**REPORTED** Imp Staff messes with enemy immunity frames.

CrimsonClawsTheCat

CrimsonClawsTheCat

Official Terrarian
Steam or GOG
Steam
Single Player/Multiplayer
Single
Operating System
Windows 10
Terraria Version
1.4.1.1
Controls Used
Keyboard/Mouse
CrimsonClawsTheCat said:
I've noticed earlier in my current playthrough with smaller enemies that the Flamarang has been going straight through enemies sometimes. I decided to experiment for a bit and it turns out that the Imp summon is responsible for some of my hits missing. Knowing that a few similar weapons had a fix for this issue, I'm assuming it's a bug. Here's a video I recorded with the Imp Staff and an Ice Boomerang being used on a Mimic.
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It is a reoccurring problem in Terraria that projectiles with penetration are defaulted to global immunity instead of static or local immunity. The default behavior (global immunity) causes the most missed damage, and only by adding special settings to switch to another immunity type do penetrating weapons deal damage reliably. Because of this there are a ton of weapons still using global immunity even though being configured like that does not improve balance and causes missed damage as you have demonstrated.
Global Immunity: Each enemy has one damage cooldown per player.
All damage using global Immunity shares a single damage cooldown. Everything using global immunity can interfere with everything else using global immunity. Early in Terraria's development this was the only immunity type so lots of older weapons tend to use it. This setting preserves old behavior from before "better" immunity types were added.

Static Immunity: Each enemy has one damage cooldown per projectile type.
Each projectile type using static Immunity shares a single damage cooldown. This immunity type allows only one of each projectile to hit each enemy at a time. This is intended for projectiles like bees that have many projectiles overlapping and would deal way too much damage if they could all hit at once. If bees were switched to static immunity, all weapons would be able to deal damage at the same time as bees. In multi-player this is sometimes worse than Global Immunity because players using the same weapons have to share immunity slots with each other.

Local immunity: Each enemy has one damage cooldown per projectile.
With local immunity, the only thing that can stop a projectile only blocks itself from dealing damage is itself. This immunity type completely prevents missed damage, but allowing weapons that produce large numbers of projectiles to deal damage with all of them at once breaks balance for weapons balanced around another immunity type.

Projectiles that don't penetrate enemies and aren't explicitly configured to use static or local immunity won't trigger any of these cooldowns.
Edit: Minor correction
 
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This was an oversight on my part, the Imp projectiles were meant to have local immunity but it appears they do not.
 
I remember Imp Fireball as not having piercing. If it gained piercing then it also gained global immunity. (previously no immunity) Is it supposed to have infinite piercing with no damage reduction per hit? Once it stops being held back by immunity frames it may become completely overpowered, especially for worm type enemies and large crowds.
 
The two mechanics are not related. Piercing frames limits single-target potential, while piercing quantity impacts multi-target potential. With that said, I'm already intending to investigate a cap on the piercing count, as I do not think infinite piercing is necessary on a minion at this stage of the game, nor is it easy to arrange a ton of consecutive hits with it due to the angles it tends to fire at.
 
I've also had my thorn chakram go through queen bee. But I suspected my melee attack speed was at cause here since it wasn't doing it previously when I used centurion(?) armor instead of molten. Might have been the summons I was using as well. I really don't know.
 
KuroShinryu said:
I've also had my thorn chakram go through queen bee. But I suspected my melee attack speed was at cause here since it wasn't doing it previously when I used centurion(?) armor instead of molten. Might have been the summons I was using as well. I really don't know.
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Most likely it was the summons, melee speed only throws boomerang type weapons further to my knowledge
 
Leinfors said:
The two mechanics are not related. Piercing frames limits single-target potential, while piercing quantity impacts multi-target potential...
Click to expand...
The two mechanics are strongly related even though they shouldn't be.

If you take a non-piercing projectile and change no other setting other than penetrate to any number other than 1, the projectile will default to global immunity. This severely limits single target damage potential. This is exactly what I believe happened to the imp staff.

Projectiles that don't have piercing are never blocked by immunity frames of any kind. The second you enable piercing, the weapon can be blocked from dealing damage by anything with global immunity, which incudes ~600 weapons/projectiles in the game right now. Those weapons block any piercing projectiles/minions from dealing damage when you focus fire to kill a strong enemy. Turning on local or static immunity won't allow them to bypass global immunity frames. I think this is problematic. If you turn on piercing you will always sacrifice single-target damage potential.
 
That's not what I meant when I said they aren't related.

I meant that from a balance perspective, immune frame time is one factor, and quantity of pierces (whether it be 2 or Infinity) is another factor.

That piercing frame mechanics are induced by the presence of piercing at all is a given, but that is honestly unrelated.
 
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