Spears not for stabbing?

It seems whenever I use a spear (wooden spear, knife spear) most of the damage type I’m doing is bashing rather than stabbing. This is frustrating; even though I’ve disabled bashing from being learned my piercing skill still takes forever to up. Why use spears at all?

That’s a bug related to how piercing practice is calculated. It was fixed a day or two ago in the development version, and that fix should be in the pipeline for 0.5.

Also, wooden spears can be pretty useful, given their insanely low attack speed. But yeah, you’ll sadly get bashing practice, not stabbing.