For a long time, my favourite weapon was a masterwork adamantine spear. On my way out of the defunct fortress after retrieving it, my brand-new adventurer walked smack into a tentacle demon. I threw the spear, it went through the brain, nuff said.
Since I was trained as a swordsdwarf, I switched to the masterwork short sword and reserved the spear (and the 500 adamantine coins, heh heh) for distance work. The sword has a tendency to overkill anything I meet. It doesn't *always* kill *immediately* with the first shot, but it usually does.
Recently, however, I "bought" a basic craftelfship alder short sword from an elven "merchant". (Read: stole from a guard). It's now my favourite, since it actually allows me to hit things repeatedly, thus increasing my sword skill quickly.
As an aside the rest of the elves actually drew blood! Couple of pine arrows in the hand. That's the first time I've been hit with this adventurer, and he's been through dozens of cyclopes/minotaurs/trolls/ettins and hundreds of ---men. (ant, rat, bat, trogs, etc.) I've taken out a handful of elite gobbo bowmen, but I was always careful to sneak close and spear them.
I'm currently on a quest to find a bronze colossus, but he's in a HUGE cave system, and so far I've only found caveswallowmen, ratmen, antmen, trogs, naked mole dogs, rats, goats and the like.
I want to wrestle him
Oh - I haven't tried it out, but I *did* make two adamantine/birch ballista ammo. I figure they ought to do good throwing damage. Didn't find them on my first visit to my fort, and I got spooked by that demon.
Fear the were-carp.