Civerb's Cudgel is a unique mace in classic Diablo. It has the following attributes:
  • 1-8 damage
  • 32/32 durability
  • -2 magic
  • -5 dexterity
  • +200% damage against demons
(for an explanation of demons vs. undead vs. animals, see Diablo monster types)

Its qlvl (quality level) is 1, meaning any monster in the game can drop it, and it's quite a common find early on.

For over a year after the release of the game, this item was more or less ignored; it's not at all hard to get, its damage is essentially nil, and equipping it actually costs you stat points. It doesn't even sell for very much at the shops.

Then, in fall of 1997, a gamer named P(IG) made an astonishing discovery: Rather than enhancing simply the base damage of the weapon, as one would expect, the +200% damage against demons affected your character's total damage.

For example, if your character had 100 base damage (i.e. damage without a weapon equipped), and you then equipped Civerb's Cudgel, the damage on your character screen would show up as 101-108. Before this discovery, everyone assumed that your character would be doing 103-124 damage against demons (tripling the weapon damage and adding it to your base damage). In fact, your character would do 303-324 damage to demon-type enemies. This is a holy hell of a lot. By comparison, a high-level Warrior would typically do about half that.

So, ok, it does a lot of damage. But only against demons. What good is that when you're fighting other monster types all through the game?

The trick is, you don't use it through the whole game. Particularly early on, the enemies are overwhelmingly undead and animals. But in the last four levels (collectively called Hell), all but a handful of enemies are demons. Even on the hardest difficulty setting (confusingly, also called Hell), you can clear the whole place and kill Diablo in well under an hour using the Cudgel. And since this last area is where most high-level characters play anyway, CC became invaluable.

This discovery led to the development of an entirely new play style for the Rogue class. Previously, the Rogues' low strength limit and unusual damage formula had prevented them from being truly effective melee fighters. With the Cudgel more than making up for this, and the Rogues' insanely high dexterity providing near-perfect shield blocking, these archers became tremendously powerful at close-range as well.

In honor of its discoverer, Civerb's Cudgel is, to this day, referred to as P(IG)'s Cudgel on the Diablo Strategy Forum.

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