Fists

Busting someone up in a bar fight is a matter of having the brawn to deliver the hits, and the endurance to take them.

The ability to hit people with your bare hands or fists-related weapons in combat.

This skill determines how likely you are to hit someone in combat when you're not wielding any weapon. It will also affect the hit and damage of fists-related weaponry.

Why Fists?

Characterized by excellent speed, to-hit, damage, and overall being extremely reliable, Fists are a popular weapon class in HellMOO. Here are the main advantages of the fists class:

• Speed - Mosts fist weapons fall into one of two speed categories: fast, or very fast. Add in the fact you can dual wield many Fists weapons to fight even faster, and you can bury your opponent in a flurry of punches before they can fight back. Fists users are no joke in this department. Dual jawbreakers is enough to make many players cringe.

• Ease of acquisition - From your bare knuckles to Jawbreakers, fists are a weapon class that is easy to get weaponry for. Many other weapon classes can get tedious in acquisition, but even the most labor-intensive crafting for fists weapons is relatively straightforward.

• Ease of Use - If you can wrap your head around the concept of maxing out Endurance, Brawn and Reflexes, you can make a good fists class. This simplicity makes fists a good class to learn the game with on your first way around, especially because all three of these stats also have good general utility.

• Mutation Flexibility - Every lifestyle mutation in the game (except Empath) can work in a good fists class. Aboms get their sexy claws, freaks get good focus to complement their DPS, vampires get the top-end stats, chromemouths get easy-mode and +3 endurance, zombies get solid soaks and high fist-friendly buff numbers, and even chuds get their minions scaling directly off of fists skill. This means that no matter what racial you want to play, you can rest easy knowing that reaching for a jawbie is never a bad call.

• Excellent Damage - Fists put out really solid DPS. Jawbreakers deal copious amounts of beat damage in addition to stun, Patas deal more slash than a shiver sword and Tesla/Edison Gauntlets deal large amounts of electric, a very difficult to soak damage type.

• Accurate - As a general rule of thumb, fists all have excellent to-hit, making them harder to dodge. This is very useful, especially in PvE - nobody likes whiffing an attack. A fister's core stats also lend themselves really well to headbutt, which has strong anti-dodge powers to complement your base DPS.

• Grabbing Synergy - Jawbreakers and knuckle busters are one-handed, which means that fisters can grab people with their off-hand and beat ten bells into them while they're unable to fight back. Since brawn, endurance and reflexes are the key stats for the wrestle skill, the synergy here is top dollar, though this doesn't work for Edisons or Patas.

Disadvantages

The fists class, while being excellent, does have a few shortcomings:

• Parry Class - Fists don't have much in the way of parrying power. Edisons are PC1 and patas are PC2, but that's about it. On the flipside, rolling to dodge is actually much better than rolling to parry, so depending on your situation this can be a blessing in disguise.

• Weapon Variety - Fists does not have a terribly wide weapon pool. A fister's life revolves around jawbreakers and edisons, with the odd pata and knuckle buster thrown in, and that's about it.

• Damage Options - Fists don't have tons of options for what damage types they put out; they've got the wide selection of beat, slash, or shock. The good news is that this covers all the bases you need most of the time, especially given how much damage you're doing of those three types, but all the sexy, exotic damage types like acid, bleed and irradiation will be out of your reach.

Weapons

Here's a quick overview of some of the more notable fist weapons in the game. A more exhaustive list can be found on the Weaponry page.

• Fists - The first weapon everyone starts out with. Unless you get the Ripper mutation, you will always have this unless you are holding an actual weapon. Damage is buffed by taking the Lithodermis mutation.

• Knuckle Buster - The first fists weapon that many players will encounter, being bought for super cheap from Ammu-Nation. Deals solid beat damage, gets good speed, has solid accuracy -- generally speaking, is a jawbie-lite. One-handed, so you can dual wield them or wield one for nanites or grabbing. Theoretically gets even better max damage than jawbreakers do with impractically extreme brawn, but the jawbreaker is all-around better.

• Claws, all of the claws - There are a few ways to get claws from mutations in HellMOO. Ripper claws, from the eponymous mutation, have mediocre scaling but good crit and grant you +1 fists as part of the mutation. Zombie claws are slow as balls (as is true of zombies in general) but scale well with brawn for damage, and can grief noobs with zombie rot infection. Chud claws are terrible compared to either of the previous, but they do have a chance to pass on any diseases that the chud is infected with on hit, so you can give all your friends AIDS. Finally, abomination claws and fangs are the best of the bunch, scaling excellently with brawn and getting great to-hit, as well as doing unsoakable irradiation damage.

• Jawbreakers - Jawbreakers are the PvP and high end weapon of choice for many fists users. They deal high amounts of beat damage (capping just under 50) at a very quick speed, are very accurate, and have a whopping 35% beat crit rate, which means you'll be stunning enemies consistently before beating the stuffing out of them. Can be dual-wielded or combined with grabs too! They do have a restricted mod pool though: you can only put a shock module and a gyro grip on them. Bought pretty cheaply from Pegleg Pete's too, so they're super easy to replace.

• Telsa Gauntlets - Tesla Gauntlets are a strange weapon among fists. For one, they primarily deal high amounts of electric damage instead of the usual beat. Furthermore, while most fists weapons scale on brawn, Tesla Gauntlets scale on skill in fists, making them a lower-brawn alternative. On top of this, Tesla Gauntlets have Parry Class 1, and are somewhat slow in speed. They are craft only, and are the most labour-intensive craft job of the fists class, but this isn't saying much -- compared to most other classes, these are pretty easy to put together. Ask any crafter worth their salt; they might just send you to prod the Matter Compiler a few times before they get it done.

• Edison Gauntlets - The upgrade to the Tesla Gauntlets. These are a little harder to speedcap, but scale much higher, capping out a little over 45 maximum electric damage. They also get increased bonus beat damage, and an extra 10% crit (which can be buffed by Torture). These scale much more with brawn than skill, unlike the teslas. A very solid choice for PvP -- with a few drugs, any fister should be able to speedcap them no problem and go on a shock damage rampage, with electric being a damage type that's fairly tricky to soak. They are two-handed though, and quite heavy at 7kg when modded. They can also only accept a grip mod, so gyro or balanced grip. Gyro is the better choice; any time that the speed really matters, you'll be buffed out of your skull anyway.

• Pata Gauntlets - The only fist weapon that is PC **. They are rather quick and deal huge amounts of slash (capping around 48) and some stab on the side. They're two handed and heavy like the edisons, but unlike the fist-mounted shockers, they do slash damage, which is very easy to soak. For this reason, the patas aren't that great for PvP unless you're playing them into extremely specific armor sets, though they are convenient for some PvE situations. These are also crafted, but the recipe is pretty easy.