Quick Blade

)   Quick Blade   (No tile)
Base item	elven short sword
Damage vs. small	1d8 +2
Damage vs. large	1d8 +2
To-hit bonus	+9
Bonus versus	all monsters
Weapon skill	short sword
Size	one-handed
Affiliation	lawful
When carried	(none)
When wielded	(none)
When invoked	(none)
Base price	1000 zm
Weight	30
Material	wood

Quick Blade is an artifact that appears in SLASH'EM, SlashTHEM and Hack'EM. It is lawful-aligned, and its base item is an elven short sword.

Generation

An elven short sword randomly generated on the ground (including in a shop) or as a death drop has a base ¹⁄₂₀ chance of being made into an artifact, which will always be Quick Blade, if no artifacts have been generated.

Quick Blade can be given to any lawful hero as a sacrifice gift.

In SlashTHEM, Quick Blade is one of the artifacts that can be created by Duri at The Forge, with a base price of 750 zm.

Description

Quick Blade has +9 to-hit and +2 damage bonuses against all monsters.

Strategy

Quick Blade is an artifact unlikely to see use in most games beyond the very early stages: its main advantage lies in the to to-hit bonus, making for reliable damage (or "quick", as compared to a less-accurate weapon) against monsters with low AC. However, the damage bonus is meager to the point of invariably falling off by the time a hero reaches the mid-game is any of the variants where it can be found. Within those early stages, the artifact can be serviceable for lawful heroes until they can sacrifice for a better weapon—outside of Hack'EM, such a hero can also dip for Excalibur if they have access to the long sword skill.

History

Quick Blade first appears in NetHack Plus, where it is the first gift for the Elf role, and also appears in SLASH 6.