Terraria, being heavily item-based, is more than expected to have at least a few weapons that absolutely shatter the game.
In general
- Players have always found ways to cheese bosses and events with minimal effort. In the order that they were patched, these include standing on meteorite, spikes, lava, and inside weak enemies. This method worked by taking constant lesser, easily tanked damage and taking advantage of the Mercy Invincibility instead of more powerful boss attacks, as the game couldn't register them both at once.
- The easiest way to cheese most invasion events is to have your home be an Elaborate Underground Base with a simple Lava Trapnote ontop of it. Most invasions will always head towards your spawn point, but while they can break open doors, they can't break into trap doors leading down. As such, one can easily sit under their lava trap as the invasion goes on, with most mobs gleefully sacrificing themselves to the great Terraria Gods above while trying to get at you.
- If you're fighting bosses or doing events, Heart and Star Statues completely break the game for anyone even moderately competent at dodging. By wiring them up to timers and spacing them apart, each one produces up to three of its respective drop, for a maximum of ten. That's free, infinite healing and mana which you can collect in a fraction of the time it takes to gulp down potions. Even the Final Boss will have a hard time wearing an agile player down. If you don't have heart or star statues, you can substitute this with mob statue traps, which will quickly kill the trapped mobs and cause them to drop hearts/mana in the process. This all eventually got heavily nerfed; Heart and Star statues now have strict limits on how many items they can create, while monsters spawned by statues have their drops restricted in various ways.
- The Party Girl's Firework Rockets can easily tear enemies a new one. While they require a lot of setup thanks to being a placeable block and not a weapon, they can completely trivialize a lot of things in the game, from beating the Dungeon Guardian in record time
to oneshotting even the toughest of bosses. - Similarly, provided you can use it without blowing yourself up in the process, Dynamite is surprisingly effective against a good portion of the bosses, and a few post-hardmode ones as well. As one user demostrates, it's possible to kill the Wall of Flesh before the first night ends in record time with them.
- Hoiking. A very, very versatile glitch. It's simple, but very effective. All you have to do is make a line of hammered slope blocks, and you have one of the fastest methods of moving items, mobs, and players around. You can use this to push certain items towards you, push mobs towards the previously mentioned Lava Trap, push players across the map faster than even minecarts, and enter the jungle temple much earlier than intended. Here's a video demonstrating several uses for item hoiks, and here's Yrimir killing Dungeon Guardian in record time because of it.
- Bringing any hardmode items into a pre-hardmode world. Most hardmode items are able to kill pretty much everything pre-hardmode in one hit, and the armor is also good enough to stop you taking any hits (aside from Scratch Damage). Good when you just want to explore or build without worrying about dying.
- The Slimy Saddle Invincibility Machine exploits the fact that stomping an enemy with the slime mount grants invincibility frames to the player and enemies. This machine simply consists of two training dummies placed under a ceiling with just enough space to enable the slime mount to continuously bounce on both dummies. This renders the player completely immune to all attacks (except those of the Moon Lord who uses unique invincibility frames for his attack). Unfortunately, this has been patched in the Journey's End update.
- Want to become overpowered quickly early hard-mode? Look no further than Duke Fishron's drops. Since Truffle Worms start spawning as soon as hard-mode starts, one who is skilled enough, or knows how to abuse Duke Fishron's pattern can get some insanely powerful drops for that early on, allowing them to shred through everything in Hardmode up until the Moon Lord himself. Granted, be prepared for a very tough fight (especially if done early in Hardmode) if you want to earn these weapons.
- Fishing yields very good drops that can help break the game over your knee, both pre- and post-Wall of Flesh, as early as the first boss. Obtaining the "Fisher of Souls" or "Fleshcatcher" (or if you're lucky, the Sitting Duck) and combining some worms with Fallen Stars to make Enchanter Nightcrawlers for bait can result in you having enough Fishing Power to successfully fish up the Reaver Shark, Stonefish, and Sawtooth Shark very early to help with resource gathering for good armor. Add in the fact that you can get special nautical versions of the Hermes Boots and Cloud-in-a-Bottle and the 30-damage Falcon Blade from an iron crate, and you'll be set up to defeat the Wall of Flesh in no-time. And then when you reach Hardmode, you can do it all again by fishing up the Toxicarp/Bladetongue and the Crystal Serpent, weapons that can last you well into Hardmode itself until you can get your bearings.
- Placing a Nurse Home in an arena. The Nurse fully heals players at a price, instantly and with no cooldowns, even during events or bosses. By having the Nurse in the middle of an active battlefield, all it takes is having enough money and being able to break from combat just long enough to get healed by her, and players can be as good as invincible to anything that would not one-shot them. Having enough money to do this becomes trivial later in the game, especially after becoming powerful enough to farm the Pirate Invasion. The most common speedrun strategy for the final boss is to make a home for the Nurse in the arena and just stay in one place, alternating between healing from her and shooting at him. She can also heal herself and for some reason she takes less damage from the final boss than other NPCs, so her dying is hardly an issue. 1.4 nerfed this by making the cost of her healing scale as the game progresses, but money is still usually not that big of an issue, especially not at the point when said final boss is available.
- The Rod of Discord is already a powerful tool that allows teleportation to wherever the cursor is, which can be a godsend in combat and exploration alike, only held back by its Chaos State that deals heavy self damage if used consecutively. Enter the Rod of Harmony, the Shimmer transmutation of said item, which removes the cooldown altogether. This is about as busted as one can imagine, allowing unrestricted, instant movement on demand, with it only being balanced out by only being obtainable after the Moon Lord. Still, like the Zenith, there's nothing stopping you from bringing it into a new world and using its godmode-like mobility to traverse the world in a snap, although if you want to use it to break the post-Moon Lord content of a Game Mod, good luck finding one that'll actually let you use it.
- The dodge tank build. It's a build that consists of the Brain of Confusion, the Hollow Armor, Master Ninja Gear, and the Star Veil. The first three gives you a chance to dodge an attack, all of which are separate chances that can chain off each other. The Star Cloak meanwhile increases your Mercy Invincibility, allowing more time for your dodge chance to recharge. This lets you have a build that can focus purely on offense and treat defense as a Dump Stat, as your insane dodge chance will allow you enough time to regen HP should you get hit. Prior to the devs specifically Nerfing this tactic against the Empress of Light, this was one of the few ways to consistently beat the daytime Empress.
Accessories
- The Worm Scarf, Eater of Worlds' Expert Mode drop, is a case of Simple, yet Awesome, "only" providing 17% damage reduction when equipped. However, this alone is equivalent to almost two Endurance Potions' worth of DR, and is straight up the largest unconditional source of damage reduction in a game where damage reduction is scarce, with its effectiveness drastically scaling up compared to defense as enemies start to deal more and more damage per hit, meaning that an item obtained in early pre-Hardmode can easily be used all the way to the Moon Lord and beyond.note At the cost of one accessory slot, you get a boost to survivability that often eclipses more than any other defensive item or Warding modifier can manage, and the Worm Scarf itself can also be given the Warding modifier to make it even better at reducing damage.
- The Celestial Shell, the result of combining the Sun Stone, Moon Stone, Moon Charm, and Neptune's Shell into one item. The situational Sun/Moon Stones become a permanent stat boost, Neptune's Shell provides a fishman form that removes the threat of drowning and allows normal movement in water, and the Moon Charm gives you a werewolf form at night that provides additional stat boosts. This used to be even more broken before the Journey's End update, as it stacked with the Celestial Stone, which has the exact same buffs minus the transformations, doubling the items' effect.
- For yo-yo users, there's the Yoyo Bag. Made by combining the White String, Yoyo Glove and any Counterweight, the Yoyo Bag not only increases the range of the yoyo, but summons a second yoyo that circles around the first upon landing a successful strike. It also summons two counterweights that swing around the player, allowing it to cover the area around you or deal even further damage by getting up close to an enemy and striking them with both the yoyos and counterweights. It allows Yoyos to deal incredibly high, consistent damage from an utterly obscene distance, and it's obtainable as soon as you begin Hardmode if you're willing to hunt for the Skeleton Merchant. For added fun, try using Flasks of Ichor to perpetually soften up an opponent's defenses while attacking!
- The Cobalt Shield is a simple but nonetheless very effective accessory. It makes you immune to knockback, making many previously troublesome enemies almost trivial by taking away the one way for them to threaten you. It can also be combined with an Obsidian Skull to form the Obsidian Shield, granting you immunity to burning blocks (Hellstone and Meteorite) and making it much easier to take on Hell and the Wall of Flesh. On Hardmode, it can be combined with the Ankh Charm to create the Ankh Shield, granting immunity to most debuffs on top of being protected from burning blocks' damage.
- The Update 1.4 brings us different type of accessory, but two in particular stands from the rest: the first one is the Terraspark Boots, which is a fusion of the Lava Waders and the Frostspark Boots, and basically adds the effect of running very fast and flying from the latter with the fire immunity and seven second lava immunity from the former. The second one, Soaring Insignia, is an expert drop from the Empress of Light, but it makes up for it by giving the player INFINITE FLIGHT with rocket boots and wings. This means that equipping both of them will allow the player to soar the skies, without worrying about the limit, making maneuvers during boss fights a breeze. It's so strong that the authors of several major content mods are actively trying to figure out how to nerf it without destroying the item or causing community backlash when they update their mods to the 1.4 versions of tModLoader.
- Obtaining the Lavaproof Tackle Bag can make the process of fishing even easier, obtained by combining a number of Angler quest-specific rewards with a Lavaproof Fishing Hook. The Tackle Bag components boost fishing power, ensure that the line never breaks upon retraction (where there is a small chance where it can, which is devastating when something valuable is on the hook), and provides a small chance of not using bait. The Lavaproof Fishing Hook, however, completely bypasses the need to use specific bait or fishing rods to fish in lava. Finally, the fishing bonus from the Lavaproof Tackle Bag can stack with bonuses from both the ordinary Tackle Bag and the Angler Earrings, which makes it even easier to fish in any environment. Lava-based Angler objectives and rewards just got a lot easier to carry out!
- Obtaining the Cell Phone involves the most elaborate chain of crafting apart from the almighty Zenith, but the components it requires provide a wealth of environmental information. The Watch is imperative for scheduling and preparing for certain time-based events, the Depth Meter and Compass can be used to figure out if one is in the right spot for certain enemy spawns and living conditions, the Radar and Lifeform Analyzer are indispensable for finding rare enemies or NPCs, and the Angler-specific components can make a difference in ideal fishing conditions. Combine all of these and more with a Magic Mirror, and you end up with an item that provides all the info you need, all taking up just one spot in your inventory, likely where your Magic Mirror/Recall Potions would be. Combine that with the Magic Conch (which teleports you to either ocean on use) and the Demon Conch (same as the Magic one, except it takes you to the Underworld on use) and you get the Shellphone, which allows you to toggle between four possible destinations (world spawn, whatever spawn point you've set up via bed, either ocean side and the underworld) before use.
Mounts
- The Cosmic Car Key dropped by Martian Saucers. It allows you to summon a flying saucer mount... that has infinite flight time and moves faster than a sprinting player. Only a select few mounts have greater speed, and they either cannot fly or have specific conditions attached. It removes the need for an arena for pretty much every boss. It's also handy for fighting the gib-happy Dungeon Guardian, as it has the same top speed and moves faster diagonally. Getting it can be a pain, but the Martian Saucer can be effectively dodged in normal mode with most wings/mounts, and on Expert Mode and up its berserk mode is completely neutralized by a simple square of blocks around the player, so you can farm them safely as long as you have a yo-yo or something which can shoot through blocks.
- An alternative to the Cosmic Car Key for Expert Mode players is the Shrimpy Truffle, obtained from Duke Fishron. It allows the user to summon a "Cute Fishron" with similar flying abilities to the flying saucer. While it is slightly slower, touching any liquid puts you into an enraged mode, making you move even faster and deal more damage. When combined with the bubble blocks that the Party Girl sells, allowing you to contain liquids in mid-air with pass-through blocks, you can easily out-pace the saucer by a long shot, and have a massive damage boost to add onto it. Like other Duke Fishron drops, you can get this as soon as Hard Mode starts, meaning you'll never even need the Cosmic Car Key.
- Destroying The Flying Dutchman of the Pirate Invasion in Master Mode may earn you The Black Spot, a flying personal airship that is now the fastest mount in the game. Able to cleanly outrun the Dungeon Guardian (which even the saucer can't quite manage) in a straight line, its only weakness is an inability to make tight turns, due to its momentum. But even then, it can negate the need for an arena with almost any boss.
- ...Until its speed got heavily nerfed in 1.4.1, making it slightly slower than the saucer. On the upside, said update also increased the speed of the Witch's Broom, an mount obtained from defeating Mourning Wood of the Pumpkin Moon Event in Expert Mode, currently making it the fastest flying mount. It's also smaller than the Cosmic Car Key, allowing you to use it indoors, thus rendering wing and boot accessories a moot point.
Melee items
- The Death Sickle, dropped by the Reapers during the Solar Eclipse, seems like just a moderately powerful melee weapon. But it also fires spinning sickle projectiles, which fly a short distance and hang around for several seconds, continuously hitting anything that walks into them... and they travel through blocks, something almost no player-usable weapons can do. This costs no mana, so you can spam glowing sickles as long as you like. With this thing, you can effortlessly slaughter most enemies while hiding behind a wall. It's especially nice for Plantera, because it spends a lot of time slowly moving through walls, allowing you to chop away at it in relative safety (unless you're in Expert Mode, where it has its own block-penetrating attack).
- The Terra Blade. It's a very high damage sword that shoots a just-as-high damage Sword Beam. This makes it easily one of the best weapons in the game for melee players. In addition, it can be acquired fairly easily with some patience and luck after fighting Plantera, despite being one of the five most powerful swords in the game. In earlier versions, it can be acquired even earlier, potentially after beating just one mechanical boss. Combined with a good modifier, it can easily carry you through most of the game. Since the Labor of Love 1.4.4 update, the Terra Blade has been reworked and it is much more powerful: its range and damage might have been slightly reduced, but both the swing and projectile are much wider and have more piercing power, and it now has a faster attack rate that scales drastically better with melee speed buffs,note making it even better at tearing apart both bosses and hordes alike with some melee gear under your belt.
- If you endure the grueling Martian Madness event, there is a chance that you will get the Influx Waver, which serves as a powerful alternative to the aforementioned Terra Blade. It fires beams that do higher damage than the Terra Blade, but instead of piercing, the beams will disappear upon contact with an enemy and reappear several times to strike at different angles, usually hitting the target twice or thrice in a single shot. The beams can even target other nearby enemies if the original target dies. Versus single enemies, the multi-hit nature of the blade can rack up incredible damage and tear through nearly any single target very quickly.
- Following the lead of both weapons above is the Flying Dragon sword. While only dropped by Betsy, who in turn only becomes available after defeating Golem, the above weapons are difficult (or at least very slow) to acquire before entering the Jungle Temple to gather Solar Tablets for grinding them, making all these weapons available at around the same timenote . Though slower and marginally weaker than the Terra Blade, each swing of the Flying Dragon releases a huge crescent Sword Beam capable of passing through walls and enemies alike. In addition to its wall-phasing properties giving it all the benefits of the Death Sickle with even better damage, the size of its projectiles makes it effortless to strike enemies at distance.
- The 1.4.1 update was incredibly kind to the Flying Dragon, doubling its base damage of 90 to 180 and giving it the fourth-highest base damage of melee weapon in the game, right behind the Zenith, the Terrarian, and the Meowmere while being obtainable considerably earlier.
- Vampire Knives fire off about five knives, which is great against bosses, because five shots is obviously better than one. However, the true prowess comes from its second effect: the knives heal you. When a knife hits an enemy, you regain 1-2 health. With the multiple knives and the fast firing rate, this weapon proves to be a great survival weapon, and is incredibly effective for any boss fightnote
- The Flairon dropped by Duke Fishron, who can be fought as soon as Hardmode is available. It's a weapon that's more akin to the Golem Fist or KO Cannon than a flail, but what makes it so good is that the head leaves a trail of homing bubbles that each seek nearby enemies and deal the same amount of damage as the flail itself. This almost eliminates the need to aim, as you can just swing the flail and let the storm of bubbles do the work.
- The Enchanted Sword/Terragrim. They are some of the strongest pre hardmode swords, but what makes them a game breaker is how early and easily you can acquire them. They're found in enchanted sword shrines (a small cave with a one block wide tunnel that may lead all the way to the surface) or rarely even randomly underground. For players aware of them, they are very easy to find, allowing you to potentially acquire a weapon to carry you through all of pre-hardmode on the first day! The only disadvantage is they aren't guaranteed to spawn in a world, but are still fairly probable, especially in medium and large worlds which have three and four shrines, respectively, although each of which also has a 2/3 chance of containing a useless decoy instead of the actual sword.
- The Starlight, dropped by the Empress of Light, is essentially the Terragrim on turbo speed. It's a rapier-like weapon that rapidly stabs in the target direction, can hit enemies through walls (including a vast majority of the game's bosses), does very high damage with infinite piercing, and its use time is even shorter than that of the Terragrim/Arkahlis, making it one of the most potentially-devastating melee weapons in the game in terms of sheer DPS even without additional accessory and armor set bonuses. Its attack speed is so ridiculously fast that you can even fell the Dungeon Guardian with it rather quickly, assuming you have an appropriate mount and take care to avoid its One-Hit Kill.
- After killing the Solar Pillar, you will be able to craft the Solar Eruption. It's a rapid flail that penetrates blocks and sweeps across practically the entire screen in a single stroke. Anything hit by it will take massive damage (usually multiple times) as well as get hit with a lethal debuff that drains 25 HP per second and spreads the flames to nearby enemies when that one is killed. Not to mention, the aforementioned reach and block-ignoring abilities mean that you can hit enemies from pretty much anywhere, even from behind cover, making it a viable choice even if you aren't running a melee build. Needless to say, getting this weapon will usually make short work of the other Pillars and will make the fight against the Moon Lord a lot easier.
- Solar Flare Armor has the potential to make a melee player nearly invulnerable to everything the game has to offer the moment they craft it. On top of having the highest defense of any armor in the game along with substantial melee buffs, wearing the full set activates its Solar Blaze effect, which grants up to 3 layers of a shield which majorly reduces damage taken and grants an explosive Dash Attack without the need to equip another accessory. Taking hits or landing shield bashes will consume shield charges, but not only does each one only need 3 seconds without taking damage to regenerate, the shield provides 20% damage reduction when charged, which stacks with the set bonus' passive 12% DR and translates to the player almost always taking 22.4% less damage on top of their boatload of defense and any other DR they may have stacked, allowing them to eat almost any attack with impunity while fighting back just as hard. If you have a Game Mod that goes beyond the Moon Lord, the armor even tends to holds up for a good while due to just how much damage and survivability the armor brings, especially with the relative rarity of damage reduction in the vanilla game.
- Update 1.4 brings us the Zenith, the Infinity +1 Sword to end all swords.note While it has the biggest crafting tree of anything in the game (requiring items from every stage of the game, including two weapons obtainable from Moon Lord, one from Plantera, one from the Martian Saucer, one from Pumpking, and the others either crafted or found in chests/areas), it compensates with a whopping 190 base damage, along with creating a veritable vortex of sword slashes that bypass blocks and hit multiple times - but most importantly, the range of the weapon is literally the size of the game window, or the player's monitor if using fullscreen, as it can target anywhere your cursor can reach but doesn't collide with physical blocks like the Magic Missile and its derivatives. Fully equipped with melee accessories and clad in Solar Flare armor, you become a human blender that can slice through anything in the game. On its own, it's essentially a Bragging Rights Reward for doing almost everything in the game, but there's nothing stopping players from crafting one and bringing it with them to an Expert or Master mode world to farm their exclusive drops, where it still shreds through enemies like paper even with the global increased mob health. It's so powerful that even the Moon Lord on Master Mode won't last longer than maybe a minute. Like the Soaring Insignia above, many content mod creators are already dreading balancing the weapon to prevent it from totally shattering modded post-Moon Lord progression.
Ranger
- For pre-Hardmode, the Minishark will tear apart just about anything. While it does cost a hefty 35 gold, which is hard to get early in the game, and you have to get something else gun-related, which requires a trip to the Corruption/Crimson as a bare minimum to even have access to it, the ends most certainly justify the means. It has a high fire rate, which absolutely shreds every pre-hard mode boss sans the Eater of Worlds and the Wall of Flesh. And it has a chance to not consume ammo, which is also very welcome considering the high fire rate.
- The Star Cannon, while having a very big drawback of having to farm stars, which is incredibly slow, is definitely a good weapon. It fires stars at a very fast pace, which cause a lot of damage. It's definitely the best weapon to use against the Wall of Flesh, and if you have a good handful of stars left over, you can get some distance into hard mode with ease.
- Upon beating the Wall of Flesh, you have a chance of getting the Clockwork Assault Rifle. This weapon is definitely what you'll need to survive the early days of Hard mode. It has the unique ability of firing three rounds a bullet, which saves you money. It also fires at the speed of the Minishark, which is also a welcome addition. In the right hands, this weapon can wreck half of the hard-mode bosses with ease. It's even better with Crystal Bullets, since it fires off three rounds of bullets that upon contact explode into several crystals that hurt enemies. You can use this to defeat even Plantera if you're good enough.
- The Onyx Blaster. This can be obtained as soon as you get into Hardmode, as all it requires is a Shotgun and some common Corruption/Crimson drops. The shotgun is a relatively expensive purchase at 25 gold, but to say it's worth it is putting it lightly. It behaves similarly to a Shotgun, but also fires a large black crystal with perfect accuracy that explodes after medium range or hitting an enemy, that does double the weapon's tooltip damage. Before modifiers, this means that on a default-stat Blaster, a meatshot will do 168 (28x6) damage. Combine this with Crystal bullets - Which is heavily incentivized due to the close-quarters nature of the gun - and it becomes a borderline admin tool. It scales exceptionally well with equipment too, making it pretty still viable all the way up to the point you get the Vortex Beater. Even when you have the Beater, it's still worth keeping around after that as it pretty much deletes any standard enemy with the pinpoint accuracy dark crystal shot, which helps a ton with ammo conservation when paired with the constant-dps-but-ammo-hungry Beater.
- If you can manage to kill a Hallowed Mimic early on in Hardmode, you can get the Daedalus Stormbow, a bow which causes numerous arrows to rain from the sky from just one arrow. With an Endless Quiver, you can create an endless rain of death upon normal mooks. Against the Destroyer, equip Holy Arrows and watch the combined force of arrows and stars generated by the arrows shred him in under a minute. As long as you're good at dodging, you can have a full set of Hallowed armor in one night. The Daedalus Stormbow was thus nerfed in 1.4, not only reducing its damage output but also reducing its fire rate when equipped with certain special arrows, including the Holy Arrow.
- If you kill Destroyer before the other two mech bosses, you can guarantee you will have an easy time against his brothers. Because with his Souls of Might, you can turn the Minishark into a Megashark. The Megashark is a Minishark on steroids, having an even higher fire rate, even more damage, and does not consume ammo half of the time. With this weapon, you can destroy the Twins and Skeletron Prime with ease.
- On the other hand, if you kill Skeletron Prime first, you can use his Souls of Fright to make a flamethrower. Said flamethrower has an excellent range, can pierce multiple targets, does quite a bit of damage and uses the very common Gel as its' ammo supply at a fairly low rate, meaning ammo is unlikely to be in short supply.
- If you're lucky, the Travelling Merchant can sell you a Gatligator the moment you begin hardmode. While it costs a hefty 35 gold, it's basically a more easily accessible Megashark, boasting similar damage and an identical fire rate in exchange for being far less accurate. If you get it early on, you can rip through most of early hardmode easily and kill the Mech Bosses without too much effort, and once you get Chlorophyte Bullets you can even keep using it further into hardmode until you get something like the Chain Gun or Vortex Beater.
- The Aerial Bane. While you'll have to slog through the Old One's Army and kill Betsy possibly more than once, it's a devastatingly powerful weapon against just about every boss in the game. To put it simply, its a 6-shot bow that converts arrows into explosive bolts which deal 150% damage against anything that's flying - namely every boss in the game bar King Slime and Golem. Combine this with the fact that its arrows split into more arrows upon striking an airborne foe, and you have a weapon capable of tearing most bosses a new one with the right setup - even being a viable choice against the Moon Lord himself.
- The Tsunami bow dropped by Duke Fishron, who can be fought as soon as Hardmode is available. It deals a great amount of damage and is an excellent ranged weapon overall that shreds most hardmode bosses until you obtain the Phantasm. One arrow not good enough? How about five for the price of one? This also means it can trigger the effects of Holy Arrows five times.
- While Chlorophyte Bullets don't deal as much damage as Crystal or Luminite bullets, it makes up for it in spades with its ability to home in on enemies. Now aiming is no longer an issue at all, especially on less accurate weapons, such as the Gatligator, Chain Gun and S.D.M.G. Bosses that are usually very hard to hit with guns, like Duke Fishron and Lunatic Cultist, are now hilariously easy since you can just hold down your mouse button and still hit them easily.
- The Snowman Cannon, while dropped by the Ice Queen, is undoubtedly powerful. To put it simply, it's a rapid fire homing rocket launcher that deals immense area damage over a very short time, shredding nearly anything within a matter of seconds. Unlike most launchers, it doesn't even do self damage, meaning you can spam it to your heart's content. The only downside is that guzzles Rockets at an extremely fast rate.
- Both of the Vortex Pillar's weapons are devastatingly effective.
- The Vortex Beater is a machine gun that sprays bullets in a small cone. However, it also fires a free homing rocket every few seconds that inflicts huge damage. Together, the rockets and bullets can blast apart entire hordes of enemies very quickly, and make short work of most bosses when paired with Chlorophyte Bullets. The icing on the cake is that it has a 2/3 chance not to consume ammo.
- The Phantasm, on the other hand, fires 4 arrows at a time, with the rate of fire increasing as you hold down the button. The kicker? For every hit you land, a small barrage of homing arrows will fire at the target. Considering how fast the thing fires, you can easily whip up a literal hailstorm of arrows that will shred nearly any boss within seconds if you focus them down with high-tier arrows.
- Vortex Armor is just as powerful as the Vortex weapons. In addition to its hefty defense and ranged damage bonuses, its set bonus provides a stealth mode akin to Shroomite Armor, except activated on demand instead of forcing you to stay still. Said stealth mode reduces your movement speed by 33%, but gives a whopping +80% ranged damage and 20% ranged crit while also reducing your aggro, which is a larger offensive buff in a single ability than that provided by entire loadouts. The buffs stack with the Vortex Armor's innate bonuses and all your other ones, so with some accessories and a strong weapon under your belt, you can eviscerate almost any enemy the second they appear on screen. On top of that, the lowered movement speed can easily be counteracted with other movement buffs, or just by erasing any target before they can reach you in the first place. If you have a Game Mod that goes beyond the Moon Lord, the armor even tends to holds up for a while due to just how big of a damage buff stealth mode gives.
- The S.D.M.G, dropped by the Moon Lord, is the endgame equivalent of the Minishark/Megashark, boasting an even faster firing rate, pinpoint accuracy, higher damage, and an even greater chance of not using ammo. Combine it with endgame ranger gear and modifiers, and any distant target will be turned into swiss cheese in a matter of milliseconds.
- The Sniper Rifle, while slow and not autofire-enabled, is extremely powerful and has a high natural crit rate, which with a full kit of endgame ranger gear can be pushed above 100%, turning every round into a critical hit. While not ideal against highly mobile bosses, it makes dealing with common enemies a snap, even in Master Mode with its inflated health pools. This becomes even deadlier in PVP, since the Vortex Armor's stealth mode makes you nearly invisible along with its absurd buffs to ranged damage, meaning every shot will potentially deal a player's entire health bar twice over and come out of seemingly nowhere. Opponents will never see you coming until they explode into gibs and the server announces their death at your hands.
- For those on the Mobile and 3DS versions, the Heart Arrows that are sold by the Merchant or found in Heart Shrines during the St. Valentine's Day event (which only happens once a year, but of course, you can change the time/date settings on your device to get them at any particular time of year). They stun and completely immobilize almost every enemy for one and a half seconds. This also extends to bossesnote , even the Wall of Flesh - and yes, it actually immobilizes the whole wall, giving you additional time to kill it in the tiny worlds that those versions provide (discounting the expanded worlds on New 3DS systems). It even immobilizes bosses like The Destroyer, and it can even immobilize the Dungeon Guardian. For the cherry on top, since all weapons and items auto-fire in those versions, you can easily keep most enemies immobilized even with just a simple Wooden Bow.
Magic
- The Water Bolt. It's a very versatile weapon that fires ricocheting bolts that can also pierce multiple targets, all while doing good damage. Used correctly, it can even be used against the Wall of Flesh effectively. What's more, there is a chance that you can find one in the Dungeon entrance, allowing you to get one before you kill Skeletron. Needless to say, this will break the game in two and likely allow you to steamroll every enemy and boss before the dungeon. Case in point: the weapon was so powerful that the developers in 1.4 decided to make the tome unspawnable at surface level, stopping players from acquiring the weapon before beating Skeletron.
- The Space Gun, specifically in combination with the Meteor Armor. Meteorite Ore is relatively easy to get, needing only a single broken Shadow Orb/Crimson Heart, some patience, and a Gold/Platinum/Tungsten Pick (with an Obsidian Skin potion recommended for mining the meteorite at lower levels, as blowing them up no longer works post-version-1.4). The Space Gun itself is a relatively unassuming weapon - a fast-firing, piercing, mid-damage laser gun - but the Meteor Armor not only buffs magic damage by 21%, it removes the Space Gun's mana cost. The result? A zero-cost projectile weapon that can be spammed all day and all night, which still deals enough damage to hold its own against anything from enemies to bosses. In some cases, you can even defeat Wall of Flesh with this setup.
- The Demon Scythe is a relatively rare drop from Demons in the Underworld, but is worth every bit of the effort to get. This weapon conjures scythes that spin in place and then shoot out at high speed, with a fairly wide range and good damage along with piercing capabilities. It's the initial spin that makes the Demon Scythe so good: because the scythes deal damage while spinning, it becomes downright lethal at melee range, easily chewing up enemies that try to get up close and personal, while its wide range makes it decent at long range as well (especially against bats and the like). Its close-range damage output even outstrips many magic weapons in early Hardmode, making it worth keeping for quite a while.
- If you're lucky enough to have Platinum in your world, you can grind a bit to make a Diamond Staff, which is a powerful weapon that costs very little mana and fires highly damaging, piercing bolts, and notably can be crafted before even needing to visit an evil biome. With good mage equipment and modifiers, this weapon becomes a Disk One Nuke that can easily carry you all the way to the Wall of Flesh, and sometimes even into early Hardmode.
- As soon as you enter Hardmode, Truffle Worms will begin spawning in Underground Mushroom Biomes. Should you have the mettle to challenge and defeat Duke Fishron before, for instance, the three Mechanical Bosses, you can effortlessly rip through whatever stands in your way with his Razorblade Typhoon. Each cast of the spell summons two rebounding discs with high speed, extremely good homing abilities, and unlimited piercing to fly about the battlefield slicing up anything unfortunate enough to get in the way - oh, and thanks to its size and wonky hitbox, the typhoons can clip through thin walls if you hug them as you fire. Because its homing and moderate turning radius allows it to hit one enemy and those around it repeatedly for its full duration, you can fire them about without fear of missing while still keeping your focus on evading attacks or using other weapons to pile on the damage. Slap on a mana-restoring accessory such as the Mana Flower or Magic Cuffs, and this tome can potentially carry you all the way through the Lunar Events and even the Final Boss.
- And once you beat the Nebula Pillar? Say hello to the Nebula Blaze. While it lacks the bouncing, piercing abilities of the Razorblade, it fires much faster and inflicts much more splash damage, in addition to being able to sometimes shoot a blue attack that deals nearly 3 times the damage. In a similar vein to the Solar Eruption, many players consider using it even if they aren't a mage, just because of the raw damage this thing can put out even without magic gear.
- Nebula Armor, while not necessarily having the incredible bulk of Solar Flare nor the damage of Vortex, is also a massive power spike for mages for a slightly different reason. Its great buffs to magic usage are one thing, but the real prize is the set bonus, which has a 1/3 chance to spawn a random Nebula Booster whenever hitting an enemy, with a miniscule cooldown of half a second each. The Boosters can buff the user's damage, regen, or mana regen for 8 seconds each, and each additional booster stacks the effects up to 3 times and refreshes the cooldown. With endgame magic weapons tending to deliver a lot of hits in rapid succession, the player can easily spawn enough Boosters to permanently have every buff at max stacks, which will give them a hefty 45% more damage while regenerating 9 HP/s and 30 MP/s, turning them into a powerhouse that can spam nuclear spells with impunity, and rapidly heal off damage that they do take, mitigating mage's Squishy Wizard tendencies. As a bonus, if you're in multiplayer, everyone can benefit from the buffs, which can make your entire team just as strong, even if they aren't using magic themselves. If you have a Game Mod that goes beyond the Moon Lord, the armor even tends to holds up for a while due to just how much utility and power comes from permanently having all of these buffs active at once.
- The Lunar Flare spell, obtained from the Moon Lord, is a powerful Death from Above spell in the vein of the likes of the Meteor Staff. Unlike its earlier counterparts, however, Lunar Flare can pass through solid blocks and ceilings. Though it uses a lot of Mana to use, it fires quickly enough to make it a quick Mana sink for non-mages, and with the right gear, can prove to be a powerful main weapon for mages as well.
- The Moon Lord also drops the Last Prism, which fires six beams which quickly converge into a single, massive laser beam that deals continuous damage to all enemies hit. While it can't pierce walls and guzzles an insane amount of mana to sustain, the damage output of the beam is absolutely absurd when paired with strong mage equipment, instantly vaporizing most enemies while melting bosses in seconds. Most notably, it's the only weapon in the game that can rival the damage output of the Zenith.
Summoner
- While summoner builds have low defense armor, they easily make up for it by having their own mini-swat team of monsters at their command, making crowd control a really easy task, and very useful for dealing with the Goddamned Bats in the game. The best part is, the minions are completely invincible and can be summoned directly at the mouse cursor. Because of this, they are absolutely amazing mob farmers; any enemies whose attacks don't go through walls can't do anything to you while your minions rip through them, making them amazing for most raid events. When combined with the invincibility machines mentioned above, it's safe to complete AFK bosses outside of the Moon Lord as a summoner.
- The Terraprisma stands out among all summon weapons for being arguably the strongest of them all, and possibly one of the strongest weapons, period. In short, it summons glowing swords that move incredibly quickly and swing at enemies, dealing massive damage - even exceeding that of endgame minion summons, with only a very long Stardust Dragon able to challenge it. If a player can get their hands on it, combining it with a good summoner build can trivialize just about everything the game has to offer. Its insane power is justified, however, since getting it in the first place requires the player to summon and defeat the Empress of Light in the day, where her attacks One-Hit Kill - meaning that the player has to pull off a No-Damage Run against an already difficult boss to get their reward.
- The Valhalla Knight armor set from the Old One's Army event is extremely powerful in some situations. It has 68 armor (only 10 points less then Solar on a class normally meant to be a Glass Cannon), a large amount of life regen to further increase survivability, and 60% increased minion damage (6% less then Stardust), while being obtainable after Golem and before even starting the Lunar Pillars. It lets you summon 4 sentry pets with a focus on massively buffing the Ballista sentry, the strongest of which deals 156 damage before buffs, making it the hardest hitting minion in the game even before factoring in all the buffs from Valhalla Knight Armor. The armor also doesn't stop you from summoning 4-6 more normal minions depending on your buffs and accessories. The only downside is that Sentries don't do well against certain highly mobile bosses, but they shine against raids or bosses that don't move very much. On top of that, it also partially functions as a melee armor, meaning you can easily grab a sword or other melee weapon and fight alongside all your minions.
