When to Choose a Weapon Skill?

[MainiacJoe]

I have trouble knowing when I have found a good enough weapon to justify training its skill. There are many backgrounds that do not start with appreciable melee skill, either book or ranged, and there are several species with flat apts, so often you have a broad range of choices. Lately I've been training Fighting for quite a while or even Armour/Dodging also before I choose a melee skill, thereby using weapons at 0 skill for many floors. Fighting after all gives me HP in addition to modestly helping my melee, and HP are good to have in the early game.

I am well aware that part of this is the sunk cost fallacy, that I am reluctant to "waste" XP in M&F for a +2 flail because what if the next floor down has a flaming great sword? Yet at the same time I suspect there's some wisdom in waiting a bit for RNG to reveal its generosity before committing oneself. I just don't know when is too long to have deferred the decision, or which weapon find is good enough to stop waiting. How do you decide?

[phloomp]

I usually just go Ash out of shear neuroticism.

.... so yeah I'm curious about this too.

[crate]

Just make a decision as soon as you want to train a weapon skill.

[Siegurt]

I suspect there's some wisdom in waiting a bit for RNG to reveal its generosity before committing oneself.

There's not, really, if training a weapon will help you survive right now, then it's worth doing, and in most cases it will help you survive right now.

If you find a much better weapon later, of a different weapon type, then that's fine, if switching weapons at that point will significantly help your short term survivability, do it, if it doesn't then it's probably not worth switching for.

[kuniqs]

If you really have to 'optimize' such a thing, choose a dagger/SS as your starting weapon, turn off Short Blades and train Fighting a few levels, and then train whatever cool weapon you found in the meantime.
You only have to reduce your weapon's mindelay to 1.0 to avoid giving monsters 2 attacks per turn.

[Turukano]

How do you decide?

In the topic ice vs fire for vehumet wizard crate and Hurkyl made posts about decisions in general. They are worth reading if you have problems to decide.

[MainiacJoe]

Thank you all. Good advice here and in the linked thread.