[Snake]

A lot of the justifications for the scaling to be as they are is "but their on-hit/on-crit/on-holding effects are strong", which should never be the case. The power of an effect is situational 9/10 of the time. There are more reliable effects than others, effects that influence everyone equally, or only work properly in specific situations.

That, should be what tells if an effect is strong or not, and warrants the weapon being chopped in the liver. As for daggers themselves? Hah... Please skip my rant, it won't contribute for anything for to give you all a chuckle.

==WARNING, RANT ALERT! WEE WOO! HIGH SODIUM CONCENTRATION DETECTED!==

Yeah? Strong enough to justify losing to a basic craft Seiryuu Tessen because even if your cool effects are so swole why aren't they earning you victories like that sweet 100% elemental attack on-hit?

That argument is flawed and should not be considered one bit when talking about game balance. If a weapon's scaling is supposed to be weak, or nonsensical for the weapon's archetype, then the effects should be swole in exchange and I'll have to say, dropping the REDACTED Dagger from the swamp after a lot of grinding made my heart sink when I saw its horrible scaling that felt like all my time invested into the hype and trying to relive the days when 10* items were first introduced to be game-changing and new-things-enabler, only to feel like I got spat in the face and laughed at behind my back for being stupid and hoping for something I'd find useful.

If I knew the 'daggers' that were going to be dropped from the new place were just dwarf swords that can't use sword skills, I'd have preferred to be spoiled about them rather than dying several times while fighting against Ooze Armor's stupid cooldown effect and the instant stuns on top of my favorite status infliction of the game, Poison. All that were extremely infuriating to fight against after the first 10 fights of the same ol' bull of being put on red HP in one round.

2/10, at least they're worth 150 Murai to Zeo. Yeah, I sold them. Mostly because I feel like they could've been better. I'll eagerly grind for another one if/when they're the bare minimum for what a normal dagger is like. After the adventure I'm certainly not a happy camper.

;_;7

==Rant over, safe from here onwards!==

I don't even know the reason why so many things are washed down while others stay at the top tier while being more simple and boring yet effective. If I wanted to feel the rush of missing enemies but have high damage for a reward on hitting them, I'd just use axes.

When I pick daggers and run a low HP, high SKI/LUC/GUI build, I wanna run behind someone and shank that mothertrucker so hard into their backs they'll feel that for the rest of their lives if they survive. That's what daggers always are in the hands of skilled and smart people. DnD Barbarians don't use daggers, for example. In fact, they laugh at whenever someone holds up a dagger their way! It's a tiny baby weapon for tiny baby people. Just by that alone it sets a theme for why GUI and SKI should be considered over STR for any 'finesse' weapons, like guns and bows (Even bows suffer from STR requirements).

That's why Mages are so broken. WIL is very beneficial for them due to FP, Skill Slots, even Luminary too on top of it. But they don't have only WIL, Tomes scale from every single stat in the game but APT. Of course people will want the freedom to build their chars the way they want, and still work because mages babysit every type of build.

Making all melee weapons standardize to Strength regardless of their theme is the main offender of why the game's itemization diversity is so poor right now. Trust me on that.

TL;DR? High time for Daggers to get a soft rework on how they're supposed to be. If the idea that they 'do' need more than a massive readjustment on their scaling is more entertained, here's my short pitch:

- Mainly scale from SKI/GUI.
- Low base power.
- Maximum scaling should be 90% total, to reach 100% or more, only weapons with an extra scaling.
- Weak on-hit effects, or perhaps "no" on-hit effects.
- Strong on-crit effects.
- Attacking an enemy from the front gives it a penalty to damage, like Bows have from attacking in melee range.
- Attacking the enemy from behind ignores either all or half of their armor, and ignore the enemy's Evade bonuses.

Void Assassin will also need a few nerfs, mostly in Backstab and Deadly Arms.

Doing this? Boom. Daggers can now be used by every class properly, as long as you're built specifically to use them. It doesn't dump all of its potential in a single class's gimmick, and allows you to use them with other classes that don't support it well that much, such as Spellthief or Black Knight.

Or even become a backup weapon for SKI-oriented characters. You see a lot in anime, Archers or Gunslingers pairing their weapons with a knife for when they're accidentally in melee range.