Status Effects

Legendary Monsters brings its own set of status effects along with its bosses, and you’ll be on the receiving end of nearly all of them. The first one you’ll run into is Stun, which locks you where you stand while something large winds up a second swing, and it sets the tone for the rest.

There are 13 registered in total, eleven of them harmful and two beneficial. A few stack up the longer a fight drags on, and those are the ones that decide whether you walk out of a boss arena, so they’re the ones worth learning first.

How It Works

These behave like any other effect in the game. They show up in your inventory screen with a timer, they tick down on their own, and a Milk Bucket will clear the whole lot in one go. Nothing here is permanent, though a couple of them will re-apply faster than they run out if you keep standing in the wrong place.

Almost every one of them arrives attached to a hit, so the way you avoid the effect is the same way you avoid the damage. Several of the mobs check whether you were blocking at the moment of impact, and if you were, the effect is skipped entirely even though some damage still comes through the Shield. That check is the most useful thing in the whole system.

The big debuff stacks. Every landed hit adds a level of Soul Fracture and resets its timer, so it gets worse the longer you stand in front of the thing applying it. Backing off for a few seconds is usually cheaper than trading another swing, as the stacks all fall off together when the timer finally runs down.

That leaves the effects that come from things you can’t block, and those are what the rest of this page covers. Most of them are short, and the two that stack are the two that matter.

The Debuffs You’ll Be Wearing

Five of the debuffs come up in nearly every boss fight, and they’re listed here in the order you’re likely to meet them. The rest only need a shorter mention further down, as they’re brief and easy to shrug off.

Stun is the one you’ll meet first, and it’s the one that gets you killed indirectly. Your movement speed drops to nothing so you can’t walk out of anything, your attacks stop registering, jumping goes nowhere, and both hands are put on cooldown, so there’s no eating and no raising your Shield. The word Stunned appears over your hotbar and the camera shakes for as long as it holds.

How long you’re stuck depends on what hit you. A Haunted Knight only locks you for under a second, the Beheaded Knight, Resurrected Knight and Annihilation Pursuer all get about 2 seconds out of it, and the Shulker Mimic holds you for a full 4. The Ancient Guardian is the one worth learning, as it skips the stun completely if you were blocking when its slam landed.

The Possessed Paladin applies this with everything it has, so melee swings, the soul pillars and the thrown phantom daggers all count. Each hit adds a stack up to five, and each stack takes another fifth off your maximum health, so your hearts vanish from the right of the bar rather than emptying out.

It also strips Absorption off you every tick it’s running, which means a Golden Apple or an Enchanted Golden Apple is wasted while you’re carrying stacks. The timer is 10 seconds from the last hit, long enough that you’re better off breaking away and letting it expire than pushing for one more trade.

The Possessed Paladin is the main source, but it isn’t the only one. The Soul Pillars that the Beheaded Knight and Resurrected Knight leave behind stack it too, one level per pillar that hits you, for the same 10 seconds.

Broken Armor is the odd one out, because nothing in the current version applies it. It’s registered, each level is worth 2 armor points off you and it was built to stack to five, but the Skeletosaurus code that would put it on you is never called and the Paladin classes that used it aren’t the one the mod spawns.

So the only way you’ll see the icon is through the effect command, or a future update that wires it back in. If it ever does land, five stacks would take a full Netherite set from 20 armor down to 10.

Freeze holds your freeze meter pinned at full for as long as it lasts, so you get the frost creeping in around the edges of the screen along with roughly 2 damage a second. That damage is the freezing kind, which your armor does nothing about, and only Protection enchantments and the Resistance effect will bring it down.

The Frostbitten Golem applies it on half of its swings, and the Ice Spikes it throws out apply it as well. Blocking the swing stops it, and the moment the effect expires your freeze meter is set straight back to zero, so there’s no thawing period to sit through afterward.

The Shulker Mimic never uses this on its own, it hands it out alongside vanilla Levitation. You get floated up, the Levitation runs out first, and then the extra gravity drops you back down a good deal harder than an ordinary fall would.

The level it applies scales with how cracked the Mimic is, so the heavier versions only turn up once you’ve taken a decent chunk off it. A Shulker Helmet pulls Levitation off you every tick you’re wearing one, which takes the lift out of the combination before the gravity ever gets a chance to matter.

The Smaller Ones

Four more turn up in specific fights, and none of them need much of a plan beyond recognizing the icon. The main reason to learn them is so you don’t panic and drink a Milk Bucket you’ll want later.

• Curse Of Desert, which a Bomber leaves on everything within about 4 blocks when it detonates. It turns your camera upside down for 8 seconds and does nothing else, though that’s plenty when there’s a second Bomber walking toward you. Blocking the blast skips it.
• Chorus Infection, handed out by Choruslings, the Chorusent, Chorus Bombs and by eating an Infected Chorus Fruit. It teleports you a few blocks at random and chips 3 damage off you as it runs.
• Fear, which the Skeletosaurus roar puts on everything within 16 blocks for up to 12 seconds. It carries no penalty at all of its own, it simply marks who was caught in the roar.
• Annihilation, The Obliterator’s stacking attack speed debuff, which is switched off in the mod config by default.

None of the four is worth a Milk Bucket on its own. Curse Of Desert is the only one that changes what you can do, and even that runs out before the Bomber it came from is dealt with.

Effects You Can Hand Out

Most of the mod’s effects can be turned around on the mobs, as several weapons from its structures carry one. The table below is every item that hands out an effect on a hit, a block or a slam.

Bleeding is the one effect you’ll be dealing out more often than taking. It ticks once every second and a half for 1 to 3 damage and goes straight through armor, so it does far better against armored targets than the numbers suggest. The Sharp Battle Axe rolls for it on every hit, whereas the Golden Halberd only checks on a critical.

The Sharp Sai carries a different one, Low Attack Reach, which lands on most of its hits and drops the target’s reach to 2 blocks for 2 seconds. Neither the Sai nor the Sharp Battle Axe has a recipe or a drop in the current version though, so you’ll only get them in Creative.

The Monstrous Anchor is the one to bring to a fight you’re already losing. Holding right-click for about three quarters of a second slams the ground, throws everything within about 4 blocks into the air and stuns it for 3 seconds, and it leaves your own tamed pets alone. Three seconds is enough to eat, drink or simply walk away.

Buffs And Protection

Unbreakable is the only effect in the mod that helps you outright, and you don’t apply it yourself, the Annihilator’s Chestplate does. Drop to half health or below while wearing it and an Annihilation Supernova goes off at your feet, and that’s where the effect comes in.

The blast deals 15 damage to everything within 5 blocks and sets it all on fire, then Unbreakable gives you 4 seconds where nothing can hurt you at all. There’s a 20 second cooldown on it, so treat it as one save per fight rather than something to build around.

A Milk Bucket still clears everything the mod applies, exactly as it does with vanilla effects, and it’s the answer once you’ve picked up stacks you can’t outrun. Two helmets handle specific jobs as well, the Chorus Mask pulls Chorus Infection off you every tick you wear it, and the Shulker Helmet does the same for Levitation.

Soul Rage is the other beneficial one, worth 6 armor, 1 armor toughness and a little attack speed on top. The Soul Great Sword‘s code has a right-click that grants it for 10 seconds, but in 2.2.3 that handler is never hooked up, so nothing in survival gives it. For now, the /effect command is the only way to get it.

That kit covers every fight in the mod, as nothing here needs a specific Potion. The Milk Buckets are the part people forget, even though they’re the cheapest thing on the list by a long way.

Tips

Carry two Milk Buckets rather than one into anything from the Collapsed Kingdom. Soul Fracture stacks faster than you can outrun it if the Possessed Paladin catches you mid animation, and one Milk Bucket only covers a single mistake.

Block the hits you can’t dodge, as blocking skips the effect even when it doesn’t skip much of the damage. Against the Ancient Guardian, the Frostbitten Golem and the Bomber that’s the difference between taking a hit and taking a hit you can’t act through afterward.

Check which effects ignore armor before you commit to an armor swap. Bleeding, Freeze and Chorus Infection all go straight past it, so Protection enchantments and the Resistance effect are what actually cut that damage down.

Don’t lean on Resistance Potions. The bosses cap your Resistance at level one when they land a hit, so a Resistance III Potion only helps with the first hit it eats. They’ll knock food out of your hands mid bite as well, and that’s why the Monstrous Anchor stun is more dependable than trying to eat your way through a bad patch.

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