Vampire's Tooth

Version 0.34: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

An ivory-like quick blade that looks like it could have been crafted from the tooth of some enormous predatory creature. It is lethally vampiric, and restores a greater portion of life to its user than other vampiric weapons.

the +8 Vampire's Tooth

+8 quick blade

Vampiric brand
Upgraded vampirism - when triggered, vampiric always heals for full damage dealt instead of the usual 1d(Damage).

Desirability

Vampire's Tooth is a highly enchanted quick blade that provides massive healing when fighting natural or plant targets. It's a strong weapon if found sufficiently early enough. Reaching mindelay is not required due to the sheer amount of healing from this item.

However, by the time you reach Zot, you'll likely want to use a quick blade of distortion or chaos instead. From Zot onward, most of the dangerous enemies are immune to vampirism and aren't easy to stab. In addition, as the Vampire's Tooth lacks a flat damage brand by default, its damage output will begin to suffer when compared to distortion. It also shares the weaknesses of all quick blades: it takes 20 skill to reach mindelay, and it suffers against high AC opponents.

Stabbing specialists in particular can make excellent use of this weapon, as not only will it deal grievous damage to stab-able enemies, but it will also heal you for the full stab damage whenever the vampirism triggers. This can work particularly well if you have a means of setting up a stab mid-fight (throwing nets, a wand of paralysis, Hexes, Invisibility, etc.), allowing you to quickly heal up from any beatings you've taken thus far.

Acquisition

The Vampire's Tooth can sometimes be found in a vault guarded by depth-dependent vampiric monsters (ranging from vampire bats to tyrant leeches to vampires and vampire knights). This vault can appear early in the Dungeon, potentially giving players access to a quick blade well before they would normally begin to appear.

If you worship Xom, you may access special Xom bazaars with chaotic versions of unrands. A chaotic Vampire's Tooth is much stronger than the base variant, with most of the original issues (low damage, ineffectiveness against vamp-immune enemies) solved due to the added chaos.

History

• Prior to 0.27, the enchantment of the Vampire's Tooth was +12.
• Prior to 0.22, the Vampire's Tooth was a +4 dagger.