Is Moon Lord a terrible boss in your opinion? (2024)

Over time, I have seen many people think about Moon Lord differently. Some people think its fine for a final boss, while some think its one of the worst bosses in the game.
Because of this, I decided to open a poll to see and hear people's opinions - what are your thoughts on the Moon Lord, final boss of Terraria?

I'll go first and tell my opinion here - In my opinion, Moon Lord is terrible and is really not a good final boss. The fight has unfair and unpredictable attacks (not to mention ones like True Eye of Cthulhu Deathrays which are terrible by concept) and has always been a frustrating, unfun simulator of running in one direction and attacking with your Daybreak/Phantasm/Vortex Beater/Nebula Blaze. Just disappointing, really.

Moon lord is horrible in every mechanical way. Literally one (1) of his attacks is acceptable from a design standpoint.

• Phantasmal Eyes are a homing projectile with area denial so ridiculously oppressive that they force you miles away from their origin point and turn the fight into a kitefest.
• Because the fight is now a kitefest and you are now miles away from the boss, the telegraphs for Phantasmal Deathray are simply no longer visible and as a result basically can’t be dodged without either memorizing the rhythm of the fight beforehand or nuking the top eye with Nebula Arcanum before the fight starts.
• Phantasmal Sphere direction is dictated by a mechanic so esoteric that I don’t think anyone who defends this boss actually knows how it works. I’m curious and would like to hear their explanation before I reveal it though, because that mechanic is pretty bad due to its esotericism imo.
• Phantasmal Bolts are actually fine. They would have a similar issue to Phantasmal Deathray but this issue is canceled out by their audio cue.

This is just the first phase and we already have a disaster. The fight forces you to run away and trivialize the boss or get slaughtered by a trillion homing projectiles. Unfortunately this is the better of the two phases. True Eyes of Cthulhu do not sync up if spawned at different times, meaning their Mini-Phantasmal Desthrays can often be desynced and as a result be

due to them spawning on different sides of you and slamming into you from both directions like a giant pair of scissors. How do you avoid this…? Well, you run. You invalidate the entire boss by running or flying at such a high speed that the eyes simply cannot reach you with any of their attacks anymore.

As a result the boss is literally just a brainless kitefest which is incredibly easy or literally impossible with no inbetween, and even if this wasn’t the case there are a multitude of other issues like visibility, unnecessary contact damage, MOONBITE, constant pseudo-screenshake, tedium to resummon (even with the cheapening of celestial sigil you can run out of them and have to do pillars all over again, which is a HUGE issue for new players especially when the boss is so anti-learning like this (there’s only 1 way to fight it and if you don’t abide by that way there’s no indication it’s the “correct” one)), and more.

It really is a mess and I don’t think anyone who disagrees has actually properly analyzed it. It’s actually tied with Destroyer as the worst boss in the entire game imo. Please please rework it, devs. You’ve proved you can make good bosses both before and after Moon Lord was added.

Orchamut said:

The moon bite debuff being shoved in out of nowhere is kind of weird and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

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Moon bite debuff really isn't a danger at that stage of the game because the player has weapons that can deal higher damage than how much he can heal. The only time where its a problem is on low damage challenge runs (such as the ones Sorbet Cafe made)

Meowlegend said:

Moon bite debuff really isn't a danger at that stage of the game because the player has weapons that can deal higher damage than how much he can heal. The only time where its a problem is on low damage challenge runs (such as the ones Sorbet Cafe made)

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Moonbite debuff prevents lifesteal and the tongue healed moon lord before moonbite was added.
They were referring to the lifesteal blocking part. Imo it’s a half-solution to a huge design issue with terraria (lifesteal is completely and utterly broken) which both acknowledges that it’s broken and states refusal to actually nerf the sources of lifesteal it prevents like they need.

Dapling said:

Moonbite debuff prevents lifesteal and the tongue healed moon lord before moonbite was added.
They were referring to the lifesteal blocking part. Imo it’s a half-solution to a huge design issue with terraria (lifesteal is completely and utterly broken) which both acknowledges that it’s broken and states refusal to actually nerf the sources of lifesteal it prevents like they need.

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They're saying that the damage of the player's weapons negates all moon Lord healing, since they do 10-20K DPS

Dapling said:

Moonbite debuff prevents lifesteal and the tongue healed moon lord before moonbite was added.
They were referring to the lifesteal blocking part. Imo it’s a half-solution to a huge design issue with terraria (lifesteal is completely and utterly broken) which both acknowledges that it’s broken and states refusal to actually nerf the sources of lifesteal it prevents like they need.

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To be honest, it is reasonable for him to block lifesteal because if he didn't, you guess what can players do.
If Vampire Knives and Spectre Hood was actually balanced then I would say the debuff is unnecessary.

King Jameth III🌳 said:

They're saying that the damage of the player's weapons negates all moon Lord healing, since they do 10-20K DPS

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I was talking about what Orcamut was referring to.

King Jameth III🌳 said:

10-20K DPS

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That is an exaggeration. Pillar weapons don't do that much DPS, they just deal high enough DPS to make the healing not an issue. This is especially true for Daybreak and Phantasm due to their DPS being much higher than other pillar weapons (without taking minions into account)

Russ Guss Doodles said:

practically the only viable strategy in Expert+ unless you’re tanking the damage

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I don't think you can actually tank ML. The damage he deals is so disgusting that even with high defense, he is probably going to turn you into a blood juice.

Meowlegend said:

I don't think you can actually tank ML. The damage he deals is so disgusting that even with high defense, he is probably going to turn you into a blood juice.

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You can in Expert. Haven’t tested in Master but Beetle Shell blocks half of all damage every 3 seconds so it might be tanky enough that it could work.
Tanking is so strong in this game that I don’t think it really works as a defense for boss issues though to be honest.

I think it's a really difficult and unfair battle. But maybe I'm just a bad fighter...
The deathrays do way too much damage, the first few tries you probably end up fried by it before you could even figure out of his patterns. Prior to 1.4, his deathray did not pass through solid blocks, which made him too easy, but since that change, it's way too hard.
Even with honey, heart statues, ridicolous defense and whatnot, it's impossible to stand your ground, and, like @Dapling said too, the only okay way to fight him is constantly running (or flying) away, as such, you won't see what is he doing, which makes it even more impossible to learn his patterns.
Also bonus point, when stardust dragon (or whatever other summon) just keeps flying by your side and totally ignores the boss because he's way too far.

As if that wouldn't be enough, summoning him involves the whole "late game chain of events" that is Lunatic Cultist & the lunar apocalypse, which is (particularly the later) no fun at all, and is just incredibly tedious to do it multiple times in a row. Yes, you can craft Moon lord's summoning item from fragments, but only a few, and it probably won't be enough when he can fry you in 2 seconds, before you would have the slightest chance to figure out what's even going on.

It's quite different from most other Terraria bosses. You don't have as many good strategies to choose from, some weapons (lifesteal) are arbitrarily blocked out by his moonbite debuff (even if lifesteal is powerful, but still why?), he deals massive dmg with lots of unfair attacks that are hard to dodge - which makes figuring out his patterns very difficult, and you're back to brainlessly grinding stupidly difficult lunar tower aliens for half an hour AGAIN, after he fried you AGAIN with the deathray you failed to dodge.
I mean, it makes some sense that a "Practically a god, his power knows no limits" would be a very difficult battle, but it doesn't scales well with other bosses (IMO), and it's not like most cartoon villain big bosses don't have a bunch of faults that somehow allows the hero to win in a fight that actually looks like some battle, and not just flying to the end of the world and back while spamming random powerful projectiles at the boss' general direction, hoping he's eventually die.

I wonder why I stop most of my playthroughs before Lunatic Cultist...

The fight gives me the feeling the Moon Lord wasn't made for a 1366x768 screen.

It's cool that it barely fits on screen, but usually not all on screen because you don't want to be in the middle of it. It's a problem when you're on one side and you can't see the hand on the other side, but what's even worse is when there's a True Eye of Cthulhu is on the other then side. Good luck dodging Death Rays when you can't see when the True Eyes are about to attack or where they're attacking from. Whenever that happens it feels like it's punishing me for not having a giant screen.

I can say, without a doubt, it is a very flawed battle. I don't particularly hate it, but I really don't like it either. I can see the attempted concept of the boss - a large enemy with multiple targets which slowly becomes a singular target with invincible backup fire - but the high amount of damage it deals basically means there's no way to fight it in a way that feels fair.

After the 1.4 change to the Phantasmal Deathray allowing it to pass through blocks, this battle doesn't feel like it tests any mechanical knowledge of the game beyond "defense is good." The GFB Moon Boulder attack is actually interesting since it is at least a knowledge check that boulders bounce off solid blocks, but that's about all I can say.

Witnessing the Moon Lord changelog in real-time back on 1.3 really cemented that there were core issues with the fight. I know I've shared this before, but those who didn't see the Moon Lord timeline and have only played 1.4 or late 1.3 should look over this to see how fundamentally funny this all was: What is the worst terraria update?

I personally believe that if players are going out of their way to make a boss encounter trivial, the reasoning behind why should be examined. People try to find ways to make daytime Empress easier because they want Terraprisma early, people try to clear Duke pre-Mech due to how powerful its gear is if you get it early, etc.. but people wanted to trivialize Moon Lord because its gear was just way stronger than anything else to the point of eclipsing everything and also it just wasn't fun to many players.

I think there are decent core ideas behind the boss, but they need refining, and I don't personally think I'm qualified to really say what or wouldn't work better. The first thing I'd suggest would be changing how the eyes work and have the battle cycle between either the head and both hands at the same time, while the hands share a larger health pool, but I'm unsure how to really address attacks from there.

However, in its current form, I feel that as long as you have the ability to run in a straight line and outrun the boss, you will otherwise either be kiting it from a safe distance to actually be able to dodge its attacks or you will be honey pit Heart Statue tanking it with a full Warding setup only bothering to dodge the Deathray with very little in between.

I do kind of feel that Master mode also has a bit to do with it, while the damage values you experience in Expert are still pretty rough, these attacks definitely weren't designed around taking 250+ damage per hit in mind

Three True Eyes is just so much as well, I wonder how it'd feel if the True Eyes only spawned after all three parts were broken or if it was just a single True Eye after two breaks or somesuch