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[Panando]

So before you read this, what do you think would be the best weapon vs the largest terrestrial creature in the game? The constraint is that all weapons are made of iron, no quality, and wielded together with a shield by a dwarf who is grand master in all skills, with these being standard arena limitations. And the Giant Elephant is no skill.

My prediction was that the Spear and Pick would be the outstanding performers.

The test Arena was 12 dwarves against 12 Giant Elephants, in 1v1, with a race to kill the Giant Elephant, with the event ending once all combat had ceased (wasn't going to wait forever for bleeding out). Every dwarf was naked except for a Weapon and Shield, I figured that armor wouldn't do much anyway against the blunt damage from a Giant Elephant so I let them keep their agility up.

Because I'm lazy I only did 8 trials. So the sample size truly sucks, but it's still suggestive. I tested ten weapons: whip, axe, hammer, sword, spear, mace, pick, scourge, flail and morning star. I also tested armed with only a shield, naked and crutch and shield, but those last three were entirely unsuccessful at killing a Giant Elephant and the crutch user wouldn't use its crutch in combat unlike dwarves in fortress.

I recorded what order the Giant Elephant was killed in, if indeed it was killed, and then summarize the % the dwarf killed the Giant Elephant in, and a sort of average rank (failure = 10th place). The weapons are simply in the same order as they are in Arena equipment select.

		1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	Won	Avg.Rank
1	Whip	3	1	1	1	3	1	1	1	100%	1.5
2	Axe			6		8		8	8	50%	8.75
3	Hammer	6			5	6	6	5	5	75%	6.625
4	Sword			4	6	5	5	7	6	75%	6.625
5	Spear	1	2	2	2	1	7	2	2	100%	2.375
6	Mace		5			7			7	38%	8.625
7	Pick	2		3	3	2	2	3		75%	4.375
8	Scourge	5	4	5		5	4	6	4	88%	5.375
9	Flail									0%	10
10	MorningStar	4	3	4	4	4	3	4	3	100%	3.625

The results shouldn't be too unexpected. The Whip upholds its reputation as being a lightsaber, effortlessly plunging through the Giant Elephant's skull and destroying its brain, it was on average by far the fastest to kill the elephant and several times got nearly instant kills including a couple of single page combat reports.

The Spear comes in second place, and was the other weapon that would sometimes get the first kill. The Spear often got the kill, including first kill, by causing bleeding out from a heart injury rather than by destroying the brain.

The Pick technically comes in 4th place, but it was usually the 2nd or 3rd fastest to kill the Giant Elephant, given that it got fast kills I suspect it was a victim of the small sample size in that sometimes its wielder just unluckily got killed before inflicting lethal injury.

The Morning Star was the best of the conventional blunt weapons and technically outperformed the Pick.

The Scourge performed respectably, perhaps even surprisingly well all things considered, it wasn't that fast at getting a kill but seemed to cripple well enough.

The Hammer and Short Sword were both poor to middling performers. Both were able to kill the Giant Elephant, fairly reliably even, but they certainly took longer than the Pick.

The Mace was substantially worse than the Hammer, I was honestly surprised it could even kill the Giant Elephant.

The Battle Axe performed truly abysmally, not reflected in these rankings is how much longer it took to kill the Giant Elephant than other weapons, it probably took at least 3x longer than any other weapon. The Axe did a respectable job of doing debilitating injury to the Giant Elephant helping to protect the Axe Dwarf from being killed, but the poor beast just had to slowly bleed out (axe was the only weapon that resulted in slow death by bleeding out rather than decisive damage to heart or brain) and sometimes it took the dwarf down with it. If the Axe Dwarf was fighting more than one enemy it'd have been defeated for sure, unlike for example the Lasher which would take the Giant Elephant down in seconds and still be fresh for more combat.

The Flail completely failed to kill a Giant Elephant, it just gave it a gentle massage.

I didn't even include the just-a-shield and wrestler, bearing in mind both were at grandmaster for all military skills. They could actually cause "serious injury" to the Giant Elephant, but not enough to cause life-threatening injury.

CAVEATS:

Arena doesn't make it easy to account for quality, and I didn't bother testing Steel for those weapons which dwarves can easily make out of Steel. For instance perhaps a Masterwork Steel Battleaxe wielded by a dwarf with maxed out strength from actual military training would perform much better than the no quality goblin/human weapons that performed better in this test.

[Putnam]

Morningstars are edged, you can look in the raws

[Panando]

Morningstars are edged, you can look in the raws

You are correct. I should've said "bashing" rather than "blunt". Nevertheless it seems to do a lot of its damage through blunt force trauma like fracturing bone and tearing apart joints, but with a bonus of heavy bleeding. Interestingly despite not benefiting from bleeding it seems to do a lot better than the mace against human zombies, and results in about as many severed limbs, or possibly fewer severed limbs (I'd guess due to faster kills). The Flail seems to perform about on par with the Mace against human zombies. The ability to make zombies in Arena is really cool, pity the combat logs disappear so quickly, even the log of deaths is lost very quickly since it only shows about 10 deaths before they start getting pushed off.

[blue emu]

I thought Giant Elephants WERE the best weapon?