During my testing, I actually found out that Obsidian only became stronger than Spider when paired with Firecracker due to its fast whip speed, if that makes sense? Like whenever I used minions that didn't have global immunity, Spider performed much better than obsidian, when both were using durendel. Like... if you lower Obsidian's whip speed and made it so all minions didn't cap out on DPS at about 3 or 4 minions then Obsidian wouldn't be as strong as Spider. You actually get more benefit out of having LESS summons currently, which is why Obsidian shines so much. The reason is because of the global immunity issue. Remove that, then Summons would perform much better and there would actually be a benefit for having more minions.
yes, but this has nothing to do with obsidian armour being too strong, and your solution would only exacerbate that. I do agree that immunity frames are an issue for summoners, but it may be that the devs aren't willing or able to address it, in part I suspect because of the immense amount of rebalancing that would then be required after the fix to keep minions from becoming overpowered across the board
I know this is probably also off of the table, but I like the idea of capping the number of summons on minions that won't be changed to get local immunity. The game lets you make a bad choice by allowing you to summon many duplicates of these minions while subtly undermining your damage. It is hidden balance information that manifests as what seems like a bug.
yes, but this has nothing to do with obsidian armour being too strong, and your solution would only exacerbate that. I do agree that immunity frames are an issue for summoners, but it may be that the devs aren't willing or able to address it, in part I suspect because of the immense amount of rebalancing that would then be required after the fix to keep minions from becoming overpowered across the board
It arguably is related to obsidian armor, since it makes the 1 extra summon slot on bee armor, (which is the only advantage it has over obsidian) less valuable.
I know this is probably also off of the table, but I like the idea of capping the number of summons on minions that won't be changed to get local immunity. The game lets you make a bad choice by allowing you to summon many duplicates of these minions while subtly undermining your damage. It is hidden balance information that manifests as what seems like a bug.
Summoning more minions will never make you do less damage (not after the piercing changes made in 1.4, unless I missed one).
While you may be making a poor strategic choice by focusing on high minion count after it is no longer beneficial, you are not decreasing your damage, just receiving less return for your value.
Additionally, this is an entirely boss-centric argument, as more active minions may be more viable in group combat scenarios, where more minions can result in more damage output against those targets.
Summoning more minions will never make you do less damage (not after the piercing changes made in 1.4, unless I missed one).
While you may be making a poor strategic choice by focusing on high minion count after it is no longer beneficial, you are not decreasing your damage, just receiving less return for your value.
Additionally, this is an entirely boss-centric argument, as more active minions may be more viable in group combat scenarios, where more minions can result in more damage output against those targets.
Ok so minions like the sanguine bat and blade staff are allowed to have local immunity to help thier boss performance, but can still potentially do more damage in crowd control scenarios. Seems totaally fair that they get it but none of the dumb 1.2 minions do.
Summoning more minions will never make you do less damage (not after the piercing changes made in 1.4, unless I missed one).
While you may be making a poor strategic choice by focusing on high minion count after it is no longer beneficial, you are not decreasing your damage, just receiving less return for your value.
Additionally, this is an entirely boss-centric argument, as more active minions may be more viable in group combat scenarios, where more minions can result in more damage output against those targets.
While you may be making a poor strategic choice by focusing on high minion count after it is no longer beneficial, you are not decreasing your damage, just receiving less return for your value.
Except it is not having a high total minion count that gives diminishing returns. It is having a high minion count for a specific type of minion.
These are the "blessed" minions that scale single target damage linearly with minion count. With these you are never punished for having as many as you want.
Finch Staff
Hornet Staff
Blade Staff
Sanguine Staff
Pirate Staff
Pygmy Staff
Raven Staff
Xeno Staff
Tempest Staff
Stardust Cell Staff (edit: this one I'm not completely sure about)
Terraprisma
Special Case summons with unique scaling that is generally worse than minions from the blessed category:
Stardust Dragon Staff
Desert Tiger Staff
These "cursed" summon items give diminished damage per minion if you summon too many, but always give full damage for the first minon of that type. Extremely unintuitive that there is no way to tell apart these minions from the ones that do scale, and the number needed before diminishing returns varies by minion.
Which leads to my biggest problem: Spiders are good for the first phase, but will never attack her while she's in the air. As this is a very mobile fight, the Spiders will just stay flying next to me. This is why I loved the Blade Staff; its niche of being reliable in fast fights, without being an absolute carry like the Bats are.
The Spiders' only chance at dealing damage is when Queenie is close to the ground or platforms, where they will be waiting to strike. This means that, theoretically, if I had many layers of extremely long platforms throughout the sky, the Spiders would come in more handy for the second phase.
So while her fight is possible with Spiders, it doesn't feel too great in the second phase.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong? If I stay near the ground or change directions or don't fly enough (things that would allow more Spider attacks), I get swarmed by her minions and projectiles. Maybe that's a result of not having as much experience with her fight compared to the years of experience with all the others?
So either I suffer through Queenie with Spiders to get my Blades, or I stomp her (and the next 6 bosses) with Bats, rendering the Blades pointless.
I dunno, feels kinda off to me.
I recall their climbing speed to be lesser than their jumping speed, but if they can really keep up with Queen Slime this way, I'll be willing to test this again.
Summoning more minions will never make you do less damage (not after the piercing changes made in 1.4, unless I missed one).
While you may be making a poor strategic choice by focusing on high minion count after it is no longer beneficial, you are not decreasing your damage, just receiving less return for your value.
Additionally, this is an entirely boss-centric argument, as more active minions may be more viable in group combat scenarios, where more minions can result in more damage output against those targets.
Perhaps but with whips applying a focus marker onto enemies making all summons attack it at once, (especially noticable in expert or master mode), you won't be doing as much damage as you should be on paper due to minions attacking whenever they'll do no damage from another minion applying an immunity frame, resulting in a lil bit of wasted damage potential. But, either way, I suppose that as long as you mix your minions up, picking the ones that won't interrupt one another you might be able to get more damage? I don't know.
But, Summoner is definitely in a better place than before. But I just really do wonder if there's a way to make it so the difference between the worst class and the best class isn't so much.
I had initially believed that items that use global immunity did not stop damage from projectiles (including minions) with local immunity, but that isn't the case at all. You can see this by getting a sluggish wooden hammer and watching how minions that use local immunity stop attacking during each swing. Even if you do this with fast melee weapons what ends up happening is your minions sync up with your weapon swings and start dealing damage in-between weapon swings. When melee weapons are slow your minions are stalled for a long time because enemy invincibility frames increase the slower your melee weapon is. Flails and whips get local immunity so they don't have this problem. Lots of magic weapons also have global immunity so magic tends to interfere with minion damage, which is not so great for users of the Forbidden Armor.
Immunity types explanation:
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 most weapons use it. This setting preserves old behavior from before "better" immunity types were added. It appears that many hand swung melee weapons only support this immunity type.
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 in theory intended for projectiles that have many projectiles overlapping and would deal way too much damage if they could all hit at once, but most weapons that have that problem still use global immunity. In multi-player this is sometimes worse than Global Immunity because players using the same weapons have to share immunity slots with each other. Currently this immunity mode is barely used, and is only relevant for firework rockets and several summon minions.
Local immunity: Each enemy has one damage cooldown per projectile.
With local immunity, many projectiles of various types can deal damage at the same time, but they will still be interrupted by other projectiles that use global immunity. This immunity type never blocks other sources of 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.
No Immunity: Projectiles that don't penetrate enemies and aren't explicitly configured to use static or local immunity won't trigger any of these cooldowns, and can deal damage even when global immunity is active. Non-piercing ranger weapons are common this category.
I did not filter out all of the non-damaging projectiles, so some entries are irrelevant.
There are many entire classes of weapons that use global immunity but have no particular reason preventing it from being changed to local Immunity. (Boomerangs, Gemstaves, Throwing Weapons, etc.)
Examples of weapons that can't move to local immunity without increasing damage due to overlapping projectiles, but could use static immunity to not block other weapons from dealing damage: InfernoFork, Bees, Vilethorn, Crystal Vile Shard, Nettleburst, Crimson Rod, Nimbus Rod, Electrosphere Launcher.
Yoyos would be able to deal damage with their counterweight at the same time as the yoyo if they were moved to local immunity. It may not be possible to stop using global immunity while preserving the current behavior without special case hacks or new settings.
Local immunity projectiles with a cooldown of -1 are only allowed to hit each enemy minion once no matter how much time passes. Local immunity projectiles with a cooldown of -2 either has some special case code in the game to set a cooldown or is possibly bugged and uses global immunity instead.
It should be possible for local immunity projectiles to deal damage when an enemy has global immunity, but local immunity projectiles overwrite the global immunity counter when dealing damage for reasons that probably make no sense in the current version of the game.
Local immunity projectiles with a cooldown of -1 ensures a piecing projectile only hits each enemy once, but global immunity piercing projectiles can only avoid this by moving past the enemy quickly before the enemy is hit again. MetorShot and HighVelocityBullet use a cooldown of 10 which could allow them to strike a very large enemy more than once. If they had been configured to have a cooldown of -1 they would not be able to.
There is special code to treat the stardust dragon as one projectile for immunity. Special case code like that can replace static immunity for certain use cases and does not have the drawback of sharing immunity with other players in multiplayer.
Spiders are much more powerful than other minions limited by static immunity because each of the 3 sprites gets a cooldown. If all your spiders are the same you are limited to 1/3 of the dps you would have if you had one of each. Spawned spiders are completely random so this happens occasionally even with more than 3 spiders spawned.
I am NOT caught up on this thread, but I want to note that I just independently found out that Imp fireballs were not properly updated to use local immunity at all, compared to my initial notes indicating that they should have it.
Regardless of any other considerations, I intend to resolve that.
I just tested an early-Hardmode Summoner loadout against Queen Slime. Obsidian Armor, Firecracker, Spiders, and a mix of prehardmode and early-Hardmode accessories (harpy wings, brain of confusion, pygmy necklace, shield of cthulhu, the works really). Of course, buffs too.
Yeah, it works. Very well, I'd say, too.
I think Summoner vs QS is not even an issue. I didn't even bother with putting background walls on my arena.
Even if Obsidian Armor is nerfed a bit (which I'm sure it will be), I'm certain it'll still be a match for QS. After my testing, my worries about whether or not I will be able to get a Blade Staff in my ongoing Summoner run have been completely removed.
It *technically* deals melee damage, but for the sake of using it, it’s not considered a melee accessory, it’s a mobility accessory. Dashing is an essential ability in Expert+ and it’s fair for any loadout to use the Shield.
??? Shield of Cthulhu is for dashing, I wouldn't consider it a weapon. I don't care if it has a negligible amount of melee damage, I'm using it no matter what class I play. That's like banning mounts for dealing summon damage if you're not playing a summoner.
I don't know if this falls under the balance category, but adding the ability to change the position of the NPC flag in the House menu should partially resolve some of the NPC happiness issues.
This would be a tremendous amount of code work that would probably require a dramatic rework to the housing system to support. Not an option at this time.
I'll say it as much as it is necessary; summoners would overall be stronger if all minions have local immunity instead of global immunity. They lose so much dps due to minions fighting against one another to deal damage.
yes, but this has nothing to do with obsidian armour being too strong, and your solution would only exacerbate that. I do agree that immunity frames are an issue for summoners, but it may be that the devs aren't willing or able to address it, in part I suspect because of the immense amount of rebalancing that would then be required after the fix to keep minions from becoming overpowered across the board
Ok so minions like the sanguine bat and blade staff are allowed to have local immunity to help thier boss performance, but can still potentially do more damage in crowd control scenarios. Seems totaally fair that they get it but none of the dumb 1.2 minions do.
I'm going to address this one time because I know its a common feedback bit (and not just for summoners, people have been saying this for years).
A bit of terminology for an introduction:
- Piercing frames = When a piercing weapon hits an enemy, that enemy becomes immune to all/most damage for X number of frames, so that the attack does not hit again every frame as its passing through their body. This is 1.0 era mechanics.
- Static Immunity = A system implemented at a later date, that makes it so that an enemy becomes immune ONLY to a specific projectile/attack for the duration, but not to other attacks. So for instance, a Slime Minion with Static immunity makes it so that the Slime minion can only deal damage every X number of frames, but other weapons can hit freely.
- Local Immunity = A system implemented at a later date, that makes it so that every single projectile (even of the same type) get their OWN immunity timer. For instance, Venom Staff shoots 6 or 7 Venom Fangs, and if one of them hits an enemy, that enemy will only be hit once by that Fang, but other Fangs can hit it as well.
In early Terraria, Red's initial implementation of piercing REQUIRED the use of immunity time. Why? So that when you shoot a laser through an enemy, it doesn't hit every single frame its in the enemy. Makes sense. So we'd have a laser with a piercing time of 10 frames, it would hit just the once, and then move on its merry way.
This didn't become an issue until people noticed rapidly firing weapons like Minishark/Meteor Shot fired faster than the immune frame time. However, at THAT time, there was no other system for it, and because the immune time was a mandatory feature to protect against the "damage every frame", it could not be removed.
Later, Skiphs developed a system for local immune frames, but it was exceedingly resource intensive, and so it was ultimately not used.
It wasn't until 1.4 that Yorai/Skiphs fixed the local immune system to no longer be FPS breaking, but by that point, the "damage was done".
What do I mean by that?
Well, the issue is that these weapons were all balanced AROUND these constraints. The power of a weapon was partially determined based on the idea that these immune frame conflicts would exist. At that point, blindly shifting all of the projectiles to use local immune would result in massive power buffs . . . for a case in point, see Poison/Venom Staff, which had to be DRAMATICALLY overhauled (and nerfed in some stats) to provide a rebalanced immune frame system.
And now we come to me. Red investigated the idea of making Ravens in particular (why Ravens, I don't know) use local immune frames early in 1.4, because they were very weak. This opened a door, and I asked if I could begin a review of all minions to receive a similar treatment.
He gave me the go ahead, but gave me a rule: aside from Ravens and a couple of other exceptions, these were NOT to be buffs. This was purely for the sake of removing the "conflict" of their piercing frames with other weapons. Anyone who has ever had a Slime Minion completely block out an enemy with 1-damage ticks knows what I'm talking about. So this project became a "fix for minions conflicting with other attacks" and not a "buff minions" project. And I had to substantially test very specific static or local immune frame testing values to ensure that minions resembled (as close as possible) their original DPS in 1.3.5.3. There were some exceptions: this was simply impossible on some minions, so they saw minor increases at either low or high minion counts, it varied, to be honest. But generally speaking, the goal was accomplished.
What he did NOT do was give me permission to set all minions to use purely local frames, completely freeing up any minion DPS from scaling directly with minion count. This was the condition of me being even allowed to engage in this project in the first place, and I can assure you, it was VERY close to not happening at all.
So from a design perspective, my choices were:
- Static frames but still conflict between minions at higher counts
- No improvements at all, every minion still on global immunity frames with all the issues inherent to that
So I picked the only option available to me.
So here we are today.
This is hardly a Summoner-specific issue here . . . Ranged players have bemoaned the immunity frames of Meteor Shot for ages (something I DID address in 1.4.1, with a minor nerf to offset it).
My hand-picked changes to local/static frames have opened a door to public perception, the implication being "if they can change some of them, they can change all of them, and may as well". This could not be further from the truth. Every item that has its frame time tweaked with takes substantial review time on my part, and oftentimes major revisions to its functionality.
Make no mistake: immune time changes are buffs, and as buffs, they need to be approved by Red and Cenx. Unless they are a literal oversight to a pre-approved change (I accidentally gave Retinamini itself static immune frames in 1.4, and not the laser, and it turns out that the Imp projectiles did not receive their immune frames either), then each one has to go through approval again, and the more buffs I continue to stack on the Summoner class repeatedly, the harder it gets to have them approved.
So where am I going with all this?
The simple fact of the matter is that I cannot make all minions use local immunity. This is because their balance was initially based around that mechanic being in place, and to remove it now is just a massive, blatant buff for each of the minions in question, and this was not approved. Likely, in many of these cases, I would HAVE to nerf the minions if I removed the frames. A lot of the discussion here has been under the assumption of using max minion count (Summoner Potion, Bewitching Table), but nerfs would have a negative impact on non-maximized Summoner players so that maximized players could see the benefits of their highest minion count.
So . . . the tl;dr . . . minions that do not use local frames already are unlikely to be changed to use local frames now, it would be a massive buff that was not approved. Should such a change be made, the minions would likely have to be "counter-nerfed" to make up for it, which both takes time and risks breaking them in a bad way.
As an additional note, because its been mentioned: Spiders, simply due to the way they work, actually use three different minions. These minions each use static immunity, but they do NOT conflict with each other (because they are not the same projectile). There's really no way I can force them to "share" a timer as a group of three, at least not within my code capabilities, and so that's pretty much just an unavoidable "perk" of the Spider staff, if you strategically summon different colors. There's little to be gained from pursuing this matter, because if any change was made, it would likely just be a Spider staff nerf of some sort. This is a conflict of "old design visuals" vs "newer design mechanics" and right now, it exists as a convenient strategy knowledgeable players can utilize, but it is neither intentional nor simple to fix. I don't consider it a feature, and I'm hesitant to consider it a bug, its just in that nebulous in between.
I'm going to make an additional post after this to address some individual discussion points, but I think this one has gone on long enough.
EDIT:
I forgot to add one thing. While switching all minions to use local frames is not in the cards, that is NOT to say that frame count adjustment is out of the question!
Immune frame time is a "balance" number like any other. I can increase, or decrease (within reason), the amount of frames between attacks, which can result in an impact on the number of expected hits per second. There is a "floor" on this, the point where the number of frames is so low that it stops serving its original purpose, which is blocking multiple hits on the same target from a single attack, but there's no reason why I can't tweak the frame count slightly to improve the Hits-per-second of a minion.
This would be a tremendous amount of code work that would probably require a dramatic rework to the housing system to support. Not an option at this time.
I'm going to address this one time because I know its a common feedback bit (and not just for summoners, people have been saying this for years).
A bit of terminology for an introduction:
- Piercing frames = When a piercing weapon hits an enemy, that enemy becomes immune to all/most damage for X number of frames, so that the attack does not hit again every frame as its passing through their body. This is 1.0 era mechanics.
- Static Immunity = A system implemented at a later date, that makes it so that an enemy becomes immune ONLY to a specific projectile/attack for the duration, but not to other attacks. So for instance, a Slime Minion with Static immunity makes it so that the Slime minion can only deal damage every X number of frames, but other weapons can hit freely.
- Local Immunity = A system implemented at a later date, that makes it so that every single projectile (even of the same type) get their OWN immunity timer. For instance, Venom Staff shoots 6 or 7 Venom Fangs, and if one of them hits an enemy, that enemy will only be hit once by that Fang, but other Fangs can hit it as well.
In early Terraria, Red's initial implementation of piercing REQUIRED the use of immunity time. Why? So that when you shoot a laser through an enemy, it doesn't hit every single frame its in the enemy. Makes sense. So we'd have a laser with a piercing time of 10 frames, it would hit just the once, and then move on its merry way.
This didn't become an issue until people noticed rapidly firing weapons like Minishark/Meteor Shot fired faster than the immune frame time. However, at THAT time, there was no other system for it, and because the immune time was a mandatory feature to protect against the "damage every frame", it could not be removed.
Later, Skiphs developed a system for local immune frames, but it was exceedingly resource intensive, and so it was ultimately not used.
It wasn't until 1.4 that Yorai/Skiphs fixed the local immune system to no longer be FPS breaking, but by that point, the "damage was done".
What do I mean by that?
Well, the issue is that these weapons were all balanced AROUND these constraints. The power of a weapon was partially determined based on the idea that these immune frame conflicts would exist. At that point, blindly shifting all of the projectiles to use local immune would result in massive power buffs . . . for a case in point, see Poison/Venom Staff, which had to be DRAMATICALLY overhauled (and nerfed in some stats) to provide a rebalanced immune frame system.
And now we come to me. Red investigated the idea of making Ravens in particular (why Ravens, I don't know) use local immune frames early in 1.4, because they were very weak. This opened a door, and I asked if I could begin a review of all minions to receive a similar treatment.
He gave me the go ahead, but gave me a rule: aside from Ravens and a couple of other exceptions, these were NOT to be buffs. This was purely for the sake of removing the "conflict" of their piercing frames with other weapons. Anyone who has ever had a Slime Minion completely block out an enemy with 1-damage ticks knows what I'm talking about. So this project became a "fix for minions conflicting with other attacks" and not a "buff minions" project. And I had to substantially test very specific static or local immune frame testing values to ensure that minions resembled (as close as possible) their original DPS in 1.3.5.3. There were some exceptions: this was simply impossible on some minions, so they saw minor increases at either low or high minion counts, it varied, to be honest. But generally speaking, the goal was accomplished.
What he did NOT do was give me permission to set all minions to use purely local frames, completely freeing up any minion DPS from scaling directly with minion count. This was the condition of me being even allowed to engage in this project in the first place, and I can assure you, it was VERY close to not happening at all.
So from a design perspective, my choices were:
- Static frames but still conflict between minions at higher counts
- No improvements at all, every minion still on global immunity frames with all the issues inherent to that
So I picked the only option available to me.
So here we are today.
This is hardly a Summoner-specific issue here . . . Ranged players have bemoaned the immunity frames of Meteor Shot for ages (something I DID address in 1.4.1, with a minor nerf to offset it).
My hand-picked changes to local/static frames have opened a door to public perception, the implication being "if they can change some of them, they can change all of them, and may as well". This could not be further from the truth. Every item that has its frame time tweaked with takes substantial review time on my part, and oftentimes major revisions to its functionality.
Make no mistake: immune time changes are buffs, and as buffs, they need to be approved by Red and Cenx. Unless they are a literal oversight to a pre-approved change (I accidentally gave Retinamini itself static immune frames in 1.4, and not the laser, and it turns out that the Imp projectiles did not receive their immune frames either), then each one has to go through approval again, and the more buffs I continue to stack on the Summoner class repeatedly, the harder it gets to have them approved.
So where am I going with all this?
The simple fact of the matter is that I cannot make all minions use local immunity. This is because their balance was initially based around that mechanic being in place, and to remove it now is just a massive, blatant buff for each of the minions in question, and this was not approved. Likely, in many of these cases, I would HAVE to nerf the minions if I removed the frames. A lot of the discussion here has been under the assumption of using max minion count (Summoner Potion, Bewitching Table), but nerfs would have a negative impact on non-maximized Summoner players so that maximized players could see the benefits of their highest minion count.
So . . . the tl;dr . . . minions that do not use local frames already are unlikely to be changed to use local frames now, it would be a massive buff that was not approved. Should such a change be made, the minions would likely have to be "counter-nerfed" to make up for it, which both takes time and risks breaking them in a bad way.
As an additional note, because its been mentioned: Spiders, simply due to the way they work, actually use three different minions. These minions each use static immunity, but they do NOT conflict with each other (because they are not the same projectile). There's really no way I can force them to "share" a timer as a group of three, at least not within my code capabilities, and so that's pretty much just an unavoidable "perk" of the Spider staff, if you strategically summon different colors. There's little to be gained from pursuing this matter, because if any change was made, it would likely just be a Spider staff nerf of some sort. This is a conflict of "old design visuals" vs "newer design mechanics" and right now, it exists as a convenient strategy knowledgeable players can utilize, but it is neither intentional nor simple to fix. I don't consider it a feature, and I'm hesitant to consider it a bug, its just in that nebulous in between.
I'm going to make an additional post after this to address some individual discussion points, but I think this one has gone on long enough.
EDIT:
I forgot to add one thing. While switching all minions to use local frames is not in the cards, that is NOT to say that frame count adjustment is out of the question!
Immune frame time is a "balance" number like any other. I can increase, or decrease (within reason), the amount of frames between attacks, which can result in an impact on the number of expected hits per second. There is a "floor" on this, the point where the number of frames is so low that it stops serving its original purpose, which is blocking multiple hits on the same target from a single attack, but there's no reason why I can't tweak the frame count slightly to improve the Hits-per-second of a minion.
As much as I am botherered by the lack of the local immunity frames on the slime, flinx, vamp frog, and spider. I will admit these minions are still good enough to make up for this weakness.
However I definately think something needs to be done about the optic staff and deadly sphere.
Vampire Frog:
So I think we can all agree that AI improvements are generally always a good thing, and since I fixed a lack of static frames and we buffed the collision box on the Frogs, I don't want to "unfix" those now. So here are my options with Vampire Frog.
It currently uses Static Immunity (unlikely to change, given the conversation, as Local would be a dramatic buff, and removal entirely is not a good thing)
It deals 11 base damage, and the Static Immunity time is set to 10 frames (aka, 6 hits per second max). This is somewhat atypical, as most minions are set to use higher than 10 frames.
So what I can do is either reduce the base damage, or I can increase the immunity frame time. Both would accomplish the same goal, and if I do both, then the buff might be too dramatic.
For instance, if I increase the immune time to 12 AND drop the damage by 1, it would be a whole 25% loss of optimal DPS (in a no-defense, base damage scenario).
So I'm interested to hear perspectives on that, either immune time of 12 (roughly 16% loss), or damage reduced by 1 (roughly 9% loss) or 2 (roughly 18% loss)
This is literally just nickle-and-diming its damage, but because a 2-damage buff + AI changes had such a profound impact, its worth the nitpicking, I think.
Imps:
My notes indicated this should have had local immune frames, but my original write-up for piercing changes actually happened a YEAR before I was given final approval to make the change, and it looks like it was missed in the process. Will be looking to assign it standard static immunity. I'll also give it some evaluation to see if a reduced static immunity time would be viable, but I'm not certain on this yet . . . I may have to reduce its piercing count from infinite to something more manageable, likely 3 or 5. Regardless, ANY piercing minion projectile should always have static, and the lack of it is just a straight up bug. At bare minimum, expect that to be fixed.
Rainbow Crystal Staff:
I'll look into this, I'll have to do some testing. It would be good if it could perform on the same level as Lunar Portal Staff.
Christmas Tree Sword:
I'll look into buffing the projectile damage here, but as the projectiles deal the majority of the damage, I'm not confident a shift from 50% to 100% is warranted (it would almost double it). I'll look into 75%.
Obsidian Armor:
Not much to say here, its clearly too strong, its just a matter of how much of a nerf it warrants. Will continue to gather feedback on the matter. I think most agree, the whip length is fine, its the minion DPS + whip DPS that is in question.
Side note, I wish we could have had a late game "whip-master" armor, but alas, not much I can do.
Desert Tiger:
Got some plans for this but it will take some time, nothing I can share yet.
Optic Staff:
I'm going to ask for approval on reducing the actual static frame count on the minions. The Retinamini Laser bug was definitely a thing, and it SHOULD be much stronger than it was in 1.4 after the fix, but I'm not seeing much comment on whether it made any difference or not. (For reference, I accidentally added the static frames to the Retinamini projectile itself, rather than the Retinamini lasers, which caused the lasers to induce universal immune frames). However, I have always been of the perception that Optic Staff is one of the better minions in the game . . . I do not necessarily agree with the broad dismissal of its power. I think, if anything, Sanguine and Blade (and Spider's buffs) have simply power-crept it to a degree, and while its piercing limitations are a fact, this was perfectly viable for a long time. So either way, the plan here would be to reduce the frame timer so that it gets more hits per second. Because the two different minion types do not conflict with each other, it doesn't need to be as low as some others to be viable, but I'm not opposed to reducing it either.
Blade Staff:
People are still asking for putting Blade Staff on Hallowed Mimic. This was specifically turned down when I brought it up. It was rare drop from Enchanted Sword or Queen Slime, Mimic is not an option. And given how unpopular Enchanted Sword was, I think Queen Slime is the one we are going to have to go with.
Spinal Tap:
Not seeing much discussion here . . . what are people's thoughts? Good? Bad? Spinal Tap was my "if I could add ONE SINGLE ITEM for Summoners" in 1.4.1, so I'm very curious to see if it had an impact. Is its presence just overshadowed by the Obsidian Armor prominence?
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