Screw it, let's rank the Terraria classes

summoner gaming is my favorite type of gaming

Intro

O.K, the hivemind blog post is currently undergoing the month-long plight of my motivational power level being far too low to handle writing a blog post about something that requires research, so I'm going to write something short and easy to get my mind back into productive gear.

Terraria classes! A lot of people tend to ignore them on their first playthrough, but sticking to a specific class's armor and weaponry is a fun addition. Considering that I have almost 1000 hours in Terraria, trying to play the game as optimally as possible gets really boring due to the low difficulty level, so I try to add challenges by restricting what I can and can't use. For example, I once did a terraria playthrough where I only used spell tomes throughout the game (which, if you know anything about Terraria, are fairly sparse).

Despite my wording implying that sticking to a specific class only adds challenge, it highly optimizes the damage that your weapons do, making the tasks that you do in a typical run easier. The 4 main classes are our focus today, and we'll first talk about...

Metric

To describe the viability of a given class, I'm going to heuristically combine the relative ease of completing the game with the potential of the class to perform well at various stages of the game. I'm not going to be doing any math to justify rankings because I am currently too lazy to do something like that, but I'll be discussing why I put a class in a given spot based off of the metrics given here.

I'll also be ranking the classes in both a singleplayer and multiplayer setting because I think that the discussion behind singleplayer viability differs highly from the discussion about multiplayer viabilty.

The Actual Ranking

I'll give the actual ranking here and then explain it later. Are you ready? Here goes:

Singleplayer:

Ranged
Melee
Mage
Summoner

Multiplayer:

Mage
Summoner
Melee
Ranger

O.K, let's talk about it

Some of you may be shaking your head in agreement or disagreement, some of you may be screaming at your computer screen (not many I assume), but allow me to explain.

Singleplayer

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Ranged, Summoner, and Melee

I would first like to talk about the 3 classes with a very defined viability level in singleplayer Terraria.

The Good: Ranger

Ranger is by far the best singleplayer class in Terraria. It's the second most tanky, it deals high DPS from a far range, and it has an abundance of weapons and ammo for it to choose from. A lot of these weapons, such as the Daedalus stormbow, are overpowered as hell. The stormbow can carry your ranger from the beginning of hardmode to plantera while still outclassing other options available. Pre-boss, ore bows are some of the best options available to keep your fragile player away from the threats that early-game Terraria possesses.
Rangers in Terraria are not requried to approach an enemy to deal damage to them, meaning that they can keep their distance. This should imply that rangers are very squishy, but they have the second highest defense out of the armors that are given to you. The tankiness, large variety of weapons, and ability to keep a good distance means that ranger becomes a Jack of all Trades, master of... all Trades. That's very important in singleplayer, as there isn't another player to cover your weaknesses in-game (we'll talk about this more in the multiplayer rating).

The Bad: Summoner

By "bad", I do not mean that I dislike summoner. As stated by the flavor text, summoner is my favorite class.
Summoner is a class that requires a lot to play (in multiple senses of the word) without giving you much reward. Summoner items are still few and far between compared to other classes (even with the recent updates), which means that it's going to be harder to keep up with increasingly stronger foes when you still have gear from 2 bosses ago. Now, this is definitely a slight exaggeration, post-1.4, solo-summoner is very much a viable class that can output high dps, but that DPS requires much more work to achieve than other classes. Summoner is also the squishiest class in the game, and it can't keep the same distance from enemies that ranger or mage can if it wishes to use its whip. Summoner is also more of a specialist than ranger and melee, as it focuses on applying constant chip damage to wittle down the enemies' health while focusing on avoiding attacks. This role is better-suited for multiplayer (which is why it takes the #2 spot), but is not as viable as other strategies in singleplayer. Summoner weapons also don't have very much variety, as most of them are AOE-focused. This fact does, however, make Summoner great for mining, events, and building (which we'll talk about even more in the multiplayer section).

The Ugly: Melee

please do not mention the Zenith, it's an endgame weapon and doesn't belong in this conversation

Melee is a weird case: like ranger, it's a generalist with a focus on tankiness (whereas ranger is a generalist with a focus on dps), but ranger's dominance and mastery of all trades is due to its tankiness and ability to keep a good distance between enemies. Melee's tankiness is due to it needing to get close to enemies, not out of seemingly nowhere like ranger. Because of this, Melee plays like a worse version of ranger (without the ammo, but that isn't really important). Melee users generally stay at mid-range from a boss before either dipping in to get hits in or firing projectiles from their sword. The extremely large variety of melee weapons that provide single-target, AOE, DPS, and even utility mean that melee typically has a decent weapon for any scenario. It is because of these factors that I would consider melee to be a Jack of all trades, master of none. This generalist nature, along with the fact that it's the tankiest class in the game (which makes it easier compared to mage and summoner) places melee solidly in the #2 spot (despite how much I dunked on it).

The Uncatagorized: Mage

Mage's strengths and weaknesses are somewhat disconnected from the other 3 classes. Mage is a specialist like summoner, but its playstyle is much more similar to ranged than any other class. Mage has the highest DPS out of the 4 classes, and it's able to deal with both single-target scenarios and multi-target scenarios very well due to its large variety of weapons. Mage, however, is very squishy, and its reliance on mana means that mage players have to operate on a specific "rhythm" to avoid mana sickness. This means that mage is slightly awkward to play for those who are unfamiliar with the class, thus making it harder to complete the game with. This makes Mage a great class, but the strength of the 2 generalists on this list push it down to #3; not because of the faults of mage, but because of the faults of being a specialist in singleplayer.

Let's summarize:

Ranged : Jack of All Trades, Master of All of Them
Melee : Jack of All Trades, Master of None
Mage : The Woes of being A Specialist
Summoner : Jack of Few Trades, Master of None

Multiplayer

O.K, now that the segment that required the most writing is done, let's talk about multiplayer. This segment is going to be shorter because I already discusses various strengths and weaknesses of the claass that still apply to a multiplayer setting.

As for what multiplayer setting we're talking about, let's assume that it's one where 2 or more agents are trying to cooperate to progress the game.

Mage: The Perks of Being a Specialist

Mage's strengths are now amplified as you have players who can protect you. Mage also has various support abilities post-plantera that are very useful to classes such as melee or summoner. Mage already being a great class has been amplified to it being the best class.

Summoner: Jack of Few Trades, Master of all

Now that summoner has teammates, the chip damage that it provides can be shown in full force. Also, summoner's ability to focus solely on evading attacks mean that it can aggro a boss while other players stay back and heal with less risk of being killed than mage. Like mage, summoner now benefits from being a specialist, as roles that summoner once sucked at are performed by other players (single target, high dps, etc).

Melee: Strong generalist -> O.K specialist

Melee's role in multiplayer switches from being a jack of all trades to a bullet sponge for the squishier classes to use as bait. Now, having a tank is useful, but the chip-damage and aggro-drawing of summoner provides greater utility if forced to choose between the 2 in a multiplayer setting.

Ranged: Renaissance Man in the Modern World

Ranger in multiplayer turns into just another source of DPS without providing as much utility as mage. Because specialists thrive in multiplayer, the inherently generalist nature of ranger means that any function that it performs won't be as good as another class performing said function (constant chip damage vs summoner, tanking vs melee, bursting vs mage, etc). This means that Ranger in multiplayer is just sub-par compared to other classes, much like the death of the renaissance man in favor of specialists that we've seen in the modern world.

one more thing for fun that im not going to elaborate on

Ranking classes based on personal enjoyment

now that I've ranked the classes in both singleplayer and multiplayer, I want to hear what you think about my rankings/your own rankings! Email me and let's talk about it.

I'm going to end this off with my personal singleplayer class rankings, so here they are:

Summoner: fun and challenging
Mage: fun and aesthetically pleasing
Ranger: kind of boring but good for harder seeds
Melee: boring

bye