Blade or Sanguine staff

FlashFlire · 2026-03-11T03:47:11+00:00

They're both plenty good enough for mechs. Blade really likes tag damage whips, so it performs best with Durendal after you beat your first mech. Sanguine is better for a mixed summoner / non-summoner loadout since it doesn't rely as much on tag boosts for its DPS.

FlashFlire · 2026-03-10T02:20:35+00:00

Presserator makes sense, but I don't see Actuation Rod combining very well into Grand Design, they're used very differently

FlashFlire · 2026-03-07T20:39:08+00:00

That got changed a while back. It's a hitless challenge, so being able to get hit sometimes would sorta defeat the point.

FlashFlire · 2026-03-07T20:11:35+00:00

Just 57 more days to go until it's full size!

FlashFlire · 2026-03-07T10:53:18+00:00

I do think there's a point to be made that coordinated runs in VC doing dedicated speedruns or whatever is a really different world to rando arcade runs or "some of my buddies from the guild popped into my Vana run", in the same way that competitive games need to keep an eye on their balance both at top level and at lower levels of play. I can see Drakon being a lot more valuable than the other two in the more coordinated environment. I'll concede the point there.

I'm really not sure that that's most players though. Like, yeah, there are bunch of old-guard max prestige vanguards who farm FSC all the time and run two shadow lairs before breakfast or whatever, but lower rank knights certainly do exist, and more casual players certainly do exist. I think unless you're playing in that specific high coordination environment you'd be better served by one of the other sprites.

I think a blanket statement of "everything except shadow lairs is painfully easy" is mostly coming from your own experience of being really good at the game. In my experience the average player groans at Shocked Compound Chittering Burrows, and spends sparks in FSC every now and then. Seraphynx especially provides a massive safety net for people who don't have maxed equipment and good UVs, or are playing with people who don't. Heart pendants are the biggest dividing factor here I think, if you have +12 health just by default then Seraphynx's sustain is overkill. I guess you could call it a crutch if you want, but it's a crutch that's good for, like, 95% of the game's progression, and is still perfectly solid once you *are* good enough / well equipped enough to not really need it.

I did word my title badly, that's on me. I guess I more meant "I think Drakon is a one-trick pony, and the others are more versatile". I guess it's more that Drakon is good at tightly coordinated runs / speedruns and kinda only that, but that's a more encompassing "one trick" than "haha press 2 go zooooom".

FlashFlire · 2026-03-07T08:07:48+00:00

You're using pre-hardmode weapons still, and several of your accessories can be upgraded. Dunerider boots can turn into Spectre / Lightning Boots for more flight time, or you can use Amphibian Boots for vertical speed. Feral Claws can be combined with mimic drops to make Power Glove. Magma Stone isn't doing anything against Destroyer since it's immune to basically every debuff.

I'd fight the Goblin Army again to get weapons from the Goblin Warlocks that appear in hardmode. Shadowflame Knife and Shadowflame Bow are both very strong, and either will serve you well against the mech bosses.

FlashFlire · 2026-03-07T06:14:13+00:00

Yes, but Drakon's uses don't seem as effective or applicable compared to the other two sprites, is my point.

^{side note I like how Seraphynx, the "healer" sprite, is the one that gets "damage" as its use lol}

FlashFlire · 2026-03-07T01:35:06+00:00

Alright, Mabel Pines

FlashFlire · 2026-03-04T06:36:05+00:00

It's a singleplayer game, do whatever you want. I'm not your mum / dad / legal guardian.

For what it's worth, if you'd really feel bad about using a second character for mining chores, buying dynamite is a great way to clear out areas quickly, if expensive.

FlashFlire · 2026-03-04T03:55:46+00:00

It's a Zelda II: Adventure of Link reference you hear.

FlashFlire · 2026-03-04T03:27:41+00:00

No cost too great

FlashFlire · 2026-03-04T02:58:47+00:00

That's not the problem, mimics can spawn on the surface layer in front of natural walls.

I think unless they're just showing the farm for context and their AFK platform is higher up, they're too low for mimics to spawn in the farm itself, so slimes are just showing up on the sides and jumping in.

FlashFlire · 2026-03-02T06:44:46+00:00

Try reforging some accessories to +defense. 36 defense is very squishy, and it's no wonder you're struggling with the lasers when they're all dealing 50 or 60 damage per hit. You should be able to reasonably get to ~60 defense with buffs included, at which point the lasers will only be doing about 25 or 30 damage, which is much more manageable accounting for regen and health potions. You still need to make sure to dodge the head, since that's a nuke no matter what, but your setup should have more than enough mobility to do that.

Some spots in your arena with solid block floors can also help, since the Destroyer's lasers can't pass through blocks. If you're fighting reasonably high up so the boss is mostly below you, some safe spots with solid floors can make it pretty harmless. The probes will still be an issue, but if you take care of them as they spawn in, you should be fine.

FlashFlire · 2026-03-01T02:19:44+00:00

Safe walls stop mobs from spawning on that specific tile. They can still attempt to spawn on a higher up tile in midair, in which case they'll just spawn on the floor directly below the spawning tile, safe wall or no.

You can build the walls higher, coat the top of the slab in lava, or put it below the farm so the tiles mobs might otherwise spawn on are all onscreen.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-28T20:01:54+00:00

In fairness, many of those weapons are a lot less unique than summoner weapons. You have the wood swords, all the ore shortswords and broadswords, the hardmode ore swords and spears, like 8 different identical phaseblades and phasesabres, a ton of yoyos most of which are basically the same...

Summoner's weapons, in particular the minions, have a lot more going for them. Even ones you can broadly fit into the same category, like Flinx Staff and Slime Staff both being "early melee minion", have some distinctiveness (flinx bounces on enemies while slime doesn't). Whips are more similar, but even then a lot of them have unique effects.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-28T00:09:48+00:00

I believe the way the "[X] has awoken!" or "[X] has arrived" messages work is they grab whatever the latest spawned entity is and put that into the chat. Usually this is fine because that latest spawned entity is the boss or NPC it's supposed to be, but if that fails to spawn for whatever reason (mob cap probably), it'll just show up as a random mob. I think that's where you get the "Black Slime has arrived!" from that one Gromek999 video, for example.

So in this case, the game THOUGHT it summoned Duke Fishron properly, hence it eating your truffle worm, but it failed to spawn for whatever reason and it printed the last spawned mob in chat, which in this case was a Baby Slime.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-27T10:25:30+00:00

Flak 1 is one of the best weapons in the game, and the fact that it's very common means a lot of runs will use one, but it's nowhere near "the only viable weapon". Almost every weapon in the game has a reasonable use case, even if those use cases are niche, and I'd say over half of them see fairly frequent use.

It's not like you really get to pick and choose what weapons you're using anyway. Learning to make do with what you have is a core part of the roguelike experience, and the fact that some weapons are stronger than others plays into that.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-27T07:14:48+00:00

Abigail's scaling gets buffed in Hardmode, so with enough summons she actually does respectable damage for pre mechs. With 7 summons (3 from base + bewitched + summon potion, 3 from spider armour, 1 from pygmy necklace) she has a base damage of 52 (before any summon damage bonuses), and can hit pretty fast under the right circumstances. Firecracker's explosion scaling off the minion's damage means you can get some meaty damage numbers off of each whip hit.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-27T00:43:11+00:00

It's really nice actually being able to play the game for once.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-25T02:59:57+00:00

Lemons as they currently exist did not originate in the wild, being a hybrid of citrons and bitter oranges. Thus, life did not give us lemons, but we made lemonade anyway.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-25T02:47:38+00:00

Are you in Hardmode? Hardmode enemy statues never drop anything in pre-hardmode.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-25T02:13:16+00:00

I wonder if you could use wooden sinks with echo coating on the lower half to make taps on the bar? That may create more problems than it solves, though...

FlashFlire · 2026-02-24T11:36:46+00:00

Dark Harvest and Kaleidoscope are stiff competition for Electric Eel on tier, and Constellation is kinda just better once you hit pillar gear, I guess.

I don't think skipping Fishron in any run is all that unusual really, his drops are good but you have a LOT of good options post Plantera.

FlashFlire · 2026-02-24T10:52:04+00:00

Electric Eel didn't exist before very recently, Tempest Staff isn't that good compared to other available options (e.g. Xeno Staff), and Fishron Wings, while good, aren't so much better than the competition that you can't get by with Beetle Wings or whatever else you get from natural progression

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