The Tavern

How is stabbing damage is calculated exactly? I understand the bonus damage for short blades, and the damage muliplier for stabbing. But the information in the Wiki does not tell where in the damage calculation the stabbing multiplier is used. Specifically, is the multiplier applied to the following kinds of damage or not?

* damage from fighting skill,
* weapon bonus (+N weapon),
* slaying bonus from equipment (rings and such),
* extra damage from weapon brands (frost, fire, holy, etc.),
* extra damage from a potion of might,
* (other damage bonuses availabe to typical stabbers I've forgotten in this list)

I'm pretty confident that

* damage from fighting skill,
* weapon bonus (+N weapon), (and slaying more generally)
* extra damage from a potion of might

will all get multiplied. I am a little less confident about brands, but I think those do too.

Stabs hit hard.

One important thing originally missing from the list:

* slaying bonus from equipment (rings and such)

The stab bonus happens after every other damage modifier except for shadow form's 1/2 damage (edit: and the statue form, cleaving and weakness modifiers).

Is that something new? Because when I played 0.12 there were definitely damage modifiers that were *not* multiplied.

Don't think so. I missed a couple of modifiers though, statue form, cleaving and weakness also aren't multiplied (but they all used to be in 0.12 except for weakness which didn't exist, I would guess that this was changed around at the time that shadow form was added). Probably worth looking at attack.cc and melee_attack.cc for a better source than the wiki.

It's worth noting that although the statform bonus is applied after stabbing, statform is also a multiplier (+50%). The very biggest stabs come from doing statue form stabbing with a dagger. I had fun with that in extended once.

I wrote several stabbing damage calculators for .11, .12 etc.

Going back at least that far it was "net rolled damage before brand or ac is applied" that got multiplied. (Of course brands that are based on the damage done effectively have brand damage multiplied)

I am not sure which bonuses you think weren't multiplied in .12

Hm, statue form plus shadow step? Might work against Cerebov.


Note that this is only true most of the time. If you have stabbing (= (Stealth + Short Blades)/2) at maximum and dex 26, other short blades outperform daggers when stabbing because of the higher base damage (when stabbing * dex > 700; maybe a bit earlier).

(If this wasn't changed after 0.12.)


I digged through the code back then, but really cannot remember which came after the stabbing multiplier, only that there were a couple of them.