Altho daggers are probably the best rogue weapons they are pretty weak and hard to find. - It's really hard to beat the stronger monsters or a whole zoo with a pure rogue character (dual wielding daggers, perception, burglary and the like). - Sneaking is great but if you attack someone and you miss, it's lethal on lower floors because your daggers are terrible at dealing damage. - If you have to fight quest monsters (hero clones or other monsters with high hp) it's really a pain to have daggers. - Floor 3 consists of constructs and the monsters are just completely impossible to kill with daggers. I think daggers should be stronger, have some kind of great reason to choose the skilltree (not passive skills), get bonuses from other skilltrees (e.g dual wielding or burglary, piracy) or increase in ammount (finding daggers in stores is really uncommon). Thanks, Alistaire
The largest problem is with the lack of daggers and polearms. This was always slightly a problem with non-swords (staves specifically) but now it's compounded with skill splitting. This will even itself out a bit, hopefully.
Well the problem is that the first dagger you get has such low stats and you have to make a huge journey without finding a better one. I should make some mods or something, maybe one for each solution.
I agree. Although I think monster zoos are a bit easier with rouges, just slower. With enough sneak, most of the monsters will not notice you and some of those that can won't be able to get past those who can't.
I recently went through as a rogue type character and did rather well up until a bug made it where I couldn't go down any more floors. I did notice a problem with a lack of weapons, but it wasn't my biggest issue as I managed to find a dagger of akumos fairly early on. A far bigger issue was that very early on you find two enemies with a whopping TEN piercing resistance (Which is most of what daggers do): The unfriendly AIs and Agar Guardians (And their palette swaps). On the plus side, piercing damage bypasses normal armor resistance, however monsters have nowhere near 10 armor until you start getting down to the lower levels (think 8 is where you first start seeing it). This means that unlike other melee types which are more or less equal on all things early on, daggers early on run into an issue where they are great on most things, but with a good chance that two monster types will be outright immune to their attacks. Having another form of damage will prove vital, whether in the form of buffs/enchants that add elemental damage, or in the form of spells or another melee weapon type (sadly, all crossbows and a lot of throwing weapons are piercing too, fancy that...) Once we get past that one little issue, daggers are pretty sweet. I could go at length on what the various skills do, but suffice to say they excel at doing tons of damage for a rogue due to their passive bonus attack and active skills gaining damage bonuses from stats rogues are likely to have in spades (Sneakiness, Nimbleness, and Caddishness). 10 is also the most piercing resistance you'll ever see (Except for gelatinous cubes, which go up to a whopping 18... really should use something else on them), while armor goes up even higher. Outside of the two monster families listed, you'll rarely see very high piercing resistance on other monsters, and they usually have even higher armor. The only ones that have any are ravens (And only heckravens on level 8 with a whopping 1 resistance), tubers (2 resistance for plaguetatos on level 5 and eldritch tubers on level 10, 10 resistance for tuber-spirits on level 12, and 4 resistance for butcher yams on level 13), mummies (3 resistance for mummies on level 1, 5 resistance for preserved witches on level 11, 8 resistance for red lichesses on level 14), statues (5 resistance for living statues on level 3, 10 resistance for stone guardians on level 11 and iron men on level 13), Wights (3 resistance for wights on level 1, dead heads on level 5, 4 resistance for witch heads on level 12, 5 resistance for screaming skulls on level 14), aethernauts (3 for undead aethernauts on level 2, 9 resistance for aether oddities on level 13, 10 resistance for Major Tom on level 11), and 10 resistance for Lord Dredmor. Outside of those? No resistances. You can walk up to a monster on level 14 and smack them as hard as you can enemies back at level 1. Really, daggers are a "slow start, big finish" skill, in that it's relatively weak in the early game when stats are low and there are enemies that resist piercing far more than other damage types get resisted at that level, but later in the game the tables are turned when you can bypass armor and have high sneakiness, nimbleness, and caddishness to fuel your extra attacks
The bright side is that they get the single best weapon in the game. Maybe second best; I haven't seen the atom smasher in action. The downside is that there are practically NO daggers from the second floor to the fifth or seventh. I actually had to use a CoE weapon with a dagger once the dagger I had simply didn't cut it, and even then I had to encrust my dagger with three layers of chainsaws so that it wasn't weak. You practically HAVE to take Tinkering for Clockwork Piezoblades if you want to stick to daggers the entire time. Once you get a dagger capable of dealing more than 8 damage, though, daggers REALLY begin to shine.
Do you think it would be feasable to have "Hybrid" weapons? Such as having the Spear count as a Polearm AND a Staff, some smaller Swords count as Daggers, Dwarven Army Sword counting as everything, add a Mace+Axe combo somewhere, etc. Weapon Skills were already a gamble, putting 5 points in Maces then the only CoE weapons you find on floors 9 and 10 are 3 Axes and a Staff or whatnot. Adding 2 more types reduces the chance of finding "your" type further; hybrids would allow a larger % of the weapons you find to match your skill, they just also happen to match some of the ones you didn't take The problem with hybrids would be, how would you handle people who take multiple weapon skills? Would Duel Weilding Swordhammers with Sword and Maces skills maxed give you quadruple stats?
I'm not exactly sure it's possible with their system. Not finding any decent weapons for the weapon you picked can be an issue, but in the long run I usually run across enough items to find SOMETHING useful. Now, the chances of finding the very best weapon for the skill you picked can be pretty low, but I doubt they'd make the highest tier weapons be multiple types anyway. If you seriously have a big problem with finding the weapons you want, just take a craft skill and make them yourself.
That makes sense for every skill... except for Daggers. The best smithable (not taking in to account clockwork stuff) dagger is the Bronze Dagger (4 1) whereas the best smithable sword is the Katana (5 10), the best smithable axe is the Hexaxe of Magic Axe Lords (36, crits, AV5), the best smithable mace is the Royal Beatdown (14 6) Dwarven Atom Smasher (40 5) , and the best smithable polearm is the Spear of Holy Sacrifice (15 15 1, blinding flashes, lutefisk smites). The best possible dagger you can craft is the Clockwork Piezoblade (12 6), which is superior only to the Katana from smithing. It is still inferior to the Clockwork Chainsword (20 4 AV4) made with the same skill. Big difference.
And by no means does tinkering + leveling it mean you'll be getting the dagger anyway. First you need the Whirling Hunter's dagger You then need to find the actual recipe as it's secret You have to max out Tinkering And all of those have to happen somewhere before DL5, preferably lower, to make the investment worth it, or the dagger will come too late to be of any use. Chances of all those 3 happening early are very, very slim. All in all, I would dump the Blood Geyser active as it's practically useless (regular hits do way more damage) and replace it with a passive that grants bonus damage (based on a rogue stat like nimbleness, savvy or sneakiness) when you attack a monster unaware of you.
