Crystal bullets vs. Skeletron Prime? Dumb idea.

[Dowlphwin]

This is like the general recommendation for fighting that boss using bullet weapons. I tried it. It's stupid. The crystal splinters don't spread far, but totally randomly and in relatively small number. AND hitting the arms isn't even such a good idea, because if you do the fight properly, the head will take main damage.
With my magic class I prefer the Golden Shower, and that naturally sprays widely and usually two or even three of four arms will be gone by the time SP dies due to the penetrating character of that weapon. But it is so damn easy to not shoot at his arms all the time, but through them and hit his head. An excellent approach that is very quick is to use a Megashark with Ichor bullets and then shoot right at the head the whole time. That's about the maximum of concentrated severe damage you can make.
Works very well against most other bosses, too.
Oh and the Magical Harp... if you have a Golden Shower, forget it. What's it useful for? It has zero knockback and the projectiles are difficult to aim due to their slow speed. It's like that weapon is optimized for making the least damage possible, especially since penetrating weapons trigger invincibility delay and thus have a hits-per-second cap.
God, I love the Golden Shower, haha. It's so easy to aim. It does everything right. And it annihilates The Destroyer.

[Sebastian]

in one of my recent playthroughs I had a bit of a... situation with prime.
the first thing that happened was that the game sent the twins after mine twice while I only had orichalcum armor and barely any gear.
playing a melee char, I thought killing the destroyer would be a good idea. so I grabbed (aka farmed) a dao of pow and a nimbus rod. right when I got to my little arena, I read "the air is getting colder around you..."
I wasnt prepared for him. not at all.
so there he is, all I have is titanium armor, a dao and a nimbus rod, with a few other prehardmode things. I didnt even have wings yet.
the nimbus rod kicked his ass.
oh and of course I then get a solar eclipse. and three broken hero swords.

the morale of the story is to always have a nimbus rod, because that thing is amazing.

[Dr. McWeazel]

Actually, I found that Crystal Bullets work reasonably well. It just depends on the user being able to aim for ♥♥♥♥.

Originally posted by Dowlphin:

Oh and the Magical Harp... if you have a Golden Shower, forget it. What's it useful for? It has zero knockback and the projectiles are difficult to aim due to their slow speed. It's like that weapon is optimized for making the least damage possible, especially since penetrating weapons trigger invincibility delay and thus have a hits-per-second cap.

1. The Magical Harp has knockback. Just because it isn't knocking back bosses doesn't mean it isn't there.
   
2. The projectiles speed up the farther away your cursor is from your character. If it remains difficult to aim, perhaps that means you just aren't particularly skillful with it.
   
3. The weapon is optimized for fighting segmented enemies- the Destroyer in particular, what with that thing having so many hurtboxes.
   
4. The Golden Shower suffers from the invincibility delay as well.

Now if you're done rambling on about that which you know little of, I'll be going.

[one piece]

Do bosses even get knockback? I don't think they do... ever...

[Unicarn]

Originally posted by Nerevar's Butler's Brother:

Do bosses even get knockback? I don't think they do... ever...

I think they do, but they're highly resistant to it.

[Sebastian]

Originally posted by Unicarn:

Originally posted by Nerevar's Butler's Brother:

Do bosses even get knockback? I don't think they do... ever...

I think they do, but they're highly resistant to it.

all bosses that I can recall take no knockback whatsoever.

[Unicarn]

Originally posted by Sebastian:

Originally posted by Unicarn:

I think they do, but they're highly resistant to it.

all bosses that I can recall take no knockback whatsoever.

Looked it up. The only boss that takes knockback is the BoC.
http://terraria.gamepedia.com/Knockback

[Dowlphwin]

Originally posted by Sebastian:

in one of my recent playthroughs I had a bit of a... situation with prime.
the first thing that happened was that the game sent the twins after mine twice while I only had orichalcum armor and barely any gear.
playing a melee char, I thought killing the destroyer would be a good idea. so I grabbed (aka farmed) a dao of pow and a nimbus rod. right when I got to my little arena, I read "the air is getting colder around you..."
I wasnt prepared for him. not at all.
so there he is, all I have is titanium armor, a dao and a nimbus rod, with a few other prehardmode things. I didnt even have wings yet.
the nimbus rod kicked his ass.
oh and of course I then get a solar eclipse. and three broken hero swords.

the morale of the story is to always have a nimbus rod, because that thing is amazing.

Nimbus Rod?! With SP? But you'd have to get the boss to always be under that thing. Makes the fight a bit inflexible.
I guess it's a nice added DPS though. I just don't like stationary damage zones much. I might try it out and see how much DPS it generates.
I avoided unpleasant surprises by manually summoning the mechanical bosses before shattering altars. I defeated them with arena design and other preparations. Lack of hardmode ore still leaves lots of other hardmode equipment.
Solar Eclipse ... I wanted nothing as much as moon stones from the vampires, but the first one gave me nothing and the second one two bat wing mats. But I got 5 broken swords the first time, and two the second time.
And during pirate invasions I got the most rare of all drops - the coin gun - for burning up money. The lucky coin I only got during an extremely messy hardmode test run - first pirate invasion ever, but screwed up the scenario/map. ... Oh well, money's still relatively plenty. I have to choose some of my reforges wisely.

@Weazel
Do your homework and stop being an arrogant prick. Harp has no knockback. Crystal bullets are not optimal for the reasons I presented, it has nothing to do with aiming. It's really not that difficult to understand if you put some effort into it.
Highest speed harp projectiles are still slow. Bullets are much faster and the Golden Shower reaches the target almost instantly. Even the Leaf Blower projectiles are faster than the harp.
You also contradict your own argumentation basis by admitting that the harp is optimized for worm-like enemies.
And again, if you did your due diligence, you'd know the Golden Shower and understand that the invincibility delay isn't a real problem with it, since it generates three streams per activation in quick succession, resulting in maximum hits for a penetrating weapon, and it penetrates up to five targets, meaning that one activation can ideally hit 15 Destroyer segments, AND it instantly applies an armor reduction debuff to all hit segments/targets. The latter is what causes Skeleton Prime to easily lose limbs - because not only do they often get covered by the spray, but they end up with little to no armor.