The difficulty modes are way too extreme in this mod in my opinion. It's honestly obnoxious. The expectations of the player are so unrealistic even for people who are good at the game. So, I recommend playing classic or expert, not revengeance or death, especially if you're playing for the first time. To play revengeance or death you need to be using the right loot for every single progression point in the game which requires game knowledge you have not obtained, and may not even obtain after one play-through because this mod adds a shit ton of stuff. You may not even finish a classic or expert mode playthrough there is so much to do, ... so playing on extreme difficulty is stupid. People who say "oh revengeance isn't that bad because they add new mechanics and weapons to balance it out" are smoking crack and have played terraria for 500+ hours minimum, don't listen to them.
Again this is obviously all opinion but I will die on this hill because as much as I enjoy this mod, it's my understanding that recommending people to play a high difficulty for a difficult and long mod in an already difficult and long game is braindead. Especially with the crazy boss re-works they just released. It's annoying that the mod overall difficulty and balance is changing over time, but that is something that happens in base Terraria too. It's hard to say if people who have rated the game highly from a past playthrough will always stand by their rating because this will be a whole different experience in 2 years time, just like it was completely different 2 years ago.
It's kinda unfortunate that base Terraria doesn't have some of the quality of life changes that this mod introduces, like infinite boss summons or crafting hermes boots or a horseshoe for example. I feel compelled to play this mod for all the crazy new additions, but revengeance is not the way, especially playing solo.
I'm also a little conflicted because I kind of combine calamity and other quality of life mods in my mind and forget that this is a review on just calamity, not calamity + other mods, so it's hard to say whether I would rather play base Terraria no mods or calamity with no quality of life mods. Overall, this mod definitely becomes equal to my feeling of normal Terraria because there are still bells and whistles to playing the game just like there are in normal Terraria, and there is still enough annoyance to rate it 7/10 instead of 9/10. Enough bloat for you to feel unreasonably confused or questioning why some parts of the mod were not combined because they are so similar or why some parts weren't cut altogether.
Again this is obviously all opinion but I will die on this hill because as much as I enjoy this mod, it's my understanding that recommending people to play a high difficulty for a difficult and long mod in an already difficult and long game is braindead. Especially with the crazy boss re-works they just released. It's annoying that the mod overall difficulty and balance is changing over time, but that is something that happens in base Terraria too. It's hard to say if people who have rated the game highly from a past playthrough will always stand by their rating because this will be a whole different experience in 2 years time, just like it was completely different 2 years ago.
It's kinda unfortunate that base Terraria doesn't have some of the quality of life changes that this mod introduces, like infinite boss summons or crafting hermes boots or a horseshoe for example. I feel compelled to play this mod for all the crazy new additions, but revengeance is not the way, especially playing solo.
I'm also a little conflicted because I kind of combine calamity and other quality of life mods in my mind and forget that this is a review on just calamity, not calamity + other mods, so it's hard to say whether I would rather play base Terraria no mods or calamity with no quality of life mods. Overall, this mod definitely becomes equal to my feeling of normal Terraria because there are still bells and whistles to playing the game just like there are in normal Terraria, and there is still enough annoyance to rate it 7/10 instead of 9/10. Enough bloat for you to feel unreasonably confused or questioning why some parts of the mod were not combined because they are so similar or why some parts weren't cut altogether.