Okay daggers are great for backstabbing, but why can't we focus on them? Why are they so bad in combat? They don't swing noticeably faster than swords, and dual wielding charged swings have that silly dagger flipping animation that makes them hit even slower. Daggers also don't benefit from the additional one-handed damage enchant, but I'm not sure if that's intended or a bug.

I'd love for someone to add a perk that gives us +10% swing speed and +5% crit chance per rank for 3 ranks. It would be a nice start to making them a viable combat option.

I played a twin dagger character until lvl 30 or so, when i started stacking that one handed enchant. Now my one handers deal even more damage then the daggers do.

I think some general changes just need to be made, like allowing a 50% benefit from the one handed enchant, and an overall increase in attack speed.

The sword perks, like 10% (+) crit chance, work on daggers. And with several characters leveled to around 30, I have to say that a dagger dual-wielder is, if anything, severely overpowered. You get quite a few swings in on that power attack, the swinging is *way* faster than a sword, which really adds up if you have enchantments on your daggers, especially like the dagger of woe. On top of that, you get the throat slit and assassinate fun, and the full multi-swing sneak attack if you really need more force. In fact, the power attack combo is fast enough and strong enough that I can overwhelm heavily-armored opponents by constantly assaulting them and not allowing them a chance for a counter.

With the DB gloves, we get 30x damage on sneak attack with daggers - that's more than enough power

Oh really? That's good to know. I always thought it was just for swords. I'll have to try it.

Could you clarify what DB gloves are? I'm terrible at the acronyms...

DB=Dark Brotherhood

Personally, I'd prefer a seperate dagger skill altogether, it just doesn't make sense to have them tossed into the same category as other one-handed weapons. Whether either solution (entirely new skill tree or added perks) is viable is something we'll see after the editor gets released.

Having all the one-handed weapons just lumped together has never made sense. They've been doing it (sort of) since Oblivion though. Long swords and short swords balance completely differently, and are weighted against different eventualities. Long swords are generally balanced toward the point where as short swords are balanced to the hilt. Axes are a completely different animal altogether, as well as maces. I was a little disappointed that they took the dumbed down way and stuck with that instead of having individual weapon type or style skill trees with synergy bonuses to the other related skill trees. i.e. a master of long sword gets a 20% bonus to his short sword skills because they are somewhat similar. Same between axes and maces etc.

However, I live with the largely lumped generalization of"one-handed" and "two-handed". Pretty soon, there's just going to be three trees for the console kiddies: Weapons, stealth and magic.

Kind of disappointed with the loss of Birthsigns and attributes too.

Do people not know of the sneak perk that gives dagger sneak attacks 15x damage? Combined with the bonuses from the 1H skill, daggers are flippen insane.

Idk about everything else but I agree with how they did most things in this game. I started with TES: Oblivion as my first one and the choosing of everything from the beginning felt awkward. I don't think everyone feels so sure with how they want to go with their character and that way doesn't give you any wiggle room whatsoever. The perks are nice I loved them in Fallout 3. Sure they could use some tweaking, and thats being done. I mean, look at how its changed already from Fallout 3. Its progress and I think its progress in the right direction.

30x sneak attack bonus (with gloves) combining with all the dual wield goodness is awesome.

daggers fall in the Sneaking catagory.


I dont ever recall armies arming their soldiers with just daggers. They are just not as good of a weapon as swords, axes, or maces.

So in a 1 to 1 fight, they should be weaker than those weapons.

but when you earn the 15x damage in the sneaking tree. Then they become utterly dominating.

They also swing faster, and generally have better procs than other weapons.

But hey. Its a single player game, so balance is all up to the player and the modder.

Go play Morrowind, or get the released version of Daggerfall. Daggerfall had no birthsigns to mention, but it was just absolutely huge. Too huge in fact to be a good game, since all the content was just rehashed from town to town, province to province and Dungeon to Dungeon.

Morrowind was perhaps one of the best games ever made in this genre due to its size and the plain openness of the world. The literal ability to do what you like. This game feels more like Morrowind than Obivion, but it still took so many steps in the wrong direction, IMO.

Keep hearing that the armsman perks do NOT effect daggers. Is this true? And how does one test in game?

The only other problem with daggers in non stealth attacks is they have very short range. You need to get real close to hit, and often you enemy will get pushed out of range if using power attacks.

I tested it in my game. I looked at the dagger damage of one of my daggers then put a point in armsman and the damage went up on the item screen. I have no way of knowing if the damage actually went up though.

If armsman doesn't effect daggers, there's no good reason for a dagger user to go down the 1-hand perk tree at all... I'm going to use the console to verify this.

If so it would seem maces could be a more powerful backstabbing weapon if set up properly. You'd only need full armsman to make a mace backstab for the same value as a dagger - 6x instead of 15x, but the damage would be more than double due to the base difference +100% armsman, so it would balance out. And then you could also add 75% armor reduction. Stacking further armsman-type bonuses would push it further in favor of maces.

EDIT: Armsman does work on daggers, enchanting hasn't been tested.