Flying Zombie fists/spears guide

Hi, I'm Sobek. This is a quick and dirty guide about the flying Zombie fister/Spears build, which in my opinion is a great start for new players.

This guide is WIP, please page or mail me ingame if you find any errors or have ideas.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Zombie is strong in PvE, yet low maintenance - you revive after most deaths, have great soaks+HP, don't have to worry about drowning or toxins and don't need to worry about trauma kits or food.
• You will quickly reach peak strength (under 200k XP).
• Flight allows you to travel (and explore) at your leisure. You don't have to worry about crashing planes or walking for ages. With Stench and Yeti Skin, neither the cold nor Chupacabras will mess with you.
• Stench lets you walk past 90% of all enemies that would otherwise attack you.
• Zombies can move through the Necropolis unhindered and are able to do the lucrative jobs both FCEF and Abom Nation offer.

Cons

• You'll get your ass slapped in PvP by experienced players.
• --> Zombies no longer have feint immunity and the general damage resistance was dropped to 15%.
• You're dumb as a sack of bricks. You won't be able to craft/repair or revive players properly without a set of implants and heavy skill investment.
• Your attack speed is a bit slow. This also makes you vulnerable to interruptions by stuns and grabs.
• You won't be able to reach the high Focus and Dodge of Freaks.
• You can't get healed by nanites or mediguns, making HP recovery pretty slow.

Fists vs. Spears

• Spears have an innate parry bonus, but take actual effort to craft/find.
• Fists are inferior at parrying, but you can simply grab Knuckle Busters/Jawbreakers from a shop and slap mods on them.

Character creation

Tags

Tagging skills gives you a free raw and makes it cheaper to buy them.

• Fists/Spears. Duh
• Wrestle. Grab bootleggers, ants, security turrets, anything you can get your arms around, and smash it. Dangerous against players with high dodge.
• Free skill. I tagged Medic so I'd be able to revive corpmates and suture them.
• Free skill. I tagged Scavenge so I can start cutting heads right away. Not neccessary, as Scavenge is extremely cheap and easy to increase.

Stats

• 14 Brawn. It's a good idea to max either this or Reflexes out first.
• 10 Endurance.
• 14 Reflexes.

For both builds, you'll need all three - they have utility beyond just giving you higher skill numbers:

• Brawn for hitting harder with weapons that have Brawn scaling, grabbing people/breaking out of grabs and carrying gear.
• Endurance for resisting things like drug induced heart attacks, getting dazed by hits, radiation poisoning, and so on.
• Reflexes for attacking faster and dodging traps.

Mutations

Mandatory:

• Zombie: Duhh
• Stench: +2 End while musking; stops most enemies from attacking you. Extremely useful while flying, as Chupacabras destroy new players.
• Leapfrog: Prerequisite to Flight.
• Flight: Never worry about getting places again. Board the planes of other players mid-air. Fly to the Skydock and molest sky raiders.
• Brute Strength: With +3 Brawn and +1 Wrestle, this is an obvious choice.

Great choices:

• Yeti Skin: With this, you won't have to worry about freezing to death while using Flight. If you don't go Yeti Fur, just skip it and wear warm clothes (parkas, fursuits) in the air instead.
• Billygoat: Much needed +End and the ability to munch heads within seconds.
• Iron Liver: Being drunk with this gets rid of the very annoying revival sickness after you revive. Also, +Brawn and passive destress.
• Fibrocartilage: Makes endocrine boosters more likely to succeed and raises your max. possible HP to a whopping 70.
• Twitchy Nerves: +Ref helps with your awful attack speed.
• Hooligan: +Wrestle. Headbutt can absolutely smash low Brawn enemies, but is unreliable against anything with decent dodge (mostly PvP).
• Writhing Smoke, Screech, Carrie: Screech and burn your enemy - minus 10/15 tohit is nothing to laugh at.
• Yeti Fur: The upgrade to Yeti Skin, this gives you a standard +1 Brawn and more if you're cold. This will make being in hot areas a pain in the ass, unless you drink lots of water and wear dishdashas/keffiyehs.
• Ripper: This is bit of a controversial choice - you will have +1 to Fists/tohit, but among other skills your Craft/Repair/Medic will tank and you can't fap or grope other players properly. Only pick this for minmaxing - Zombie fisters already have high tohit.

Getting started

Oh god how do I stop dying

• Zombie basics: Unless healing, always aim to be at full hunger (or you'll lose the stat buffs and reviving will take AGES). Cut a bunch of heads from orphans and stash them in your apartment's freezer.
• For fighting, your basic buffs are these: Max horny, max hunger, stimutacs or alcohol with Iron Liver, musking with Stench.
• Don't grind skills, but learn them from players/NPCs. All grinding does is waste time and keep you weak for longer. With this build, you will have plenty of spare XP that you can invest in things like Medic.
• Aim to get your Fists/Spears and Wrestle to 15 as soon as possible.

What equipment do I use?

• Rule of thumb: Carry only what you need, and the cheapest you can get away with. Hell is full of bullies who will kill you for your gear and monsters that straight up eat it.
• Your basic armor: 3x leather/smoking jacket+pants, 3x rusted pot, gas mask+2x hockey mask, combat boots, 2x heavy gloves or 2x lacrosse gloves (PYN in Freedom City).
• Alternatively: Tire armor. Amazing soaks, the dodge penalty won't matter at the start and you'll have enough brawn to wear it.
• You can wear these two all the way until you start killing ants.
• Fist weapons: Modded knuckle busters (force enhancer+gyro) and jawbreakers (gyro). While patas and edisons are great, they're just too expensive for new players. About anything in the game that's not another zombie will die from eating a jawbreaker to the face.
• Spears: Pitchfork, Large Scythe, Abossegai and Chainsaw Lance are all great.

What do I kill?

• I'll write more about this later. For now, here are things zombies kill easily:
• Karnivore punks, treemen and bootleggers: These respectively deal bullet, beat and bullet/wasting damage. Put on tire armor, and anything short of a headshot will only tickle you.
• Ants: Grab and kill with jawbies/abossegai. Another ant walks in? Just shove it into a different tile. Make sure to bring firemen/leech armor for the burning hemolyph and scrimshaws or THC to destress. Having Firewalker makes this easier, but is not a must.