- In general, daggers are terrible for parrying and relatively easy to avoid with various defenses. (If they're dodging well, they'd be dodging well with any weapon in hand.) While it's good for a lot of things, it's a detriment to their tanking.

- They do have a ready selection of lightweight weapons. So yes, STR loss isn't going to be great-- it's not supposed to be a universal tactic. DEX loss is crippling, however, and you can also just go with throwing tons of damage-- most of the builds that work well with daggers aren't brimming with extra HP.

- Dodge-heavy classes in general need to travel light. This both restricts equipment choices, and works counter to certain power-based skills like Bash.

- If they can't take your weapon with STR-loss (you gear for it and/or wield something very light, etc.), they're going to have a lot of trouble getting your weapon out of your hand-- daggers are fairly terrible for Disarm and related skills.

- As warriors go, their options for denying your commands are lower than usual. Whatever tactic you decide to go with, you're going to have a shot at using it.

Overall, they certainly aren't dominating. It's not remotely the most common spec choice, and it's not overrepresented among the highest-PK warriors. (Actually, it's fairly new that finesse-based warrior builds make that list with any frequency. It used to be more like a pile of giant/duergar bash specs.) I think the current situation looks healthy-- there are very effective dagger-spec warriors, but there are also very effective warriors with other specs.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com