ghostly weapon buff

[CryptoCrash]

"item cant be detected"

can someone please explain this???

[LHGreen]

It's weird. And inconsistent. Like, you know those token-looking items that give you energy, but you have to have empty spaces around them or two spaces away from them or diagonally from them or whatever else? Well, you can put a ghostly item in those spaces and they'll still work, because those items won't be detected. But there's other interactions where you would expect that to also be the case, but ghostly has no effect, and there's no indication either way.

[Fingeris]

It means that this item can't be "seen" by other items.

So it won't trigger buffs or debuffs for being adjacent or diagonal to other items.

[Hailspork]

It also won't be affected by whetstones. All other items will consider it to be empty spaces.
In particular, this will buff arrows and certain ghostly items; it will help with the legendary accessories that demand adjacent/2 squares away spaces to be empty.
NEVER PUT IT ON AN ARROW. Ghostly arrows don't work.

[Drackmore]

Ghost items mean they cannot be seen by other items. This has some practical applications but overall is relatively useless due to how few "ghostly" items actually spawn in a typical run.

For example take a right facing arrow for example. It gains +1 damage for every empty cell to its right. Lets say for the sake of discussion it has 10 cells to its right. With every item to its right it loses 1 damage. So if you have ghostly items there instead you can keep the +1 damage.

That's the "useful" application of "Ghostly" items.

However, lets say you get a cursed forge and you forge your wooden sword with +3 damage and the "Ghostly" trait. This trait prevents your sword from gaining buffs from whetstones, gems, and other sources.

On paper, "Ghostly" isn't bad but in practice its extremely lackluster for the most part (The Ghost Gem is pretty good, particularly in the early game when you have a nice and empty pack) but the rest of the items have minimal synergy with the rest of the items and requires you to run more or less a pure spectral build which is nearly impossible because the game barely hands them. And even if weren't so stingy with them the number of ghost items is abysmal and their effectiveness is just as bad. Take ghost glove for instance, gives basically no defense and its only use is to make an adjacent item ghostly for a single turn usable only ONCE per combat.

[Aeralis]

Ghostly is weird because it's an interesting mechanic that could have a lot of cool applications but it's more often a hindrance because the only good uses for it require getting it onto multiple items, which is hardly ever possible.