Trencha

To be fair, several of them were also top Dota players before HoN was a thing. But even with that said, what ex-HoN teams such as Fnatic and most of Dignitas have achieved in Dota 2 is a credit to how competitive the game was and, of course, a credit to how talented those players are.

Question is accompanied by quite a long justification, I provided a tl;dr summary at the bottom for your convenience, should you wish to use it.

Terraria has a lot of grindy parts to it. I don't mind so much in the early stages of the game when you're trying to grind out enough Copper, Silver, Gold etc to make more armour and weapons. You're exploring and discovering new places so you don't really notice the grind. Then when you get to Demonite and Meteorite and such it's ok because these are acquired via events in the game like boss fights and destroying Shadow Orbs, not via mining, and when you're acquiring jungle gear you're still exploring at the same time. New gear like Murakumo and the Rocket Boots are acquired by exploration and more game events.

But then when you get to hell and you have to grind out a lot of Hellstone and Obsidian, I always start thinking "I've already done a bunch of grinding at the start of the game, this is one of the last parts of the 'normal mode' game, why does this game start and end with a grind?". Then once I've unlocked "hard mode", mining all the new ores, grinding the various Souls, including boss souls, this all seems like so much of an anticlimax and not particularly fun, especially since a lot of it occurs in areas that I have already explored and I have no motivation to go back and explore them again just to find new ores. I can make lots of Spelunker Potions to help out, but that's a pretty substantial grind in itself.

I feel like this end-game grind puts off a lot of people who play Terraria, and is the reason why a couple of people like TotalBiscuit/Jesse Cox and Tobuscus did very popular YouTube playthroughs of the game but never even fought a hard mode boss.

Has anything been done in patch 1.2 to address this perceived issue? If yes, can you tell us some of the things? And if no, why not? Do you even think it's an issue?

tl;dr I think that a lot of the end-game in Terraria has too much grinding (mining ores and acquiring souls) and is quite dull compared to the rest of the game. Thoughts?