The Tavern

I like to generally start with Polearms and during the first few floors, I often find a branded something to use temporarily (without investing any skills training in it).
But sometimes, that short use ends up being much longer like in my current game:

I found a +2 dagger of venom very early and I'm still using it as my primary in D:8 while at XL10.
Meanwhile, the Polearms skill is at 9.6 and I've invested nothing in Short Blades.
(The spear does see some use but mostly on Skeletons and to finish off something highly poisoned.)

Do some of you invest 1 or 2 skill levels in these temporary short use weapons once you start approaching D:8?

One or two skill levels are practically free, so yes, might as well.

I disagree. One or two skill levels also practically have no effect.

When I find a dagger of venom very early, I switch to short blades. It is not rare for me to have 3 weapon skills trained at the end of game: weapon I started with, short blades or m&f which I used early game and finally weapon skill for late game weapon I found.

Train Fighting. Fighting is really good. You shouldn't train a weapon you aren't using - if your polearm isn't your primary weapon you shouldn't be training it.

Short blades are ultimately terrible late game, so any XP you put there will be just about wasted in the long run. I suppose you might say a level or two of short blades might be worth it, if your Fighting skill is already quite high (like 10). But I certainly hope you'll find a better weapon soon. Maybe you've already found a better weapon (no tridents? no glaives?)

Fighting is definitely better bang for your buck. Putting a few points in short blades isn't especially useful unless you can pair it with a way to stab stuff (at which point it becomes pretty good and can kill tougher things)

Daggers already swing pretty fast, and are pretty accurate, and get very very little from the percentage bonus to base damage, so the melee benefit from training short blades is minimized, compared to other melee weapons.

Also venom daggers are surprisingly effective, i would use a venom dagger over any unbranded one handed non demon weapon in the non poison resistant portions of the game prior to the depths.

Maybe over a +0 unbranded weapon (though I have my doubts about that too). But surely you don't enchant your venom dagger? In that case, it's better to use a "real" weapon and enchant it.

I do if I'm not playing a melee bruiser, if I am using conjurations as my primary damage source, and the venom dagger as a backup weapon, I definitely enchant it (the only melee weapon that would be better untrained is an electric dagger, and those are pretty uncommon)

Also if I'm playing an enchanter, of course I enchant it up (I'm going to be doing mostly dagger stabbing, it may as well have a brand). In any other case, probably not.

Seriously though, a +0 venom dagger is better than a surprising number of weapons, I would use a +0 venom dagger (against a non-resistant enemy) over:

Once you tack on a brand, some enchantment, and/or some training, of course all those weapons outpace a venom dagger pretty quickly.

Part of that is that venom dagger's strongest use (hit a couple times then retreat) is something that I do out of habit anyway, typically I'm going to be doing a running retreat style fight a lot of the time (rather than an outright retreat to a holdout point) because I'd frequently rather not take the time to lure every piddly enemy all the way back to a choke point, when I can kill a few on the way at very little additional risk (that's my laziness showing through) two hits to max poisoned will take out most early-to-midgame stuff, and you can walk away while they die from it, and hit them again to reapply if needed.

Also I like adding (cheap) stabbing to most builds (most spellcasters and some non-spellcasters have ways of getting some weak stabs in here and there for little XP, which pairs well with a strong dagger like venom) so I probably use daggers in the early-to-mid game slightly more frequently than most.

This didn't look obvious to me so I ran some fsim tests. Venom does not work well in fsim so I used another additive brand i.e. electro.





No conclusions as I don't want to start another hot discussion.

If you have polearms skill 9.8, I would carry one using a polearm rather than a +2 dagger of Venom. But you don't describe whether you start off with polearm skill or not., nor how early is "very early". By the time I got something like 9.6 skill I would use that weapon skill with 9.6 skill, unless I found a +9 long sword or whatever and the aptitudes to train it isn't too bad either. +2 dagger of venom I find is a very strong weapon in the early game. Short blades tend to have worse outcomes by the time you are in depths I find. If the start was not a melee background, I'll have no problem switching to shortblades and train a few levels, like 4-5 levels. If it was a melee background, I'll use it for a few levels but not train it before abandoning it, but only because I don't like to "waste" the training experience.