The enemies have increased health on harder difficulties, x2 and x3 on hard and hardcore. The impaling attacks with different weapons have different multipliers, I think in vanilla it's x15 for the daggers, assuming you are using the regular ones, without any modifiers they will only do 15 damage, while black guards on hard have 36 health.

You can always just impale once more, so it's not a big deal.

What about other weapons? I would have thought, of all weapons, daggers would give the highest.
Thanks for the quick response.

Originally posted by titanbass1:

What about other weapons? I would have thought, of all weapons, daggers would give the highest.
Thanks for the quick response.

Swords have 20, staves have 18 and I just double-checked, but daggers only have 10. You can always just impale again or negate this downside by increasing strength or getting better weapons.

The good thing about daggers is that with their power attack, you will deal x3 damage if both hits land, so you don't need to dump them straight away.

That kinda makes sense, but I've had instances where I needed to do 3 impales with daggers but only one with staves. The math doesn't seem to be working out here.

Originally posted by titanbass1:

That kinda makes sense, but I've had instances where I needed to do 3 impales with daggers but only one with staves. The math doesn't seem to be working out here.

Depends on the staff and how much damage you have dealt before the impale.

I'm using the base sword, staff, and daggers from the beginning of the game.
Slightly unrelated, what are your thoughts on hard being the first play-through?

Originally posted by titanbass1:

I'm using the base sword, staff, and daggers from the beginning of the game.
Slightly unrelated, what are your thoughts on hard being the first play-through?

That's a normal difficulty for Dark Messiah. It might be a bit tough for the first time, but it's fine once you get used to the game and its mechanics.
Normal gets too easy once you level up.