User:Vayra/Character Building - skillsets and starting packages

This guide is bad and you should feel bad for even looking at it.

Hello

This aims to be a companion to the Simple character building guide for those of you without the balls or patience to figure stuff out for yourself. Stuff like: What's better, fists or rifles? What if I want to be a non-combat character? How can you help me be all I can be^TM?

Build Focus

First off, you need to decide if you want to be a weak nerdy branes faggot or a tuff buff and sexy combat character. From there, you need to decide if you want to craft or pick locks as a focus if you chose the former, or what weapon you want to use if you chose the latter.

I'll attempt to supply an objective comparison of the different paths below. Remember that you dont have to stick to just combat or brains, you can be both with a little effort.

Brains

Really your main choice here will be between picking locks and robbing people (a noble profession) or making things for people to rob you of. Let me list some of the upsides of each build focus.

Crafting

• You can obtain a huge amount of experience rather quickly.
• You can make powerful items for yourself and your friends.
• You will likely have decent Science skill, allowing you to assist in robbing jerks bust ghosts.
• You are not required by your character focus to routinely get in trouble with the Law.

Lockpicking

• You can get revenge on those who wrong you in the most permanent means possible in HellMOO -- Taking their text items.
• You can obtain powerful items for yourself and your friends.
• Robbing is a lot more fun and less boring than crafting.
• Your corporation will likely not offer you a lot of support and aid as lockpickers are in short supply are all over the fucking place now..

Combat

For a combat character, your main decision to be made is that of your weapon type. Do you want to be Spears? Fists? Clubs? Pistols? Something else? I'll help you out by listing a few of the traits of each weapon type.

Flails

Flails are a "special" class of weapon specifically for use of fishing poles there are no flails in this game. No, they're not viable. Absolutely useless at the moment.

Fish

You use this when fishing for fish and also in combat when fighting with a fishing pole. They are not flails. This is still not viable.

Throw

Throw is terrible because shuriken and special soda cans are the only obtainable throwing 'weapons'. Other objects are throwable, such as grappling hooks and molotov cocktails (which are technically bombs, but you need throw to use them without killing yourself), but only shuriken will earn you any XP. They also do shitty damage. You don't need the same kind of total you would need for a real weapon to throw said utility objects, so it's stupid and dumb to build a character for throwing.

Bombs

Bombs is gay because it's not really a weapon type and you can just use a grenade launcher to bypass the need for the skill in most cases. Not to mention you don't gain XP for blowing things up. Useful for killing high-level monsters and players with as little risk as possible, but OH HEY DID I MENTION YOU COULD JUST USE A GRENADE LAUNCHER

Wrestle

Wrestle is at the moment entirely useless, only checked for the hooligan's headbutt ability and stripping an opponent of their clothes while you have them grabbed. Sadly, headbutt is currently more often useful to your opponent than you, and if you have someone restrained your time is better served beating their face in than it is stripping them.

Whips

Low end whips are easy to get a hold of, higher end whips do elemental damage. The speed cap is easy to get close to and the best whip stuns like a mother fucker. An excellent weapon for brainy branes since most whips dont require brawn to do damage. The only issue with whips is that they do absolutely terrible damage compared to any other actual weapon skill. Ideally this will change soon.

Blades

Blades are an extremely common weapon in hellmoo, especially in the early game. However, because blades tend to be quite slow and do slash/stab damage, which is easily soaked, they are gay. Also, while there is a very powerful end-game blade available, it requires power sources and is extremely difficult to craft. Another problem is that most decent low- and mid-range blades are only obtainable once per player which will likely cause trouble unless you're the kind of person who can rob jerks. In addition, the stats are fairly hard to balance at first -- especially if you want to remain intelligent -- and the 'best' blade is two-handed.

Clubs

Clubs are another weapon type that is common in the early game but rarely used in the late game, as high-end clubs do rather low damage compared to other high-end weapons (though still competitive) and require expensive mods to be of viable speed and power. The weapon type also suffers from a lack of useful mid-range weapons.

Spears

Spears are powerful. Spears are very, very hurty and have high parry class. There are useful one-handed fast spears(assagai), and useful two-handed slower spears(lance/zap). Both are very impressive. Spears suffers a little from a lack of low-end weapons, however. You will likely need a corporation to support you in the beginning if you choose spears. Also for note you'll spend forever in the toxic dump trying to get more spears to replace any you loose.

Spears — Endurance and Reflexes. Use Brawn for damage, Reflexes for weapon speed, and Endurance+Reflexes to hit. Benefits greatly from speed and cocaine. You can use meth for a +2 bonus to Endurance, +2 to Reflexes at all times, really helping your to-hit and weapon speed. High brawn can really jack up the damage on these, so don't neglect it.

Lenneth says:

So let us discuss spear builds atm. There are a variety of ways to go spearbro in hellmux but the best ways are pretty straight forward depending on what you want to do besides stabbing shit.

Stat progression should go Reflexes then Endurance then Brawn since there are a shitload of ways to buff your brawn it and the zap is the only thing that scales well with brawn and you shouldn't use one till you've hit end game.

Any way you look at it basic spear progression will go from military fork>wooden stakes>slaver spear>garden weasel>lance/zap. The stakes are in there purely for grinding spears since you can wield 2 of them and with 5 raw dodge you should be able to dodge pigs on the country road and get all your ip up to 5 fighting them cautious.

On to character building. For starters if all you want to do is stab a bitch, zombie, is one of,if not THE, best options. When full fed you get massive buffs to your brawn which increases the damage you do and all the stat downsides are negligible. The big disadvantage is when you get feinted you get feinted hardcore, which can be avoided if you try and grab someone right at the start of the fight since it will stun you if you miss and that stun lasts like 1 second. I'm not actually a zombie so talk to one of them about what mutes to take besides zombie.

If you want to clair/medium/blink your gonna need focus and that is greatly helped by freak so you don't stress the fuck out all the time. Now if your going freak you can get ultraclotte as you won't need bleeder to frenzy and get another brawn boost. Take Hyper immunity and a bunch of focus mutes and use the scare ability of freaks to crank your frenzy late game. One of the benefits of this build is that you can keep your brains medium high and not get feinted as easily, just walk around caffeinated since it helps your focus anyways. You can do this without freak but you loose the frenzy and its nice brawn boost, I don't recomend that as the zap scales stupid well with brawn.

Option 3 involves replacing ultraclotte with bleeder and taking whatever mutations you want, focus or not. You don't have to go freak with this build, and I believe you can go vampire in this build if you really want to, but basically you want the frenzy from bleeder to boost your brawn for damage again.

That's all I've got on the subject.

Rifles

Rifles is gay because the rifle you would use for grinding is only obtainable BY BUYING IT FROM BLASTARMS also there are craftable ones. They also require high brawn to cap their speed, which is necessary because they're slow even AT the speed cap. Especially if you want to use cover, which you shouldn't in most cases because you'll either be wasting time while a hostile NPC attacks you or while the player you want to kill runs away. In addition, they're all two-handed.

On the other hand, most armor does not protect against bullets well, plasma rifles fuck anyone up, and guns can't be parried. It is also important to note that rifles have a combat-interrupt unique to their weapon class, as your shots will randomly cause targets to duck and weave... if you have high skill.

Pistols

Pistols is gay because the top-end weapon (12mm pistol) is [s]difficult to obtain[/s]free if you have decent corpmates and they can't make use of supressing fire like Rifles can. The good ammo is non-craftable which means you'll be spending tons of money on ammo.

On the upside, unparryable high-damage one-handed weapons. Yaaay.

Fists

Fists are not the best. The upsides of fists are that they require less poopsocking than other weapon types (since you start with higher raw) and they are fairly easy to get a high speed with. The downsides are that they have low parry class and only do beat damage, and not terribly impressive amounts of it (though they are definitely okay).

Starting Packages

These will be some simple guidelines for how to start a playable character of any common build. Of course, there's no problems with switching out a stat point here or a skill point there, to fit your preference.

Brains

You'll notice both brains builds also have a combat skill. This is because you will want at least passable skill as many crafting components are in dangerous areas, and it's roughly of equal viability for gaining XP as a lockpicker.

Craft

Brawn 8 Reflexes 14
Brains 14 Endurance 8
Cool 8 Senses 10
Skills:

• Craft
• Science
• Whips
• open skill

Lockpicking

Brawn 8 Reflexes 14
Brains 14 Endurance 8
Cool 8 Senses 8
2 Free Points: Spend them in Brawn if you choose Clubs or Senses if you choose Whips. Alternatively you can be the ever uncommon shiver sword picker, and spend them on Cool.
Skills:

• Hack
• Locksmith
• Whips OR Clubs OR Blades
• open skill

Combat

Flails Fish

wield fishing pole
cry

Throw

throw tv to e
wist

Whips

Brawn 8 Reflexes 14
Brains 8 Endurance 8
Cool 8 Senses 12
4 Free Points: Spend them in Brains for repairing, medicing, and utility skills. If you don't want to do those things then go hog wild!
Skills:

• Whips
• Climb
• open skill
• open skill

You can exchange brains for other stats if you don't want to be a brainy brane, but if you keep the brains tag something like locksmith/hack, science, or any other skill you want that is difficult to grind.

Blades

Cool 14 Reflexes 14
2 Free Points: Spend them in Brawn for more damage with few weapons or Brains for easier repairing, piloting, and medicing.
Skills:

• Blades
• Climb
• open skill
• open skill

Clubs

Brawn 14 Reflexes 14
Brains 8 Endurance 10
Cool 8 Senses 8
Skills:

• Clubs
• Climb
• open skill
• open skill

Spears

Brawn 12 Reflexes 14
Brains 8 Endurance 12
Cool 8 Senses 8
Skills:

• Spears
• Climb
• open skill
• open skill

Rifles

wield shotgun
k me

Pistols

Brawn 10 Reflexes 14
Brains 8 Endurance 8
Cool 9 Senses 8
PLUS 1 free point -- put it in Cool if you want to become a Vampire or Brawn if you don't.
Skills:

• Pistols
• Climb
• open skill
• open skill

Fists

Brawn 14 Reflexes 14
Brains 8 Endurance 10
Cool 8 Senses 8
Skills:

• Fists
• Climb
• open skill
• open skill

Suggestions for open skill slots

• Climb! It makes getting around SO much easier. Easy to grind if you're into that sort of thing.
• Quickdraw - Especially important for guns users as it determines your success when aiming at people. (and your chance to cause them to fail when aiming at you)
• Repair - Fix your OWN weapon instead of having to carry backups and cry for the smarter members of your corp to do your weapon laundry. Easy to grind if you're into that sort of thing.
• Medic - It's either this or spend a lot of money on nanites, most of the time. And some builds can't even use nanites. Less required if you don't mind spending a lot of money or having really high brains.
• Craft - Make bullets and other nice things. Get XP.
• Swim - Makes moving in water a lot faster and a lot less frustrating. Generally easy to grind even by accident, and rarely required.
• Chemistry - Make hootch and molotovs. (both are useless) Get XP really fast in the beginning and then never use this skill again.
• Pilot - FLY PLANES -- GET YOUR PLANE STOLEN -- CRY. Probably a good idea to tag if you want to fly planes. Not very useful.