillar drop 2-5 pieces of Luminite. Seriously.
 
I'm not gonna be as harsh as most would be, but I'm just going to say that the only reason I'm not in-game right now is because I don't want to have to spend the next 30 minutes killing the Cultist and the Pillars and then the Moon Lord just to get a weapon made for another class.

I'm playing as Mage and so far I've got:
  • Meowmere
  • Star Wrath (I actually really wanted this, it's an idea I put forward to Yorai)
  • Lunar Portal Staff
  • Lunar Portal Staff
  • Terrarian
I've battled him 7 times, and died during two of those battles. That's about 5 hours of my life dedicated to defeating him 5 times. Needless to say I'm not looking forward to spending too much more of my holidays getting all his drops.
 
The wiki says you have to kill him 15-19 times to get all the loot, not counting ammo or rng.

Yes, he should get a new summoning method. But he should also drop WAY more luminite, and the random drops need to go. Killing him 9 times is still pushing it tbh.
 
Now, personally, this boss really excited me the first time I saw him. The entry was spot on, with the music slowly fading and the screen distortion. However, I died in seconds. Now, I've beaten him a few more times, but I've been unable to ever since 1.3.0.3, and I don't even use lifesteal. And I use lots of buffs. Now, the problems with him I would change are this:

1. The armor. I honestly think this boss would be far better if you actually could get the new armor before him. Post-pillars, pre-lord. This would not only make the battle more exciting, like you just got this awesome armor, now here, kill this guy with it to feel the power. That there would have made him FAR more fun and give a better first impression.

2. Spawning. First of all, make his spawning after killing the pillars take longer. Give some extra prep time and room to breathe. And, make him spawnable WITHOUT going through all the Pillar stuff again. The pillars are a fun battle at first, but tedious to be forced to do them over and over.

3. Death penalty. Have him stay after you die for at LEAST three deaths. Honestly, I think the biggest mistake here was the pillars setting you up to think dying is fine, they just stay right there. So you're kind of calm from that. But then Moon Lord kills you and leaves, and it's just like wait, what? So give some room for error by letting him stay when you die, at least for a few times.

4. Drops. He needs to drop far more Luminite, and he needs to drop like a single essence or something, which you transform into whatever of the new treasures you want.

5. Attacking. He does far too much damage, and his attacks are too constant. Allow the player to take a few more hits. And give him some defeatable minions like the Probes, that can drop extra health and mana, so the players can restore themselves a little better.
 

I appreciate your input, however there might be better solutions already proposed and discussed in this thread (e.g. new boss spawn mechanics)


Having the boss stay after the player death is not what we're looking for in good game design. Imagine this: you meet him the first time, or even at a latter date and you just can't deal with him. Now you're gonna stand in your seat, powerless to do anything, while the boss humiliates you by killing your character for at least two more times as you spawn?

Removing his special drops to make them craftable instead, is going pretty far from what Terraria has been for quite a while. Besides, I doubt you'd think about doing that if the battle would be fun and access to it was a bit easier.

It's the last boss, it's not unreasonable to do far too much damage. The almost impossible to dodge way and frequency with which it does damage is overkill. When 3 laser beams go off at once, you better not be in your summoner armor, or hope to have rod of discord off cooldown. You can almost hear the cultists respawning at that point.
Also why are the white eyes invincible? The boss spawns more all the time and they just puff-out after they get close to the player. They could be a source of hearts/mana.

This boss just burned me out on the game. I want to play but I find it hard to get myself to play Terraria, even if I'm not going to do anything related to the final battle. It's gotten to the point where the pillars get me killed, even though I have better armor and weapons and didn't really had any problems defeating them in the first place.

I hope I'm not giving off the wrong idea. I really do like the 1.3 update (except the battle with Moon Lord) and I do appreciate the work that went into it, and that we're getting it for free (but that doesn't put it above criticism).
 
Yeah, I don't like the invincible minions either. There's all this crap flying around and I can't do anything whatsoever at all about it other than "Build a Cheese Bridge" and "Use Mirror/Teleporters!"

Building a Bridge for WoF is OK because that's mid-game, a boss that was designed and implemented during 1.1. That was years ago, and the player does not have tools to deal with the stuff very well (Water Walking boots are rare and potions can come off cooldown, and even with those, there are lots of obstacles in the way that I wouldn't want to use that method anyways).

But for the Moon Lord... we get mounts that can fly.... but wait, they're slower than a unicorn that runs on the ground. I'd love to know how a unicorn can run faster than a space-age flying vehicle. But anyways, we have a mount that can fly, but yet even that doesn't work very well with this boss, because it just isn't fast enough to keep away from his cheesy attacks.

IMO, there should be a flying mount that's a little easier to obtain and it should play an integral role in the battle. The stuff should be more easily dodged while on a flying mount, as it would make for an awesome "Pinnacle of the Game" battle. But the problem is, the only two "infinite flight" mounts are incredibly rare drops and the spawn method for the Martians themselves are still not well-known (do you have to kill Golem for a new probe to spawn? What exactly causes probes to spawn? etc etc etc, wiki has very spotty info about this).

That way, Flying in Terraria (infinite flight, not wing-based flight) would be an awesome New Mechanic, fitting for a last boss, especially one that comes from another world. We shouldn't be using the same tactics to defeat him as we did the 1.1 boss, lol. That's anti-climatic. The Wiki suggests building a long wood platform bridge and then building a row or two of solid blocks above that so that he can't hit you with his death ray and just kiting him. That's... just cheese.

I want to actually WIN the Title, "Champion of Terraria" but the only possible ways to do that are by cheesing the fight.
 
But the problem is, the only two "infinite flight" mounts are incredibly rare drops and the spawn method for the Martians themselves are still not well-known (do you have to kill Golem for a new probe to spawn? What exactly causes probes to spawn? etc etc etc, wiki has very spotty info about this).

To my experience, the probes just spawn randomly anywhere aboveground and in the sky, at any time after they're eligible to spawn, whenever that is. They're just a bit uncommon. I've taken to deliberately killing any I see, just so I don't have to fight Martians more than I need to.


As for fighting Moon Lord, the only method I've found of fighting it that doesn't reek of solid dairy product needs you to have a very tanky melee setup, and even then it relied on the presence of regen buffs and a couple heart statues, and even then only on Normal.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom