[Autumn]

Daggers grow into an increasingly worrying position, most of their viability relies on fleur and duelist heavily, which CAN be fine, as a lot of games tend to allow branching out into a more duelist-y feeling path with daggers. (Being able to fight alongside swinging daggers rapidly, parrying attacks etc.)

But this reliance on duelist has grown too much and has started to shunt them into an unfavorable position when it comes to exactly what classes are viable with them, one could argue that dagger dance would normally allow them to critically hit twice and still perform another action, thus giving them usefulness with every class, but I fail to see this as ever the case, simply put you gain too much mileage from carrying One Versus One, Eviter and Fleur, combined with possibly pairing a dagger with a sword for mobility sake. (Sidecut with flottement is one huge example.)

Now I will not deny that VA has received some tools that helped its physical counterpart quite a lot, both in viability and synergy, void flight has quite a few interesting combos you can do, extend void can have some fun interactions with certain buffs, and vanishing strike definitely helped it immensely in setting up a kill, I'd wager it competes as one of the best skills in the game.

Shooting now to the point of the thread after hopefully conveying my thoughts on the position of daggers properly, I'd like to see a buff to their damage somewhat, not very huge damage changes but enough to start causing daggers to actually be set into a comparable position versus a Duelist's damage, daggers actually can't gain a lot of SWA comparatively to a sword or an axe or a spear, which is why they fall off really hard in comparison, so much so that a vorpal fang or dancing shiv built with 50 or 60 GUI in mind can end up dealing only marginally less or more damage than a sword can.

Pictured here is a high SWA duelist versus a high crit damage VA, both have comparable offensive stats (50 STR vs 50 GUI, 144 SWA vs 97 SWA),the sword ends up dealing very comparable damage despite the sword duelist only having 15 GUI, the damage of other weapons has gotten so conventionally high that the niche of using daggers has been erased almost entirely, not to mention daggers end up having a very poor hit rate for some reason or another, I can't exactly tell why.




I hate to go into such a long winded explanation for actually just minor number adjustments, and I actually apologize for it, but I felt I sort of needed to in order to make a point, nevertheless, here are the changes I propose finally: (Explanations in spoilers)

Rogue Changes -
Dagger Dance changed from 20% damage on secondary hit to 30% damage on secondary hit.

(Dagger dance sits in a spot that is only sort of weak, it has to go through armor on the second hit so it could use a minor damage jump to be worth main classing and dual wielding for.)

VA Changes -

Deadly Arms now provides a Rank * 4 hit bonus to dagger type weapons as well.

(Daggers lack the ability to hit without another subclass for help, and even with another subclass they somehow run into troubles anyway, this will help them immensely more than any other change)

Backstab changed from Rank * 2 bonus damage on backstabs to Rank * 4

(Backstab is currently not worth 5 skill points for about 20 damage after modifiers, this'll help daggers a lot imo, on top of this backstab is completely avoidable by hugging the wall, team mate or having armor of eyes.)

Spellthief Changes

Mystic Dagger - Now deals magic damage instead of physical damage.

(Befitting of the name and opens an option for spellthieves to deal damage with, and will probably pair well if combined on a destiny VA/Spellthief, there was not a lot of reason to use this skill before.)

[Lolzytripd]

Another option in this issue I strongly agree with would possibly be increasing guiles effectiveness or increasing dagger swa totals.

[Snake]

I kind of disagree with Dagger Dancer.
It can afford being 50% damage at max level, since Matador still works on it. (The update that hit chunking off 20 damage from a weapon that doesn't even have high base damage to justify? Hell no.)

Deadly Arms would make Void Assassin be more independent when it comes to using daggers, I like this.

Backstabbing is still something hard to do, and especially now with Shaitan's 250 slash damage punishment for standing behind their backs. I also like this.

Mystic Dagger should do magic damage on both hits, that aside, I agree.

Goose Bite should also be changed to magic damage.

Flying Dagger could afford being magic damage too, since it deals little numbers. And another effect I wish it had is that it threw more than one dagger at a foe, like... two of them. That would be a bit more flashy.

Why so much 'it should be magic damage'? I think I've made my point with this a few hundred posts ago. Small numbers are easily ignored or straight up turned into 0 by physical defenses. Magic damage is a bit harder to resist without the proper set or investment, so there goes.

[Akaiger]

I have been thinking about this all the time for my Spellthief. I know the thread is mainly for VAs, but the changes on both Rogue and Spellthieves will be very valuable to their gameplay. While dagger dance sounds a good skill, having 20% damage at max rank is disappointing. Rogues that use daggers usually tend to have low base damage and fully deppend on criticals, so it's pretty much a bad format for a skill that is meant to boost your damage IF you main the class. I'd like more than 30% damage on secondary hit too.

Mystic Dagger damage being changed to magic damage would be very good, since there isn't enough reason to pick it up. As for VA changes, they seem reasonable.

I'd like to include this: While Flying Dagger could be magic damage as Snake pointed, I believe turning it into a resistable skill, dealing SWA% damage while throwing up to Rank daggers, would be better. Besides Final Flare and stolen spells, Spellthieves have no reliable source of damage. Also I believe Invisible Weapon should give a effect that ignores enemies' on hit effects, much like Ghosthands.

[Neus]

I don't think overloading Deadly Arms with even more stats is a good idea.

[Autumn]

Hmm, I thought it simply fit, if there's another idea for hit tweaks for daggers I'm all ears, such as eastern wind being changed to hit instead of ski/luc (as we already have evade and crit wind bonuses)

Otherwise my other points still stand I assume.

[Autumn]

Gonna bring this up again due to recent ghost changes, while hit vs evade is in a better spot now, I feel as if daggers lack a bit of hit still, being lower than all weapons for the most part.

Is there a possibility of buffing GUI's hit bonus once again to accompany all the recent changes that hit's been hit with? Buffing up Flanking bonus to 50% from sides, 75% from back? Doubled if an Ally is Flanking, hell possibly tying this to a passive or innate within Rogue/VA itself