As Lethal as it Needs to Be: Daggers (Patreon)

Contents:

1. Introduction

2. Axes

 3. Bows

 4. Arrows and Quivers

 5. Clubs 

6. Daggers 

7. Grand

8. Katar 

Overview:

So, with the aim to try and be as positive as possible about the applications of Daggers, and explore just how you can use them effectively, I'm going to put most of my issues with them in general in the Overview and the conclusion. Daggers are a very problematic weapon design in KD: Monster.

To start with we'll take a look at the net graph for this class:

As you can see, not a single category in Daggers passes the 5 mark. Daggers are not fast, strong, full of abilities, accurate or heavy on affinities.  Now when you consider this in comparison to other weapons, you'll find that Daggers actually trend on the higher side for affinities, but that's not a trait that's front and center of what makes a weapon class good. Weapons are good based on strength, speed, accuracy and abilities like Reach/Range, Deadly, Devastating and unusual things that are triggered on stuff like Perfect Hits.

Speaking of which, that takes us to the other issue with Daggers, their ability design is all over the place.  For the most part they are designed to be used paired (which is always a poor ability because of how it eats 11% of your available slots in order to give you +X speed and a really awful duplicate of your original weapon). Except that sometimes they're not paired at all and they sometimes have Perfect hit abilities, except that's not always true either. 

Then there is the specialisation and mastery.

So, the specialisation goes some way towards negating the low strength, high speed design that daggers have, you get to dump an unwanted, unresolved hit location to try and score a success on the main location you want to wound. This is a neat ability, but there's an issue, which we'll get to shortly. The mastery ability is unique, cool and can create some really odd rules situations. For 1 survival you get to hit a high priority location and try to wound it again - that is very powerful and fun. However there is this same issue, which is absolutely core to the problem with daggers and lets get to it.

Daggers should be the Deadly weapon class.

Yeah, more than any other weapon in the game, daggers are the class that should have had deadly on them. Their high speed, low strength design is the perfect place for deadly to have existed. In addition, both the specialisation and the mastery are perfectly designed to try and hit critical wound hit locations and score the benefits. In fact, the whole deadly/critical wound/no reaction dynamic is exactly what daggers should have been doing.

In addition, this plays into the exact trope that daggers are the backstabby sneaky assassin style weapon. Something that for an utterly unknown reason has been given to the Denticle axe instead.

So in short, Daggers have an absolute identity crisis, they have a weapon design that doesn't mesh with the mechanics of the game (high speed, low strength gets punished without deadly/luck ti support it) or even it's weapon spec/mastery.  Daggers have been given some Perfect hit mechanics, and as we'll see a few of these are decent to excellent, but overall Perfect hits, despite both the existence of the Backstabber strain fighting art and the CE design decision to push towards the Perfect hit as the focus of the weapons is just wrong for the core game. Daggers need an identity rehaul from the start, and other weapons need to have deadly taken away from them (I'm looking at you Grand weapons).

So, I've said my peace. Enough about that, lets get into the daggers themselves!

Bone Dagger - Bone Smith

Power Level: Early Game

Speed: 3 speed is bananas on a weapon like this, it's only got 1 strength and it doesn't even have paired (which everyone, including Adam and his seems to forget example 1 and example 2).   In fact they may as well be paired, because that's how they are depicted in the lore.

Accuracy: 40% chance of hitting is fine with a 3 speed weapon, its higher variance, but it's something that I consider to be comparable to 2 speed 6+.

Strength:   Strength 1 is, in this game, absolutely garbage against almost every single monster. This means your average roll is 6.5, and with the weakest none Flower Knight monsters being toughness 8, well it's a terrible situation for a weapon to be in. You're not even good enough for the first monster encountered outside of the prologue, even with Survival of the Fittest you're still not at a 50% wound rate. 

Affinities:  The single best part of the Bone Daggers, this is one of the few reasons why the weapon gets used. It tends to be placed to 'fix' issues with the White Lion affinities and get you towards a set of 4 red affinities.

Ability:   There are better ways to gain survival, even early on the Perfect hit ability of a cheap weapon. While this is a nice, simple way to introduce the Perfect hit gives you a bonus mechanic, it set the precedent for daggers to be one of (many) perfect hit weapon classes. Useful in the meme Red charm build though (see below).

As an aside, It is worth noting that the bone dagger is one of the cheapest weapon options in the game and it's not frail like the Bone Sword/Axe/Darts, but right now it's very unlikely you'll hit an issue with super dense locations very often regardless because they are not common even on most later game monsters.

Summary: So there is a meme build using Bone Daggers, Red Charm and White Lion armor spam attacks that wound monsters 50% of the time. The Bone Dagger is a core part of that build, but it's not because it's any good, it's because ignoring monster toughness, either for auto wounds or a fixed 50% success rate is very powerful (and cheesy, no credit for winning with that method anyone can do it)

Here's one version..

Cat Fang Knife - Catarium (L3 White Lion)

Power Level: Early Game

Speed: 3 speed is one of the more interesting speed levels for a little risk without too much, though when it's combined with the rest of the stats. Well, same problem that's rotten throughout Daggers.

Accuracy: 6+ is not what you'd expect from a monster locked weapon, honestly this one could be doing a lot better.

Strength:   This is an absolute joke, the design of this weapon is scoring perfect hits to boost up its strength, but you'll notice that first of all, it's not got paired, so you can't easily increase its speed without relying on White Lion armor. Secondly you don't even get to always keep those tokens if you do get the ball rolling because a knockdown will ruin your day.  Honestly this weapon only works if it has a high base strength, and you can get there with the meme Lion God build. But it's not worth the effort and difficulty at all.

Affinities:   Affinities are absolutely great if you want to get the Red Charm activated, otherwise they're kind of who cares outside of Lion God stuff? I can't really complain about them, but they are the one aspect of this weapon that IS good.

Ability:   OK, so I've trash talked the ability a bit already, so I'm going to look at the positives with this, if you can leverage it. 

The idea behind this weapon is to scale your perfect hits so they boost your strength before you get into the portion of the attack where you will be using it. So in order to properly use this weapon you want to have access to Timeless Eye, Backstabber and a way of negating knockdowns. Tumble is an option, but honestly you're already relying on two fighting arts, so Dancer Armor is probably the better choice. However if you take Dancer armor you're missing out on the extra speed and strength that other sets offer. So you can just risk getting knocked over and instead go with Phoenix, White Lion, Cycloid or Dragon which will give you a boost in stats so you can get the ball rolling.

The ultimate aim is to go with the meme-supreme build of White Lion Armor + Cat Fang Knife + the Lion God trilogy:

Spoiler, the statue is super important for this build and it's locked behind the L3 Lion God. Suffice to say if you can get the statue, you don't need the statue.

Summary:  This one was an ambitious bit of design from the team, it just falls short because of how hard it is to build in comparison to its baseline stats.  If you can consistently start snowballing strength with this weapon and keep building on that, you've got something that can potentially handle anything in the game, but the situations where that happens are rare and there are many other easier things to activate.  

Scrap Dagger - Weapon Crafter

Power Level: Early

Speed: In the higher bracket for daggers, it's fine and actually plays into one of the weapons (limited) strengths.

Accuracy:  As mentioned elsewhere, I'm good with 3 speed weapons that hit on a 7+, I think they are comparable to 2 speed 6+ weapons. 

Strength:   Ugh  

Affinities:   Not bad. But there are few builds that are clamoring for this combination at the moment. If the weapon was more useful overall you'd be valuing this more highly. As it stands, you just want to remember it exists for the Red Ring.

Ability:   Each dice you attack with has a chance of triggering this perfect hit ability, so this weapon is idea for use with the Timeless Eye/Backstabber combo and it fuels gaining additional speed quite well also. In this, its a reflection of the Scrap Sword. 

Still, can you feel that but coming? 

But. But, this is an unreliable gain in strength, you can't be sure how likely you are to score a wound before you start your attack, especially if you are planning on gaining strength to do so. Which means you want a decent baseline strength before you even start attacking. Which therefore means that you don't need this ability.

The odds of getting strength bonuses from Perfect hits (without any modifers) are as follows:

• +2 strength = 271/1000
• +4 strength =   27/1000
• +6 strength = 1/1000

Those are pretty crazy fractions, so if you want to see them in % form they're:

• 27.1%
• 2.7%
• 0.1%

And that's the issue with this ability, it's a plus to your strength in less than a third of attacks.  It gets better when you have Timeless Eye and/or Backstabber, but relying on non-tutorable fighting arts (and both of those are not really tutor able for most players) means that this is the kind of weapon that can be used rarely by most players.

It's a low payoff for a hard to trigger ability that doesn't do enough when you do get it, this isn't the CW-Axe or ATD.

Summary:   For 1x bone and 1x scrap this weapon is not half bad, however being not half bad when you're in the same crafting location as the Zanbato/CW-Axe and your stats are worse than the White Lion and Gorm gear just isn't good enough. Like most Weapon Crafter weapons, this one is a victim of too much power being concentrated in the early monster specific weapons and overall dagger design troubles. 

With better baseline stats this ability would have been fantastic, Daggers just aren't the right place for it.

Acid-Tooth Dagger - Gormery

Power Level: Any

Speed: 2 or 4 and often you're going to want to run this one as a 4.

Accuracy: 7+ is fine, in truth you're going to consider weakening your accuracy as much as possible with this weapon and combining it with Timeless Eye. If this weapon hit on a 10+ I'd still rate it's accuracy as being fine.

Strength:  On a normal hit, this weapon has 2 strength, but on a Perfect hit it's infinite. That's quite a range to jump from. So, yeah this weapon is very powerful.

Affinities:   Solid affinities, they are usable by the White Lion set, which is one of the best places to use these daggers. They're also fine with Cycloid Scale or Phoenix/Dragon, which are the other places.

Ability:   Another super sweet Perfect hit ability here and one of my favourite ones in the game, while this is similar to the Counterweighted Axe/Red Ring/Sunring Bow it's not as powerful and honestly more balanced. While you get to hit an automatic wound on a perfect hit, you have to draw that hit location and you will suffer the trap or any Reflexes that trigger on a Reaction or a Wound. This is powerful, but it's not busted or abuse able the way that the other three abilities are above.  I wish that all of the above items used the Acid-Tooth Dagger ability as their auto wound ability because it's powerful, well balanced and makes for a better game experience.  This ability also encourages and rewards using the daggers paired, I like it.

Summary:   My favourite daggers and one of my favourite things to pair with Backstabber + Timeless Eye. These daggers are somewhat costly, but I think they are one of the few designs in the line up that actually work. It's not Deadly, but it's a great alternative because it's hard to look down at "infinite" strength on a weapon. Which is what this offers.
 

Nuclear Knife - Dragon Armory

Power Level: Early - Late with support from Cores

Speed: Speed 3 is not ideal for a weapon of this type.

Accuracy:  6+ is not what you should expect from a weapon of this caliber and difficulty in making. It should be a 5+.

Strength:   The strength on this weapon is straight up terrible, this is a weapon that requires a Radiant Heart strange resource to make, which is a seriously dangerous resource to get your hands on, killing someone who gets it via the death blow 80% of the time (woo). 

Affinities:   This is one of the few places where there is an up and left blue pairing, which is something that the Dragon Armor set loves to have in order to complete the waist and body gear piece affinities. It's got a bucket load of affinities.

Ability:  I will not call this one useless, it's not great because it's an ability that requires you to deal 3 brain damage to yourself at the cost of an activation and all you get is devastating 1 with your next attack. That's a bucket load of negatives in exchange for making your speed 3, strength 3 weapon devastating 1.  

However, there are certain monsters who punish you hard for high insanity (Slenderman, Screaming Antelope) and this is a place where this weapon can be used as a safety valve.  Also survivors with natural insanity gains, such as Abyssal Sadists can also use this weapon on occasion. So the ability isn't completely bad.

Summary:   Interesting weapon, great affinities, lousy stats, very situational ability with poor payoff. This is one of the common thread that occur with Dragon King weapons, unlike the armor which has an excellent place in the meta, the DK weapons are universally terrible.

Now, it is absolutely vital before we finish to note that you can make the Nuclear Knife into a very effective weapon if you combine it with Dragon/Phoenix armor and the Red Core or whatever you like and the Blue Core.  These two cores, which are not easy to get, are designed to power up nuclear weapons a great deal.

I actually believe that they are worth the slot you assign to them, however it's galling and difficult to use both with the same weapon, so if you can take down an L3 Dragon King, I would recommend the Blue Core over the Red every time.

As many of my patreons have pointed out, it's dumb that these two cards don't have a single affinity of their respective colour fitted to them. I've attached to this post custom versions of these two cards with an affinity color on them, so next time you are printing custom cards you can also add these to the mix.

Bonus mini homebrew expansion!

Lantern Dagger

Power Level: Mid (Intended to be late)

Speed: This one is either 2 speed or 4 speed.

Accuracy:  7+ accuracy is unacceptable for a weapon with a base of 2 speed, it's clear that this dagger has been designed for Paired use without considering how it works unpaired.

Strength:  Technically the strength here is 6.5 on average (because that's how much extra strength Sharp gives - 1d10 = 5.5 average roll). So its average wounding roll is 12.  

Affinities:   Well, the left red half affinity is technically in the right place for it to connect with the monster-tooth necklace (which it actually needs because every point of strength matters for this weapon). But it's nothing to write home about.

Ability:   Early Iron on 2d10 is an ~19% chance of having all your attacks cancelled (or essentially a 1/5 if you don't mind inaccurate shorthand), paired it jumps up to a ~35% chance of missing when you go with 4d10. Having the odd dice miss, or getting punished with unwieldy isn't so bad, but having between 1 in 5 and 1 in 3 of your attacks do nothing at all is a massive problem in the showdown where time has proven that consistency is king.  

This is one of the reasons why the Rainbow Wing Belt is highy recommended for use with weapons that have Early Iron.

Summary:   Not worth the resources and while the oxidised version gains a little strength, loses Early Iron and regains the Bone Dagger survival gain ability it's so expensive and so low down on the Oxidisation totem pole that honestly this weapon is pretty much a pass in all forms. If you want Sharp daggers, you can do better with Cycloid Scale + Nuclear Knife/Acid-Tooth Daggers.

Finally, lets look at the somewhat tricky to unlock Promo dagger from the White Speaker boxed set. This one exemplifies what daggers should have been about from the start and because it's the only truly non-garbage dagger in the game it often gets called "broken" and "overpowered" without justification, statistically it's a fine weapon - only the fact that it makes leveling fist & tooth have a lower skill floor (and if you can't level F&T without help by now, you're playing the wrong game) is remotely on the strong side.

Speaker Cult Knife

Power Level: End game

Speed: 3 speed is the higher end choice and it's rather good on this weapon because it has the offensive power to back it up.

Accuracy:  50% accuracy is absolutely fine for a weapon like this, heck 40% would have been fine also, but 50%? I'll take it.

Strength: 9.5 base strength is great, honestly not enough end game weapons reach this level of strength and it's going to be an issue when stronger monsters turn up. 

Affinities:   The affinities are oooookay, up and down are not the optimal positions for Red affinities, there's not a lot that works well with them, especially because you need to have this gear sat in the middle row in order to activate it, but for a crystal skin or leyline walker this ability can be nuts (especially if you have the gear to stack it with other evasion stuff). 

Ability:   So once activated, if you're insane and naked, you get +2 evasion (pretty powerful) and +2 strength (reasonable). You have to remain insane when using this in order to get the benefit, you also don't have any armor to protect you (but you can pack shields). 

Very importantly this weapon has Deadly, as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, in order to make the Dagger spec/mastery you need access to an increased range of critical hits. This weapon helps a great deal with that, and sharp has great interactions with the weapon spec as well.

In addition to the listed abilities this gear card has a weird form of 'irreplaceable' in the event, you can only craft it once per timeline. So if you lose this because of some strange event, it's gone without a reset of some kind.  

Summary: As the template for what daggers should have been, the only real shame with the Speaker Cult Knife is that it makes all the rest of the daggers in the game look garbage in comparison. If you are playing official rules only and not using my upcoming homebrew on the matter (link here when its live) the cult speaker knife should be your aim in every campaign.

Conclusion: 

Daggers are held back by a lot of design issues, they're a complete mess, with an excellent mastery/spec combo that's counter to the design of most Daggers in the game. 

If you want to be a dagger user, at the moment the only real sensible choice is to get your hands on Timeless Eye and/or Backstabber (strain fighting art), Cycloid Scale armor and either the Nuclear Knife or Acid-Tooth Daggers.  The only other serious options are the Speaker Cult Knife (Dancer armor is great for that one, or go nude) or memes with Red Charm + Bone Knife.  However, if you are brave and want to really do something few people manage, aim for a Nuclear Knife + Blue Core.

I've always rated this as one of the three worst weapon classes (along with Whip and Thrown) and a deep dive into the options has just cemented that opinion. But I'm not going to stop using them in my campaigns!

Also, I'm so unhappy with Daggers that there's something coming out soon for them from me. It's a small part of a larger project, but I think I can release it as a single, self-contained entity in advance. Link will be here when it's released.