Slaying vs "of penetration"

[YourMum]

I have a phase dagger (knives at level 11) and robbed Vanquisher from a red dragon vault (2 handers level 8). Is ignoring PV or slaying going to be more effective against the balors I'm going to have to face imminently? Tried bashing the wyrms and ancient dragons with vanquisher but had to run away from the wyrms. Not liking my chances on D50 if I struggle against ancient dragons even with st43...

[Blasphemous]

Ancient dragons and wyrms in a greater vault are very or even highly experienced, with an occasional extremely experienced one.
In general they are very tough to deal with, especially for melee characters since they hit very hard and multiple times, with lots of criticals.
Balors on D50 are not experienced at all. They have no breathing attacks and the number of physical attacks is fixed around 2 or 3.
Slaying will be much, much better against them than ignoring pv, especially for a weapon like phase dagger, with abysmal damage dice of 1d4.

Unless you have 70-80 strength or more, in which case it's the main factor determining damage, there's no point using phase daggers as the damage is so small.

[SirTheta]

It depends: calculate your damage range for each, then you can decide. If a foe's PV is high enough, penetration easily outweighs slaying.

Without doing any calculations, I'd bet against balors that the phase dagger will do more damage because: (a) balors have about 40 PV, so Vanquisher would have to do 40 more damage than your phase dagger (b) Vanquisher's damage sucks ass - it's only 6d5+3 - the only reason it is any good is that it slays everything (c) with the phase dagger you have a shield so you get hit way less often.

So, I'm very confident the phase dagger will be better.

[JellySlayer]

I'd definitely go Vanquisher. Phase daggers suck unless you're fighting molochs.

[Mobius]

Why settle for one or the other:
Get a penetrating weapon of slaying. It's possible!

[SirTheta]

I'd definitely go Vanquisher. Phase daggers suck unless you're fighting molochs.

Molochs (non-greater) have same PV as balors

I decided to run the calcs, for character on normal tactics w/o St bonus

phase dagger 8 - 11 x 1.5 = 12 - 16.5; against balors, equivalent to 12 - 16.5
Vanquisher 19 - 43 x 2 x 1.5 = 57 - 129; against balors, equivalent to 17 - 89

Damage-wise, clear winner is Vanquisher, but of course once you factor in strength bonus (which adds about 16 damage to each, disregarding Fire Orb), the phase dagger starts to be at least a bit more respectable.

Really, though, you should just use slaying ammo

P.S. most of the time, balors are slower than end-game heros [when you consider energy reduction from weapon marks, speed, etc.]. This means you can use Vanquisher w/o repercussion as long as you time things correctly and don't get surrounded.

@Mobius: neither of those occur on weapons; they're missile affixes.

[Soirana]

Damage-wise, clear winner is Vanquisher, but of course once you factor in strength bonus (which adds about 16 damage to each, disregarding Fire Orb), the phase dagger starts to be at least a bit more respectable.

16 on Vanquisher goes through crit multiplier too so realistically it favors twohander even more.
Base problem is abysmal damage from phase dagger to start with.

[JellySlayer]

Crit multiplier applies to strength and tactics bonuses I think. So Vanquisher would get +32.

[SirTheta]

True, I didn't take that into account.

[Mobius]

...
@Mobius: neither of those occur on weapons; they're missile affixes.

Ah, I get confused. I found a slaying & penetrating missile once, so I assumed it's possible for weapons.
I also have been annoyed that throwing a phase dagger did not penetrate PV.