Part 43: Dangerous Raid

#41 - Dangerous Raid



Hello everyone, and welcome back to Rivershire. Last time we got our asses kicked by Duke Fishron, a boss that most players never fight until they outgear him by leaps and bounds. So what do you say we take another shot at it?

Duke Fishron Boss Fight

There's like 3 or 4 seconds at the beginning where I accidentally clicked off Terraria, so it came through as nothing. So don't freak out if nothing happens at the start, it's just me being bad at recording.



Unlike last time, I'm now carting around a bunch of buff potions. In addition to the usual regeneration, thorns, and ironskin potions, I've also brought a swiftness potion to make us move faster. This is going to be a cornerstone of our strategy.



First off, Duke Fishron has 50,000 health, giving him the second highest total we've seen thusfar in the game. He's also an extremely fast, and extremely powerful boss. He deals 100 points of contact damage, and has 50 defense. He can also inflict two different debuffs at 33% chance each, bleeding and "feral bite," neither of which we want to deal with. Duke Fishron is the only enemy in a non expert game capable of inflicting feral bite.


So my strategy here is, like I said last time, to "run the fuck away."



There's also an incredibly important distinction to be made here. Running away means we're going to use our UFO mount to fly in large circles around the beach, always away from the boss. Fishron is like Plantera in that he has an enrage mechanic. If you leave the beach while fighting him, he deals double damage and has twice as much defense.



Duke Fishron only has a small handful of attacks. First off here is the Detonating Bubbles. He shoots about 10 of them at you, and they lazily chase you. If they get close, they explode.



Luckily, our bullets can literally curve.



Bullets, as you might imagine, should not do that. So let's take a quick break from the boss fight in progress to examine why it's happening.



This is Sam 20 minutes in the past, and we have a shitload of Chlorophyte in our inventory.



1 Chlorophyte bar + 70 musket balls nets us 70 Chlorophyte Bullets. As long as we point our gun vaguely in the direction of an enemy, the bullets will do the rest of the work. To quote Gary Oldman, "One shot, and replay sends every following shot to the same location."

While Chloropyte Bullets aren't quite as handy as the ZF-1, we will be getting good use out of these.



Anyway, back to the boss fight.



There's really not a lot to say about the early part of the fight. We're just flying in circles while staying ahead of Fishron's charges.



Here's Fishron's other attack about to take root in the air.



He creates whirlpools that spew sharks at us. You might even call them Sharknados. The sharks that it shoots out disappear when they collide with blocks, and deal 90 contact damage.



Once Fishron falls below half health, he transitions to his second phase, identified by his glowing yellow eyes. In his second phase, he deals 150 contact damage, and his sharknado spawned adds deal 160. His speed also increases by quite a lot, but his defense drops to 40 points. It's for this phase that I brought the swiftness potion, because you saw him tear me a new asshole last time.



If we didn't have that potion, we'd have taken a lot of damage here. His charges are unbelievably fast in this second phase.







Because we're using homing bullets, Fishron goes down absurdly quickly. I'm still not entirely sure how you're supposed to fight him normally. He moves so fast that I don't believe a midair arena would be of much help.



The most important part of fighting Fishron is catching his drops before they hit the ground. It's a style thing, in that if you let them touch the ground you have none.



Fishron has 5 weapon drops, and one will drop every time you kill them. He can also drop a couple of other things in addition to the one guaranteed weapon.

Bubble Gun - (70 magic damage. I've never used it, and I don't think I've ever gotten it as a drop.)
Flairon - (66 melee damage. It's the next flail drop, except the head will also fire homing bubbles at enemies.)
Razorblade Typhoon - (60 magic damage. It's a magic weapon that shoots a disc that homes in on enemies. It's hilariously good, and once I get it, I'm going to farm up a set of Spectre Armor just to make the best use of it.)
Tempest Staff - (50 summon damage. It summons a sharknado minion for us, which is pretty cool. Though it's strictly worse than the summon weapons you can get from the Solar Eclipse or Martian Madness event.)
Tsunami - (60 ranged damage. It's a bow that shoots 5 arrows at once, but only uses 1. It's really good, but you should avoid using piercing arrows with it for reasons related to enemy mercy invincibility.)
Duke Fishron Mask - (14.29% chance. )
Duke Fishron Trophy - (10% chance.)
Fishron Wings - (6.67% chance. The first real wing upgrade you can get before the endgame wings become available.)

Our Frozen wings give us 81 blocks of height and 150% horizontal movement bonus. The Fishron wings grant 143 blocks of height and 167% horizontal movement bonus. These are one of the best sets of wings in the game, really only beaten by endgame sets.



Anyway, moving on, the rest of the update is going to be just some roundup stuff. To start off with, we have a problem... look at the background in the image.

Remember the hallow barrier that I created between the Crimson and our treefort? The Crimson has breached containment and enough is nearby to change the biome.





This is why the Clentaminator is always something I buy as soon as it becomes available. This is only a stopgap measure, unfortunately. I've looked at the area in the map viewer, and the Crimson infection is too deeply rooted for a simple Clentaminating to fix. We'd have to tunnel through a lot of the ground to fix it.

I'm also surprised that it's grown this much. Once Golem dies, the speed of the hard mode biome spread is cut to 33% of its boosted form. So it's not quite as slow as it was in normal mode, though it's also not nearly as aggressive as the early HM spread either.

The ideal thing to do here would be to spread some Hallow with the Clentaminator, but then we'd have a growing Hallow problem next to our base.





For the first time since the very early parts of normal mode, this part of the map has been cleansed.





Jumping ahead... nine days, we've gotten a collection of really nice weapons from the dungeon, the Martian Madness event, Solar Eclipses, and, yes, Fishron. You can also see a new helmet in our inventory, which means we've also started wearing the Spectre magic set.

This part was recorded in preparation for that multiplayer event I hosted. But what I want to call specific attention to are the two rings at the bottom of our inventory.



A Band of Starpower from shadow orbs + a Band of Regeneration from somewhere in the super early game lets us create an accessory that gives the effects of both.



If we combine the Mana Regeneration Band with a common shackle from any random zombie, we can create an accessory that restores mana when we take a hit, as well as boosts our maximum mana.



Infrequently, the traveling merchant will sell a Celstial Magnet, which increases the pickup range of mana stars.



Finally if we combine our Magic Cuffs with a Celestial Magnet, we have an incredibly strong accessory for mage type characters.

You can also combine the Celestial Magnet with an Avenger's Emblem to get 15% increased magic damage and increased pickup range on mana stars.









You guys absolutely do not want to know how much farming these took. How many solar eclipses I had to trigger in the associated biomes.

Once a single Crimson Key dropped, two more did inside of a minute.



That's all five biome chest weapons, though. I think we're pretty well set for the future.



10 Hallowed Bars + 30 Pumpkins + 5 Ectoplasm will create a Pumpkin Moon Medallion.



20 Bolts of Silk + 5 Ectoplasm + 5 Souls of Fright will create a Naughty Present.

Why do I bring these up? Oh... no reason.

NEXT TIME: