Bleeder

The Bleeder mutation allows a player to injure themselves for combat bonuses. It is mutually exclusive with Zombie and Superclot.

Location

The Bleeder mutation is hidden somewhere within St. God's Memorial Hospital in Slagtown. It is easy to acquire as it is unguarded, just be careful where you go once you find it...

Effects

This mutation grants:

    The ability to Rend
    The Frenzy buff when bleeding
    Stress loss/gain depending on whether you are covered in blood or not
    Immunity to passing out from blood loss
    

Message upon receiving

[ You've just received some new commands. ]
[ rend : Tear bloody gashes all over your body. ]
Player's body twists and shudders, and something writhes under their skin, crawling through the tissues and subtly altering them.
[ You've developed the 'bleeder' mutation! ]
[ Your clone has been updated! All skills and experience saved. ]

Advantages

Entering a frenzy will grant you up to +4 Brawn and +4 Senses raising your combat abilities greatly and on command. Frenzy effects reduce your chance of being feinted. You will also lose stress at a rate of -10 when covered in blood, and will never pass out from blood loss.

Disadvantages

Though you will never pass out from blood loss, you absolutely can still bleed to death. You'll also gain stress when you aren't covered in blood, which often comes up if you've just recloned or are fighting mobs with dangerous blood. Having blood on you reduces your climb skill, so you'll need to either increase your climb skill to compensate or carry a towel and destressing materials. You also cannot take Zombie or Superclot.

Don't forget that being in a frenzy debuffs your medic by a bunch, so you might end up bleeding to death without the skill to use a suture kit and save yourself. There is counterplay to this: nanites can give you an emergency burst of health if your build can use them, and rolls of makeshift bandages will stop bleeding just as well as a suture kit, though they take a little longer to use. Both of these items require little to no medic skill to use, and can still be applied into the negative double digits of medic skill. Finally, simply lying down (lie) reduces how much damage you take from blood loss every heartbeat.

Apparently, the Frenzy effect does not stack with the frenzy gained from scare as a Hideous Freak.

Rend

Using Rend will make your character attempt to deal a bleeding wound on him/herself. Using a cutting implement (swords, knives, claws, etc) raises your chance of a successful rend-frenzy.

Message Upon Use:

(Without cutting implement)
<name> starts tearing wildly at his/her body, the skin giving way to bloody gashes with surprising ease. 
<name> roars in a mad frenzy, his/her fingers utterly bathed in blood. 
YEAH. You start to go berserk!"

(With cutting implement - This is an example, it varies!)
"<name> draws his/her long masamune from his/her back scabbard. 
<name> takes the tip of his/her masamune and slides it across his/her flesh frantically. 
<name> screams with anguished pleasure as his/her blood drips down the edge of his masamune. 
YEAH. You start to go berserk!"

Bleeder and other mutations

Vampires have a mixed relationship with Bleeder. On the one hand, the increased feint resistance is a huge help against feints, and +4 brawn and senses is a big buff to stats which are already very strong for vamps. Using rend in combination with other buffs, vamps can reach higher brawn totals than any other class in the game by quite a large margin. On the other hand, every time you bleed as a vampire, your hunger will increase. It's best to use bleeder sparingly as a vampire, and make sure you have a plan to either stop your bleeding quickly or fill back up on blood a little while after rending. Don't forget that blood healing from feed can heal you for up to 5 hp per heartbeat and requires no medic skill to use, which can neatly negate bleeder's damage ticks.

For Hideous Freaks, bleeder is often a less attractive choice. Frenzy debuffs focus very hard, and many freaks lean on their focus total very heavily to support their focus mutations, which means that bleeder can actually hurt their effectiveness more than help it. On top of this, bleeder's passive destress is reversed for freaks, meaning that any time you have blood on you, you'll start stressing out. This is less of a problem when you can just screech and mend your stress away, but it's still annoying. Finally, bleeder freaks will have to deal with two damage ticks whenever they rend: one from actually bleeding, and the other from their own blood's acid damage, which also has a chance to chip away at your armor.

Appearance

Bleeder doesn't change bodily appearance automatically, though you'll be spending a lot of time sliced up and covered in blood if you're even somewhat sane - so in that sense, it does.