When did Balanced Dagger get nerfed?

[MTaur]

I'm pretty sure that before EE, Balanced Dagger gave +3XP for xp-valuable same-level kill. In-game, I noticed that it now grants +2. I couldn't find a changelog.

I wouldn't complain, exactly. Balanced Dagger did seem sort of strong to me, at least in situations where the dungeon makes it difficult to farm +2 level monsters. The nerf makes it so that +1 level monsters are no longer obsolete. It's still usable, especially in situations where you're limited by inventory space more than by gold.

But yeah, changelog is sort of hard to find.

[Darvin]

It was one of the few balance changes that occurred as part of the Enhanced Edition. Here's the changelog it happened on.

[Tinker]

I don't think Balanced Dagger was OP at +3 XP. Though it's still useful at +2 XP (no longer useful enough to prep it, but definitely useful enough to pick it up in a shop).

[MTaur]

[Lujo]

I only beat Namtar's Lair with the Goat with it prepped and I tried all sorts of things, so no, it's still well worth prepping. It was like this originally, mind you.

[Darvin]

[Tinker]

Well. Even if all things fall into place, you'll only get a maximum of something like 25 uses from the Dagger on your average run. You might tweak that with Humility and/or Wicked Guitar, and you may get more if you have abnormal number of monsters like on Vicious difficulty (i.e. Naga City, the Gaan Telets, Demonic Library), but that's pretty much it.

At 2 XP per kill the dagger will give you at most as much as another XP prep (Yendor), except instead of giving it in one shot, it gives it to you over time. On Vicious you'll go with another prep anyway (i.e. Dragon Shield).

At +3 XP it at least had a hypothetical long-term effect that exceeded Yendor, like some of the current one-shot / over time effects have (compare: Crumbling Ward: +15 piety; Stone Sigil: +1 piety per kill, can go up to 38+ piety over time; Amulet of Health: +10 Health; Troll Heart: +2 health per level, can go up to +18+ over time; etc.).

Which is why I think that in the context of the other items in the game, the nerf means the dagger no longer makes sense as a preparation.

[Lujo]

Tinker, you're not taking into account strats which can make half a yendor on the map extra go a long way. If the point isn't reaching lvl 8 or whatever, but having a really easy time dinging and not fighting stuff that takes effort to kill (such as if one of your bars is tied up with the bossfight) the dagger is still kick ass. And I also notice you tend to prep the Titan guitar or remove all the walls on mazy maps in other ways - when you don't do that you run into level-appropriate monsters more than ideal targets and stuff. It's still a perfectly legit prep, and does wonders with the right strats (and matches it's price and size far better than the +3 version did). The +3 version was ridicuouls, you could go from lvl 1 to lvl 2 with one single slowed lvl 1 guy killed. Then you could go from lvl 2 to lvl 3 with 2 lvl 2 guys. That's like killing 3 invisible lvl 3's. Without it it takes 3 slowed lvl 1 guys, and 4 slowed lvl 2 guys. It made killing 1 lvl 1 guy give as much as killing a lvl 2 guy at lvl 1. Without it, it would take killing 5 lvl1 guys, and you have to even find 5 lvl1 guys to do that. It seriously messed with how monsters are distributed, both in terms of the layout and in lvl tiers.

There's good reasons why you can't prep the pactmaker. Alchemist pact is one of them. No need to have that as a prep. Yendor is what it is because it was never adjusted for the locker system and it's one of those things which are the way they are more for style than for sense - it can give you a full ding when you're level 10 and it's supposed to be a super rare thing not somethign you can have on every run. It's silly by design, but takes a large investment to get from the shop, the dagger could be snap picked (and was) by anyone. There's still plenty of combos in plenty of places where it's fine if you don't want to go full-Yendor on it.

And I'd prep it on Vicious dungeons if I was looking to save exploration space as I would on VT runs. What Darvin said is a bit screwed up in logic - it's not that it gets better with the difficulty increase, because it doesn't change. It's that lower difficulties have a bigger margin of error / margin of wankery, so you can more easily get away with oversteping the games boundaries and overgreeding your plays. I see all that as wankery, really, you can do it, but the game easy enough at those stages that you don't have to do it even if you can. Killing a lvl 8 monster at lvl 3 is less worth it on lower difficulties than killing anything at all is on higher difficulties because what you gain is far more likely to just spill over into overkill. The moment the game gets serious - you have more opportuinty to notice that you can't really always do what you want, and then the value of the dagger, even as a prep rises quite a bit.

[Tinker]

I'm not convinced I mean, probably there will still be a lot of cases where it would be an at least OK preparation, and sometimes it might even be a Good preparation. But it did lose 1/3 of it's effect and that turned it in my eyes from a "Generally Good, sometimes Excellent" prep into a "Generally OK, sometimes Good" prep. So at least for me it is no longer worth the locker slot; of course it's still a good buy in dungeon.

[Lujo]

Yeah, well, I suppose it does depend on what you want in your lockers.