The Problem with Reforges

The Problem with Reforges

I’d like you to ask yourself a question do you like terraria’s reforge system do you think it’s fun rewarding engaging interesting because I don’t and I think it could be turned into something much better but before I get into that what’s wrong with the reforge system reorges are the random modifiers that get applied to weapons and accessories and they can be rerolled at the goblin tinkerer for coins I’m going to have to distinguish weapon and accessory reforges because they’re completely different and each have their own issues and let’s be clear while I don’t like this system I don’t dislike it either right now it’s kind of a bland underwhelming part of the game to me let’s talk weapons first there are 64 different weapon modifiers 14 of them are Universal and can affect every weapon class 10 can affect everything except certain melee weapons 16 are melee and whip specific 12 for ranged and 12 for magic and summoning weapons they can increase or decrease damage crit chance attack speed size Mana cost velocity and knockback that sounds pretty robust depending on whether you want your weapon to attack faster do more damage have a larger hit box you can try to get a modifier that boosts that attribute and man that would be a great system that’s not how Terraria works though these modifiers give somewhere between 5 and 18% bonuses to those attributes with crit chance only going from 1 to 5% that’s tiny it’s meaningless the best I can get is 18% size and nothing else that’s pointless if I’m going to go out of my way to buff my weapon size or knockback instead of damage it needs to do a lot more than that to make it worthwhile modifiers weigh damage speed velocity knockback weapon size and Mana cost the same and for some reason crit chance bonuses are much smaller on top of that in almost every situation every other modifier is eclipsed by the objectively best one it doesn’t matter if you can get 18% size or 15% damage or 15% speed when legendary gives the most damage 5% worse speed than light to the most crit chance a size buff and the most knockback regardless of whether you want an attack speed build a crit build pure DPS knockback weapon size Mana cost you’re going to go for the exact same modifier it’s repetitive and not a fun play pattern if you ask a player their least favor in NPC it’s a 50/50 shot whether they say the angler or the goblin tinkerer modifiers haven’t really been changed much since 2011 when the Tinker was added in 1.1 back then reforging was much more expensive the game was a lot shorter and the period of time before the goblin tinkerer was a larger trunk of the game and the game was is also much easier there was only classic difficulty in the 13 years since 1.1 most melee weapons have been buffed or completely reworked the throwing class came and went Summoner was born Summoner got whips Summoner whips got nerfed the all powerful Molotov cocktail was created and subsequently died we got planta Pirates Golem pumpkin and frost Moon Duke fishron the cultist the empress the moon Lord expert in master mode all the secret seeds and yet were still working with the ancient reforge system of 31% of the modifiers are objectively bad and 5% of them invalidate all of the other positive ones just keep hitting the hammer until you get legendary mythical or unreal maybe stom a Godly or demonic the clearest example of how old the modifier system is is that Summoner has no reforges of its own it just takes magic or melee reforges it doesn’t even benefit from most of the stats that magic reforges have that’s why you go for ruthless because speed crit chance and Mana cost don’t do anything for summoning weapons so the system is a bit lackluster it ends up just leading players to fish for the modified that have the best DPS and grind a bunch of money to do that but I do like the foundation of modifiers and I think it could be reworked into something more fun and rewarding in my opinion your weapons reforge should be very impactful to your character and if you’re trying to make a particular build it should start with your weapon there shouldn’t be a bunch of modifiers that do practically nothing or that you’d be actively shooting yourself in the foot for using remember you’re giving up a 15% multiplicative damage bonus and 5% crit just for not using demonic let alone legendary a lot of the modifiers just feel like bloat when it could be more fleshed Out imagine if instead of a massive modifier giving an 18% size increase it gave a 40% size increase 50% if you want to spec into a big weapon build you can get a massive weapon you could go for increased Mana cost on your magic weapons for a big damage payoff or a large speed Roost for range weapons in exchange for a damage penalty those reforges with downsides could have strong upsides to offset them instead of just being strictly worse I had electric essence one of the mods in my Discord server make me a modded client that changed around a few of the reforge values and it took him like 10 minutes this isn’t difficult to change we already mentioned massive so let’s start there this is what a vanilla massive weapon looks like it’s a little bigger compare that to a legendary weapon and it’s just pathetic that’s not massive this is massive that is a giant sword and you could buff that size photo with gloves with a reforge like this you could reasonably use a lot of lower range swords the main thing that makes them so diff ult to use is how close you need to get to enemies you’d have lower damage but you could deal it from further away and most importantly this is fun as hell having a giant sword like this is awesome I don’t know if it’s good but I would actually want to get a massive reforge if it did this to my weapon the Fring reforge gives plus 15% speed in exchange for minus 15% damage that’s just bad a 15% multiplicative damage penalty for 15% speed which is the same as what rapid gives and that one doesn’t have a penalty it’s only 5% better than unreal which has a 15% damage boost it’s awful but the concept of trading damage for Speed isn’t bad it’s just not taken far enough what if we had a 40% speed increase and still minus 15% damage that is a lot and this is what that looks like a normal Phoenix Blaster is this fast an unreal one does this and a frenzy one does this and honestly this is too powerful it’s better than unreal and quite a bit better reforges don’t affect ammo so so the damage penalty would need to be a bit higher maybe 25 or 30% and the speed bonus could go down to 30% as well but this is a fun reforge and I would take a modifier that gave 30% attack speed for 30% less damage it feels like you’re actually in a frenzy firing at attack wildly there are a lot of other modifiers that give a bonus in exchange for a penalty and most of them are just awful heavy is the counterpart to light and it gives you an attack speed penalty for a knockback bonus that is horrendous and it’s the same knockback bonus that legendary gives let’s fix that this titanium sword has plus 100% knockback from heavy and that’s absurd that’s unreasonable but you send enemies flying because your weapon is heavy it’s not good you’re doing less damage than an unre forged weapon but I would get a reforge that did this it’s got utility it’ll let you stun lock knockback resistant enemies and juggle other ones and watching enemies go flying is incredible I’m not saying Implement exactly what I did here 100% knockback is a bit much but the reforges that give penalties in buff should give some powerful Buffs to compensate and make players consider and want to use them they don’t even need to be good they just need to be fun Furious is a really cool concept to me it increases the Mana cost of your weapon and the damage but it’s not a good damage buff you can get a reforge that Buffs it by the same amount of damage and reduces the Mana cost let’s double the bonus to 30% that’s a a huge damage bonus you might even need to increase the Mana cost more than 20% a furious magic weapon with this rework would be the highest damage rege but it comes at the cost of being less sustainable you need to drink more Mana potions spend more time regenerating Mana or take more damage with magic cuffs would you take a 30% damage boost for a 30% increased Mana cost 40% 50% these are just a couple of ideas and I don’t know how balanced they would be I just made up the numbers and tried them out but every single one of these sounds fun to me much more fun than the current system you could actually specialize in a build you could be a mage that goes for increased Mana costs instead of just hunting down mythical you could get gigantic swords and make true melee weapons a lot more usable the modifiers that buff crit chant like zealous could actually give good crit chance Buffs instead of 5% there could be a modifier that gives a big buff to damage but a penalty to crit chance or of attack speed weapons with a different modifier would actually feel meaningfully different now there are just too many modifiers to make every single one unique and useful there are a lot of filler modifiers that just give minor bonuses and overlap with each other I don’t think it would be possible to make every reforge desirable but you could easily do it to a good number of them and I think the single easiest way to make players want to use other reforges is to make legendary mythical and unreal much less common right now you’ve got about a 2.5% chance to get it when reforging it’s easy to spam until you get it and it’s just bad better than every other option if it were 5 to 10 times rarer than they are now and the other reforges felt cool and unique then players wouldn’t just sit there spamming reforge until they got legendary it did also make it feel a lot more impactful when you actually get a legendary reforge it’s not okay I got legendary it’s okay I got legendary you could even buff those reforges a little since they’d be much rarer and you’d want it to feel impactful when you got them if a system like this were implemented it would completely mix up a meta that hasn’t changed in over a decade it had Foster creativity players would be going around finding out which reforges synergize with which weapons how to build around having higher attack speed but lower damage or higher damage but increased Mana cost and it’ bring a nice breath of fresh air into the game I haven’t addressed Summoner reforges yet and it’s because I don’t really know what to do with them every other class has a unique attribute size velocity or Mana cost and benefit from crit chance and speed summoning staffs basically only get affected by damage and knockback modifiers while whips at least to get size damage speed and knockback for Summoner to have meaningful and unique reforges it needs to have some modifiable attribute unique to it and I don’t know what that attribute would be you could increase the speed of minions you could adjust the number of summon slots that minions take you could change how much tag damage whips deal but honestly I don’t think any of those are particularly good ideas tag bonus changes are the best idea out of those maybe a whip is slower but it deals increased tag damage it’ be good for if you’re using one whip instead of stacking them but I think that inability to find a good reforge idea is probably why Rel logic hasn’t given summon unique modifiers yet what would you modify about a summoning weapon without introducing an entirely new mechanic if you’ve got any ideas feel free to share them that’s all I’ve got to say about weapons though let’s talk accessories I spent a long time talking about warding menacing and lucky in my recent videos so I’m not going to go over why what I’m saying is true you can go watch those videos for the explanations lucky and menacing are practically identical for most purposes warding is usually the best reforge because of how defense works and because plus4 defense is a lot more valuable than plus 4% damage and then you have these two quick and Arcane these two modifiers suck Arcane gives plus 20 Mana it’s not bad for the first few nights if you manage to get a magic weapon early on past that it’s pretty bad once you’re at 200 and usually a bit above 200 because Mage Armor increases your Mana raising your maximum Mana isn’t that helpful especially when you could be increasing your damage or defense instead if you’re using Mana potions or Magic cuffs the modifier is pretty awful because it’s just going to give you an initial boost of mana and then you go into drinking potions or taking damage to recover it however the most noticeable effect it has is it increases your Mana regeneration rate if you’re allowing it to recover naturally this is because it scales based off of your maximum mana and it is noticeable but it’s a really Niche effect you can see the difference in speed here using jungle armor and six Arcane ref forges to reach the maximum Mana of 400 because of that I would treat Arcane more like a modifier that improves your Mana regeneration rate rather than one that just Buffs your maximum Mana it also synergizes with Mana regeneration potions because they set your Mana regeneration rate to its maximum which is based on what your max Mana is even with that I still don’t think it’s good I don’t really play Mage so I can’t say with certainty nor do I care to test in detail I’m sure somebody out there likes having the increased Mana regeneration rate but I can’t personally imagine ever wanting it instead of another reforge quick gives 4% movement speed that’s bad really that’s it’s pretty awful it’s an additive movement speed bonus and having seven quick accessories will increase your speed by 4.2 mph each quick accessory individually gives 6 mph the thing is this does not affect your speed when running or your speed when flying it does cause you to reach your running speed faster but not that much faster for comparisons a swiftness potion is 3.75 mph a food buff is between 3 to 6 mph the Panic necklace is 15 the slice of cake is three quick is just bad it’s basically spending all of your accessory reforges on a swiftness potion there are tons of other sources of movement speed bonuses just get those instead there’s also violent which isn’t bad but it is complicated the thing to know about melee speed is that it doesn’t directly translate to damage a good number of melee weapons don’t attack faster with melee speed yo-yos flails the Zenith the Daybreak they might get increased range or projectile velocity but not attack speed generally only swords and spear actually improve their attack speed from melee speed and a lot of projectile swords have an internal cooldown to their projectiles even if you’re swinging more you won’t spawn more stars from the Star Fury or seeds from the seed LS for instance this isn’t true of all swords the knight’s Edge blade of grass true Knight’s Edge and terrorblade don’t along with several others let’s say we have a legendary TRX caliber with a use time of 16 because like damage the weapon speed reforge applies first if we say your average player pre-plant era has a mechanical glove and turtle armor they’ll be at 12% melee speed just 4% melee speed one single violent reforge brings us down to use time 13 we need three violent reforges to reach 12 six to reach 11 and a seventh wouldn’t do anything if we throw in a pumpkin pie and Ale which is 29.5% melee speed we see that one violent reforge brings us down to use time 11 four brings us down to 10 and seven doesn’t do any more than four as I hope it’s clear from this demonstration I can’t make generalizations about violent every single weapon has has different break points to reach and depending on your build you’re going to need different amounts of melee speed so unfortunately I’m going to have to show you tables of every use time and you’ll have to do the calculations yourself to see when violent is worth it this is a list of all of your melee speed bonuses so you can add these together to see what you have before modifiers in general I’d say it’s worth spending one or two reforges to hit a break point but not more than that also I’m not including early prehard mode weapons since you can’t really make a melee Speed Build early game I didn’t put the terrablade bladed glove FedEd bag neack or psychon knife on these tables that’s because they have a specific Nerf to how effective melee speed is the bag knacks only receive 25% of melee speed bonuses the psychon knife 33% the bladed glove 50% and the Tera blade 75% I’m going to look at the terrablade with legendary which has the same use time as the Truex caliber if you’ve got two gloves Beetle scale mail with the full buff active ale and a medium food buff you’re at 83.5% melee speed you would need six violent reforges to do anything and any more than that is pointless and that’s for an attack one tick faster which relative to the build already with a use time of nine is a 12.5% increase in attack speed for six modifiers that’s not great because violent is so case dependent I can’t really say it’s bad but I also can’t say it’s good there are situations where one or two violent reforges can push you over to a break point to a higher attack speed which is worth it and situations where seven violent reforges will only get an attack that’s one tick faster for a lot of melee weapons it doesn’t affect your attack speed at all and instead does things like increasing range of projectile velocity which in my opinion is not worth getting here’s another way to think of it violent is not continuous for the terot blade 1% 9% 20% 31% 45% 61% 81% 104% and 134% are the only melee speed values that matter if you’re at 32% melee speed and get three violent reforges those reforges do nothing and there’s no way to know where the break points are unless you have a table to consult and add up all your melee speed values and even then you don’t want to have to reforge your accessories all the time and a full violent build is typically going to have several reforges that do nothing at all and even if you optimize them there are still a bunch of weapons the shadow flame knife every flail the solar eruption the Daybreak the Zenith vampire knife scourge of the corruptor the possessed Hatchet and a lot more that just don’t scale their attack speed off of melee speed because of all that I don’t really think it’s worth getting violent not because it’s bad but because it’s a headache if you really want to use it you can go look back at the tables find your weapon use time calculate your melee speed Buffs and see how many violent refor you need to reach the next break point get that many reforges and no more because the extra ones are going to do nothing so how would we fix the modifiers I think warding lucky and menacing are pretty much fine as is maybe the damage reforges could use a slight buff but people still use all three of these reforges and want them and I don’t think Waring is overpowered either it’s the other three modifiers that need to be buffed I don’t think there’s any way to make a maximum Mana reforge be good Terraria Mana is caed at 400 and mages will typically be near 300 from late prehard mode onward the Mana regeneration is okay but I don’t think it’s very good I think a great fix is to make it decrease Mana cost instead it could even follow the 1 to 4% rule that other reforges use getting 28% Mana cost reduction could make a mage a lot less reliant on Mana potions especially when combined with other Mana cost reductions I don’t know how powerful it would be but I think a mage would actually want Arcane if it did that and could make a good Arcane build it it have some powerful synergies with certain weapons the fix for quick is honestly really easy make it work like a MAG luminesence or Shadow Armor the fact that it doesn’t increase the speed of boots or Wings is what makes it feel bad because that’s how most players are moving around you could throw in movement speed and acceleration too if you really want to buff it you want players to actually want quick that’ do it and then we have violent and it’s not bad it’s just weird honestly it’s probably fine as it is I don’t know how you could change violent because it’s melee speed that’s clunky not the mod fire I’ve proposed a lot of changes in this video some of them I’m sure are horribly unbalanced and a lot of them would change the way the game feels the initial response to something like that is often times to go no that would never fit in the game it’s a bad idea it would change the meta it’ probably break things and I like things the way they are in anticipation of that let’s look at some of the things Terraria has added or changed in the past few updates uh Shimmer you you’d be laughed off stage suggesting adding something like that before 1.4.4 deep crafting almost everything in the game at no cost permanent upgrades changing around items to make sure you get the one you want from pyramids or the Wall of Flesh just go play with your Quality of Life mods but Shimmer was added it did change the game and the meta and the way players interacted with the world shifted to accommodate it broke things there were invincibility machines money exploits prehard mode Hollow and they all got patched same update melee weapons got massive reworks across the game all of a sudden an underwhelming class got flashy powerful and cool weapons to use at every stage in the game if you suggested turning the knight’s Edge into this or the teror blade into this you’d be told to go play Calamity mod flashy visual things like that that’s not how vanilla Terraria works but the weapons were changed and the meta and the way players interacted with the world shifted to accommodated it broke things the knight’s Edge and teror blade were way too strong and needed to be nerfed back in 1.4 Summoner got completely reworked and was given whips a change that overhauled the class from a punching bag for jokes to an extremely powerful glass Cannon and back in 1.3 if you suggested giving Summoner a melee weapon to buff your minions people would tell you that Summoner wasn’t meant to have a primary weapon it’s Balan to have you use other class weapons alongside it and why give it a melee weapon that doesn’t make sense give it something unique and you can stack the Buffs that’s overpowered Summoner is supposed to be the challenging class that’s worse than the others but Summoner was given whips and the meta and the way players interacted with the world shifted to accommodated it broke things obsidian armor needed to be nerfed twice whip stacking was absurdly powerful the blade staff had to be nerfed there were a lot of balance hiccups and in all three of those situations something completely out of left field that was very different from how Terraria was got added broke the hell out of things and then got patched so why not do that for the reforge system would it be unbalanced and break things definitely but it did get fixed just like the Shimmer just like the 1.4.4 melee weapons and just like whips what’s more important is that it would make the game a lot more fun by revitalizing a system that’s bailed been touched in over a decade

Breaking news: Gameplay mechanic from 2011 found underwhelming. Proposed changes, an in-depth explanation to violent, and one hidden mouse within.

Intro 0:00
Weapon modifiers 0:37
Modifier history 2:15
How to improve weapon modifiers 3:38
Massive 4:37
Frenzying 5:15
Heavy 6:23
Furious 7:15
Legendary, Unreal, and Mythical 8:44
Summoner 9:42
Accessory modifiers 10:45
Arcane 11:09
Quick 12:25
Violent 13:08
Melee speed tables for every weapon 14:35
Terra blade 15:11
How to improve accessory modifiers 17:04
17:20 Arcane fix
17:58 Quick fix
18:29 Change is scary
20:42 Reworked modifier ideas

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