PC How to deal with radiated zombies in earlyish game?

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Kosmic Kerman

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I’ve started to run into radiated zombies in tier 4 quests around Day 18. I don’t know if the POIs were rebalanced or if the never ending horde nights and challenge system have inflated my game stage. I have a purple iron spear, a blue pipe machine gun, and a yellow pistol. None of these weapons are really cutting it. In the past I would have had stronger weapons before I had to deal with radiated zombies, i.e., pump shotgun, ak, magnum, etc.  Any tips on how to kill multiple rad zombies with mediocre equipment? 

 
Lots of Kiteing. Its about the only thing I can say. 1.0 is the slog/tedium update, so the combat was naturally affected by this too. I was worried about an issue like this now that traders no longer give gear for quest completion, as that was one of the better ways to get geared with this dumb learn by reading system, the result is what happened to you, you basically are forced to fight stuff far undergeared now, a key piece of gear to try to get is Preacher gloves, as they add 10-60% more damage done to anything undead, i'd say they are basically required period to make the game playable with the hp pools things now have. My last game of vanillla I had a tier 2 quest in the forest on day 4, that sent 2 feral lumberjacks at me each having about 1100 hp. A pipe machine gun which I only had a tier 1 of just does not cut it when enemies have that sort of hp. It also was the only gun I had at this point. I managed to kill them by kiteing them around and sneak headshotting them with a crossbow, and then meleeing when they got low on health. I had a armor rating of about 45, and got hit once which took about 40 hp off me. I play on warrior so zombies take 13-17% less damage and deal 50% more. I'm honestly scared to see how inflated radiated zombie hp is now. It was done purely to make it more tedius and take longer and this shows as the weapons never got any buffs to deal with the higher hp pools. Some zombies namely tourist, big mama, biker and lumberjack seemed to have their hp basically doubled, or at least it feels this way for how long they take to kill in 1.0 compared to a21.

Once I saw this I had to ask myself: have the devs even tried to play thru this in single player like past day 7? above noob adventurer mode? in Adventurer mode player gets a fairly decent free damage boost and takes noticably less damage. The old default difficulty was Nomad, which both sides did normal damage to each other, but I guess tfp has discovered alot of their playerbase is just bad at the game and they lowered it. The diff in damage done to zombies between nomad and warrior is not that big, but the fact they hit 50% harder IS noticable.

Also have you been staying in the forest? as if so thats a big nono, the loot stage in the forest is complete trash. People I have talked to said they have found lever action rifles, and pump shotguns on day 10 or so by doing some tier 2-3 quests in the snow biome. Maybe try a lower tier quest in the snow area to get some gear then try higher ones?

 
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Scyris said:
I'm honestly scared to see how inflated radiated zombie hp is now.
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I took on a T3 fetch in the desert biome, around gamestage 80, just today, and I was met with two feral bikers and a radiated tourist in the end loot room. I'm glad it was a tourist zombie, otherwise I would have objectively died. It took 3 full mag dumps from my AK-47 to kill it, and this is on Warrior difficulty. Radiated bikers are going to be a living hell.

Further clarification, it was a quality level 4 AK, fully modded, 4/5 Machine Gunner perk. 90 bullets, many of them headshots, to finally put it down.

 
MechanicalLens said:
I took on a T3 fetch in the desert biome, around gamestage 80, just today, and I was met with two feral bikers and a radiated tourist in the end loot room. I'm glad it was a tourist zombie, otherwise I would have objectively died. It took 3 full mag dumps from my AK-47 to kill it, and this is on Warrior difficulty. Radiated bikers are going to be a living hell.

Further clarification, it was a quality level 4 AK, fully modded, 4/5 Machine Gunner perk. 90 bullets, many of them headshots, to finally put it down.
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Might make the armor that increases damage to radiated zombies actually worthwhile, though I'm not sure how much that increase will actually matter since it's a relatively small increase.

 
Scyris said:
Also have you been staying in the forest? as if so thats a big nono, the loot stage in the forest is complete trash. People I have talked to said they have found lever action rifles, and pump shotguns on day 10 or so by doing some tier 2-3 quests in the snow biome. Maybe try a lower tier quest in the snow area to get some gear then try higher ones?
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This is helpful. I hadn't thought about doing lower tier quests in other biomes to get better loot.

 
Wooden spikes or hatches in the doorway. Don't forget to have the attributes for the weapon you use high up at like 7+ for extra dismemberment chance along with boosted headshot damage.

Hopefully you got either preacher gloves or some other gloves equipped to boost your damage. There is also a book that's boosts damage done to zombies by 10% I forget which one it is.

Since you're saying your issue are the weapons then stop questing and go loot books or find crack a books to loot for magazines to make more progress in the crafting tree. You don't need quests to go looting books or looking for PoIs to loot.

 
MechanicalLens said:
I took on a T3 fetch in the desert biome, around gamestage 80, just today, and I was met with two feral bikers and a radiated tourist in the end loot room. I'm glad it was a tourist zombie, otherwise I would have objectively died. It took 3 full mag dumps from my AK-47 to kill it, and this is on Warrior difficulty. Radiated bikers are going to be a living hell.

Further clarification, it was a quality level 4 AK, fully modded, 4/5 Machine Gunner perk. 90 bullets, many of them headshots, to finally put it down.
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Well 1.0 is the slog update so this fits, they did anything they could to slow the game down because they know it has no content. The super tanky zombies are just one part of the slog they added.

Also I checked the XMLs a Radiated Biker has 1800 base health, and zombies can have 85% to 115% of that number. Radiated Wight has 2400 base health. 1530 to 2070 health range for radiated bikers.

 
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One thing you shouldn't do is panic.  Because one radiated zombie will quickly become a whole pack of regular zombies, feral zombies, and radiated zombies as you run through the house and past the key that would open an escape route for you.....not that I would know this personally mind you.

I play agility so when I get into a situation with ferals or radiated, I look for high ground and I keep moving.  I target ferals first, then I work on taking down the radiated zombies.

Best experience taking down a radiated zombie for me so far was just shooting one from the stairs and keep getting sneak damage in.  Poor thing couldn't figure out where the arrows were coming from.  I almost felt sorry for it.....then I remembered the house.....

Also helps if you found a rad remover to stop the healing.  If not, then like I said above, wait until you get the other zombies down first then tackle the rad(s) as you can concentrate on them to take them down.

 
Kosmic Kerman said:
I’ve started to run into radiated zombies in tier 4 quests around Day 18
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Was that an Infestation quest?

It feels like Infestations became much harder compared to A21. I've recently took a T3 (i.e. T2+) Infestation on Day 15, and met with ~8 radiated zombies, including 2 green bikers. Do you know how many shots in the head with 1st level sawn-off shotgun it takes to put them down? As for me, I have no idea, because they quickly cornered and killed me...

 
Ray Garraty said:
Was that an Infestation quest?

It feels like Infestations became much harder compared to A21. I've recently took a T3 (i.e. T2+) Infestation on Day 15, and met with ~8 radiated zombies, including 2 green bikers. Do you know how many shots in the head with 1st level sawn-off shotgun it takes to put them down? As for me, I have no idea, because they quickly cornered and killed me...
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It was not. I was avoiding infestations for that reason. In that playthrough, I did all my quests in the forest which may have been part of the problem. In my second playthrough, I switched to agility and quested until I hit tier 3 and then moved to the desert. That went much better and never felt like my gear progression did not match the level of enemies. But that may have had something to do with agility getting early access to tier 1 melee and ranged through toilet knifes and pistols. I’m going to start a third playthrough soon with a different build, probably perception again, to see how that goes. 

 
I damn near unloaded my 9 millimeter on one and that did it. He was with a whole pack of feral Z's and I would knock them down with a round and then go back to him.  I had two maybe three rounds left and had three more ferals. I carry two 9mm just in case the warm sticky stuff rains.

 
I like to carry traps with me that I can throw down to create obstacles they can damage themselves on to give myself some time to stam up or get to safer distance or whatever. Things like wood spikes or barbed wire traps are nice.

I also swap between melee and ranged to help with stamina in order to keep taking their health down.

 
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