PC A18 Knife advice

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Synvastian

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anyone out there running an AGI build? any advice for someone struggling to use its melee intuitively?

I get bleed, its a useful trick if you have room to run

using a weighted head mod on my knife gives enough staggers to avoid being hit too often, but it still happens

any advice is appreciated

 
Well, I've been mostly using knife builds for all patches this far. Even when it hasn't been the optimal tool, I've loved using it.

In A18, it just feels .. dull. Nothing dies properly. Feels better using a Tier 1 steel axe.

In a 2 man co-op we found a Tier 1 baseball bat, took it for a spin. That thing performs better than my 10/10 agi machete on all aspects. And no, I didn't have points in Str, just a cigar when doing the comparison. Found a Tier 6 Bat little later, my friend doesn't want it.. I've bought a forgettin' elixir by now. Just waiting to figure out how to spec before taking it ... :(

The machete is an absolute blast in a stealth build to sneak up on sleepers and cut their heads off. But for any actual fighting as an A18 Agi build, I'll just swap to bow or pistol.

 
I dunno why I keep going back to it (maybe because I work minimally and never carry more than 2 weapons at a given time) but the knife is the bottom of the barrel weapon until you get the machete, then it starts to feel a little more palpable.

As to your question about intuitively, that just takes practice and concentration. I don't enjoy using it when im outnumbered either. The rage mechanic really makes melee uncomfortable in all forms, but knife gets it the worst IMO. If you're using to sneaky stealth builds, you'll get more and more chances to use it the way its been intended to be used. I feel like the bleeds are borked and aren't terribly effective. It's way more deadly in PVP, which is what I think the knife was tailor made for.

The difference between the knife and other melee weapons, is that you're not meant to face tank something with it unless you have to. You kinda gotta stick and move, much in the same way you might use the knuckle dusters. Even without perks, the Brawler weapons feel way stronger and you're already used to the engagement distance anyway. Unless I loot a machete, the moment I get my hands on brass knucks or better, is the same moment my knife ends up in my vehicle storage and used only when I have to. I'd rather throw hands. The speed boost on the Knife made combat worse because of the Rage mechanic.

Decent mods: Burning, weighted, fortifying grip, and tempered blade. The extra chance to bleed on serrated doesn't seem worth the slot. Bleeds are just not a reliable source of extra damage, and the scaling on that is lackluster at best. In PVP, I have to consider the fact that bleeds come with a sort of blinding utility attached to it, and thus a weapon of choice in PVP. Against zeds bleeds mean absolutely nothing.

If I could posit a change the devs, I would like to see knife progression take a different route. I would get rid of bone shiv entirely. I would rather see us have a sorta scrap shiv of some kind or a basic camp knife, and then finally an actual Combat Knife. Machete gets moved to a blade mod, for chopping and gains a better chance to dismember or decap, and then we get a Punch Knife mod that adds a small penetration and crit bonus. Both of these new mods would make sense as Combat Knife only. A knife in all of its forms is both a tool and a weapon, so why not stick to that altogether?

 
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yeah, I can use knuckles on horde nights when I go FORT, ended up using a pistol instead of my knife on a day 14 (AGI build)...was kinda sad (looking for a machete) may scrap this playthrough and switch to a sneak/brawler instead of trying a AGI main stat

 
With the crazy attack speed of the hunting knife I kind of thought it'd work well just relying on decapitation chance.

 
It Should, but the dismemberment chance is A Fun Pimps Percentage .. you read, you understand what it says, you test it and it does something completely unlike what you thought you read.

While testing, the weakest zombies, maxed blade, Agi maxed to 50% dismemberment, I've seen about 20% as the max head pop rate for normal attacks. On a machete.

Take a normal biker, a hunting knife, and stab him in the leg until he dies; half the time he dies with two legs. Maybe that's the 50%? Hit the limbs of the remaining corpse, see 50% dismemberment in action..

I mean resistance is fine, but normal zombies being essentially immune to your main attribute's biggest contribution...?

 
I don't really have an interest in trying to have a build that revolves around blades, but I was thinking maybe including it in like a combination melee routine. Something like punch (knock out the teeth for no infection), stab quickly (get a chance for that bleeding), step back while equipping some finisher.

 
It Should, but the dismemberment chance is A Fun Pimps Percentage .. you read, you understand what it says, you test it and it does something completely unlike what you thought you read.
While testing, the weakest zombies, maxed blade, Agi maxed to 50% dismemberment, I've seen about 20% as the max head pop rate for normal attacks. On a machete.
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I tried testing the percentages with the zombie spawner but because the zombie heads swing around so erraticly (especially at close range) I could never be really sure whether I hit the head directly or whether it was a glancing blow.

Did you have a better method how to test it?

 
I just go sledge or clubs aka baseball bat as they are the only melee thats really viable late game, the rest just don't have reliable enough secondary effects. Knockdown is god pretty much. Knives is fine 1 v 1, but when you have multiple zombies knives just can't deal with them well. To avoid getting hit 1 v 1 with knives, you need to time your hits properly so you keep them in the pain animation, if they get out of it for even half a second they will hit you. As knives attack range is basically the same as zombies like brawling. Sledge/club is not op, its just the most balanced the rest all need some serious balance work done to make them viable, and the devs testing this on adventurer is not going to solve the problem, they need to test balance on warrior difficulty to get a feel for how they actually play.

- - - Updated - - -

I tried testing the percentages with the zombie spawner but because the zombie heads swing around so erraticly (especially at close range) I could never be really sure whether I hit the head directly or whether it was a glancing blow.
Did you have a better method how to test it?
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I believe the dismember bonus from stats is a percent bonus to the weapons base chance. So if a weapon had 10% base, +50% chance would make that 15%. I doubt its a flat +50% chance as you'd then be killing most zombies in 1 swing more often than not. So try factoring that into the testing should produce more reliable numbers.

 
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The glancing system is a pain for testing, sure. That 20% is me ignoring obvious glancing blows (since I have no idea how they're supposed to work with procs)

Best I can offer is two things:

- numpad 0 in the dm (or cm, dunno) shows the zombie stats. Glancing blows do very little damage. Reading the damage done seems pretty reliable, albeit slow.

- Audios of the glancing blow and the normal hit are usually different enough to hear. After a while checking for the ones I doubted, I think I can pretty much hear it now for the tests I've done.

 
I believe the dismember bonus from stats is a percent bonus to the weapons base chance. So if a weapon had 10% base, +50% chance would make that 15%. I doubt its a flat +50% chance as you'd then be killing most zombies in 1 swing more often than not. So try factoring that into the testing should produce more reliable numbers.
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It's probably something like that, sure. Giving the headshot damage as the actual value in the same tooltip is sorta bonkers thou. And since we're in the guessing grounds, we can just guess that each zombie type has it's own level resistance to diffent effects, which is probably just a straight up reduction in the final chance ... or something :)

 
It's probably something like that, sure. Giving the headshot damage as the actual value in the same tooltip is sorta bonkers thou. And since we're in the guessing grounds, we can just guess that each zombie type has it's own level resistance to diffent effects, which is probably just a straight up reduction in the final chance ... or something :)
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Thats exactly it actually. If you check entity classes.xml it lists what % of dismemeber effects actually work I think. Like for a normal zombie male this is what it looks like,

<property name="DismemberMultiplierHead" value="1"/>

<property name="DismemberMultiplierArms" value="1"/>

<property name="DismemberMultiplierLegs" value="1"/>

the 1 means 100% so you have your full dismemeber chance vs basic male zombies. Before individual zombies override that, its the basic male template.

Then you have a feral wight which has these values, which also may apply to ferals in general, which means your chance of dismemberment is 70% of your base.

<property name="DismemberMultiplierHead" value=".7"/><property name="DismemberMultiplierArms" value=".7"/><property name="DismemberMultiplierLegs" value=".7"/><!-- Feral -->

Radiated feral wight has a head dismember value of 0.4, so its reduced to 40% of whatever your base is.

So using my example of 10% with full stat being 15% chance, you'd have an actual chance of. 10.5% to dismember the ferals and 6% chance to dismemeber the radiated wights.

It might even be more complicated though, what if the chance to dismember only has a chance to take effect every swing? that'd put the overall percent chance even lower.

 
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Yeah, lets say I didn't exactly pull that guess out of my .. :) Didn't have the .xml:s at hand, but I remembered seeing those types of lines somewhere.

But hey, at least it looks like a percentage reduction and not a percentage point reduction ... :)

EDIT: Adding:

Just watching tube, noted that the wording for the dismemberment chance (in fortitude) is:

"have a <X%> chance to dismember with <weapon types>"

and not, for example, "increases dismemberment chance by <X%> with <weapon types>"

I'm not a native speaker, but I'd say that's a pretty straightforward statement of result, not change.

 
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Just watching tube, noted that the wording for the dismemberment chance (in fortitude) is:

"have a <X%> chance to dismember with <weapon types>"

and not, for example, "increases dismemberment chance by <X%> with <weapon types>"

I'm not a native speaker, but I'd say that's a pretty straightforward statement of result, not change.
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Yes, I don't see how it could be interpreted differently. And the xml of the agility attribute looks like it supports the interpretation. It uses "base_add", not "perc_add" to add 0.45 at maximum agility.

I think I'll try the pistol with x2 scope on normal zombies far away and count that (One can get a reliable headshot with that). If that approaches 50% I could mod the game so I have unlimited stealth to make reliable knife headshots and try the knife again.

The reduction Sycris found for higher level zombies sounds reasonable but it would be nice if it were hinted at somewhere in the game, preferably in the description of agility itself.

 
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Test results are in: With agility 10 and a pistol I got 10 of 40 headshots be dismemberments. So seems like 25% instead of 50%.

I made a rather shoddy bug report, lets see if they say that it works as intended or that there really is something wrong.

 
Nice. Shoddy is better than I did :) I wasn't sure how to report this, probably as a "Description error", since 50% decap would be insane if implemented :)

Btw, since you mentioned stealth for the knife testing, I'll just point out that you can turn off the AI via numpad * to help testing. The zombies will stand still in their idle animation, but react to damage pretty normally. Not sure if that effects ANYthing other than their movement, who knows what is spaghetti'od with the AI code, but I'd say it's safer than modding for testing.

Edit:

I just read Gazz's response.. as I kinda expected, but doesn't make the tooltip any less horrible ... :)

 
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Focusing into Agility, is hard mode IMO. You got nothing for BM and you got a narrow range to be OP in POI's.

I respect the player who deliberately goes into Agility just for those reasons. I don't do it, it would just annoy me.

 
A perception build is a big step up from Agility. For BM you have that ever stronger kill-streak damage so you can save the most ammo over any other focus. (you could argue about an INT build, I guess).

Easy mode is Strength, Fortitude or, my favorite, a mix of both.

 
EDIT Hiding pure speculation that seems to have nothing to do with my current test world. It's wrong, don't read it :)

Heh, that also explains the great head popping rate for heavy hitters: overkill is probably NOT removed for the calculations, so if you do damage twice as much as you need for the kill, you'll get twice the chance of pop.

Sure, you already killed her twice, so it's not exactly game changing, but ... oh well :)

I think I'll have to test this one just for some compensation for the biker tests ... :)
 
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A perception build is a big step up from Agility. For BM you have that ever stronger kill-streak damage so you can save the most ammo over any other focus. (you could argue about an INT build, I guess).
Easy mode is Strength, Fortitude or, my favorite, a mix of both.
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I'll mostly agree, but a good pistol isn't half bad for blood moons. Plenty of stagger power, decent damage. And AGI overall is the tree I'd use if I Had to do "running outside" horde nights. There's no need to, sure, but it's a whole lot of fun :) Might want to prep your area to have a couple Parkour-climbable ledges for short rests.

 
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