Blade Staff

Summoning one parks a dagger in a slow ring above your head. When something comes into range it peels off, flies into the target and saws at it repeatedly, then returns to the ring the moment nothing is left nearby. The search range is generous, around fifty tiles, with a slightly wider leash past which a dagger gives up and comes home no matter what it was doing.

Each dagger applies a short invincibility window on whatever it hits, which caps how often it can register. In practice the daggers spend part of every second traveling rather than touching, so the real rate sits under that cap, but this is still one of the fastest hitting minions in the game and every judgment about it follows from that.

Each individual hit is tiny. The weapon works by landing an enormous number of them, and that makes it respond to gear completely differently from a heavy single hit minion.

• Whip tags add a fixed amount to every hit, so their value scales with hit count. Most whips will more than double what a set of daggers produces, a bigger swing than the same whip gives almost anything else.
• The Dark Harvest is the extreme case. Its reaping mechanic and the daggers feed each other across a crowd.
• Percentage based summon damage barely moves the number, because a percentage of very little is still very little.
• Effects that scale off the minion own hit, like the Firecracker explosion, are close to wasted for the same reason.

Stacking generic summon damage and wondering why nothing changed is the standard mistake with this weapon. Build for hit count and flat additions instead.

Built in armor penetration is why an early hardmode drop stays usable long past the point it should have been shelved. It strips a fixed slice off the target, which is enough to ignore the defense of most ordinary enemies outright. Push past that threshold and the math turns hard against you, because whatever defense is left gets subtracted from an already tiny per hit figure.

So against high defense targets, defense reduction is not a garnish, it is the weapon. A Flask of Ichor, Betsy's Curse from Betsy's Wrath, and Broken Armor from something like the Paladin's Hammer all cut the number directly, and any one of them can be the difference between the daggers working and the daggers doing nothing at all. Melee players sometimes run this specifically because they were already carrying an ichor flask for their own damage.

It has no knockback, so the entire knockback branch of the modifier table is unavailable and the usual advice does not apply. Ballistic is the default for most builds. It stops being the default in two cases. Once your summon damage bonuses climb high enough, Focused overtakes it. And if you are not running a whip at all, Ballistic gives you nothing, so Worthy takes over against low defense targets.

Eager is the one the game itself flags as best, and for normal content that is simply wrong, since almost nothing you fight carries enough defense for the extra penetration to matter. It becomes correct against a short list of very heavy targets: Duke Fishron, the Empress of Light once she has changed form, and the core of the Moon Lord. It is never the answer if Betsy's Curse is already applied, because the defense is gone either way.

Precise tracking and a fixed idle position make it dependable against things that move erratically. The daggers do not drift or lose a boss between passes the way looser minions do, and they redistribute cleanly as targets die, which is why the same weapon handles both a single fast boss and a packed corridor. That puts it in the same practical bracket as the Sanguine Staff and the Terraprisma, despite arriving much earlier than either.

It carries no knockback of its own but it can borrow some. A Papyrus Scarab or a Well Fed buff puts a small shove on every hit, and at this attack rate a full set of daggers can hold a knockback vulnerable enemy completely still while everything else you own kills it.

It is also one of the better answers to the Dungeon Guardian. Nothing meaningfully damages that thing, so the fight comes down to how many times you can touch it per second, and the daggers touch it more than almost anything else you could bring.

Its internal file name is Smolstar. Its buff line is one of a handful that breaks from the usual pattern of naming the minion and saying it will fight for you, borrowing instead a phrase for a Chinese execution method that stayed on the books until 1905. The image of blades suspended over your head is very likely a nod to Damocles, the courtier who got his king seat for a day with a sword hanging above it.

It used to drop from Enchanted Swords, which is why old guides send you to the underground for it. It comes off Queen Slime now, which lines it up neatly as an early hardmode summoner pickup.