Desert Tiger Staff

Casting again does not give you a second tiger. It feeds the one you have. Every extra summon makes it hit harder, run faster, shorten the wait between pounces, and chain the pounce through one more enemy. You can read the total off the sprite: a cub at the low end, an adult in the middle, an armored adult once most of your slots are in it. Only two other summons work this way, Abigail's Flower and the Stardust Dragon Staff.

On the ground it runs at things and body checks them, which is unreliable against fliers and useless across a pit. The pounce is where the damage lives. It travels through blocks to reach a target, so it hits things behind cover and things you cannot see, and once it has been fed enough summons it bounces along a group, striking several of them in one leap. It only looks for enemies inside a wide box centered on you, so kiting far ahead of the fight makes it go idle. Against an airborne target it now sticks to it rather than sliding off after the first hit.

There is exactly one source. The Desert Chest in the Dungeon holds it, that chest needs a Desert Key, and keys only drop from hardmode Underground Desert enemies. The chest will not open until Plantera is dead either, so this arrives late even if the key turns up early.

Fabled is the default answer and the right one for most of the game. Once your summon damage bonuses climb high enough, including everything a whip is adding, Ruthless overtakes it, and the crossover point shifts depending on how many summons you have poured into the tiger. Be warned that reforging is priced off the weapon's sell value, and this one is expensive enough that rolling for a specific modifier costs far more than it does on any comparable staff.

Because so much of its output arrives as single large hits, whip tags multiply unusually well here. The Firecracker turns each pounce into an absurd number, at the price of standing close enough to keep the tag refreshed. If that range is uncomfortable, Durendal or Morning Star give up some of the payoff and let you keep the tiger fed from somewhere safer.