(Read description) Is Defense Overrated in Terraria?

(Read description) Is Defense Overrated in Terraria?

Terraria can be very unforgiving at times the smallest mistake can spell out your death so it’s important to do everything you can to improve your survivability one of the easiest and most common ways people improve their chances of survival is to increase their defense that’s

Great and all but what if i told you that they’re wrong what a defense isn’t as great as it’s made out to be and are there any alternatives oh yeah disclaimer uh 3 2 1 done so before i start explaining why defense isn’t good we’ll first have to explain how defense even works

This little icon displays how much defense your character has it can be increased by wearing armor equipping accessories using potions etc depending on the world’s difficulty the effectiveness of the fence will change the values are shown here got all that memorized no alright moving on so based on the examples shown

It seems like defense will be pretty effective i mean on master mode it will reduce damage taken by the trap to near zero which is great why would anyone not want to have the ability to take as much punishment as possible well it’s because of stuff like this

Granted this is a bit of an extreme example but the last thing you want to do in terraria is to take damage especially in higher difficulties sure defense may help you against some of the heftier blows you’ll be taking but not much the difference between getting hit is a summoner

Who has the lowest defense of any class and a warrior who has the highest is pretty negligible against bosses and melee users can only take maybe a hit or two more than a summoner so that’s it then right i’ve shown the flaws of defense and

Why it sucks might as well just not wear armor anymore ah well no although the fence isn’t as powerful as you may have once thought it could still be useful in some situations have you ever wanted to say go outside at night early in the game but you find yourself in this

Situation a lot to a fresh character this situation would be absolutely terrifying however slapping on a few pieces of armor can really even the playing field and negate a lot of the damage taken having a high defense score can help the player tank far more hits from enemies

That may dish out not the most damage but said damage can stack up quickly when overwhelmed other examples where a high defense score can help a ton include solar eclipses the seasonal moons and invasions this strategy could sort of fall apart in higher difficulties when everything just kind of decides to

Hit like a truck but the fence is definitely valuable in normal mode and can help anyone make it through the toughest of times so if you don’t want to be using defense especially on expert and master mode what should you use instead well first off there’s damage reduction or dr

And yes it’s different from defense unlike defense which is a score that decreases incoming damage by a set amount dr lowers damage taken by a percentage some items that give you dr include wearing a worm scarf beetle armor using an endurance potion and some other stuff so since dr is percentage based that

Means no matter how much an incoming attack is going to hurt the damage will be reduced by a pretty good amount top it off with the fact that dedicating your gear to having a high dr can almost completely negate the most powerful of attacks however damage reduction does have a fatal flaw

It doesn’t perform too well against ship damage yep dr’s weakness is defense’s strength and defense’s weakness is dr strength because ship damage is usually pretty low but still lethal enough to make an impact having an item that reduces damage taken by a certain percentage will lower the damage taken slightly but because of

Math and stuff not by much you will certainly be taking less damage but having a high defense may be better used in these situations there is another alternative to defense and this one is much more luck dependent dodge chance some items give the player a chance to completely ignore an incoming hit

Items let you do this include master ninja gear the brain of confusion after 1.4 and the hollowed armor or titanium armor now i know what some of you are thinking if dodging completely negates damage sometimes why bother with stuff like defense and damage reduction see there’s the thing sometimes it’ll negate damage although

You’ll be completely immune to all damage every once in a while all the other hits you take will be dealing full damage so relying solely on dodge chance can be risky thankfully most items that grant dodge chance are either accessories or armor pieces so you’ll have some defense or dr to

Back yourself up when you get smacked although those are all the conventional methods of raising one’s survivability there is one more maxing out your attack strength i know you’re all sick and tired of hearing a great offense is a good defense yada yada yada but this mentality actually applies very

Well to terraria scrapping defense and going for armor and buffs that will give you the most damage will let you beat things faster which means less time is spent fighting the boss lowering the chance of you messing up and dying if you want you can further increase your damage output

By going to this blue idiot and getting all your accessories reforged to a damage increasing modifier but good luck with that you’ll be getting good reforges only slightly more consistently than my upload schedule

UPDATE: So yeah, looking back, this video makes some bold claims with nothing much to really back it up. I really only made this video because I saw some people considering replacing their wings with a warding shackle which is like… why? So yeah, don’t get mad if this video says some garbage. Treat it as more of a showcase of alternatives for defense. Thank you for understanding and have a nice day

(Outdated garbage ahahah) I just kind of feel like that defense is super ineffective whenever I play so instead of trying to get good or something, I made a video about it. Funny how that works.
Also I hope I got my math stuff right. It was never my strong suit really

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Sources:

Laugh Track:

Dimble Woods inside Bowser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad0rTOKnWF4&list=PL0F1CC7E40779F15F&index=9

Terraria Underground theme:

Super Mario World Credits Theme: