tModLoader

tModLoader

Fervent Arms
Personal Feedback
I was starting to post really lengthy messages in the comments and not only will they easily get buried but i'll clog your mod with one big-ass message that is not really worthwhile to stick around in there...

So yeah, big text dump:
The "Anti-QoL" is pretty simple, albeit i can disable the damaging pickups in the settings, i usually go with the "default settings" being the intended way to use a mod, and "tweaking values into being highly favourable" something that while it is a convenient change, is not the first or intended impression.

The main gripes are;
Modifiers can be a minor inconvenience in the base game. But you can never "suffer" from them. That's where negative rolls changes things;

These are somewhat short "time periods" but they still constitute the experience, a whole chunk of the run, you do not have reforging, so any accessories obtained before then, any armor or weapons crafted, can roll stats that greatly affect them negatively, making either another craft be required, wasting resources. (You wouldn't believe the amount of times i get a projectile weapon and it rolls -80% velocity, making it almost unusable)
For someone trying to get a critical "build" going, and then rolling a weapon with -110% crit chance, you'd not be happy. Similarly, armors are even more of a hindrance, since their negative stats are all passive and constant. While some are "variables" such as homing or ricochet, and i do not know what their negatives will do until extensively tested across weapon types, some others are more detrimental, such as -life, -defence, -penetration, etc.

Reforging; Like i mentioned, it's already very expensive as it often scales based on item-price. Meaning refoging an aglet is somewhat painless, but reforging your boots is always a capitalistic critical hit. Now with Negative stats counting as high rolls, and increasing the item-price, the cost goes up when you can get a "bad" stat. If you don't reforge out of it, you are going to be wearing worse equipment. Trying to play along with the mod and learn it's mechanics, it's prefixes, emptied my bank after 50+ boss kills almost immediatelly, and left me with one piece of gear that singlehandedly ruined one stat.

The Prefixes themselves; They are usually tiered in 4 tiers and have very clear effects, while these use terms that need an explanation. This limits the possibilities, makes it clear which is the "best" for a stat, and makes it easier to balance in general. One person might get 99.98% homing and assume the stat does not work because it's not 100%, instead of testing it per weapon type/projectile type.
The explanation side is somewhat easy to fix, albeit needs some string management (Between the long decimals which are also a setting, and the well-worded preferably 3-word-max definition, if at all possible).
Something like shortening the Ricochet tooltip from:
Ricochet: +28.091%
to simply;
+ 28% chance for (your?) projectiles to bounce - or - 28% chance for projectiles to not bounce (includes "not" if the stat is negative)
Would make the stats more readable, save on lines, and hopefully describe effects better.
As for the values, having such large variety of outcomes, possibility, and generally just rolling a number between -max and +max, you will be spending a lot more because you don't know if the value is "good enough" or if you can do better. Feels kinda like gambling, which is why other mods usually alter these mechanics. I did notice it was affected by Luck, which in-of-itself can be pretty exoteric in Terraria, as it has too many rules/triggers. (Did you know sitting on a toilet increases fishing power for example?), but the range is too big, and the stats can always "drop". Having a option to have a weighted reforge that picks only values above the current range, or below the current range ( basically sets current as either -max or +max depending on your desire?) to prevent the extreme gambling cycle. This "narrows down" the amount of tries and gets people out of the loop of reforging forever. Another feature other mods altered. The general idea is to avoid wiki-crawling during gameplay, where you gotta "Google what does the how when what" or experiment for a couple hours only to find out something doesn't apply to a weapon.

Last one, Percentages and Absolutes.
Some stats have both of these and reforging picks between the two at random. This is frustrating as you'd often prefer to have control over which one you're getting, while some stats simply don't have applications on their own. Having +110% penetration with 0 AP is a wasted stat. I'd suggest either separating them into "stat%" and "stat+" or simply picking one as the definitive way it works.
Last edited by Redstark Magnusson; 13 Nov, 2024 @ 3:02am
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Spazz  [developer] 13 Nov, 2024 @ 8:15pm 
To me it seems the anti-qol portion is a non-issue. I can understand how some people would want to keep the default settings of the mod, but choosing not to change the options available is their prerogative. The options are available for people who disagree or dislike certain features ( Such as hearts and stars occasionally being a damaging version ).

As for the early game prefixes, in my opinion, is not too much of a problem or even different from vanilla. In vanilla you can craft a platinum broadsword, and it could get the broken prefix which would make it worse than the lower tier metal weapons, until the goblin tinker is available ( Which is available almost immediately upon starting a game, requiring only a shadow orb or crimson heart to be destroyed to begin spawning ). Of course, with more prefixes being available on a larger variety of equipment, leads to this being a prevalent occurrence very early game, but I feel that is what gives motivation for the player to want a goblin tinkerer and distinguishes that very early portion of the progression. After the goblin tinkerer has been found, prefixes such as -80% velocity are only a click and maybe 3 gold away from being fixed.

For the gambling mention, I've added an auto-reforge mechanism both for the prefixes and the percentages ( Which auto-rolls a given amount of times and stops when either the selected prefix, or a high value is found, respectively ) a few updates ago, that I believe completely rids the essence of any gambling.

I do like the more in-depth prefix description idea, but it would take quite a lot of work and space to accomplish. It would require multiple descriptions for each prefix, and they would all have to be translated as well. I've added in-game descriptions of the prefixes to both the stat and the reforging screen, which should make what each prefix does more clear. Given the common idea that a negative stat will do the opposite in almost all cases, besides only multishot and pierce I believe.

I personally enjoy the flat and percentage stat increases, as it opens up more builds to a larger variety of weapons, and allows for the player to have more control over how their stats scale. Such as a weapon with very low, or non-existent critical hit chance rolling a flat +15 critical hit chance on itself, it would now have a base to further scale off of.
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