Quick blade

Version 0.31: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Name	Quick blade
Skill	Short Blades
Damage	4
Accuracy	+6
Base delay (%)	12 (120%)
Min delay	5 at skill 14
Hands	1H
Size	One-handed
Ranged?	No

A dagger with an uncanny enchantment upon it, allowing it to strike twice for every blow the wielder makes. "He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword... -Julia Ward Howe, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". 1861

This weapon falls into the 'Short Blades' category. It is a one handed weapon.

Quick blades are extremely rapid weapons. Whenever you swing with a quick blade, you get two attacks. This is treated as if you attacked twice with any other weapon, so factors like brand, auxiliary attacks, and AC can activate twice.

Sources

Quick blades are rare items.

• For those invested into Short Blades, Trog's weapon gifts are likely to gift one eventually. Scrolls of acquirement, or Okawaru's weapon gift, also have a high chance of gifting 'rare' weapons.
• The Hall of Blades has a decent chance (~41.5%) of having a dancing quick blade, always branded. Also, deep elf blademasters have a 1/26 chance of holding one.
• Some of the more powerful spriggans have a chance of spawning with one.

Strategy

Essentially, quick blades are rapiers that swing twice with more than half the base damage. They benefit greatly from flat damage effects, such as enchantment, slaying, auxiliary attacks, and stabbing. After all, if every hit gets +1 damage, then hitting twice as fast means you get twice the benefit. Conversely, enemy AC has a greater effect. Therefore, you should use a quick blade if you have many flat damage bonuses. With a good flat damage brand (namely electrocution, pain, distortion, and chaos), quick blades are quite powerful; a quick blade of distortion can take you through Zot.

For stabbing purposes, quick blades are better than daggers for everything except sleep stabs, assuming you've reached mindelay with both weapons. While daggers may get bonus damage, quick blades make twice as many stabs. Since the dagger bonus is always less than twice the damage, quick blades are just better. Sleeping enemies are the sole exception: since sleeping enemies wake up after the first stab, the stronger first hit off a dagger is better.

	Quick blades
Mundane
Magical
Artifact
	Unrandarts
Gyre and Gimble
Vampire's Tooth

History

• Prior to 0.31, quick blades only made 1 attack per swing, but had a base delay of 0.7 decaAut and mindelay of 0.3 decaAut.
• Prior to 0.30, quick blades could not naturally generate with brands.
• Prior to 0.29, quick blades dealt 5 base damage and scaled with strength instead of dexterity.
• Prior to 0.27, Cheibriados disapproved of quick blades.