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.

This skill governs the accuracy and damage of your attacks with your fists or fists-related weaponry.

Advantages

• Speed - Mosts fist weapons are either fast or very fast. Some can be dual-wielded; double jawbreakers can bury opponents in a flurry of punches before they can fight back.

• Ease of acquisition - Even the most labor-intensive crafting for fists weapons is pretty straightforward. Knuckle Busters and Jawbreakers are your bread and butter, and both are bought for cheap in NPC stores. Jawbreakers don't even need modding to be effective.

• Ease of Use - If you can wrap your head around the concept of maxing Endurance, Brawn and Reflexes, you can make a good fists class. All three of these stats also have good utility; a newbie playing fists will be able to climb cliffs easily.

• Mutation Flexibility - Most racial mutations can work in a fists class. See the section on Racials for more details.

• Excellent Top-end Damage - Jawbreakers deal copious amounts of beat damage in addition to stun, Pata deal more slash than a shiver sword and Tesla/Edison Gauntlets deal large amounts of electric, a very difficult to soak damage type.

• Accuracy - Most fist weapons have very good to-hit. You'll rarely miss in PvE, and as long as you pick your battles carefully in PvP, you'll smack most non-gunners just fine.

• Parry Class Coverage - Jawbies and knuckle busters cover PC0, Edisons are PC1, and Pata are PC2. Fists is the only class in the game that can boast a viable endgame weapon in all three parry classes aside from Whips. Fisters can make almost any non-gunner fight on their terms with this flexibility.

• Grabbing Synergy - Jawbreakers and knuckle busters are one-handed and fisters have good wrestle, which means that fisters can grab people with their off-hand and beat them up while keeping themselves out of danger. This doesn't work with the 2-handed fists weapons.

Disadvantages

• Weapon Variety - Fists does not have a wide weapon pool. The big three are jawbreakers, edisons and pata, while knuckle busters and abom claws get honorable mention. There are few other weapons, and they (Uru pounders, for instance) are all trash.

• Damage Options - Fisters have the choice of beat, slash and shock. This is usually enough, but there's no exotic damage types like acid and bleed.

• Vulnerable to dodge - Fists has no real answer to high dodge outside of gaming parry classes. Hooligan is a nice idea but it's inconsistent, slow and laughably easy to counter. If a fister is not careful to engage a high-dodge opponent with a PC that's the same or lower than theirs, they'll struggle to land a shot unless they can stun and get a grab.

• Vulnerable to parry - Spears can stall out fisters with their parry bonus, and if you don't bring pata, you'll be stuck trying to dodge their hits with your terrible dodge skill.

• Damage roulette - Most fists weapons have extremely wide damage ranges, which makes them less consistent than other classes. Top-end damage is fun, but it means little when your jawbreakers bounce off someone's triple leather armor three times in a row.

Notable Weapons

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

• Knuckle Buster - Bought for super cheap from Ammu-Nation. Deals solid beat damage, gets good speed, has fine accuracy -- generally speaking, is a jawbie-lite. One-handed, too.

• Claws, all of the claws - Ripper claws are quite bad but give you +1 fists. Zombie claws are very slow but scale well with brawn, and can grief noobs with zombie rot infection. Chud claws are poor, 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 fast, scale excellently with brawn and get great to-hit, as well as doing unsoakable irradiation damage.

• Jawbreakers - High beat damage (capping just under 50) at a very quick speed, very accurate, and 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! Bought pretty cheaply from Pegleg Pete's, so they're easy to replace. PC0, so you can force PC0 nerds to attempt to parry you.

• Edison Gauntlets - Juiced up Tesla Gauntlets; these are a little harder to speedcap, but scale much higher (with brawn), capping at about 45 shock damage. They also get 35% torture-buffable crit, and shock is really hard to soak in PvP. PC1, so you can force PC1/2 enemies to try to parry you. Two-handed, so no grabs, and they're also heavy as sin. They're also craft-only and the hardest fist weapon to replace; the recipes aren't that hard, but the process requires a particle bench.

• Pata Gauntlets - These are rather quick and deal huge amounts of slash (capping around 48). Crafted, but the recipe is easy. Monstrous 40% crit rate, which is torture-buffable. Also PC2, so you can buff up your to-hit and stall out against lower PC opponents that aren't dodgy. Downsides are that they're two handed and heavy like the edisons, and that slash is relatively easy to soak -- though 48 slash with ~50% crit definitely isn't.

Modding

Fists mod pools vary a lot from weapon to weapon.

• Jawbreakers can only take gyro and a shock module. You should use a gyro for your PvP jawbies, but a stock jawbie is fine for PvE.
• Knuckle busters are mostly used for PvE on the cheap. They have a huge mod pool, but you can just stick a force enhancer on and call it a day.
• Pata take the same wide range as KBs. Gyro is good for accuracy and parry rate, sharpening kit for bonus damage. Spike cluster and elemental are optional depending on how you want to stack cost vs. performance. The balanced grip variant is nice for PvE if you're too lazy to drug.

Racial Synergy

Abomination - Abom is unpopular, but fists and abom do synergize well. The mutation itself boosts fists by 1, and gives you the scary, radioactive abom claws. Aboms also can't kill themselves with drugs, which means they can buff themselves like crazy. No armor and cheap or free weapons makes your clones very disposable, too.

Chromemouth - Recently nerfed, now +2 endurance for -2 brains. +1 fists/wrestle in exchange for -2 medic, -1 pilot and more feint trouble if you don't rend is a good trade. You can't zero but that's no big deal. A good choice for the conservative or new fister.

Chud - Chud minions spawn with their claws, which scale on fists. Their stats mirror your base stats, so they'll get their claw damage boosted.

Hideous Freak - Gives good focus and stress immunity, which means you can spam grab, burn and screech in between smacking them around with jawbies. You can also screech and burn while holding a grab!

Vampire - A stats match made in heaven. The vampire mutation's +4 brawn is a huge boost; +2 to weapon skill on top of big bonus damage. Also includes the +4 endurance that most others have to fill two mutation slots to acquire.

Zombie - Solid soaks, which help with your lower fister dodge if you can't set up or land a grab. Also easy access to high, fist-and-wrestle-friendly buff numbers with barf.