Fair warning,
Wall of Text has awoken. I got really invested into the subject and probably typed out way more than I needed to. Also, sorry admins for getting off topic.
First of all, your video was very well made and showed credit to facetanking that I didn’t see before, so kudos on that. I still don’t agree with it being objectively the best build though, more around an alt setup if you know what you’re doing. I’ll elaborate on that later.
Platinum Armor + Full Warding + Ironskin Potion + Bast Statue. That's over 50 defense.
You can see it in action here, I didn't even have 100% Warding. I obtained these gears perfectly fine during my playthrough, it didn't take a crazy amount of grinding or anything.
Although it’s easier to reach 54 defense early game than I thought (I’ll admit I overlooked Well Fed and Bast Statue), I still don’t agree with a tank build being the best way to race down the Eye. I’ll start off by looking at how much it costs to apply this build at this stage:
We’ll assume 12 defense for free from consumable buffs that aren’t hard to get
-300 Platinum Ore for another 20, this is probably the easiest on here. Mining ore isn’t nearly as hard as people say it is, imo.
-Underground Desert: Bast Statue, 1/9 chance in a chest: or fishing (20% chance to obtain crate with crate potion, 9.3% to be oasis crate, 1/8 to be a bast statue) for another 5. A lot of RNG in this - you could get a house with Bast right outside the Desert, or have to fish for hours on end.
-We’d want at 4 warding modifiers to get another 16 defense, bringing us to 53. It looks like most accessories at this tier have a sell price between 50 silver and 1 good, meaning 83 silver or 1.66 gold, and this is neglecting prices increasing with modifiers. You can get 19 different modifiers, meaning between your four accessories you set to Warding, you could need to spend *over a platinum* on
average (this can statistically vary, a lot) reforging. You’d need several dozens of gems for stained glass of a lot of time to farm frogs for sauteed frog legs to wield this money pre-boss. You could settle for smaller reforges, but then you’d have to reforge more accessories.
-In order to reforge this to begin with, you need to meet the requirements for, encounter, and defeat a goblin army.
Now, I believe you that this is attainable if you make it your goal, the price is a bit less than I thought before, but let’s look at something else you could do with this time:
-Make a mixed set of tiers 2-4 armor
-Make a gold or platinum bow
-Gather torches, wood, stone and ice for frostburn arrows
-Find hermes boots or sunflowers + swiftness potions
-Use the hours you saved not grinding to move on to the worm, jungle and dungeon tier
And this is perfectly capable for Eye of Cthulhu. It may not be a free win by taking 1 damage from the eye, but if you try at least a little bit, it sets you up for success. A 1-damage-per hit build is, although reasonably effective, simply not the *best* way to take on the eye, although not the *worst*.
When it comes to Hardmode, even Melee/Summon hybrid has no issue getting over 100 defense Pre-mech, and Worm Scarf can provide further protection. You're right about a tank build harming movement, but DPS? It's the opposite. Titanium facetank does far more damage than anything else. Even in Pre-hardmode, your DPS won't be low since you get boosted by Armor penetration (Sharpening Station) and/or Summon Tag anyway.
As for damage, in order for your damage to *not* be hindered by a defense build, you have to use weapons specifically designed for facetanking, and this wasn’t what I meant by a tanky build. If you’re not specifically using Titanium Armor and Fetid Baghs to facetank, you’re specifically giving up 28% damage in order to take 28 less damage per hit in the field of reforges. You also miss out on the benefits of other accessories that aren’t Worm Scarf, a shield, etc. Usually, a build with an offensive merit misses out on the benefits of a build with a defensive merit, and vice versa. *This scenario* is what I meant by tanky builds having less damage, I’ll admit I wasn’t accounting for a complete facetank.
Now I was actually really interested by this facetanking strat in the video, and I want to look into that further. I’ll go back on my previous argument that this isn’t effective, seeing your video prove me otherwise. But I also noticed things in the video that I have to point out as not being free about these fights, and how this build poses a need for ability as does any other build. You can use weapons like Fetid Bagh, Blade, Titanium and Snapthorn to However, this *does* require skill, as funny as sitting on a boss is. Here are some of the challenges I see with facetanking that the player has to overcome:
-Spazmatism’s fire breath deals 162 damage and his body deals 190, and both spazmatism and retinazer move around quite a bit, and in order to keep up with them, you need quite a bit of effort. Falling back during the flamethrower and then jumping back into spazmatism while also micromanaging health and whips, as in your video.
-Skeletron Prime deals a whopping 230 damsge while spinning, and while he isn’t and his damage is reasonable, he’s flying around like an angry wasp. In your video, you took rather significant damage from Prime’s spinning - almost a third of your health bar per hit, and when he wasn’t spinning it required significant effort to stay on top of him. Plus, I saw how low your health was at the end of that fight, and how much time you cut out where you simply stayed away from the boss and let your health regen judging by the position of the moon.
-You have to *stop* attacking temporarily in order to eat up the whip speed from the Snapthorn - if you mess this up, you could actually miss out on damage from Feral Claws. I myself have a physical issue with this - juggling multiple weapons within the 4 second timespan of whips is reasonably difficult if you don’t have a very good sense of rhythm.
-I concede on Destroyer, I saw how effective the tank build was versus him, but the same thing I said about Eye applies here: do you really need this overcomplication of a setup when you can just Dart Pistol, Life Drain or Daedalus Stormbow him to death with little to no issues?
Now, my point is that this may be an equally effective build to everything else, unlike I previously thought, but I’m not convinced it’s free like you say it is. There’s strategic merit to it, such as the caution you had to take during Twins’ second phase and to watch your health versus Prime. There’s a need for precise movement like dodging a boss, but in this case it’s to stick to the boss when needed, fall back when you’re losing health, and avoid trying to tank deadly attacks like the flamethrower. You need to have practice and experience swapping out weapons on the get go and need accurate and precise timing to do so. Finally, a build like this does require significantly more setup than a get-go class build, like I described versus the Eye of Cthulhu. Put all this together, and I have to call a facetank build as effective a strategy as basic defense or offense, but not a better one.
Finally, I’ll acknowledge that this facetank build does get significantly easier to sustain in lower difficulties, considering the proportionally higher influence of defense, and lower boss attacks, but at the same time I do have to point out that this applies to any build: dodging boss attacks, recovering from hits, sustaining enough DPS even with weaker weapons. Maybe a facetank is by far the most effective build in Normal Mode - I’d have to play around with that - but for everything I’ve listed so far, I can’t support the argument that it’s the easiest build or the best path for a free win.
Between all this, although I take back what I said about these builds not being as viable, I don’t see the merit in Melee - specifically facetanking, being *objectively the best class*. I disagree with this forum’s obsession with calling Melee the weakest, but as I see it, specs into melee and especially into a complete facetank as you provided requires a certain skill set and a significantly above average need for preparation, that mean they are not *more* viable than other builds.
Wall of Text has been defeated.