Orichalcum Helmet

Orichalcum is the middle Hardmode ore set: shared body and legs, three heads for melee, ranged and magic. What people actually wear it for is the set bonus. Land a hit and a flower petal spawns at the edge of the screen and rips across to your target, passing through blocks and liquids and hurting everything it touches on the way. It is classless, so it does not care which head you picked or what weapon fired.

There is a short cooldown between petals, which means what matters is how often you hit, not how hard. A high fire rate weapon like the Clockwork Assault Rifle keeps a petal in the air almost constantly and effectively doubles as a second weapon. A slow heavy swing wastes most of the bonus.

Worms are the standout case. Because the petal crosses the entire screen, entering a Wyvern or The Destroyer at the right angle puts it through every segment on the way out. Minion hits and stars from a Star Cloak also trigger petals, so a build that is not even focused on this set still gets them.

The downside nobody warns you about is that petals destroy background objects along their flight path. Pots are one thing. The larva inside a bee hive is another, and fighting anywhere near the Underground Jungle in this set is a good way to summon Queen Bee by accident.

This is the one multi-class set where only the melee head gives flat damage for its type. The ranged and magic heads hand you critical strike chance instead, which is worth reading carefully: if your weapon already crits often or you are stacking crit elsewhere, the return is smaller than the number suggests, and if you are not, this set does more for you than the equivalent Mythril piece.

The Orichalcum Leggings beat Mythril Greaves when a meaningful share of your damage is passive or supplementary rather than coming off your own swings. In practice that mostly means leaning on sentries once the Old One's Army reaches its middle difficulty. It only comes up for melee and ranged players, since magic has Forbidden Treads by then and an active summoner has Spider Greaves.

For matching dyes, Violet Dye sits closer to the armor's color than Pink Dye does. As for the name, orichalcum is a metal mentioned in ancient writing whose real nature was never recorded, which is why fantasy has been free to make it whatever it needs.