Weapons & Equip Shark Tooth Necklace (and by extension, Stinger Necklace), need a buff

[Lynxical]

Currently, Shark Tooth Necklace (and Stinger Necklace) give 5 Armor Penetration, Armor Penetration works in a really awkward way but to put it simply, Every 2 Armor Penetration (AP for short) is equal to 1 extra damage, so Shark Tooth Necklace gives +2 damage (or +3 damage on odd defense enemies like 7)
The problem is that this effect is extremely weak and barely noticeable, here's a chart on the effective damage % boost it gives
10 BASE damage=20% increased damage
20 BASE damage=10% increased damage
30 BASE damage=7% increased damage
40 BASE damage=5% increased damage
(These numbers are only referring to base damage, the thing about Armor Penetration is that it doesn't scale like 20% increased damage would, the damage is flat and only cares about base damage, not boosts you get from external sources like Accessories, Armor, or Buffs)

On paper this seems fairly strong, but, very, very few weapons have less than Minishark's base damage, it's basically only noteworthy on Minishark, as the diminishing returns you get from 10 to 20 damage alone starts to show

This is shown with Stinger Necklace on an even bigger problem, not only is the Honeycomb effectively 5 defense, but this is effectively a Late-PreHardmode accessory giving less than 10% damage because most damage with armor is now around a 7% boost which is not enough at all to be worth an Accessory Slot

Sharpening Stone is 12 Melee AP, which, is a free buff, and isn't overpowered, and Ichor, while very strong, isn't overpowered either, it's just that other debuffs are really bad, both of these have 0 opportunity cost to use, while STN and Stinger require an accessory slot, which you only have 5 or 6 of

Basically what I'm trying to say, is that STN and Stinger need their AP increased to 8 or 10, if Ichor is 15 and fine, and Sharpening is 12 and fine, and both don't have a cost for using them, then 16/20 AP is completely fine on something that requires 2 slots, and 8/10 is fine on something that requires 1 slot

Remember, accessories have to use an accessory slot, accessories should not be weaker than other effects that don't require slots and easy to obtain, especially ones that aren't considered overpowered

 

[chewythebigblackdog]

Keep in mind that the shark tooth necklace (and stinger necklace) are pre-hardmode items. 5 defense and approximately a 7% damage boost is pretty good for a pre-hardmode item, especially because bees are already a powerful source of damage that has low base damage (making the damage boost even better). These items are intended to be replaced with better accessories later (along with most pre-hardmode accessories) and in their current state accomplish this purpose pretty well. Plus, both of the effects that are stronger than them are either later in the game (ichor) or class-specific (sharpening station, which also isn't even guaranteed to be obtainable in pre-hardmode).

 

[The Grimwar]

I like the Shark Tooth and Stinger Necklaces myself.

I think they should be given hard-mode upgrades.

 

[chewythebigblackdog]

Having a hardmode upgrade would be cool imo, but potentially game breaking. There are several weapons that are already good and scale a lot with armor piercing, such as crystal bullets, holy arrows, and vampire knives (though because of sharpening station this one won't benefit that much from it), which is likely the reason that there are not many armor piercing effects in the game (betsy's wrath does exist, but that's a later game weapon locked behind a difficult event).

 

[Quadrapus]

An Ichor necklace as and alternative to the stinger necklace perhaps?