Valheim Weapon Stats Compared: Damage, Stamina, Block Armor

This is the numeric half of the weapon question: what each weapon actually lists, before resistance multipliers and before any judgement about whether it is worth the metal. Values are read straight from the wiki infoboxes for 69 weapons.

Two conventions apply throughout. Listed damage is the tooltip number, not the damage a specific enemy takes — every component is multiplied separately by that enemy’s resistance, which is covered in which weapon against which enemy. And zero entries are dropped: several infoboxes carry a placeholder 0 for a damage type the weapon does not have, so printing it would invent a damage line that does not exist.

Axes

One-handed

Two-handed

The one-handed line climbs unevenly rather than smoothly — 15, 20, 40, 60, 100 slash — so the big jumps are the bronze tier (double the flint axe) and black metal (+67% over iron), while iron only adds 50% over bronze. That makes the axe the safest single investment in the game, with two obvious stopping points. Note the chop component: it only matters against wood and structures, so an axe’s real anti-creature damage is the slash figure alone. Jotun Bane is the only axe with a third damage type (40 poison), and Crystal battleaxe is the only axe with spirit (30), which is why both read as sidegrades on the tooltip but outperform against undead.

Clubs and sledgehammers

One-handed

Two-handed

Frostner is the lowest-slash, highest-total entry in the one-handed column: 95 total across three types on a weapon whose blunt alone is 35. That is deliberate design — it is a tool for targets weak to frost and spirit, not a general-purpose mace. Demolisher holds both the highest blunt (145) and the highest knockback (210) in the game, at the cost of 28 stamina per swing and only 100 durability.

Swords

One-handed

Two-handed

The sword line is where the game starts stacking types. Silver sword’s 30 spirit is undead-only damage that does nothing to living targets, so its true comparison is 75 against most things and 105 against the undead. Mistwalker reads as a downgrade on slash (75 vs the black metal sword’s 95) and only wins once you total in its 40 frost. Slayer’s 170 is the largest melee number in the game and comes with 64 block armor, matching Skull Splittur and Himminafl for the highest block value on any non-shield weapon.

Spears and polearms

Spears

Polearms

Spears are the purest single-type weapons in the game — every one of them is 100% pierce — which makes them the most sensitive to the resistance table and the easiest to plan around. A polearm at the same tier always lists higher than its spear (the iron atgeir’s 65 beats the iron spear’s 55) and adds the spinning heavy attack. Himminafl looks like a downgrade from the black metal atgeir at 85 vs 105, but its 40 lightning is not a physical type, so it is the stronger weapon against anything that resists physical damage.

Knives, bows and crossbows

Knives

Bows

Crossbows

Knives are the stamina-efficiency class: Skoll and Hati totals 90 damage for 14 stamina, the same stamina a black metal sword spends on 95 slash. That is why knives stay relevant for backstab openers and long stamina-starved fights even though their numbers look small. The bow numbers above are bow-only — arrow damage is added on top and applies its own type, which is why an Ash Fang with a frost arrow behaves differently from one with a needle arrow.

Crossbow damage does not scale with weapon level, so the 200 and 220 above are mostly fixed by your Crossbows skill. That single fact is why a dedicated crossbow build must level the skill rather than chase the next crossbow tier.

Staves

The eitr column is the real cost curve. Staff of Embers lists 240 total damage across two types — the highest single-cast number on this page — for 35 eitr, while Dead Raiser asks 100 eitr and deals no damage at all. Trollstav and the two blood staves have no damage line: their infoboxes describe a summon or a barrier, and this table does not invent numbers for them.

Shields

Tower shields cannot parry, which is why the serpent scale shield lists no parry bonus despite 100 block force — the highest in the game. Block armor climbs steadily to 114 on the flametal shield, but the buckler line’s 2.5x parry multiplier keeps the 28-armor iron buckler mathematically ahead of the 42-armor banded shield on a perfect parry.

Related guides

• Best weapons tier list — what to craft at each stage, with the resistance math applied
• Which weapon against which enemy — the enemy-by-enemy resistance table
• Weapons by stage — progression order and what to skip
• Best arrows — how ammo changes bow damage
• Best armor — the other half of your stats
• Valheim hub — everything else