In-depth Hardmode weapon tier list

What do you mean? I never noticed ravens doing 'nothing'.
Xeno instantly teleports, tiger pounces.
While your character is moving, look carefully at ravens, they always have slight delays in swithing between enemies, especially when they are far from each other.
Ultimately, in the course of 9-min night, it results in significant damage loss
 
Ravens do much better because they have a higher base damage and can hit much more often, but I have noticed that occasionally they stop chasing enemies to follow the player and end up flying around doing nothing.
Realistically, you'll be using a tag-dmg whip +ichor with xenos. This mitigates armor-penetration factor.
Tigers scaled damage per-hit is multiple times higher than ravens.
 
Ravens do much better because they have a higher base damage and can hit much more often, but I have noticed that occasionally they stop chasing enemies to follow the player and end up flying around doing nothing.
I think I noticed that occasionally during the pumpkin moon, it was usually just 1 or 2 ravens. That happened a lot more often with the tempest staff though.

It never happened during the empress fights.
 
I think I noticed that occasionally during the pumpkin moon, it was usually just 1 or 2 ravens. That happened a lot more often with the tempest staff though.

It never happened during the empress fights.
Tempest is indeed worse than Ravens, it misses a lot.
Even 0.1 sec delay in 100 switches between enemies results in 10 sec of uselessness. – 30K dmg total loss at 3000 DPS
In PM, there are hundreds of ememies
Compared to Xeno and Tiger
 
I was comparing them to Sanguines specifically, of course Xenoes attack faster and Tiger hits harder.
If you were talking about Sangune vs Raven, than... Excuse me, really, Im totally angry and blind Nimbus
Yes, pure raven DMG is more. The only thing – stay closer to EoL.
I was thinking about Raven and tiger since they were relatively inthe same tier
 
If you were talking about Sangune vs Raven, than... Excuse me, really, Im totally angry and blind Nimbus
Yes, pure raven DMG is more. The only thing – stay closer to EoL.
I was thinking about Raven and tiger since they were relatively inthe same tier
Yeah the desert tiger and xeno staff did better than the raven during the pumpkin moon I'd agree with that. Where I got different results was raven vs. sanguine. The only time where they were comparable was during duke fishron in every other scenario the ravens outperformed sanguine.
 
Yeah the desert tiger and xeno staff did better than the raven during the pumpkin moon I'd agree with that. Where I got different results was raven vs. sanguine. The only time where they were comparable was during duke fishron in every other scenario the ravens outperformed sanguine.
My results of Ravens and Sangune were so close because of my way of fighting Fishron and EoL.
I try to escape as far and fast as possible – not very suitable for relatively slow, but more damaging ravens – occasional high bursts of damage as a result.
Sangune always damages but slowly.
If I stood closer and moved a bit slower – ravens would be much better
 
My results of Ravens and Sangune were so close because of my way of fighting Fishron and EoL.
I try to escape as far and fast as possible – not very suitable for relatively slow, but more damaging ravens – occasional high bursts of damage as a result.
Sangune always damages but slowly.
If I stood closer and moved a bit slower – ravens would be much better
That's probably the difference, I like to keep threats on screen so thier easier to aim at.. and so I can actually hit with the whip. I noticed that in your Empress test, the ravens performed worse than sanguine in the 'no whip' category, but performed comparably when you used a whip. I think it's because you tried to stay closer to use the whip

I will say though ravens do move pretty fast. For martian saucer phase 2 I would just hover in 1 direction with my hoverboard and the ravens would fly up to the saucer and stay in its hitbox dealing massive damage. I also pulled this off on Empress of light sometimes, when she was doing her prismatic bolt attack and follows the player.
 
Guys, I recently tried Tempest Staff with combo of Kaleidoscope and Dark Harvest.
The results are good – early 18 wave! Tempest has bad reputation, but its only slightly behind Ravens (early 19 wave), Tiger (mid 18).
Only close-to-death Ice Queens are somewhet problematic to hit.
Is it only for me or it is an A tier summon now (here at least) ?

Against Fishron and EoL its average
 
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Guys, I recently tried Tempest Staff with combo of Kaleidoscope and Dark Harvest.
The results are good – early 18 wave! Tempest has bad reputation, but its only slightly behind Ravens (early 19 wave), Tiger (mid 18).
Only close-to-death Ice Queens are somewhet problematic to hit.
Is it only for me or it is an A tier summon now?
That might be pushing it a bit, because it is still nowhere near the same level as the other Fishron drops. Occasionally performing worse against Ravens is not a good sign considering that most people go for the Raven Staff first. That said, it does have a *few* good matchups. Its performance against Empress was good (I'm willing to overlook the fact that it took ages for it to finish off the last sliver of her health bar) and it worked fine for Cultist since he stays still a lot the time.

It doesn't have an especially impressive synergy with either Kaleidoscope or Firecracker, so its damage output can't really compare with similarly-tiered summons that receive extreme boosts from one or the other. It also has a lot of moments where it obviously sucks, which casts a shadow over its otherwise okay single-target performance. Under no circumstances would Tempest Staff ever be a top choice, but I could see it being C+, maybe B- if I'm being generous. It definitely isn't A tier because of its awful return speed, which is barely better than Ravens.
 
Everyone's talking about what the best summon is, but I would like to add that, although it seemed to overall be the worst. I was surprised at how well the tempest staff did considering its former reputation.

The thing even got a comparable time to desert tiger against empress of light.
7 tempest staffs is really good at crowd control
 
Did some testing with a 'post pumpkin moon impure summoner build', My main weapon was the sniper rifle with crystal bullets, no ichor, no tag bonuses.
I got tired of doing events, so I'm just comparing duke and Empress this time.
1609948867957.png

All menacing.
Summoning potion, bewitching, and wrath... I think I ran out of food and forgot to restock.
ok... I know you probably won't have betsy wings at this point, just pretend that's a hoverboard or something.
1609955282579.png

The results here are pretty similar to before, raven and sanguine perform about equally, and the desert tiger does better.
Also I decided to try out the deadly sphere... now I remeber why I forgot about it for previous tests.
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Without the help of the kaleidiscope and ichor, the raven loses the advantage it had over desert tiger, its now performs about as well as it.
Sanguine is still a much worse option.
This is just not the fight deadly sphere is made for.

I was waiting on some more test before I suggested any tier changes.

Xeno staff, and desert tiger can stay in S tier, they seem to be the best overall.

Sanguine staff can also stay where it is, although it was one of the worst performers its available at the start of hardmode. None of the other minions I tested here can say they helped with the mech bosses.

Raven should be bumped up to A, it was never bad in any situation I put it in. Its worst performance was against duke fishron, and it wasn't noticeably worse than anything else. Its best performance was against empress of light, where it was at least as good as the desert tiger if not better. Calling this thing a side-grade to sanguine really undersells it.

With the tempest staff I'm juggling between B- and C+, it's objectively worse than the raven staff, and it comes at a later progression tier. Still it has at least passable damage output.
 

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Getting loads of Empress of Light practice right now. Here's what I've observed:

Raven Staff and Tempest Staff both get her down to half health just fine. Sanguine Staff takes quite a bit longer but that's not a deal-breaker since this isn't the phase most people die on.

Then she activates phase 2 and it all goes downhill. I think it's 100% fair to say that both the Raven Staff and Tempest Staff are dog:red: against a phase 2 Empress that you're trying to dodge realistically. Sanguine Staff was also dog:red:, but that was mainly due to its damage output not having been very good in the first place. Of the three, I think Raven Staff wins here due to being able to damage Empress during a few phases where Tempest Staff cannot (Prismatic Bolts iirc). I think it would be a good idea to measure each weapon's DPS against phase 2 specifically. I can at least vouch for Xeno and Desert Tiger doing fine against that phase.
 
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