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.
• Stench lets you walk past 90% of all enemies that would otherwise attack you.

Cons

• You'll get your ass slapped in PvP by experienced players. This is due to Feint vulnerability, slow attack speed and mediocre Focus/Dodge.
• 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.
• You can't get healed by Salamander, nanites or mediguns, making HP recovery pretty slow.

tl;dr you're brain damaged Superman. Fly places, meet people and rip them in half with your bare hands.

Fists vs. Spears

• Spears have an innate parry bonus, but take actual effort to craft/find.
• Fists are inferior at parrying, but you can grab super cheap Knuckle Busters/Jawbreakers from a shop and slap mods on them.
• The damage output of Spears is more consistent, with higher average minimum damage.

Character creation

Tags

Tagging skills gives you a free raw and makes subsequent ones a third cheaper to learn 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.
• 14 Reflexes. Get this to 18 first, then Brawn.
• 10 Endurance.

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:

• Billygoat: Much needed +End and the ability to munch heads within seconds.
• Twitchy Nerves: +Ref helps with your awful attack speed.
• Iron Liver: Being drunk with this gets rid of the very annoying revival sickness after you revive. Also, +Brawn and passive destress.
• Hooligan: +Wrestle. Headbutt can absolutely smash low Brawn enemies, but is unreliable against anything with high dodge (mostly PvP).
• Fibrocartilage: Makes endocrine boosters more likely to succeed and raises your max. possible HP to a whopping 70.

Soak mutations:

• Yeti Skin: Keeps you from freezing to death while using Flight. If you don't plan on taking Yeti Fur, skip it and wear warm clothes (parkas, fursuits) in the air instead.
• Yeti Fur: Default +1 Brawn and more if you're in one of the very few cold areas. Makes being in hot areas a pain in the ass, prepare to drink lots of water and wear dishdashas/keffiyehs.
• Firewalker: The only way to soak damage you take from being on fire. I don't see any reason not to take it.
• Solar Sponge: You won't benefit from healing or Carrie synergy and the +2 Brawn/Brains in sunlight are very unreliable.
• Rubberskin: Electric damage is a bitch to soak, nice pick if you're going for three T1 skin mutations.
• Silicone Skin: Incompatible with Zombie.
• Snakeskin: Stab/slash are easy to soak, don't bother.
• Eelskin: You have more than enough Brawn to break out of grabs and can breathe underwater by default. Don't bother.
• High Density: This adds to your already nice Beat/Bullet soaks.
• Lithodermis: Nothing spectacular, you already have nice Beat/Bullet soaks and your high Endurance makes knockouts less likely to happen. Also incompatible with Flight.

tl;dr Firewalker+Yeti Skin/Fur for minmaxing, Firewalker+Rubberskin+HD for everyone else.

Sub optimal choices:

• Ripper: +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 spergy minmaxing - Zombie fisters already have high tohit.
• Carrie/Screech: Giving gunners -15 skill/tohit sounds good, right? However, with this build you won't reach the needed Dodge totals to dodge bullets.

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 + 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.
• Implants: As a zombie, you'll pretty much always revive after death. If you have a bunch of spare cash, it might be worth investing the +3 Brawn/Endurance implants.
• Rad mutations: If you have a brainy friend that can rad detox you: Sit around some spent fuel rods until you hit ~20-30 rads, then ask them to detox once you have the ones you want.

What do I kill?

• I'll write more about this later. For now, here are things zombies solo easily:
• Karnivore punks (Nukem Academy), treemen (Crater Forest) and bootleggers (Glowstiller): 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 a radsuit + firemen/leech armor for the burning hemolyph and scrimshaws or THC to destress. Having Firewalker makes this easier, but is not a must.
• Dinos: Same as above, grab and smash. Dinos have a ton of HP, so expect this to take a while.