As always, rules for this thread:
-DO NOT post suggestions.
-DO NOT critique unreleased features. Wait until you've had a chance to try them before passing judgement.
With that out of the way:
I'm a day early on the dev diary this week (I normally post them Mondays), but it's been a couple of weeks since I did one, and I seem to be at an appropriate point to talk about what I'm doing, so I figured no time like the present :)
Allow me to open with my usual screenshot from my world, which this week relates directly to what I've decided to work on next:
I'll start off with two points about this right off the bat:
-I was pleasantly surprised by the wither, and had some fun defeating him. Did so without a single death and without consulting the wiki on him beforehand either. I suspect though that it will suffer the same fate as most boss mobs in almost any game in that they're cool for a little while the first time you encounter them, but then they're basically "done" as game content and rapidly lose their interest. Ultimately, this makes them a development time sync where the same effort is better spent elsewhere.
-Beacons suck ass.
Seriously...on the 2nd one, I don't think I've seen such a decent idea so brutally sodomized in vanilla before. They're right up there with the enderdragon in terms of lost potential. By contrast to the wither, this is a block we could potentially get a lot of use out of and thus would have been a great thing to spend development time on.
Specific observations on them:
-They're frigging useless. I guess that about sums it up :)
-They're seriously underpowered to the point where I have no idea why I'd build one. This contrasts sharply with them being a cool large structure that takes a fair amount of work to create, and seriously, after going through all the trouble of building one, the actual usage of them is a huge let down. And yes, this is one of those rare instances where I'm complaining about something of Mojang's being underpowered instead of over. Go figure :)
-I have no idea why powers aren't material dependent. Currently, there's no reason you'd ever want to build one of these out of diamond. It's pretty much guaranteed that everyone is just going to use iron for them, and no other material unless it's strictly for aesthetics.
-The GUI is a frigging mess. What you're supposed to do with it is in no way obvious, and the material sacrifice to power it again makes no sense because why you'd use anything other than iron is beyond me. Honestly, I don't even think this thing needs a GUI to begin with.
So, my next task given that these things are potentially really cool, and potentially a really nice reward for completing a rather difficult in-game task (everything from collecting the wither skulls, to killing the wither, to collecting the materials to build the pyramid), is to rebalance these things to make them actually useful to have around, more rewarding to build as a result, and to refine the way they work so that different materials actually matter and probably to get rid of the GUI entirely.
Again, I think they're a potentially very cool idea (probably the coolest in 1.4) that was just terribly implemented, so I'm quite keen of fixing them up with my usual minimal amount of effort and turning them into something interesting.
Beyond that, this week I also plan on tackling specific reactions for each animal in the nether and the end dimension, and will likely be thrust back into version updating later in the week when 1.4.4 is officially released.
And don't worry...I still plan on the explosive themed update for Novemeber 5th/10th/???, I just really want to put all the remaining 1.4 related issues to rest before moving onto that. It's still definitely coming though :)