most powerful of the game to upgrade?

[giorgiobusoni]

So, I finally reached the incursions and I started farming upgrade shards. Upgrades cost a lot. I got tier 5 glaciarm armor, that is the armor I used in the late game.
I use a melee buld with fast movement and lot of resilience/fast resilience regen

What is the best armor I can now invest into?
-slime (has not res regen?)
-nightsteel
-spiderite
-dawn
-crystal


also, what weapons are the best?
I have upgraded
-ancient sword t2 (better then this only the gemstone?)
-cryo glaive t3 (slime glaive - seems the same except for range?)
-carapace dagger t3

Any other weapon worth having at t5? (also not melee)

With my current build I did all t2 incursions without big problems (slime boss faield first attempt at 0.5%, night swarm done very easily, spider failed at first attempt but done easily after expanding arena and taking potions), but I don't know how much I can go up with this armor and weapons. Goal is get t5 achivement for sun/moon

[ElDudorino]

There's a bow that only drops from enemies in graveyard incursions that I think is the best weapon in the game. You can fire one arrow that drops from the sky and causes splash damage or right-click to fire a rain of arrows with splash damage, which covers enough space that it can almost one-shot the graveyard boss.

I use crystal armor once I reach it as it seems designed to be the overall strongest but I haven't evaluated every early and midgame armor. I'm not sure if you noticed but when you upgrade the helmet it doubles the set bonus of pre-tiered armors, or along those lines. Dawn armor is also pretty great if you use melee but overall I'm not wowed by incursion armor sets other than crystal.

[K]

Spiderite is no doubt pretty OP, you can dash almost indefinitely. Not sure about other sets but this one won't fail you for sure.

[dataVi]

I first recommend upgrading your pickaxe to level 5. Why pickaxe? Well, a level 5 pickaxe can clear any tile in 1-2 hits, especially if you combine that with the mining trinkets (see below) and a mining potion. I was able to clear out any extraction incursion within 1 minute using my ninja armor and mining trinkets. The speed is very nice because you don't have to worry about enemies since they cannot catch you (except for desert worms and the freaking spider egg nests). Once you clear the mining goal, pop a spelunker potion (bought from the friendly witch in swamp overworld) then you can mine up the remaining upgrade shards at your leisure.

You'll be able to get 150-200 upgrade shards per extraction incursion without even killing the boss. You'll be able to upgrade everything else to level 5 in about 5 incursions.

Of course there is some gear that can help you out.

Armor
I'm honestly a fan of the Ninja armor set. You don't get much of a bonus to DPS, but you can move at full speed (including sprinting!) while attacking or mining. If you combine this set with some speed trinkets, then you can use thrown weapons (see below) while dodging from afar. This also works with mining. Imagine being able to mine your way from one end of the incursion map to the other in 10 seconds while gaining up to 1500 stone!

If you are taking too much damage with the ninja set, then I recommend the Ruby set (ruby helm, crystal chestplate and crystal boots). Combine these with resilience trinkets (Clockwork Heart, Manica, and one other I can't remember). Enchant everything with resilience. The set bonus increases your damage by 1% for every 10 resilience, capping out at 400 resilience.

Note that if you upgrade your armor to level 5, the enchantment effect will be doubled

Weapons
I primarily used two weapons. First is Butcher's Cleaver (found in deep swamp chests) because it can chain to nearby enemies and absolutely shreds enemies with multiple segments like the worms and dragons. You can combine the cleaver with a rolling pin for a slowing effect, but I don't recommend it as the rolling pin projectile doesn't chain.
The other weapon I liked is the Carapace Dagger (crafted using a bone hilt [40 bone + 4 tungsten bar] and 5 worm carapace. This has a very fast attack speed and hones in on enemies.

Trinkets
I used the Explorer's Cloak, Balanced Frostfire Foci, Spiked Bat Boots, and Frozen Soul for my ninja and ruby sets. I used the mining trinkets with the ninja set and resilience trinkets (especially clockwork heart) with the ruby set.

Mining Trinkets: Seriously, you need to combine a Toolbox, Miner's Prosthetic, and Digging Claw!!!! You'll be able to clear the area around the boss portals in less than a minute. With a mining potion, I can completely clear out the Sun or Moon arenas in 5 minutes