Dam+4

[snow]

Does dam+4 add 4 damage to your average attack or max attack? Also does it add to spell damage?

[KoboldLord]

It treats your weapon as if it had a stronger base type, so it can be startlingly good, particularly on a fast weapon. The salient point is that a slaying bonus gets added in BEFORE multipliers such as weapon skill, so it increases the effect of every other boost your character can assemble. This is distinct from the plus to damage on your weapon itself, which is applied after most of these multipliers and therefore has a much smaller effect. For example, a +0/+0 hand axe paired with a +0/+4 slaying bonus is roughly equivalent to a +0/+0 war axe, but a +0/+4 hand axe with no slaying bonus is markedly inferior to that same war axe.

A slaying bonus has no effect on spells or spellcasting, or other non-weapon sources of damage such as evocable objects.

[njvack]

No effect on unarmed combat either, right?

[lucy_ferre]

No effect on unarmed combat either, right?

Slaying bonuses affect UC.

[Stormfox]

A slaying bonus has no effect on spells or spellcasting, or other non-weapon sources of damage such as evocable objects.

Hmm. I seem to remember that if you equip a non-weapon like the anti-Mara bread ration, if you have at least +1 damage from slaying, you can do damage. However if you have no +dam from slaying, you don't do any damage no matter how strong or good at Fighting you are.

Unless you're referring to things like rods and magical staves, which have combat stats but cannot be enchanted conventionally.

[JeffQyzt]

I believe what KL is saying is that slaying bonuses don't affect the damage from e.g. a rod of smiting, when you evoke smite with it (as opposed to bashing things over the head with it.) No idea if it affects the skull-bashing case, but it's still suboptimal.

[KoboldLord]

Sorry, I see that I said something more ambiguous than I was intending.

If you're dealing damage by mashing arrow keys, you do apply slaying. Regular weapons, unarmed attacks, wielded pizza slapping, rods of smiting used as a club, all get the bonus. Spells, evoked wands or rods of smiting, divine invocations, mutation-related fire breath, etc. do not. Also, throwing, firing from a launcher (bow, sling, etc.), and evoking a polearm of reaching get the bonus.

[snow]

So just to make sure this cloak will NOT make my magic hit less?

[mageykun]

Nope.

[lucy_ferre]

So just to make sure this cloak will NOT make my magic hit less?

Yes, it won't affect spell accuracy.

Edit: Beaten.

[dolphin]

Does anyone know if Slaying or Might affects DS-spikes? It seemed like it was, but I'm no code-reader, so I don't know for sure. Henzell didn't appear to know, either.