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 make an attack action with a quick blade, you get two attacks. This is treated as if you attacked twice with another weapon, so factors like brand, auxiliary attacks, and AC can activate twice.

Sources

Quick blades are rare items.

• For those invested into Short Blades, Okawaru and Trog's weapon gifts are likely to gift one eventually. A scroll of acquirement also has a high chance of gifting 'rare' weapons.
• The Hall of Blades has a decent chance (~30.5%) 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

A quick blade is essentially a rapier that swings twice with half the base damage. Thus, quick blades benefit from flat damage effects, such as enchantment, slaying, auxiliary attacks, and stabbing. Conversely, enemy AC has a greater effect. You should use a quick blade if you have many such flat effects. With a good flat damage brand (namely electrocution, pain, distortion, possibly 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. While daggers may get bonus damage, quick blades make twice as many stabs, and daggers always get less than twice the damage. (As sleeping enemies wake up after the first stab, quick blades are worse. However, time spent switching weapons is time where monsters can wake up.)

	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.