Hard Mode: Is it viable?

After playing for 30+ hours now on casual and dying numerous times against the first boss (often from falling damage due to laggy mis steps) a few times against other bosses, and more than once from unexpected falling damage when mining and digging into the roof of a deep cavern before I unlocked the fall bubble tech.

Given the challenge level of the bosses, and ease with which death can arrive when exploring I find myself curious if anyone plays this on hard "dead is dead" difficulty, and if so how far have they gotten in it?

 

Impressive, is there any specific technique you've used to increase your survival chances against the bosses (and in general when exploring deadly worlds) beyond the normal "crafting best armor/spam medkits method?"

Edit: Also curiosity compels me to ask how many tries it took you to get to your current level of progression?

 

Honestly the bosses before the testing facility are all easy if you know what to do. (The erchius boss is realy easy if you just take your time, bring something to block with, dont rush, and dont miss-step/fall).

The testing facility itself (aka shockhopper or whatever) is kinda hard to get trough without dying once, but not impossible.

 

Once you get used to dodging/blocking the game is rather trivial. Nowadays I only die from really dumb things like a rocket launcher getting caught on some pixel pod I didn't see or something.

Also, I haven't played stable in a while but did the boss changes make it there or is it unstable only? Because if they did I really don't get all the complaints about the bosses, their damage got nerfed so hard, you have to try to get killed by them (exception being Dreadwing, he was a pushover all the way back in February already).

 

Generally I'd say don't use permadeath in beta, only a matter of time before some balance issue pops up and kills your character, wait till full release.

 

I've been only playing hardcore characters since the last update, and I don't think I'll go back. It brings a new level of investment to your character, as well as changing the gameplay to rogue-like by creating bases and weapon reserves waiting for your next round of characters. I'm a bit of an evangelist about hardcore mode, and I wonder how many devs see the game play in it.

Random deaths teach you to not mess up again. But deaths usually come quickly, with a bit of panic, as you see the last second the inevitability. Not having your healing items prepped. Missing a jump to escape a monster. I just lost a character to a meteorite the other day. I was never scared of them before, I guess I will be now. I'm tempted to mod a hotkey for teleport.

Falling through into deep caverns is something you get over. I never unlearned the behaviour in other difficulty modes, but now I'm much more cautious when digging long shafts.

Anyways, in dealing with bosses, I've yet to get past Shockhopper on Hardcore, and it sucks that items dropped on missions are gone forever, but that's the risk. With the mid progression, you basically need to find a really good weapon that fits your style before attempting to face the bosses. I'm not so good with a shield, as I'm on trackpad. Using the grapple against Shockhopper helped, but wasn't enough.

The bosses are challenging, and a bit beyond my level of engagement, so I look forward to release when I'll be able to play on a server to get friends to help me in that regards.

Anyways, I'd definitely recommend that you try it. It's a neat experience. Even just acknowledging that your character is mortal and impermanent changes your attachment to them and their buildings/accomplishments.

 

I usually play on hardcore.... the weapons test mossion is the only one I had to go through twice, and the second time, I built the magic lazer staff, and opened the door, fired in, rinse, repeat, till he died, without ever trapping myself in the room. Almost everything else in the game can be overcome through patience and attention to detail, cause frankly I am not great at maneuvering out of danger, but my shield and patience are are sufficient.

 

Haha, I did sort of the same thing when I originally played that mission. Sadly, chucklefish has noticed this and changed the arena so that you have to fall down into the zone before you can fight it.

I thought about playing hardcore a couple times but decided against it simply because of how hard the weapons test boss is. I haven't been able to beat it without dying at least 4 times before actually beating it. I never really played hardcore on Terraria either. I guess I'm the type of person who likes a challenge but a challenge that I can re-attempt without having to had invested a couple hours into then simply lose it all due to a stupid mistake on my part. I'll probably end up trying hardcore when the game is "fully" released but until then I probably won't bother.

 

I'm more like you Esachc_, but I have tried starbound in hard mode and really enjoyed it for a few time, something like 6 characters dies in this atempt.
I agree with infinitezer, the experience bring new kind of challenges and feels about the game.

 

It's viable I guess, if you're willing to take your time and be VERY careful, but I don't really see WHY you would want to do hardmode in
a game like this. Not only can progression be fairly slow, especially when it comes to completing quests and upgrading your ship, but due
to how random things are, you're very likely to lose items that you might literally never be able to reobtain.