Weapons & Equip Desert tiger is a massive dissapointment

Terru

Terrarian
For a while, I thought that the desert tiger was pretty nifty, kinda like the stardust dragon, but it didn't take long for me to realise that it's just the pirate staff with more damage and only one minion. It's main issue is that it's a melee minion, which means that it's damage is incredibly inconsistent, the worst with flying enemies, which just happens to be around 80% of terraria's bosses, for example. Even normal walking enemies are a problem if they decide to jump around, which means that the tiger has to also jump with them and stay on them, which just like the pirates, it rarely can. So what you get is a summon that sure, does a ton of damage, but is only one superpowered minion, said minion being melee only, therefore nearly useless against flying enemies or any enemy with even a hint of mobility. It cannot protect you, since it has trouble focusing on even a single enemy.

However, the thing is, it could easily be fixed. Y'see, it has that one move where it curls into a ball and pounces on enemies, regardless of where they are. That's great! ..except that it has a cooldown and it does it mostly randomly. If it did that move more consistently, that would improve it somewhat. But by far, the biggest thing that makes me ponder, is that the wiki says that it's supposed to latch onto the enemies like the spider staff. It does not. I tested it on the eye of cthulhu, all it did was jump up and down to try and keep up with it's flying, massively decreasing it's dps. This was with platforms by the way, if there were no platforms, it probably would have taken a lot longer to defeat the eye of cthulhu, the literal first boss of the game. Is the desert tiger not latching a bug? Is the latching incredibly rare? At the moment it just feels like a single pirate minion with a lot of damage and an occasional pounce at enemies.
 
I agree, by the time you are able to farm for the key in order to open the chest the tiger becomes irrelevant due to all the late game flying bosses. The summon was cool to me at first then when I saw it in boss battle it was extremely underwhelming.
 
I haven't even used it yet and it seems incredibly disappointing, just based on watching others use it.

They should just turn the tiger into a passive pet of some sort and completely redo the summon in that chest.
 
I was under the impression that it worked like the spiders, latching onto a target and rending for a while, which sounds good on paper to me. Maybe it just needs to be stickier? I havent used it yet, still looks fun for a good summon to use when you dont want cluttered screen but also dont want to deal with zombies.
 
I feel like there best option would be to make it a defensive summon that doesn't take up a slot (that way it feels worth getting and keeping throughout the rest of the game, like the vampire knives). Reduce the aggro range but increase it's damage so that enemies that get too close will take damage, something like the guardian from the stardust armor set. Perhaps it could vanish in a shadow and deal constant damage to the closest enemy to you within its range. You could also keep the multi level by making it a 3 level minion, with its first level being free.
 
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