Short Blades

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

The Short Blades skill denotes how adept your character is at using short bladed weapons. Although these weapons have the lowest base damage in the game, you can attack fast with them, and they do obscene amounts of damage when used for stabbing. This skill crosstrains with the Long Blades skill.

Short Blades use Dexterity instead of Strength for their attacks.

Aptitudes

At	Ba	Co	DE	Dg	Ds	Dj	Dr	Fe	Fo	Gr	Gh	Gn	Hu	Ko	Mf	Mi	MD	Mu	Na	Op	On	Sp	Te	Tr	Vp	VS
-1	1	-1	0	-1	-1	-1	0	N/A	0	-1	-1	8	0	3	2	1	-2	-2	0	0	-1	1	1	-2	1	-1

List of Short Blades

Name	Dam	Hit	Speed	Hands	Size	Dam Type	Prob
Dagger	4	+6	10	One	Little	Piercing	10
Quick blade	4	+6	7	One	Little	Piercing	2
Short sword	5	+4	11	One	Little	Piercing	10
Rapier	7	+4	12	One	Little	Piercing	10

Strategy

Short Blades are good at two things:

• They receive bonus damage from stabbing. Great if your character has a consistent way to stab things. Hexes are the most obvious means to do so. Both Uskayaw and Gozag offer ways to stab things, even orbs of fire.

• They attack quickly. Most short blades attack at 0.5 mindelay, and quick blades attack at 0.3 mindelay. They are great with "flat damage" procs. Slaying gives you +1 damage per swing, no matter how how strong your attack is. So the faster you swing, the more you benefit. Other than slaying, auxiliary attacks and certain brands (venom, electrocution, pain, distortion, chaos) are flat effects.

Conversely, enemy AC has the greatest impact to Short Blade damage.

Another positive is that Short Blades "require" less skill than other weapons; they are more accurate, and it takes less skill to reach mindelay.

To compensate, Short Blades have the worst base damage of all weapon types, and they fare the worst against AC. So, for "fair" combat, Short Blades are the weakest weapon type. However, stabbers aren't playing fair. Plus, a quick blade of distortion can remain viable into Zot, whether you stab or not. If nothing else, you can use the crosstraining to swap to Long Blades.

An early dagger / short blade of venom can make the earlygame a lot easier, even if you started with another weapon.

History

• In 0.29, Short Blades now use Dexterity instead of Strength for their attacks. Except for daggers, all short blades were reduced by 1 base damage.
• Prior to 0.20, the Captain's Cutlass still dealt slicing damage despite all other short blades dealing piercing damage.
• In 0.16, cutlasses were renamed to rapiers. Short swords and rapiers were changed from slicing to piercing damage.
• In 0.14, sabres were renamed to cutlasses.
• In 0.9, knives were removed.

See Also

• List of short blades
• Table of species aptitudes
• Short blades selection strategy