The Tavern

Okay, from reading the CrawlWiki, it sounds like Haste has the same effect as speed brand - it doubles the speed of your attacks (and other actions too).

Questions:
- Does it stack with speed brand? I believe you can't get below delay 3, correct?
- Will it make my dagger of electrocution just as fast as my dagger of speed?

I have a Level 14 Halfling of Okawaru, and am trying to decide between enchanting my +5,+0 dagger of speed or my +2+4 dagger of electrocution. I have 7 Ench I scrolls and 5 Ench II scrolls.

The dagger of speed does slightly more damage if I use Might and is kind of useless without that. The dagger of elec does better damage without might. The downside is the noise though.

Or, should I hold out for a sabre or demon blade or something?

I'm using either a +1 dwarven buckler or a +2 shield of fire resistance.

I just drank a potion of speed. My attack speed with the elec dagger is "very fast" both before and after. Hm.

What version? Haste has been nerfed to 1.5 speed in trunk.

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?t ... tack_speed
The lowest ATK speed Possible is 2 and that is Hard Coded into the game.

Use your scrolls on the Electric dagger, as it will serve you better end game.
With a high enough Short blades skill the Gap in the Attack Delay will begin to close, but the Damage per hit will be significantly higher with the Electric dagger.
Plus Haste will end up helping you out more.
I'm not sure if Double hasting is possible, but even if it was then I would still go with the electric Dagger.
Double Hasting would be kinda redundant with Short blades, as they are already fast.
Double Hasting would be more useful when one is using big Heavy weapons.

From Henzell's learndb:

# Attack delay is 10 time units for a weapon with base speed 100%. Every 2 levels of weapon skill lower the delay by 1 unit.
# A weapon's minimum delay is half of its base delay (rounded down), but if the following value applies and is lower, use that instead: 3 for quick blades, 5 for short blades, and 7 for 2-handed weapons or 1.5-handed weapons without a shield.

Thus, if your attack delay is already very low, haste may not have any room for further improvement of your attack delay.

Zicher wrote:From Henzell's learndb:

# Attack delay is 10 time units for a weapon with base speed 100%. Every 2 levels of weapon skill lower the delay by 1 unit.
# A weapon's minimum delay is half of its base delay (rounded down), but if the following value applies and is lower, use that instead: 3 for quick blades, 5 for short blades, and 7 for 2-handed weapons or 1.5-handed weapons without a shield.

Thus, if your attack delay is already very low, haste may not have any room for further improvement of your attack delay.

So From what he just said you have probably already closed the Delay gap between your Dagger of speed and Lightning Dagger.
If you REALLY want to start doing damage switch to long blades with a Reliable Hasting source.
(Seeing as you are with Okawaru You already have that)
As long as your EV is good then you can pretty much use whatever you want, now its just a matter of building up your Damage.

The crawl wiki has a very detailed article on attack speed which I think is accurate at least for 0.7.

There is a hard-coded minimum player weapon speed of 3, and if the minimum delay is less than three it is increased to three.

The speed brand comes into effect after the check against the minimum attack delay is done. So, a weapon with the speed brand can actually attack faster than the minimum delay. The speed brand halves delay, but rounding UP. So a handaxe of speed, at an axe skill of 14, would hit at a delay of 3 instead of 6. An executioners axe of speed would hit at a delay of 4 instead of 7 at an axe skill of 26.

...

So, now we have an adjusted speed, of our weapon, plus our shield. We aren't done yet. If we are slowed, this value is multiplied by two. If we are hasted, it is divided by two. If we are a statue, it is multiplied by 1.5. The result of this calculation is an integer, but the rounding is randomized, weighted by the reminder. Basically, it means that if your total weapon + shield delay is odd, and you are hasted, there is a 50% chance it will be rounded one way and a 50% chance it will be rounded the other way.

The smallest delay you can possibly hit with is 2, so if it is less than that it is set to 2. This can happen with weapons that have an adjusted weapon delay of three, if you didn't get any extra delay introduced from your shield. For example, this could happen with quickblades, any short blade of speed, katanas of speed, demon whips of speed, and so on. That means that haste only works at 50% effectiveness for attacks with these weapons when there is no added shield delay. Haste will reduce the delay from 3 to 2, and not to an average of 1.5.

So, if we assume a short blade skill of 10, we get for dagger of speed:
delay: 3
hasted delay: 2

dagger of elec:
delay: 5
hasted delay (average): 2.5

Unless you've got insane slaying bonus, the dagger of elec has probably a higher damage potential. But as you said, there is also the noise drawback. Also, be careful in water.

Thanks everyone.

Another thing to note is that with elec the damage will be more concentrated in those 1/3 of hits where the lightning strikes, so this would be better against high AC monsters. e.g. there may be monsters that can shrug off normal dagger damage, but not an electrical discharge.

That raises the next question: should I hold out for a decent long blade with all my scrolls? I'm thinking maybe I should since those daggers are currently handling things fairly well even without further enchantment.

btw, yes, this is 0.7.

I think elec doesn't go off if you are attacking a flying enemy. So keep that in mind if you decide to attack a Sphinx or something.

I don't know, if you do plan to switch you should keep some Accuracy scrolls as that would be your main problem with the Long blades.
You just need a good Long blade training weapon until Okawaru gives you a good randart.

P.S. Use the buckler for now to Boost your shield skill so that you can use the Fire Resistance without much Problems in Zot.

Maybe it would be better to wait for a Quick Blade? If you can get one as a gift from Okie with a good brand like Elec or even Draining then it would be better than either dagger. And if you're going stabbing, stick with Short Blades.

The Tavern

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