Players should start with the best possible non-ego weapon

[marvalis]

After playing a rogue wielding iron daggers for a little while I was seriously annoyed by the low damage output in the early game. This limited my play to such an extend that the game was no longer enjoyable (And I just cheated and made me some voratun daggers. I could have gone to town and back to buy some, or I could just press ctrl+q to open the debug menu. What is the difference?).

Most melee classes suffer from low damage in the early game (and that scales up to very high damage because most skills have multipliers instead of adding damage). This is imho a serious balance problem and a design flaw. The only real solution to this is changing some of the multiplier into addition.

The very least we can do is let all players start with the best available non-ego weapon they can equip at character birth (a rogue with 16+ dex should start with steel daggers and not iron daggers). Some race/class combo's might not reach the requirement for steel weapons, and I think it would be fitting for these players to get the incredibly crappy iron weapons. I would like to emphasize the fact that these iron weapons are really really bad.

[bricks]

There's an inherent issue with how randomly-determined small integers spread. I looked this up when Cursed were still restricted to axes for their abilities. For bump attacks, no crits, iron greatmauls deal approximately 44% more damage than iron battle axes. It's only 14% for voratun weapons. Even more frightening, the best iron battle axe does 100% more damage than the worst. (60% for greatmauls.) This number is closer to 10% for voratun.

What I think should be done is this: one, reduce the damage spread on low material level items. This would address your problem, marvalis, and believe me, I've been there too. Two, bring average damage for the lower material level items closer together. The crit bonus of different weapon types is largely meaningless in the early game; since everything dies so quickly anyway, what you want is consistency. I've actually had trouble finding weapon upgrades in the early game since damage can be so low on supposed upgrades. Not that it is bad for the player to make these sorts of decisions; it just feels wrong to restart a character because you got a shitty starting weapon. Dwarves suffer pretty heavily for this.