How to REALLY use the brightshade staff

[Tortoise Guy]

 I think most of us can agree that the brightshade staff was quite... underwhelming. It only deals 10 damage per hit, which by itself is quite weak for a post-CC weapon, but it's not even all that useful against early game enemies such as hounds or spiders due to it's low durability.
  However, there is a way to make it deal more damage, a way that I feel most people have been forgetting about. The Enlightened Crown spawns a gestalt that deals 42.5 damage per hit as long as the user is at over 85% sanity, consuming one point of sanity per gestalt. Combine this with the staff, and you'll deal 52.5 damage per hit with it, and as long as you have a couple staves and some sanity food, you could very well use it as a powerful ranged weapon.
  But how often would it be useful? Well, let's say that you're fighting 2 enemies, in that situation, due to the projectile bouncing 5 times, you will deal a total of 315 damage per cast (157.5 to each enemy). Having the full brightshade armor set would make you only deal 80 damage per hit in this situation, which makes the crown clearly the superior choice.
  In conclusion, using this method makes the staff far more deadly, but also unfortunately makes the armor set a little more underwhelming. 

[Tranoze]

12 minutes ago, Tortoise Guy said:

 makes the armor set a little more underwhelming. 

Not 100% sure but after reading some code, brightshade staff decide how many bounce it will go when you start casting. So it is possible to switch to crown for maximum damage after hit.

Equip full brightshade set.
Cast.
Switch to crown before projectile hit.

[Brago-sama]

Yeah thats how ive been taking out triple brightshade herds. 1 staff can net me 9 kills with crown usage/killing the other 2 once one dies. Very economical

 

[Tranoze]

5 minutes ago, Brago-sama said:

Does anyone know if the staff does bonus damage vs the shadow nightmare bugs that eat away at daywalker?

Yes it does 20 damage instead of 10.

[Primalflower]

People forget that the context with which this new content appears in is going to have you acquiring the enlightened crown before anything else. It makes the brightshade staff super potent against even more things than the brightshade staff can already handled, provided that they sit still just enough for the enlightened crown gestalts to connect. If they don't, then the armor serves as a sort of backup, in my eyes.

[Brago-sama]

Some theory crafting for me says they might be super good vs splumonkeys for nightmare fuel farming

3 hits from the crowns alone kills them, so a group of 15 dies from 6% of a staffs use. Not bad if youre maxwell and shadow sneak them all for  guaranteed nightmare fuel. Thats about 240 fuel (and other monkey junk) per staff

Of course this relies on your splumonkey world gen rng, how willing you are to use other methods for fuel (shadow peice cheese) and now that i think about it, if your maxwell, bunny farm

Still nice to have anti monkey weapon

[Krotux]

I hadn't tried it before but if it works with the crown then that seems pretty strong

[ShadowDuelist]

Worth noting that for it to work with the crown it has to be against slow, stuck, stunlocked or immobile enemies.
Any other situation will move away the target from the path of the gestalt  and miss the extra damage. 

[Tortoise Guy]

1 hour ago, ShadowDuelist said:

Worth noting that for it to work with the crown it has to be against slow, stuck, stunlocked or immobile enemies.
Any other situation will move away the target from the path of the gestalt  and miss the extra damage. 

  True, but an idea I had was that you could potentially use Overcoming Arachnophobia as wickerbottom to slow enemies down before attacking them. Wickerbottom's high sanity synergizes well with these items anyway, and the book gets an actual use other than cheesing AG, I see this as an absolute win!