J Bame
Terrarian
Using the exact same build every single time eventually gets boring. This is what leads people to try out new strategies and loadouts: Sometimes you try out a new class, other times an entirely new armor or accessory combination. But there are some slightly obscure combos out there that aren't obvious at first glance, and don't always seem like they would work, but lead to very unique and fun loadouts. These are not hidden top tier strategies, I wouldn't even call some of these "good", but they are certainly a fun new thing you can try out in your next playthrough.
The Hidden Whip Set
All of the Old One's Army sets are inherently mixed class sets. They give less class bonuses than dedicated class armors, and as summoner sets they fall far behind, with 0 minion slots and just sentry slots that are very limited for bosses. However, the Shinobi Infiltrator set stands out above the rest, and can fill in your desire to have an Obsidian Armor for the late game.
With a 60% summon damage increase and 20% melee speed, the armor gives a massive DPS increase to whips, and 54 defense is more than any other Summoner armor can hope to have. But it does not end here: This armor's dedicated sentry is the Lightning Aura, a very fast-hitting sentry with very low base damage. Low base damage and fast attack rate... sounds like the perfect match for Kaleidoscope's 20 tag damage. Even with Lightning Aura getting a 50% tag damage penalty, this 20 tag damage ends up being about 33% increased damage for the auras.
For crowd control, Kaleidoscope is innately a massive hitscan hitbox with infinite pierce. Cover the area around you with Lightning Auras, summon as many Xeno Staff minions as you can, and you'll see that not even the pillars can stand up to you. Your crowd control will be extremely good... but unfortunately crowd control is just about the only use you'll find for this. Sentries are fun and all but they don't keep up against bosses. And even if they could, melee weapons are bound to contribute more single-target DPS than Whips. And even if that wasn't true, Spooky Armor with maxed-out Xenos will have more DPS no matter what.
But hey, you may start keeping a Kaleidoscope in hand when using this armor set.
Papyrus Scarab... an all class item?Papyrus scarab is the Recon Scope of the summoner class. Summoner emblem is a good item, Pygmy Necklace is a good item, so naturally an item that is literally Summoner Emblem and Pygmy Necklace combined is an incredible item. These massive summon bonuses... do you really need to be a summoner to make use them?
It's common knowledge that with Summoning Potion and Bewitching Table you can summon 3 summon slots without changing your loadout at all. Some loadouts take note of these slots, and slightly change their setup to include global damage bonuses to improve their contribution as much as possible, barely hurting the main class' weapon: using Menacing over Lucky, choosing Avenger Emblem over something with slightly more raw stats, etc. More advanced loadouts mix Old One's army armor pieces to get better stat armors, these usually come with 20-30% summon damage on their own... you can get quite a lot more Summoner damage than you may think
But even with all this summon damage the minions will only have a fraction of what your main weapon will have, so is an accessory that gives them even more damage and an extra minion truly better than a big main weapon bonus like Recon Scope? Let's see an example.
Ranger build with a lot of minion focus. I'm going to use a Tsunami as my main weapon, and summon Xeno Staff UFOs to back me up. What is the better 6th accessory, Recon Scope or Papyrus Scarab?
If every accessory is Menacing, without buffs we will have 94% increased summon damage. We also have 94% increased ranged damage (i swear it wasn't intentional) with a 1.15x multiplier thanks to the shroomite headgear. This is without counting the last slot's bonuses, which could be either Papyrus Scarab or Sniper Scope. Which one will do more, we are about to find out.
Unreal Tsunami with Ichor arrows has about 1100 DPS at base. Each Ruthless Xeno Staff summon has 105 DPS, we have 3 summon slots so 315 DPS. After all our damage increases this becomes 2454 and 611 respectively.
With Recon Scope, Tsunami's DPS goes up to 2707. With Papyrus Scarab, our Xeno Staff DPS becomes 880. Recon Scope adds 253 DPS. Papyrus scarab adds 269.
Would you look at that, Papyrus Scarab is actually slightly better than Recon Scope's massive 10% damage and critical strike chance increase in a dedicated build. Do note that i'm ignoring buffs to simplify the calculation (most importantly, Archery) but this should tell us that Papyrus Scarab is always a good addition to your build, provided that it already has a lot of summon damage bonuses.
Regeneration at the click of a buttonHoney is a very potent buff. Regeneration better than a Band of Regeneration, and protection against Damage over time debuffs. However it is rarely used because it's too much of a hassle to keep honey pools around all the time.
However the Honey Bucket allows you to access the buff directly from your hotbar. Simply place the honey on you every once in a while and pick it back up, this keeps the buff refreshed. Make sure not to carry more than one bucket, else when the honey is placed the honey will become an empty bucket and move away from the current slot, making it MUCH more annoying to use. If you are afraid of losing the honey in the middle of exploration, just keep some spare honey buckets in your Piggy Bank or any other portable inventory.
Is this worth it, you may ask? Well, let's see here. Without counting the accelerated natural regen you just get a free Band of Regeneration, not a massive bonus, but you are also just placing a bucket down. It's a nice passive buff. However it's also very handy to put out On Fire and to cancel out Poisoned Damage over Time. It is not a good idea to try to place down the bucket in the middle of combat, ESPECIALLY against a boss, but you can get a nice survivability boost for very little effort while exploring.
Phoenix Blaster... stronger than clockwork assault rifle?
1.4 nerfed Clockwork Assault Rifle. 1.4.4, due to the autofire setting, had to tweak Phoenix Blaster's stats to not be so overwhelming with it turned on. This actually increased its DPS a little. How do these two guns compare now? Using Meteor Shots on both (crystal bullets are hard to calculate DPS for)
Clockwork rifle has 173 DPS, 208 when reforged to Rapid
Phoenix Blaster is 162 DPS, but 210 when reforged to Unreal
So they are very, very close with their best modifiers. But Phoenix Blaster has much higher base damage, meaning it gets less punished by defense, meaning Crystal Bullets can go harder with it. So if you got lucky with an Unreal Phoenix Blaster... you may skip Clockwork Rifle altogether.
No more Space Gun.
Meteor armor gives a lot of damage, but no mana. Its set bonus gives infinite mana to the space gun. So naturally, with Meteor Armor you use primarily Space Gun, right? Space Gun is a measly 60 DPS. A diamond staff is 53. A water scepter comes only a little later and it has 107 DPS.
So do you just use Jungle armor with stronger weapons and ignore meteor armor altogether? Well not necessarily. Meteor armor has very good damage bonuses, so you can simply use the stronger weapon until your mana runs out, and switch to the Space Gun while mana is regenerating. And that leads me to my next point: Space Gun is not the only magic weapon that costs 0 mana with Meteor Armor equipped. And i'm not talking about the Zapinators, either. Im talking about... literally any other Melee or Ranged weapon.
Space Gun with Magic Power and Meteor Armor bonuses has almost 90 DPS. Handgun with meteor shots has 136. It doesn't matter that it won't get Magic damage bonuses, a TON of ranged and melee weapons will get more DPS than a Space Gun. Really, space gun isn't that good.
Beetle Shell is not a melee armor.This one is really simple and similar to the above. Beetle armor with the Shell only gives 11% melee damage, 5% melee crit and 6% melee speed. This is barely better than an Ale. Using Beetle Shell is practically the equivalent of using an armor with no damage bonuses, nothing forces you to stick to melee.
The best weapon to apply Ichor...
... Is NOT the Golden Shower. Not even close. Applying Ichor isn't special. Any gun or bow with Ichor ammo or any melee weapon with an Ichor Flask can do the same. But what is the best weapon to apply the debuff?
Well, Ichor is extremely good. If you are going to keep swapping to a sidearm to inflict the debuff, it would be nice if you could get other debuffs while you are at it, right? Therefore a melee weapon with an Ichor Flask and an innate debuff comes to mind, like the Shadowflame Knife. So, what would the weapon affected by Flasks that could inflict the most amount of debuffs in one weapon use?
That would Cool Whip: Big hitscan hitbox with infinite pierce, applies Frostbite, the strongest DoT you can get in Early Hardmode, and 6 tag damage is a massive increase for any Blade minions you had summoned or even Sanguine Bats. It also has a Snowflake. It doesn't do anything, but it looks like it does so it's nice to have.
You could upgrade to Kaleidoscope later on, when the Frostbite really doesn't do anything, and the 20 tag damage and 10% tag crit is a MUCH bigger bonus to your side minions. Or use Daybreak, a high-velocity weapon with at least 100 DoT in the form of Daybroken.
Rainbowflame Knight
What is the best use for a DoT? Spread the debuff as much as possible, leaving all enemies at half health or lower, let the DoT finish the job while you divert your attention to something else. This Rainbowflame Knight is a build that aims to bring these DoTs to their full potential, so this actually covers several items.
The most obvious ones are Frost Armor, Cursed Flames Flask, and Shadowflame Knife. 3 fire debuffs covered. But there are two unexpected items i'd like to give attention to:
The magma stone: Right at the start of hardmode, where you dont have the armor, weapons nor accessories to stand up to the new enemies, you can get a Cursed flames flask and combine it with this item. After that you have a very safe way of dealing with enemies, all you really have to do is hit them a couple times and let the DoT finish the job. The Hellfire's contribution to this will matter less and less as you go on and get stronger and stronger items, but I think this is a notable use for an underappreciated item.
Sergeant United's Shield, actually the best weapon that this build can have. Sure, the Shadowflame Knife is your Best DPS, coupled with another DoT that no other weapon can inflict, but the homing and piercing ability of the shield, paired with its high base damage but slow attack rate, is exactly what the Rainbowflame Knight is looking for: In just one weapon use a lot of enemies on your screen will lose a chunk of their HP and get all the debuffs applied at once. Since the weapon homes in you can play as defensively as you want and no enemy will be able to reach you.
This build is actually excellent for Queen Slime: The homing piercing shield combined with the fires makes quick work of all the summoned slimes, and without their help, the Queen is just a flying target dummy.
But what about other bosses? Well... DoTs can speed up the Twins fight quite a bit; keeping the debuff on both twins means that when the one you focus on dies, the other one will have lost a chunk of its health. You can also bully Prime by burning away his arms but by that point you should switch to something else.
And that's about all i know of. Again, for the most part this isn't post isnt meant to give light on extremely powerful hidden strategies, it is primarily focused on creative new ways to use the items in this game. Terraria is a constantly expanding game with hundreds of items, it would be boring if we played the same way every time.
All of the Old One's Army sets are inherently mixed class sets. They give less class bonuses than dedicated class armors, and as summoner sets they fall far behind, with 0 minion slots and just sentry slots that are very limited for bosses. However, the Shinobi Infiltrator set stands out above the rest, and can fill in your desire to have an Obsidian Armor for the late game.
With a 60% summon damage increase and 20% melee speed, the armor gives a massive DPS increase to whips, and 54 defense is more than any other Summoner armor can hope to have. But it does not end here: This armor's dedicated sentry is the Lightning Aura, a very fast-hitting sentry with very low base damage. Low base damage and fast attack rate... sounds like the perfect match for Kaleidoscope's 20 tag damage. Even with Lightning Aura getting a 50% tag damage penalty, this 20 tag damage ends up being about 33% increased damage for the auras.
For crowd control, Kaleidoscope is innately a massive hitscan hitbox with infinite pierce. Cover the area around you with Lightning Auras, summon as many Xeno Staff minions as you can, and you'll see that not even the pillars can stand up to you. Your crowd control will be extremely good... but unfortunately crowd control is just about the only use you'll find for this. Sentries are fun and all but they don't keep up against bosses. And even if they could, melee weapons are bound to contribute more single-target DPS than Whips. And even if that wasn't true, Spooky Armor with maxed-out Xenos will have more DPS no matter what.
But hey, you may start keeping a Kaleidoscope in hand when using this armor set.
It's common knowledge that with Summoning Potion and Bewitching Table you can summon 3 summon slots without changing your loadout at all. Some loadouts take note of these slots, and slightly change their setup to include global damage bonuses to improve their contribution as much as possible, barely hurting the main class' weapon: using Menacing over Lucky, choosing Avenger Emblem over something with slightly more raw stats, etc. More advanced loadouts mix Old One's army armor pieces to get better stat armors, these usually come with 20-30% summon damage on their own... you can get quite a lot more Summoner damage than you may think
But even with all this summon damage the minions will only have a fraction of what your main weapon will have, so is an accessory that gives them even more damage and an extra minion truly better than a big main weapon bonus like Recon Scope? Let's see an example.
Ranger build with a lot of minion focus. I'm going to use a Tsunami as my main weapon, and summon Xeno Staff UFOs to back me up. What is the better 6th accessory, Recon Scope or Papyrus Scarab?
If every accessory is Menacing, without buffs we will have 94% increased summon damage. We also have 94% increased ranged damage (i swear it wasn't intentional) with a 1.15x multiplier thanks to the shroomite headgear. This is without counting the last slot's bonuses, which could be either Papyrus Scarab or Sniper Scope. Which one will do more, we are about to find out.
Unreal Tsunami with Ichor arrows has about 1100 DPS at base. Each Ruthless Xeno Staff summon has 105 DPS, we have 3 summon slots so 315 DPS. After all our damage increases this becomes 2454 and 611 respectively.
With Recon Scope, Tsunami's DPS goes up to 2707. With Papyrus Scarab, our Xeno Staff DPS becomes 880. Recon Scope adds 253 DPS. Papyrus scarab adds 269.
Would you look at that, Papyrus Scarab is actually slightly better than Recon Scope's massive 10% damage and critical strike chance increase in a dedicated build. Do note that i'm ignoring buffs to simplify the calculation (most importantly, Archery) but this should tell us that Papyrus Scarab is always a good addition to your build, provided that it already has a lot of summon damage bonuses.
However the Honey Bucket allows you to access the buff directly from your hotbar. Simply place the honey on you every once in a while and pick it back up, this keeps the buff refreshed. Make sure not to carry more than one bucket, else when the honey is placed the honey will become an empty bucket and move away from the current slot, making it MUCH more annoying to use. If you are afraid of losing the honey in the middle of exploration, just keep some spare honey buckets in your Piggy Bank or any other portable inventory.
Is this worth it, you may ask? Well, let's see here. Without counting the accelerated natural regen you just get a free Band of Regeneration, not a massive bonus, but you are also just placing a bucket down. It's a nice passive buff. However it's also very handy to put out On Fire and to cancel out Poisoned Damage over Time. It is not a good idea to try to place down the bucket in the middle of combat, ESPECIALLY against a boss, but you can get a nice survivability boost for very little effort while exploring.
1.4 nerfed Clockwork Assault Rifle. 1.4.4, due to the autofire setting, had to tweak Phoenix Blaster's stats to not be so overwhelming with it turned on. This actually increased its DPS a little. How do these two guns compare now? Using Meteor Shots on both (crystal bullets are hard to calculate DPS for)
Clockwork rifle has 173 DPS, 208 when reforged to Rapid
Phoenix Blaster is 162 DPS, but 210 when reforged to Unreal
So they are very, very close with their best modifiers. But Phoenix Blaster has much higher base damage, meaning it gets less punished by defense, meaning Crystal Bullets can go harder with it. So if you got lucky with an Unreal Phoenix Blaster... you may skip Clockwork Rifle altogether.
Meteor armor gives a lot of damage, but no mana. Its set bonus gives infinite mana to the space gun. So naturally, with Meteor Armor you use primarily Space Gun, right? Space Gun is a measly 60 DPS. A diamond staff is 53. A water scepter comes only a little later and it has 107 DPS.
So do you just use Jungle armor with stronger weapons and ignore meteor armor altogether? Well not necessarily. Meteor armor has very good damage bonuses, so you can simply use the stronger weapon until your mana runs out, and switch to the Space Gun while mana is regenerating. And that leads me to my next point: Space Gun is not the only magic weapon that costs 0 mana with Meteor Armor equipped. And i'm not talking about the Zapinators, either. Im talking about... literally any other Melee or Ranged weapon.
Space Gun with Magic Power and Meteor Armor bonuses has almost 90 DPS. Handgun with meteor shots has 136. It doesn't matter that it won't get Magic damage bonuses, a TON of ranged and melee weapons will get more DPS than a Space Gun. Really, space gun isn't that good.
... Is NOT the Golden Shower. Not even close. Applying Ichor isn't special. Any gun or bow with Ichor ammo or any melee weapon with an Ichor Flask can do the same. But what is the best weapon to apply the debuff?
Well, Ichor is extremely good. If you are going to keep swapping to a sidearm to inflict the debuff, it would be nice if you could get other debuffs while you are at it, right? Therefore a melee weapon with an Ichor Flask and an innate debuff comes to mind, like the Shadowflame Knife. So, what would the weapon affected by Flasks that could inflict the most amount of debuffs in one weapon use?
That would Cool Whip: Big hitscan hitbox with infinite pierce, applies Frostbite, the strongest DoT you can get in Early Hardmode, and 6 tag damage is a massive increase for any Blade minions you had summoned or even Sanguine Bats. It also has a Snowflake. It doesn't do anything, but it looks like it does so it's nice to have.
You could upgrade to Kaleidoscope later on, when the Frostbite really doesn't do anything, and the 20 tag damage and 10% tag crit is a MUCH bigger bonus to your side minions. Or use Daybreak, a high-velocity weapon with at least 100 DoT in the form of Daybroken.
What is the best use for a DoT? Spread the debuff as much as possible, leaving all enemies at half health or lower, let the DoT finish the job while you divert your attention to something else. This Rainbowflame Knight is a build that aims to bring these DoTs to their full potential, so this actually covers several items.
The most obvious ones are Frost Armor, Cursed Flames Flask, and Shadowflame Knife. 3 fire debuffs covered. But there are two unexpected items i'd like to give attention to:
This build is actually excellent for Queen Slime: The homing piercing shield combined with the fires makes quick work of all the summoned slimes, and without their help, the Queen is just a flying target dummy.
But what about other bosses? Well... DoTs can speed up the Twins fight quite a bit; keeping the debuff on both twins means that when the one you focus on dies, the other one will have lost a chunk of its health. You can also bully Prime by burning away his arms but by that point you should switch to something else.
And that's about all i know of. Again, for the most part this isn't post isnt meant to give light on extremely powerful hidden strategies, it is primarily focused on creative new ways to use the items in this game. Terraria is a constantly expanding game with hundreds of items, it would be boring if we played the same way every time.
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I found another Honey Bucket enjoyer, my brother where have you been
