Hallowed Hood

Chest and legs are shared across the whole set and the head picks your class. There is a mask for melee, a helmet for ranged, headgear for magic, and a hood for summoners. Every one of them also carries a smaller bonus that applies to all four damage types, which is why this set holds up for players who switch weapons mid-fight instead of committing.

Ancient Hallowed pieces count as the same set, so a mismatched pair still gives you the bonus and you never have to keep two full kits.

The summoner hood is the odd one out. It gives less summon damage than Spider armor, which you could have had much earlier in Hardmode. What it gives instead is survivability and real bonuses to the other three damage types, so if you play whips plus a weapon rather than pure minions, it is the better set despite the smaller headline number.

Hit an enemy and you gain Holy Protection, which cancels the next hit you take. Not reduces it, cancels it. Once it fires there is a cooldown before you can earn another.

That makes the set's value scale with how hard the thing you are fighting hits. Against a swarm of weak enemies it eats a scratch and the cooldown wastes it. Against a boss that takes a third of your health per contact, it is the strongest defensive layer available at this point in the game.

The practical consequence is that Hallowed armor lets you run an accessory loadout built entirely for damage and still survive, because the one hit that would have killed you is the one it eats. It used to be a chance roll and no longer is. As long as the cooldown is up, striking anything grants it, so you can build a rhythm around it rather than praying.

The melee mask carries an unusual amount of defense for a head at this tier, and it travels well. Dropping it onto Turtle armor or a squire set gives up the original head bonus and comes out ahead on raw stats anyway.

The same trick reappears later. Keeping the Beetle Shell but swapping the head for this mask and the legs for Valhalla Knight's Greaves beats the full beetle set on defense outright, with better melee bonuses attached. If you find yourself doing that, the mask is worth crafting even in a run where you never wear the rest.

Crafting a spare head and selling it returns more than selling the bars it took, which is a small but genuine money trick if you are sitting on a surplus.

The clones the dodge spawns render without skin or hair, so they occasionally look headless for a frame. This and Chlorophyte armor are the only sets with a dedicated head for all four classes.

Redigit has said the look comes from a Final Fantasy paladin, which reads clearest with the magic headgear equipped. The set no longer transmutes in Shimmer either; it just breaks back down into bars.