Star Cloak

Nothing happens while you are playing well. The stars only appear when something hits you, so the accessory pays out for taking chip damage rather than avoiding it. That decides where it belongs: a crowded brawl where a few hits are unavoidable, not a clean boss run you intend to finish untouched. Enemy hits set it off, and so does a bad landing. Damage you take from traps or drowning does not.

The volley falls around you, not around your cursor, and you have no aim over it. Each star sinks through terrain until it reaches the height you were at when you got hit, then behaves like a solid projectile and breaks on the first block below that. Underground this works better than it sounds, since the ceiling above you is not in the way. What it cannot do is reach anything that is not near you, which makes it dead weight against an enemy shooting from the far side of an arena and genuinely useful against a press of bodies on top of you.

The stars belong to none of the four classes, so nothing in your build touches them. No melee bonus, no summon bonus, no flask, no potion, no armor set. What they do bring on their own is a chunk of armor penetration, which is why they still bite into heavily armored enemies that shrug off your early hardmode weapon. Expert and master multiply the damage without touching the penetration. Early in hardmode a volley is real damage. By the endgame it is background noise and the slot is worth more to almost anything else.

A star will pass through a couple of targets before it breaks, and the family uses separate invincibility frames, so the volley does not steal hits from your actual weapon or block your other piercing shots the way it once did. You can hold a spear or a piercing gun and let the stars work in the same space without either interfering.

Wear two or three of these at once and you still get one volley. Choose one and use the other slot for something else. The upgraded versions bundle in an extra on-hit effect, and one of them extends your invincibility after a hit, which sounds strictly better until you notice the trade: longer immunity means fewer hits taken, and fewer hits means fewer volleys. If you are wearing the thing for damage rather than for survival, the plain version fires more often. Shimmer also turns it into a cosmetic variant if you would rather have the look than the upgrade.

The stars glow brightly while they are inside solid ground, more than the little particles they leave when they land. Take a deliberate hit in an unexplored cavern and the whole column above you lights up for a moment, which is a crude but free way to see what is over your head. It works the same way the Starfury does, except the stars fall faster and center on you instead of your cursor.