Best dagger brand for stabbing

[danr]

Just curious what people like best for stabbers. I've become fond of Enchanters of Dithmenos but I have these niggling doubts about which daggers to carry / enchant.

My top picks, in no particular order:
- Vampiric - you can get a ton of healing with the damage you do on a successful stab. The downside is going through food when / if you swap out, and as a Spriggan that means permafood
- Speed - just lets you get in lots of stabs in less time - it's effectively an unbranded quick blade.
- Draining - a useful attack that is most effective on small fast weapons
- Distortion - the chance to banish any enemy to the abyss instantly is pretty tempting. The blinking / teleporting can be annoying but can also save your life, and only occurs when you aren't actually able to stab.

Do any of these stand out as being better than the others? Did I miss one - I suppose holy wrath for demons?

[duvessa]

in practice all brands are the same for stabbing

it's a stab

it kills the monster no matter what the brand is

[tasonir]

Duv's basically correct, but I would say that the rare super brands are once again better. Speed daggers are nice to let the rest of things nearby have less time to attack you, I used one on my HEEn (left it at the +2 I found it at ). I've never been lucky enough to have a vamp dagger on a stabber, but assuming it heals you, well that's pretty nice too, since you clearly don't need more damage on stabs. Other than that, unless you really have nothing else to swap for melee, the brand isn't that important. I guess protection might be a slight defensive boost.

[danr]

Yeah, I know the stabbing damage is the same, but there are still pros and cons e.g. if you don't want to carry other melee weapons (or don't want to switch because your dagger is vamp or distortion), speed lets you stab more guys in the same amount of time, poison can be good for kiting with a spriggan, protection gives a defensive boost.

My last good stabber did have a vamp dagger, and I could heal 30 HP with one stab - it was like a free Heal Wounds with each successful stab.

[Lyrick]

Did I miss one

chaos baby

[danr]

Chaos kicks ass on axes, I have to say.

[mopl]

Considering that you are doing a stab, you should kill the monster and don't worry about the brand...

The only case when the brand matters is when you fail to stab a monster. I assume that being a stabber, you're not a GrGl^Chei wearing CPA + boots of assassin and satbbing with exec axe (though that's very powerful and extremely fun to play), but a fragile stealthy character...

In this case, Distortion seems to be the best brand because banishment/blink let you good escape options of you don't want to finish a fair fight !

[jejorda2]

Vampiric daggers are kind of silly to me. If I can stab it, it is asleep or immobilized, so I can get away and rest to heal, right? Why sneak up on something if you still have hp to heal off? Run away, heal, and come back.

[tasonir]

It's entirely possible I'm a horrible stabber, but since I've actually won one, it's pretty far from the ideal case all throughout the game. Frequently you'll have a full pack of something coming at you (yaks, orcs, etc) and you want to sleep/confuse them when they're either already in melee range, or 1 tile away. That way you're already there for stabbing, you kill them asap, and then you sleep/confuse the next monster. So while you're stabbing one thing, 1-2 other monsters might get a chance to attack you, which is why I liked my speed dagger.

I haven't played dith with shadow step or 500+ stealth, so maybe that would be a safer way to keep things closer to the 'ideal' stabber scenario. In my experience, things wake up, you have to disable them somehow.

[DrKe]

for confused/distracted clearly speed since the first stabbing attempt might not kill, for asleep doesn't really matter, vamp i guess in case you have taken damage somehow

[XuaXua]

Is electric not listed because it makes an explosion sound when you stab things with it?

Also, what about plain Vorpal?

[ackack]

Vampiric daggers are kind of silly to me. If I can stab it, it is asleep or immobilized, so I can get away and rest to heal, right? Why sneak up on something if you still have hp to heal off? Run away, heal, and come back.

Generally this is correct. Undead characters that can swap vampiric daggers in painlessly should keep one, though. It's a nice option when you're tabbing packs of things (which most of my stabbers do at least some of.)

re: elec, unless there was a change in the last couple months, it does not make bonus noise.

[Eyesburn]

Frequently you'll have a full pack of something coming at you (yaks, orcs, etc) and you want to sleep/confuse them when they're either already in melee range, or 1 tile away. That way you're already there for stabbing, you kill them asap, and then you sleep/confuse the next monster. So while you're stabbing one thing, 1-2 other monsters might get a chance to attack you, which is why I liked my speed dagger.

Use Enslavement on those 1-2 other monsters

[Lyrick]

Is electric not listed because it makes an explosion sound when you stab things with it?

The explosion of sparks makes no sound at all.

If you want to kill things fast by hitting them over and over again, then yes electrocution is good.

But for a stab, you do not hit the monster over and over again. So whether or not you set off an explosion of sparks for 10-24 damage is irrelevant.

If the monster is awake and not dead, thats when you take out yo quickblade.

[Hurkyl]

Considering that you are doing a stab, you should kill the monster and don't worry about the brand...

Confusion/distraction stabs have already been mentioned. Another case is when you're stabbing big game; it takes a lot of stabbing skill to one hit kill Lom Lobon or The Royal Jelly or such, and a multiplicative brand reduces the amount of skill needed by several points.

[Sandman25]

I love Electro/Pain for Confusion stabbing. Even if I am unlucky and the stab does not happen, the monster still dies very fast.

[wisp412]

So do Daggers of Stabbing not give their damage bonus to stabs? It seems intuitive that they would, although perhaps it isn't usually needed when the base stab damage is already very high. It just makes sense that something called "of Stabbing" should be good at what it says, even if thats only for simplicity for new players. Honestly though, Daggers of Stabbing should probably be changed to be better for stabbing in some way, even if the bonus damage currently applies.

[crate]

You don't care about vorpal/flame/freeze brand on stabs because overkilling by 300 isn't actually better than overkilling by 200.

[celem]

I'm assuming we are actually talking about stabbing here. As in target is in some way pre-occupied, not just short blade melee.

I like poison or speed. Main reason being it might not matter what your brand is if you 1-shot your target, but it will do if you don't. Poison can DoT them right out without retaliation if you almost got them, speed means you are going to followup nice and swift and get the job finished before they get lots of chances to 'do stuff'.

Distort sucks, you stealthily stab, if you dont kill it, it leaps out of range, awake and 'does stuff'.

In-case you missed the point, letting monsters 'do stuff' is kind of the opposite of what stabbing tries to achieve, winning is easier when they get as few turns as possible.

[njvack]

Distort sucks, you stealthily stab, if you dont kill it, it leaps out of range, awake and 'does stuff'.

In-case you missed the point, letting monsters 'do stuff' is kind of the opposite of what stabbing tries to achieve, winning is easier when they get as few turns as possible.

If it's a sleeping stab, it's already dead. If it's invistab, you're invisible. If it's a confusion stab, the target is confused.

Distortion melee is a good chance per hit for any target to go away effectively forever, no resist, no nothing. Other results are "lots of irresistible damage" and "go away for a long time."

Blinking enemies with ranged attacks or summons can be problematic, but I'd hardly say distortion sucks for it. And since training a disto dagger to min delay is really cheap, you have plenty of XP to train up a big ol' conjuration to put those blinked dudes out of their misery. Of course, if you're following Lucy, you can just swap that dagger for a ranged weapon if you'd rather roll that way.

[jejorda2]

What's irritating is when you use consumables for buffs, then the enemy you hit with distortion teleports to another area you would like to explore or clear, and now your buffs don't last through the rest of the fight.

This is worse for distortion melee than for stabbing. I guess "potion of resistance and distortion weapon" is a bad combination for Nikolae.

[danr]

I'll just elaborate on what I said above since some people have still said that vamp makes no sense for stabbing - vamp healing is tied to the HP damage dealt, so with the massive damage that stabbing does, it can give you a whole lot of healing.

Naturally the best outcome of stabbing is that you don't take any damage at all because you are killing one sleeping monster at a time. Believe it or not though, stabbers do occasionally lose some HP. I realize that's maybe crazy talk, but hear me out... not every monster encounter is a monster sleeping by itself in a corridor. Sometimes you are surrounded by multiple awake monsters. Fortunately you still have ways of stabbing them - EH, confuse, invis - and when you do, you get a whole lot of healing, which (I know, again, this might be controversial) comes in handy when you are a spriggan surrounded by a pack of raging monsters.

So vamp stabbing is very much worth it for those inevitable crowd situations.

I agree that brand is irrelevant when you get that straight up stab opportunity. It just doesn't always work out that way.

I'd say that vamp and distort are clearly two of the most powerful brands for stabbing, but they have a cost to unwielding them. The question is are they good enough that you can use them without needing anything else, or is it better to use a dagger that is easier to swap out for some bigger weapon for straight up melee.

I'm surprised that the huge explosion of sparks from elec daggers is silent. I'm pretty sure that they make a noise when you equip them at least, I think I've had that wake up monsters in the past. But it might have been coincidence or that might have changed since an older version.

[Siegurt]

There's no noise for wielding, or attacking with an elec weapon.

For a while there was some nonfunctional code that *appeared* to make elec weapons make more noise, but it didn't actually work (It added some noise to a counter that was subsequently overwritten with a different value). This non functioning code was removed.

Possibly at some point before that that code might have functioned, I don't know.

It is, however, true that any action taken within LOS of a monster can wake it up, and that attacking *in general* causes noise proportional to the damage done (up to shout level at lots and lots of damage, stab successes don't make noise as a special exception)

[Lyrick]

The cost for using vamp is well worth it. (Unless, possibly, if you are a spriggan).

Unfortunately, there are a few branches where it is impractical to wield constantly. It also doesn't proc off summoned monsters, which become a regular occurrence after the midgame.

Distortion is useful in any branch (except maybe the abyss, does it even work there?)

(The biggest weapon is a dagger though)

[daggaz]

Vamp is terrible. You definitely shouldnt be stabbing anything if you need the healing, and if you end up needing the healing at some point and are in melee, you dont do enough damage to make it count for squat. You are also kind of locked in with your hands (not that food is rare, but its sooo annoying to wield/unwield vamp weapons) when you should probably be doing things like shooting a blowgun, evoking objects, or throwing nets.

Elec, draining, and poison are great for melee because of the attack speed on applying the brand to the monster, speed is better than it was but is nothing to write home to the surface about (stabbing is going to kill things fast anyhow, you rarely need more of them and once you are in melee it loses its appeal), and Duvessa is right: for stabbing it doesnt matter the brand because they are going to die anyhow.

[celem]

Distortion is useful in any branch (except maybe the abyss, does it even work there?)
)

It should do, being banished in the abyss sends you down a floor so it should proc fine (cant say i've ever actually tried)