Daybreak

This is a Solar Pillar weapon, so it lands in your hands during the lunar events after the Lunatic Cultist goes down. That gives it a short career: the pillars, and then Moon Lord. It happens to be one of the better melee answers to that last fight, which is most of the reason to build it.

Every throw plants a sun spear in whatever it lands on, and the spear keeps burning the target without any further input from you. You can bury eight in a single enemy at once, each running its own timer, so the plan against anything large is to throw as fast as your hands allow and then spend the rest of the fight dodging while the burn works. The spears fly flat for a moment and then drop, so anything at range has to be lobbed rather than aimed straight.

A spear detonates when its time runs out, when it smacks into terrain, when the thing carrying it dies, or when a ninth spear shoves it off the pile. Those bursts hit for the weapon's own damage and spread the burn to anything standing close, which is the only reason it has any presence against a group at all. The Solar Eruption is still the better pick when the problem is a lane full of enemies rather than one big target.

Take flat damage over critical chance. A large share of the output arrives through explosions, explosions cannot crit, and so crit bonuses quietly do less here than on any other melee weapon. The burn does not scale with your damage gear either, which makes this unusually comfortable on a defensive build: wear the Beetle Shell and the damage over time still lands at full strength. Flasks and the Magma Stone can add their effects to the spears themselves, but never to the explosions.

It behaves like a much angrier Bone Javelin: a thrown shaft that sticks in a target and bleeds it out over time. The difference is that this one counts as melee, so it takes melee speed and melee damage gear. Melee speed makes the spears travel faster, not thrown more often, which catches people out.