User:Xiay/What Daggers To Use?

What Daggers to use for PvE:
Daggers can have up to 3 upgrades, a tang, a handle and an inscription/inherent stat. Without modification daggers deal piercing or slashing damage. Max damage is 7-17 the lowest average damage of any weapon in guild wars, however it’s not all bad, because most of the damage an assassin does comes from skills not the actual daggers themselves.

Ultimately the daggers you use will depend on the build you are using; however here is a guide to what mods are good and what are bad.

Damage Type

When choosing damage type as a general rule slashing is better as piercing is weak against skeletons where as slashing is good against plants and although ultimately this will make little difference as most damage comes from the skills used not daggers if you have a choice go for slashing. Certain dagger tangs can also add elemental damage like fire or cold. These damage types can be effective against certain creatures (and weak against others) for instance fire deals extra damage against undead and ice creatures, but once again as most damage comes from skills its is not worth using up a mod on your daggers (namely the tang) to deal a little extra damage to certain creatures. Having said that in certain instances you may use skills like mark of the Roddgot to hex opponents combined with a fiery dagger tang to cause burning on every hit. For more info see “Burning Dagger” build.

Tang

Hopefully having deterred people from using elemental dagger tangs unless for a specific purpose we now have to decide what tang to use. The easy answer is Zealous. Loosing a pip of energy regeneration does seem bad but the return in energy is much greater than the loss. 1 pip of energy regen gives one energy every 3 seconds where as zealous can give 2-6 energy per 3 seconds depending on double strike chance and if you increased your attack speed. Ultimately your build will have the final say in what to use but Zealous works with most builds.

Handle

Your options on the handle are quite open. +30 health can be handy if you need that extra buff however most of the builds bellow have protection in the form of armour buffs and blocking skills this means you will either have lots of health or be dead – Assassins don’t do very well when their enchantments and stances are removed and are very fragile so although +30 health will be handy it wont make a huge amount off difference to survivability, its ultimately only gives you about one more hit before you die, and if its come to that final hit its usually too late. Another Handle option is the +20% longer enchantments. Assassins use lots of enchantments so this mod can be very handy. For instance as a general rule in HArd Mode PvE critical defence is essential and it doesn’t last very long so making it last an extra 20% can give you time to get in that critical hit to refresh it (if you haven’t taken critical strike) and the most important aspect to your survival is you ability to block 75% of attacks which greatly reduces the damage you take. Furthermore making enchants like shadow refuge or the dervish skill mystic regeneration last a bit longer will give you extra health. Further more you will save energy because some enchantments like way of perfection will not have to be cast as often. +5 armour is another possible mod but the amount of damage reduction you get from this will be very small.

Inherent/Inscription

I will start by saying a damage bonus for instance +15% damage when health is above 50% (15^50) is Pointless it only increases the base damage of your daggers (7-17 if max) so assuming you get a critical strike and deal just over max damage and extra 15% will amount to about 2 extra damage, the damage per second is increased on average by 1 when chaining attacks. (When testing using dagger attacks the DPS (damage per second) went up from 58 per second on average when using un-modified daggers to 59 when using 15^50). So in 20seconds of combat you will deal an extra 20 damage from the modification (assuming you health stays above 50 or what ever the requirement is). That’s kind of lame - so what else can you use? +5 energy is another option for an inscription or inherent mod, this is a good idea as the extra 5 energy will make a noticeable difference to you. Energy is essential to an Assassin as your inherent damage from daggers is very little you need to make sure you are constantly using skills which usually cost energy. The only exception to this could possibly be a deadly arts signet build. However even this has some costly skills and it isn’t a very good build in my opinion so I never use it.

Therefore the ideal daggers for most builds will be slashing damage 7-17 with Zealous tang and +20% longer enchantments and +5 energy.

Xiay