Dancing weapon

Version 0.30: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Useful Info

Dancing weapons are weapons animated into life, fast enemies that hit relatively hard. While they have pathetic HP, they have high EV and a wide array of resistances, making them annoying to fight. Be aware that their stats vary based on the weapon type; dancing daggers are much less of a threat than dancing giant spiked clubs. Dancing weapons can have enchantment and brands, which work as normal.

Instead of leaving corpses, dancing weapons simply become their base weapons when killed (unless they were summoned). Unless the weapon was animated by Tukima's Dance, Gozag turns these weapons into gold.

Friendly weapons can appear via:

• Tukima's Dance
• Xom action

Hostile weapons can appear via:

• Wandering the Elven Halls (especially in the Hall of Blades on Elf:2)
• Zenata's Sheza's Dance spell
• In Tukima's Studio
• Xom action
• Beogh's and Wu Jian's wrath.

Dancing Ranged Weapons may appear, but only in certain vaults or as a result of Tukima's Dance.

Tips & Tricks

• Spells that deal non-elemental damage, such as Airstrike, Stone Arrow, or Iskenderun's Mystic Blast, are very effective against dancing weapons.
• Dancing weapons also lack see invisible, so stabbing specialists with access to invisibility should have an easy time with them.
• In console, dancing weapons are distinguishable at a glance from normal melee weapons since they are "reversed": dancing weapons are represented by (, while normal weapons are represented by ).

History

• In 0.27, ranged dancing weapons were added.