Game Mechanics Iframes and piercing damage need a rework.

a31337

Terrarian
What is the common factor between the Blade Staff, Terraprisma, Zenith, Last Prism, Eventide, Nightglow and Razorblade Typhoon (and possibly more weapons to count) that make them so good?
They do not follow the general rule of iframes.

What is the common factor between the Meteor Shot, Jester Arrow, Hellfire Arrow, Unholy Arrows that make them such a terrible ammunition pick?
They follow the general rule of iframes.

The newly added weapons to Terraria will completely neglect the 10 tick invincibility frame. And there's no real way of making them follow the rule because the weapons would become completely useless. So why not remove the current piercing invincibility system altogether?

Hear me out now. Terraria has 2 types of piercing damage.
  • Long lasting piercing [LLP]: This is the piercing damage that will take a long time to despawn, if ever. Examples include summons, sentries, the Last Prism, Razorblade Typhoon. Anything that can deal damage multiple times to the enemy.
  • Short lasting piercing [SLP]: This is the piercing damage that can despawn quickly and is the type of damage which (probably) forced the creation of piercing iframes so as to not make them absurdly overpowered. Examples include the majority of pre-hardmode piercing ammunition: Jester arrows, unholy arrows, even the Retinamini summoned by the Optic staff fires SLP lasers.
The problem with the current piercing system is that it makes the enemies completely invulnerable to any sort of damage, except maybe summon damage [tests required], for a whole 10 ticks. This limits piercing weapons to a slow 6 shots per second at any given time, and once you hit enemies with piercing projectiles they will completely ignore even non-piercing damage. Using the meteor shots with the S.D.M.G means you're, no pun intended, shooting yourself in the foot and limiting your DPS by as low as 60% of your damage with musket balls! My rework would separate the 2 types of piercing damage and make them deal damage in a different way.
  • LLP rework: Once a piercing projectile of this type passes through the enemy, iframes activate for that single projectile and last 10 ticks (or varied amounts of ticks). This means that if another LLP projectile passes through the enemy within those 10 ticks, it will also deal damage to the enemy instead of whiffing the shot completely because of global invincibility.
  • SLP rework: Once a piercing projectile of this type passes through the enemy, the enemy registers a single hit from the projectile, then ignores it. No iframes are activated.
This rework means that you will never have to suffer from global invincibility caused by projectiles. Some weapon combos would be actually useable, for example the Chlorophyte Shotbow or Tsunami with jester arrows would not be suicidal anymore, because the SLP rework would allow them to hit a single enemy 3-5 times. More and more weapons seem to completely ignore the current 10 tick invincibility frames anyway.

edit: fixed spelling errors
 
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