What Brand for SpEn

[styrix]

Yes, you get more hits in per turn. A dagger of speed with haste isn't very good, even with might. It'll takes a long time to kill anything dangerous in melee. You'd be better off finding a sabre of speed or a branded quickblade.

Being a SpEn, I'm pretty stabber-focused, so a branded quickblade is more my liking. What brand would you recommend? Is there a way to make a brand spell permanent?

[styrix]

Well, I did a little research, and now it looks like Scroll of Vorpalize make permanent a temporary brand. Does that really work?

[Kate]

The best brands for a quick blade are the additive brands, since it has low base damage. Pain is awesome if you have high necromancy (get Kiku to brand it), distortion is awesome if you just want stuff out of the way (get Lugonu to brand it), elec is cool but only available in the cloud mage wizlab. A scroll of vorpalise weapon can only make freezing, flaming and poison permanent, none of which are great on a quick blade. I'd go with freezing if you don't want to get pain/distortion, though.

You could also use Excruciating Wounds for temporary pain branding, or Warp Weapon for temporary distortion (if you're playing trunk where it's reduced to level 5).

[styrix]

What about just Vorpalize on a quickblade?

[szanth]

Eh, you're better off with freezing. The vorpal brands aren't that great.

[KoboldLord]

Vorpal brands aren't that bad, either. They don't crap out on you the moment you leave the area where they're optimal, and you really don't have the resources to pump up weapons situationally depending on where you want to go.

Memorizing the Fire Brand and Freezing Aura spells and using them situationally depending on what you face is generally going to deal more damage than simply vorpalizing the weapon, but on the other hand that costs four spell slots and a turn to cast them. Spell slots may be in short supply or not depending on your build, and that turn could potentially be an extra turn for your mark to wake up or notice you.

Assuming you train necromancy extensively, pain brand is the best up until Zot and Slime, after which point it becomes completely worthless. It also essentially requires you to go Kiku.

Holy wrath is useful the moment pain brand is useless and not very useful before that point, but likewise it straitjackets you into TSO.

Electric branding is a bad idea for a stealthy character. It may deal lots of damage in a straight fight, but it will also wake up all the nearby monsters and force you into a straight fight in the first place.

Distortion branding is bad for pretty much everybody. Again, it may be a high-damage brand, but it also likes to blink big bruisers around you so that they can all hit you at once and block your escape route. By the time you can deal with this, it's long-since stopped mattering whether you have a brand on your weapon or not.

[lucy_ferre]

Assuming you train necromancy extensively, pain brand is the best up until Zot and Slime, after which point it becomes completely worthless. It also essentially requires you to go Kiku.

I assume you haven't used a weapon of pain in Zot.

Distortion branding is bad for pretty much everybody. Again, it may be a high-damage brand, but it also likes to blink big bruisers around you so that they can all hit you at once and block your escape route. By the time you can deal with this, it's long-since stopped mattering whether you have a brand on your weapon or not.

It's useful for getting monsters out of your way. I like using a short blade of distortion when playing a SpCK.

[KoboldLord]

I assume you haven't used a weapon of pain in Zot.

"Up to Zot and Slime" was inclusive, hence the "after which". Pain brand is excellent in Zot. Once you've cleared out Zot and Slime, you've only got Tomb, Pan, and Hell to do, and in all of those places it is completely worthless. All enchant weapon scrolls you've burned on your pain brand weapon are immediately wasted, and you have to start from scratch, which involves tediously farming Pan or the Abyss.

It's useful for getting monsters out of your way. I like using a short blade of distortion when playing a SpCK.

It's very useful when it's doing what you want. It doesn't always do that, though. I tend to shy away from tools that have a comedically catastrophic failure mode.

[styrix]

So it sounds like my original plan of vorpalizing a plain quickblade and then enchanting it up to +6+ or whatever is still good. I can still cast frost aura brand on it, right? Could I also frost brand a firebrand blade?

[KoboldLord]

So it sounds like my original plan of vorpalizing a plain quickblade and then enchanting it up to +6+ or whatever is still good. I can still cast frost aura brand on it, right? Could I also frost brand a firebrand blade?

No, pick one. You can only give temporary brands to a plain quickblade, so if you want to switch on a situational basis you have to prepare and use all the appropriate spells.