Solar Eruption

The blade whips out toward your cursor and snaps back on a fixed cycle, roughly half a second start to finish, and it passes straight through terrain, so you can stand behind a wall and still connect with whatever is on the other side. It reaches its full extension part way through the swing and only along the exact line to the cursor. Everything else is a randomized loop around that line, which is the weapon's main flaw. Your effective reach changes from swing to swing, so you can be in range one moment and whiffing the next without moving a tile.

Every connection drops a burst on the target and sets it burning, and that burn accounts for a large share of your total output. The bursts vary in size and they cannot land a critical hit, which is why critical chance is worth less here than on almost any other melee weapon and flat damage is worth more. Ruthless is the pick for that reason. The same split governs on-hit effects: the blade will apply what a flask, Frost armor or a Magma Stone gives you, and the explosions will not.

The blade and its explosions both stamp invincibility onto whatever they hit, and they take turns locking each other out. The practical result is a hard ceiling on how often any single enemy can be damaged. Swinging faster or standing closer will not push past it, which is the real reason this loses a straight damage race against one target.

Unlimited pierce plus wall penetration is why this is the default pillar clearer. Point it into a pack and everything standing in the line takes hits off one swing, walls included. Because a connection guarantees a burst and the burst guarantees follow-up ticks, it is also a cheap way to shred the leeches that latch onto you in the final fight, though anything decent for that fight can manage those as well.

Its counterpart the Daybreak throws much further and hurts a single target far more, at the cost of piercing nothing. Against one big boss with room to circle, reach weapons like the Flying Dragon or the Terra Blade keep you safer, because the short and unpredictable range here forces you to fight from inside the danger.

A solar eruption is another word for a flare, and the arcing loops the blade traces are a fair impression of a solar prominence. The projectile is filed internally under a name that reads as a sword, which hints this was meant to be the straight melee blade of the lunar set before it became a whipsword instead. The burn it inflicts cannot ever land on a player, so it was never given its own icon and borrows one from an unrelated buff.