Sword, Dagger or Club?

[HaruDanji]

Iridium Needle for life. I use sword in early and mid game, but the late game I prefer Iridium needle (dagger). I can go to volcano at 7-8 PM at evening and still can reach map level 9 before 2 AM and still get amount of goods. It almost one shot every monster if you have proper build, but it requires player skill and a lot movements. It is very satisfying and addicting tho :)

 

[Elenna101]

Just about everyone that likes the club or dagger best... almost always says that they also carry around the sword for when their favorite weapon just isn't a good choice. The best example is when dealing with ghosts and you have a desperado with a fancy dagger weapon... and they switch to the sword for killing the ghost. I also have heard people talk about switching from a club/hammer weapon to the sword when the haunted skulls and magma sprites show up. Using a sword I never have to worry about when it may not be a good weapon. It's always a good weapon.

Like I said, once I get acrobat and the artful enchant, I drop the sword and just spam the club special attack. I can absolutely kill a magma sprite in one good combo (pressing right click and then mashing left click) with an infinity gavel, while the infinity sword takes at least two hits and you have to wait for it to come back after the first hit knocks it away. Granted, the combo takes a little practice, and I sometimes have to tank a hit in order to get enough damage in before the enemy is knocked away (mostly with iridium bats).

I never bother with a sword once I get a club. The Mallet, for example, is probably one of the best mid-tier weapons as you descend in the Mines. And once you get a Galaxy Hammer, it's GG for swords, period.

Between knockback and how monsters tend to move, there's zero point in the faster (sometimes) swing speed of a sword, barring dealing with metalheads or the shadow brutes that pretty much ignore knockback. Everything else gets knocked back enough that you won't have to worry about the marginally slower swing rate.

Honestly, I have no clue why anyone would ever want to touch a dagger, mechanically they simply cannot compete.

I've heard people say that the daggers are pretty good for single high-HP enemies now that the special dagger attack freezes enemies in place? IDK, haven't bothered to learn to use them myself, but it does seem like a decent argument. My main problem with them is that it seems basically impossible to fight a swarm of enemies with a dagger, but maybe others disagree?

 

[lilan castel]

Swords. Basic and harmful.

 

[One More Day]

Honestly, I have no clue why anyone would ever want to touch a dagger, mechanically they simply cannot compete.

While I'd tend to agree with this, there is, as always, an exception. If you are fortunate enough to fish up a Broken Trident before the Mines open, it is going to massively outperform any other weapon you can get before Floor 40, unless you also manage to fish up a Neptune's Glaive.

 

[Fat Link]

Swords for me but I’m pretty sure the clubs and daggers do more damage.

 

[imnvs]

Swords for me but I’m pretty sure the clubs and daggers do more damage.

Daggers of the same level do less but can be attacked with more often as they are quicker.

Hammers/clubs of the same level do more but are slower so can not be attacked with as often.

Swords are the middle ground.

 

[Davinn]

Dagger with crit build + crit rings and I 1 shot most things with my special. Artful as the enchant

 

[EktorulisPro1m]

stupid question if you ask me, i personally prefer hammer and slingshots but usually i take all of them, sword, club, dagger and slingshot

 

[Cptldsilver]

Clarifying: to one-shot the high HP monsters, you need to mash left click (or the regular attack button, if you're not on PC) immediately after doing the special attack. This will give you a bunch of extra hits, making clubs OP.

With the nerf to the cooldown time in 1.5, I've started bringing a sword with me to Skull Caverns along with the galaxy hammer, because I'm not good enough at mashing to consistently kill enemies in one hit especially before I can forge it in the volcano. Once I get a few rubies and the Artful enchant on the galaxy hammer, the sword gets put away because Artful enchant + Acrobat perk lets me basically spam the special attack constantly.

Is it worth it to take the acrobat perk over the extra damage from the fighter perk? The CD gets pretty short with the artful enchant.

 

[Elenna101]

Is it worth it to take the acrobat perk over the extra damage from the fighter perk? The CD gets pretty short with the artful enchant.

I see what you mean, I think it's mainly a question of whether the fighter perk actually decreases the number of hammer smashes needed to kill an enemy. Like, for example, if an enemy has 300 HP and I do 200 damage with Acrobat verses 250 damage with fighter (numbers completely made up, no clue how correct they are), then it'll take two smashes either way and the fighter perk doesn't give any benefit. But if I'm doing, say, 200 with Acrobat versus 300 with fighter, then it takes one smash instead of two, which obviously makes a difference.

I haven't done any testing with Fighter so I'm not sure how much it actually helps in practice. I know with Acrobat I can generally kill anything in one or two smashes.

Also, does Fighter even affect the hammer special attack, or just the hammer swing? I know the +attack buff from the iridium band or ruby ring doesn't affect the special attack.

 

[hexnessie]

Sword here, because I'm too uncoordinated to consistently use the hammer's special move, and daggers require altogether too much craft and positioning. With the sword, basically I just wave at things until they go away, and that's where my fighting skill ends.

I need to learn to use the slingshot - never even tried it yet (I'm a very slow adopter). I saw a video where the poster exploded rocks with her slingshot and it was beautiful, but I would probably just end up exploding myself...

 

[Cptldsilver]

I see what you mean, I think it's mainly a question of whether the fighter perk actually decreases the number of hammer smashes needed to kill an enemy. Like, for example, if an enemy has 300 HP and I do 200 damage with Acrobat verses 250 damage with fighter (numbers completely made up, no clue how correct they are), then it'll take two smashes either way and the fighter perk doesn't give any benefit. But if I'm doing, say, 200 with Acrobat versus 300 with fighter, then it takes one smash instead of two, which obviously makes a difference.

I haven't done any testing with Fighter so I'm not sure how much it actually helps in practice. I know with Acrobat I can generally kill anything in one or two smashes.

Also, does Fighter even affect the hammer special attack, or just the hammer swing? I know the +attack buff from the iridium band or ruby ring doesn't affect the special attack.

From my understanding the hammer combo is one special attack and multiple regular attacks? I could be wrong.

 

[FlyingCatPhillips]

I prefer the sword, but that's more because I am used to it and it's easy to use from the start. The daggers look cool, but I am a bit too uncoordinated to properly wield them without tons of practice. I also continuously get the sling shot backwards, even when I change the direction keys for them! And I panic too easy... sad but true, so sword for me. It's not a problem if I am dealing with a monster that I am expecting, but then if I don't expect it, it's bad. And let's face it I get blue slimes mixed up with rocks! So, sword it is.

 

[Giant Octopodes]

Right now my preference is a Crit Build with Swords. The Dragontooth Cutlass when built right has a 1/4 chance of one shotting any enemy in the game other than the Dangerous Purple Slime, Special Purple Slime, or Royal Serpent. It's served me very well but I definitely need to test heavy special attack focus with the club and dagger, I haven't really given them a fair shake imho. For ease of use though Swords are tough to beat.

I see what you mean, I think it's mainly a question of whether the fighter perk actually decreases the number of hammer smashes needed to kill an enemy. Like, for example, if an enemy has 300 HP and I do 200 damage with Acrobat verses 250 damage with fighter (numbers completely made up, no clue how correct they are), then it'll take two smashes either way and the fighter perk doesn't give any benefit. But if I'm doing, say, 200 with Acrobat versus 300 with fighter, then it takes one smash instead of two, which obviously makes a difference.

I haven't done any testing with Fighter so I'm not sure how much it actually helps in practice. I know with Acrobat I can generally kill anything in one or two smashes.

Also, does Fighter even affect the hammer special attack, or just the hammer swing? I know the +attack buff from the iridium band or ruby ring doesn't affect the special attack.

Set aside for a moment what does and does not affect the damage, because I also haven't tested and can't answer that. Best case, Fighter / Brute increases damage throughput by 25%. Best case, Acrobat increases damage throughput by 100%. Certain enemies may take more hits to kill (as you know, if you want to check the breakpoints, there's a combat calculator sheet which can help identify where it would and would not make a difference, for base weapon swings at least). However when you're dealing with enemies beyond the range of a single swing, you're reducing the time needed before you can smash again even for enemies where one smash Does kill them. If you're already killing generally anything in 1-2 smashes, I can virtually guarantee Fighter won't be better. If you do testing though please share how it goes, it's definitely on my "to do" list to thoroughly explore the options from a practical standpoint rather than just theorycrafting in the near future.

Out of curiosity, when you say "generally kill anything in one or two smashes", is that including things like starred tiger slimes and royal serpents? How many "hits" are you generally getting per smash? It was those 1000+ HP enemies which initially turned me off of straight damage builds and towards crit builds, but if you're getting say 4-5 hits consistently with a smash on them and it only takes a couple of smashes to kill them as a result, that swings things in favor of hammers pretty drastically.

 

[Bbirdo]

I like using daggers on ice foes and clubs on rock crabs also swords on anything else

 

[Elenna101]

From my understanding the hammer combo is one special attack and multiple regular attacks? I could be wrong.

My impression was that it's multiple special attacks, but I'm not sure either. In any case I know for sure that only the regular attack and not the combo is affected by iridium ring.

Out of curiosity, when you say "generally kill anything in one or two smashes", is that including things like starred tiger slimes and royal serpents? How many "hits" are you generally getting per smash? It was those 1000+ HP enemies which initially turned me off of straight damage builds and towards crit builds, but if you're getting say 4-5 hits consistently with a smash on them and it only takes a couple of smashes to kill them as a result, that swings things in favor of hammers pretty drastically.

Oh, I hadn't actually realized royal serpents had so much HP, and it's been a while since I did that quest. When I said 1-2 smashes, I was thinking iridium bats.

 

[FilthyGorilla]

I have to admit, I am a club boy,
For me there is littl eto no reason to use a dagger unless you are going for a ohko build with the iridium needle/are lucky to get a broken trident really early on and swords are reliable but slow and tedious to wait around for while the serpent or iridium bat I just hit goes careening away just to come back again.
Clubs are just easy, the clubs you get early game are way better than the swords you can get, take for example the wooden club or if you are lucky, a wooden mallet, whearas a sword user may use the steel smallsword which deals 4-8 damage a club user may be using the wood club which deals 9-16 and way more if you can abuse the special attack well (I, with using the attack key on keyboard and left mouse click can usually get abou 7-9 hits in the time it takes for the special attack to wear off) which in turn will allow you to have it as a viable weapon much longer than a sword and can keep you from having to go out of your way to buy/grind crates for a better weapon.
The wooden club for me was a useful weapon until about floor 50 and then again at floors 70-90 because of the skeletons there being so weak.
Mid-late game the club-type weapon is also superior personally because of the massive output of damage coupled with the ways to lower special attack cooldown making the special attack the only one you actually use.

*slight spoilers

My weapon evolution as I progressed went similar to this with the approx. amount of time used (in game) beside it:
1/2 day/rusty sword
1-2 weeks/wooden mallet (lucky)
3 weeks/yeti tooth (I always get this from crates and it is way better than the obsidian edge)
2 weeks/galaxy sword (eh)
8 weeks/galaxy hammer (good weapon, now just lies in a chest with all my collectable weapons)
~1 year/Dragontooth club (one of the best looking weapons in my opinion and second best hammer)
1/3 year and counting/Infinity gavel (I was unsure whether to upgrade as I liked my previous weapon immensly and I am a pretty nostalgic person but decided to anyway)
1/3 year and counting/slammer* (I really just like the slammer as a weapon and I like to fight the more powerful dangerous creatures with a weaker weapon for fun and to practise for when I am on newer files)

*Spoilers (though if you are on this thread you are just asking to know...)


If you do choose to use the club as a weapon, there are a few builds that will maxsimise its potential:
Pure damage:
With a build that focuses on pure damage, you will ideally have an Infinity Gavel with three ruby enchants, two iridium/ruby forged rings and the combat perks for extra damage.
With all these percenatge bonuses you get an insane 95% extra damage (the game counts damage boosts all together then adds) and makes your gavel do 195-234 damage per hit which is nearly enough to one-hit mummies in the mines.
for this build I would reccomned using Artful but crusader will allow you to near garunteed one hit mummies (255 minumum damage to the undead, the mummies health is 260).

Pure speed and special attack:
For this build you will need the same weapon as the last but enchanted with three emeralds (speed) with the artful enchant and acrobat perk which will allow you to do each special attack at 25% the regular wait and attack faster.
You will also want emerald rings for speen and iridium bands (which you cannot go wrong with in a build like this)
Though some testing I have come across the hypothesis that higher speed does in-fact help when spamming the special attack on hammers though I may be wrong which would be nice to know.

Of course, these are extreme examples and I do not reccomend doing them and instead using a good mixture of the two with your own choices for rings and forges (though I would try to use iridium bands), these are just placeholders and are meant as a good place to build off of when making your own build that suits you.

My old build was the dragontooth club forged with one speed and two weight and enchanted with artful because I liked letting the monsters go away for a while and letting me mine away then hit them again and had no damage boosting rings. (damage and extra health perks)

Right now, my build is the infinity gavel triple forged with ruby (attack) and enchanted with artful as well as having acrobat for the way faster cooldown and my own fav ring combos which includes one iridium band.

As a kind of summary, do what you will and use weapons you like, if you like clubs, do feel free to take from this what you will and have a good day.


*I am also a person who likes doing useless things and collecting what I like and have started a collection of rare/cool weapons which includes 8 dark swords, all of the dragontooth weapons, three dwarf hammers and a dwarf dagger, neptunes glave, and some others. I have also fully enchanted and forged the starter weapon (rusty sword) with haymaker and 30+ weight to mess around and other things of the like.