Khopesh vs Piercing weaps for a rogue...

[EliahuTheMighty]

What are the pro's and cons to each of these when thinking about what weapon a rogue should choose? This will be a halfling pure rogue dual wielding.

Piercing: Picks and rapiers are desirable for high crit damage and fast attack speed, and don't require special training. But not so commonly found? Expensive?

Khopesh: Wider attack range, but must specialize, costing a feat. Also, apparently they are expensive on the AH.

What else is there to consider? Please explain your reasoning as much as possible. Also please confirm or deny my above thoughts on the two.

[Noctus]

If you are a new player Kopeshs will be rally, really expensive most probably prohibitively too expensive to buy them from the AH.

Rapiers are cheaper, and thus you can easier afford better ones.



If plat is of no concern to you:
* Picks have no advantage.
* Rapiers crit often, thus benefit from on-crit-effects. As a longer-time goal this makes the shroud-craftet Radiance Rapier your prefered weapon of choice. It blinds on crit, making the mobs sneakable and severly lowering their fighting-back abilities, too.
* Kopeshs cost a feat, but have a slightly higher DPS output. And you need to be STR-based as their higher DPS output comes from multiplying the base-damage you deal via their high crit-value. So if you base-damage is lowish, Kopeshs wont do you much good over Rapiers. Also a Radiace Kopesh is not as good as a Radiance Rapier.

[ReaperAlexEU]

well noc covered that well with just one thing missing. there is no difference in attack speeds between the weapons. a dagger attacks just as fast as a kopesh.

[EliahuTheMighty]

Tons of help! Thanks guys!

[Isolani]

With the U9 changes to banishing, smiting, etc...large crit range weapons like rapier and scimitar are even further behind khopesh than before. Khopesh is better in nearly every situation now. For a new player I would still go rapier personally, especially with the new piercers from the U9 quest packs...the epee is a poor mans MinII and the polycurse dagger got corrosive salt added to it, so there's a few decent free piercers for new midlevel players now. In the long run, khopesh is better though.

[Noctus]

With the U9 changes to banishing, smiting, etc...large crit range weapons like rapier and scimitar are even further behind khopesh than before.

This did not effect the weapon stats of Kopesh and Rapiers. So nothing changed when comparing DPS, which is the most important part.


The most important difference is feat-cost, racial weapon enhancements and indirectly to-hit. A pure Rogue like we are talking about here is short on feats. TWF, ITWF, GTWF, PA, Toughness, IC, free feat.

He can either spend his free feat on EWP:Kopesh and dual-wield Kopeshs, or he can spend it on OTWF and dual-wield Rapiers with an effective +2 to-hit.

* For a pure Rogue the base weapon damage is relatively unimportant in comparison to the hughe amount of extra-damage he gets from sneak attack (~70 extra damage per hit).
* Rogues dont have a good to-hit bonus from their class.
* The +2 to-hit of the Rapier-combo is relevant to a pure Rogue due to their moderatish attack bonus, and important because of the big amount of lost damage a missed swing causes.

---> While a dual-Kopesh on a Rogue has a slightly higher average damage per landed hit, for most Rogues the dual-Rapier will have the higher average damage per swing (and thus total DPS), as they miss less often.

Just because Kopeshs are the best for classes that hit everything on a 2+ (Fighter/Barbs, under which conditions most of these weapon comparisons are made) doesnt mean that this result automatically stays true for a class which has many instances whre it does not auto-hit everything.

Just comparing damage per hit is so invitingly easy, but ignores an important part of the actual DPS output of a Rogue, the having-to-suceesfully-hit-it-1st-part.



Kopeshs are only better if you have a character who can indeed hit everything on a 2+ with PA active. Almost all Fighter- and Barb-builds reach this. Most Rogue-builds dont.

[unbongwah]

With the U9 changes to banishing, smiting, etc...large crit range weapons like rapier and scimitar are even further behind khopesh than before.This did effect the weapon stats of Kopesh and Rapiers how? ... Ohhh, right, it didnt.
I believe Isolani's point is that now that Banishing et. al. have gone from a proc-on-crit-instakill-with-DC-check to bonus-dmg-on-hit-plus-vorpal-effect, weapons with a large crit range such as rapiers & scimitars (which procced the former effects more often) have lost one of their (very few) advantages over khopeshes.

OTOH, the silver lining to the nerf to helplessness is it boosts the relative DPS of rapiers etc. against held mobs; now that you no longer get auto-crits, using low-crit-multiplier weapons is less of a liability.

EDIT: as for the OP's question, I'd say either take khopesh prof. or use rapiers and save yourself a feat for something else.

[Rydin_Dirtay]

What else is there to consider? Please explain your reasoning as much as possible. Also please confirm or deny my above thoughts on the two.

Looking beyond the good info in the other posts, another thing to consider, is that if you ever TR your halfling rogue, into a halfling rogue, you will probably want the Rogue Past Life feat, because it adds a nice bit of dps.

If you take Khopesh, this will be a problem, as you will be a feat short on a non-human.

Of your Seven (7) non-class feats, many rogues want the three TWF feats, IC: Pierce/slash, Toughness, Power Attack. That leaves one more feat for Khopesh -- but leaves you without the past life feat. If you go with rapiers, you'll be able to take the rogue Past Life feat instead.