Forum:How many daggers should I carry?
Daggers are cool. They are easy to get, have good to-hit, and don't require a launcher. They are not poisonable, though.
But the main question is: How many dagger should I carry?
A normal, an orcish, or an elven dagger weighs 10, and a silver dagger weighs 12. They are much heavier than an arrow or a dart.
They always have been the cause of burdening, so I want to get answer to this question.
Also, I have some additional questions:
1. Silver daggers are demanding to me, as they have silver damage. Is it worth to wish for them?
2. If I got too many daggers, what should I do with them? Is it wise to use one of them to engrave Elbereth?
Sidenote: According to my calculation, the only role whose best ranged weapon is daggers (esp. silver daggers) is Valkyrie. Any other roles have better weapon to use for.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by NDos (talk • contribs) 13:53, 30 January 2015
- IMO:
It depends on your character and playstyle, but a stack of a dozen or so good daggers is usually plenty. Remember that daggers don't break when thrown, so you generally only need as many as you're likely to throw at a single monster or a small bunch of them. (Then you can go pick them back up.) If you have a bag of holding, consider keeping a couple of volleys' worth of daggers in your main inventory, and the rest in the bag.
I usually just keep collecting daggers until I notice that I'm no longer running out of them in a typical fight. Then I stop, unless I happen to find a particularly nice one (say, a random silver dagger), or have plenty of spare carrying capacity. I do try to collect some extras before enchanting them, since it's kind of nice to have some spare enchanted daggers stashed away, just in case you need to replenish your stack later for some reason.
What you generally want to do is collect a bunch of identical (normal/elven) daggers so that they stack together, because that will a) minimize inventory slot use, b) maximize multishot opportunities, and c) let you enchant them all at once.
I've never really found silver daggers worth wishing for, especially since you only get two of them per wish on average. If you really want some, it's probably more efficient to polypile for them, even with the low generation rate. That said, I've found them to be somewhat underwhelming in practice: sure, they do good damage against demons, but by the time you start encountering lots of demons and can reasonably hope to get several silver daggers (i.e. after the Castle), you can probably deal with most demons just fine without them.
It's pretty much never a good idea to write Elbereth with a dagger, or any other weapon except an athame. If you don't have an athame (or a suitable wand) and want to write a semi-permanent Elbereth, just use a hard gem or ring (but remember that this still takes a full turn per letter). Incidentally, if you don't already have one, an athame (either Magicbane or, if playing artiwishless or just with enough artifacts already generated to make the wish risky, a normal blessed +2 athame) is also a good use for a spare wish.
For your spare daggers, I recommend just stashing them somewhere. You can always go back to pick them up when you want to enchant your dagger stack, or just use them as polyfodder.
As for your calculations, according to these tables (and my experience), daggers are the best choice for mid-to-late game Rogues. Sure, in the early game, darts and crossbows are marginally better than daggers at the same skill level, but you'll still want to train the dagger skill for the late game, and even a single skill level difference is enough to negate the advantage. Given that, and also how much easier the dagger skill is to train, there's IMO rarely any point in wasting skill levels on any other missiles.
- —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:08, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
