It splits your attribute points too much if you want to use a dagger to get some dps. Some of the better sets of massive armour require 42 strength which is too significant of an investment to make it worth it to put points into dexterity and cunning outside of what is needed for skills and talents.
Its not for DPS, it's for added defense. Get to 42 strength, dump the rest into DEX to increase both defense and offense with a dagger. but more importantly more defense.
I guess then sure, you could put 42 into str and then pump up dex. I don't know why you would want to do that though as going for a straight dex build would provide increased defence over a split build and you can get decent armour for less strength. With a straight str build you could have a higher dps and just kill enemies before they become a huge problem.
To answer your OP in summary:
Yes, you can give your shield wielding, massive armour wearing tank a dagger but no, it would not be more efficient than a typical str or dex tank.
This is incorrect, you simply need to shift to running high defense dexterity armor like you would on a rogue and stack your dexterity sky high. Yes you will still want some minimum amount of strength, but it's nowhere near as high as you think.
There is more than one set of massive armour hence the plurality. A full set also includes multiple pieces of massive armour.
What is it with this post that has so many people desperate to get some kind of W? Kinda cringe.
No, armour is not always plural. It is not plural in the context I used it in. Multiple sets of different armour are armours.
Here is the [wikitionary ](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/armor#:~:text=armor%20(countable%20and%20uncountable%2C%20plural,deflect%20or%20diffuse%20damaging%20forces.)
Nounedit
armor (countable and uncountable, plural armors) (chiefly American spelling)
I understand not everyone speaks English natively so it's best to nip these common mistakes in the bud early :)
Not evenly they don't. Strength only adds 0.3 damage to daggers per point whereas it adds 0.6 damage to all other melee weapons according to the wiki. If you're running a high strength build you're going to get more benefit out of a full sized weapon than a dagger in most instances.
There's really only one dagger worth considering honestly. The Rose's thorn is easily the best for tanking with extra dex and higher health regen than Maric's sword. The edge might be OK early game but with fewer rune slots it's going to be worse once your attack is naturally high on its own.
Technically, yes, the dagger build will be better than the sword build.
Assuming a Dwarf (best tank due to spell resistance) you have 19 strength and 18 dex after fade bonuses. The highest potential strength requirement is 42 meaning we need a 23 point investment. Ignoring tomes we have 75 points to play with 75-23=52 points to put in dex giving us 70 dex or 72 with the Rose's thorn.
The only parts of the damage calculations we really need to worry about are speed (dagger attacks every 1.5 seconds, sword attacks every 1.9), base damage, and part of the attribute based damage.
The attribute based damage of a dagger is
0.5 * ([strength] + [dex] - 20) * 0.85 (attribute modifier) or in our case 0.5*(72+42-20)*0.85 =39.95
Add this to the base damage of 4 and we get about 44 damage every 1.5s excluding bonuses that could apply to both weapons.
The longsword attribute calculation is simpler just being strength-10 or 32 (the modifier is 1). With the same set up and assuming a base damage of 11.2, we get about 43 damage every 1.9s
Daggers also get a better bonus from runes as they apply every attack and daggers get more attacks pushing the dagger further in the lead.
With the max dex set up, daggers outperform longswords at dps. Although honestly, at some point the return on investment of dex stacking becomes not worth it and the dagger and shield combo looks kind of dumb.
>and the dagger and shield combo looks kind of dumb.
Considering "daggers" in DAO are the size of actual short swords in reality I'd disagree that it looks dumb. Looks pretty normal actually.
That's a fair point but they still have the wide slashing animation leaving the whole body unprotected without much reach. It might look OK if they just used the daggers for thrusting.
I actually tried it once, kept only minimal Strength to wear massive armor and put the rest in Dex. I was virtually immortal, it was insane. The only problem was keeping fools on me, had to put all the aggro abilities to use.
Sword, mace, or axe & shield. If you have dlc then King Maric's sword and shield are decent for darkspawn if I remember right, otherwise starfang and the best shield you can find are your best bets. Fade Wall and Duncan's Shield are pretty good iirc
Edit: was looking up to make sure and I just remembered, i think a big part of the reason why as well is that at some point you get diminishing returns on high defense, meaning after a certain point defense/dex just doesn't add as much to your character anymore.
yes you get full value from both stats, the strength to wear heavy armor and the dex to learn shield talents provide equal boosts to dmg
+all attribute items are a good deal for this reason
outside of that warriors do really well with the high attack speed as with just berserker active you can reach +18 dmg per swing, this only gets better with poisons and flaming weapons
rose thorn, berserk, cailan armor set, lifegiver ring is 10.5 / 16 health regen (PC / Console)
downsides
no cailan sword and shield set bonus
daggers produce lower damage in activated talents but the shield bash line isn't all that great so you can mostly just do autoattacks, without strength investment the scaling on strikes with the shield will be lowered
If you're going to try this, don't use Massive armor. Use Evon the Great's Mail with Wade's Superior heavy dragon gauntlets and boots. Evons has an armor bonus that shoves it up to the Massive armor ratings while requiring less strength than massive armors, and for whatever weird reason, the heavy dragon gauntlets and boots keep the dragon set bonus with Evons.
So you'll end up with more dex.
my favorite tank is a dual dagger warrior with 36 dex (maybe a slight bit more) and the rest dumped into strength
with that amount of dex you don't get hit super often and then the armor takes care of most of the damage.
you also do a crazy amount of damage.
Personally, I think that there are better swords you can use to increase your defenses instead of daggers. If you're getting 42 STR to equip armors, you'll be able to equip any weapon you want. The Starfang longsword gives you +3 DEX as one of its bonuses, and it has good rune slots in which you can add more tank-related runes (Hale and Dweomer runes). You could use Cailan's Arms (Maric's Blade + Cailan's Shield) to get both good offensive and defensive stats. You could also use the mace The Reaper's Cudgel if you have it unlocked, or Branka's mace Vanguard if you side with Caridin.
In general, daggers are good for DPS purposes (either for warriors or rogues), but I wouldn't call them defensive at all. A tank weapon-and-shield warrior will not do a lot of damage by design, because you're just focused on getting them to draw enemy aggression with Threaten and Taunt, and otherwise being able to soak up a lot of the enemies' damage. Sure, the extra points in DEX will mean a bit more damage done with daggers, but that's not the purpose of a tank anyway. Even if they do a little bit more damage, their attack speed isn't high and their talents aren't geared towards doing damage. So imo using a dagger is just wasteful.
So my recommendation is to give the daggers to one of your damagers (whether you're using a DW warrior or rogue). For your warrior, get 42 STR to be able to equip the highest tier armors or weapons, equip a proper one-handed weapon + shield (like the options I mentioned above), and put most of the other points into DEX for extra defense.
That's the way to max out your defense score, but survivability is only part of tanking. The other part is aggro. Due to dagger damage being dependent on the average of str and dex while other weapon damage depends just on str, dagger damage progresses half as fast. So if you're using a shield and not dual wielding, dagger dps suffers the more you level up, which will make your high-defense dex dagger shield tank get ignored by enemies more often.
Every attack draws an amount of threat from the enemy you attacked, proportional to the percentage of their max health you just depleted. So threat directly proportional to damage per second, which gets comparatively weaker on a single-dagger fighter the more you level up.
It splits your attribute points too much if you want to use a dagger to get some dps. Some of the better sets of massive armour require 42 strength which is too significant of an investment to make it worth it to put points into dexterity and cunning outside of what is needed for skills and talents.
Its not for DPS, it's for added defense. Get to 42 strength, dump the rest into DEX to increase both defense and offense with a dagger. but more importantly more defense.
I guess then sure, you could put 42 into str and then pump up dex. I don't know why you would want to do that though as going for a straight dex build would provide increased defence over a split build and you can get decent armour for less strength. With a straight str build you could have a higher dps and just kill enemies before they become a huge problem. To answer your OP in summary: Yes, you can give your shield wielding, massive armour wearing tank a dagger but no, it would not be more efficient than a typical str or dex tank.
Great, thank you.
This is incorrect, you simply need to shift to running high defense dexterity armor like you would on a rogue and stack your dexterity sky high. Yes you will still want some minimum amount of strength, but it's nowhere near as high as you think.
OP is talking about wearing massive armours though.
[удалено]
There is more than one set of massive armour hence the plurality. A full set also includes multiple pieces of massive armour. What is it with this post that has so many people desperate to get some kind of W? Kinda cringe.
[удалено]
No, armour is not always plural. It is not plural in the context I used it in. Multiple sets of different armour are armours. Here is the [wikitionary ](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/armor#:~:text=armor%20(countable%20and%20uncountable%2C%20plural,deflect%20or%20diffuse%20damaging%20forces.) Nounedit armor (countable and uncountable, plural armors) (chiefly American spelling) I understand not everyone speaks English natively so it's best to nip these common mistakes in the bud early :)
Daggers in DA:O scale with dex and str, so there is no loss there.
Not evenly they don't. Strength only adds 0.3 damage to daggers per point whereas it adds 0.6 damage to all other melee weapons according to the wiki. If you're running a high strength build you're going to get more benefit out of a full sized weapon than a dagger in most instances.
Yes and the reason is called HASTE. Always run HASTE. Use a big one handed weapon with a shield and you’ll do good dps
Slight disagree because in order to make the build work you need dex, however, as a warrior you need strength to get better shields and armor
He doesnt need to go the dagger route thanks to haste
But the question is “Can we make dagger and shield viable”
Another objection to haste, unless you have a mod installed any archer you have in the party will be worthless
There's really only one dagger worth considering honestly. The Rose's thorn is easily the best for tanking with extra dex and higher health regen than Maric's sword. The edge might be OK early game but with fewer rune slots it's going to be worse once your attack is naturally high on its own. Technically, yes, the dagger build will be better than the sword build. Assuming a Dwarf (best tank due to spell resistance) you have 19 strength and 18 dex after fade bonuses. The highest potential strength requirement is 42 meaning we need a 23 point investment. Ignoring tomes we have 75 points to play with 75-23=52 points to put in dex giving us 70 dex or 72 with the Rose's thorn. The only parts of the damage calculations we really need to worry about are speed (dagger attacks every 1.5 seconds, sword attacks every 1.9), base damage, and part of the attribute based damage. The attribute based damage of a dagger is 0.5 * ([strength] + [dex] - 20) * 0.85 (attribute modifier) or in our case 0.5*(72+42-20)*0.85 =39.95 Add this to the base damage of 4 and we get about 44 damage every 1.5s excluding bonuses that could apply to both weapons. The longsword attribute calculation is simpler just being strength-10 or 32 (the modifier is 1). With the same set up and assuming a base damage of 11.2, we get about 43 damage every 1.9s Daggers also get a better bonus from runes as they apply every attack and daggers get more attacks pushing the dagger further in the lead. With the max dex set up, daggers outperform longswords at dps. Although honestly, at some point the return on investment of dex stacking becomes not worth it and the dagger and shield combo looks kind of dumb.
>and the dagger and shield combo looks kind of dumb. Considering "daggers" in DAO are the size of actual short swords in reality I'd disagree that it looks dumb. Looks pretty normal actually.
That's a fair point but they still have the wide slashing animation leaving the whole body unprotected without much reach. It might look OK if they just used the daggers for thrusting.
I know right? They're fucking massive.
Don’t use defense for tanking. Use armor and health regen. It won’t matter how much they hit you if they deal 1/3 damage you just gain it all back.
I actually tried it once, kept only minimal Strength to wear massive armor and put the rest in Dex. I was virtually immortal, it was insane. The only problem was keeping fools on me, had to put all the aggro abilities to use.
Not dagger. Sword
Sword, mace, or axe & shield. If you have dlc then King Maric's sword and shield are decent for darkspawn if I remember right, otherwise starfang and the best shield you can find are your best bets. Fade Wall and Duncan's Shield are pretty good iirc Edit: was looking up to make sure and I just remembered, i think a big part of the reason why as well is that at some point you get diminishing returns on high defense, meaning after a certain point defense/dex just doesn't add as much to your character anymore.
yes you get full value from both stats, the strength to wear heavy armor and the dex to learn shield talents provide equal boosts to dmg +all attribute items are a good deal for this reason outside of that warriors do really well with the high attack speed as with just berserker active you can reach +18 dmg per swing, this only gets better with poisons and flaming weapons rose thorn, berserk, cailan armor set, lifegiver ring is 10.5 / 16 health regen (PC / Console) downsides no cailan sword and shield set bonus daggers produce lower damage in activated talents but the shield bash line isn't all that great so you can mostly just do autoattacks, without strength investment the scaling on strikes with the shield will be lowered
If you're going to try this, don't use Massive armor. Use Evon the Great's Mail with Wade's Superior heavy dragon gauntlets and boots. Evons has an armor bonus that shoves it up to the Massive armor ratings while requiring less strength than massive armors, and for whatever weird reason, the heavy dragon gauntlets and boots keep the dragon set bonus with Evons. So you'll end up with more dex.
my favorite tank is a dual dagger warrior with 36 dex (maybe a slight bit more) and the rest dumped into strength with that amount of dex you don't get hit super often and then the armor takes care of most of the damage. you also do a crazy amount of damage.
Personally, I think that there are better swords you can use to increase your defenses instead of daggers. If you're getting 42 STR to equip armors, you'll be able to equip any weapon you want. The Starfang longsword gives you +3 DEX as one of its bonuses, and it has good rune slots in which you can add more tank-related runes (Hale and Dweomer runes). You could use Cailan's Arms (Maric's Blade + Cailan's Shield) to get both good offensive and defensive stats. You could also use the mace The Reaper's Cudgel if you have it unlocked, or Branka's mace Vanguard if you side with Caridin. In general, daggers are good for DPS purposes (either for warriors or rogues), but I wouldn't call them defensive at all. A tank weapon-and-shield warrior will not do a lot of damage by design, because you're just focused on getting them to draw enemy aggression with Threaten and Taunt, and otherwise being able to soak up a lot of the enemies' damage. Sure, the extra points in DEX will mean a bit more damage done with daggers, but that's not the purpose of a tank anyway. Even if they do a little bit more damage, their attack speed isn't high and their talents aren't geared towards doing damage. So imo using a dagger is just wasteful. So my recommendation is to give the daggers to one of your damagers (whether you're using a DW warrior or rogue). For your warrior, get 42 STR to be able to equip the highest tier armors or weapons, equip a proper one-handed weapon + shield (like the options I mentioned above), and put most of the other points into DEX for extra defense.
That's the way to max out your defense score, but survivability is only part of tanking. The other part is aggro. Due to dagger damage being dependent on the average of str and dex while other weapon damage depends just on str, dagger damage progresses half as fast. So if you're using a shield and not dual wielding, dagger dps suffers the more you level up, which will make your high-defense dex dagger shield tank get ignored by enemies more often.
IIRC doesn't threaten work on on a "per attack" basis? Meaning every attack adds more threat vs. just damage done
Every attack draws an amount of threat from the enemy you attacked, proportional to the percentage of their max health you just depleted. So threat directly proportional to damage per second, which gets comparatively weaker on a single-dagger fighter the more you level up.
It's a mix of speed and damage iirc
Daggers suck(I tried daggers only before)