For some context to this feedback: I've played in Alpha 18 till Day 53, Lvl 76, on Survivalist/24 zombies/Jog during day sprint at night, with a mostly Handguns/Agility based character, although I dabbled quite a bit in other trees too.
Some feedback on weapon balancing:
Melee Weapons:
To be blunt (har har) Bats/Sledgehammers seem to be way way way better then all the other melee weapon types. Knives especially are just godawful.
First of all, just comparing all the melee weapons at equal perk/stat point/quality levels, the bat/sledge end up playing better because fast weak hits don't work well in this game (you generally dip in and out of range to land hits, not stay in and facetank), and bats/sledges are the hardest 'single hit' melee weapons, so they mesh well with the way you melee in this game, at least if you don't want to get hit.
Also, in singleplayer, you pretty much HAVE to invest at least a few points in strength for mining, which means clubs/bats tend to be ahead of the stat curve early on.
It doesn't help that bats also have their own line of magazines for unique perks while other melee weapons lack an equivalent.
As for the problems with the other melee weapons:
Knives: These are just terrible, because again, fast weak hits don't fit this game's 'melee style'. I assume the bleeds are supposed to make up for it (ie you are intended to weave in and out and bleed up all the zombies), but frankly in practice they just don't do enough damage. This may be because I play on Survivalist (I'm not sure how the bleeds feel on lower difficulties), but even with a Rad Remover installed, trying to kill a radiated zombie with a machete, even with 5/5 ranks in it, is just painful (it just takes forever to bleed them, and the actual attack damage of the machete is awful), while a baseball bat can kill weaker irradiated in just 3 headshot swings even on Survivalist.
The Hunting Knife is even worse then the Machete since it is much weaker and faster, which only makes all the issues worse. I tried using a Hunting Knife in the early game and it was just completely unusable, I ended up either taking a lot of damage trying to land fast hits or running around forever waiting for them to drop dead when I could have already killed them a long time ago with a club. Ironically however, the rapid speed of the Knife does make it REALLY good for lawn mowing/breaking paintings, which is kinda nice.
Knuckles: Pretty much the same issues as Knives, except you can't even bleed targets, but with the caveat that Beer does buff them to be fairly decent, so in theory if you set up a massive beer farm and have 100% uptime on the buff I could see these actually being viable. This seems to be the intent as well, since Fortitude includes the farming perk, but frankly getting a huge beer farm takes time, and by the time you have it up, melee is much less important anyways. Still, this is probably the 3rd best melee weapon after clubs/sledges.
Stun Batons: Just a low damage club with a 'stun' that doesn't actually stun on occassion. Also you need to loot one, and it's tied to a relatively otherwise weak for combat attribute (Int, which also has turrets which basically aren't actually good until very high int lvls) which doesn't help.
Spears: Again just really low basic damage, and the throw isn't powerful enough to compensate for the time it takes to recover the weapon if you miss/if you are fighting a group. I could see the spear being effective on lower difficulties where the throw would 1 shot targets, but not on higher difficulties.
While I assume it's not necessarily intended all melee weapons are perfectly equal, currently the gaps are pretty huge. I can't even imagine trying to use Knives seriously currently, and while Spears/Batons aren't THAT bad, the only reason you would use them is if you had a lot of points in them anyways.
Not sure if ideas are desired, but I'd probably start by buffing bleeds, and improving the stun on the baton somehow (either proc more often, or be a 'full' stun, or making the stun do a bunch of damage over it's duration), and possibly buffing the spear throw damage a bit more to compensate for the drawbacks. I like the idea of different melee weapons being unique, so playing up the unique aspects would be the logical place to start rather then just blanket damage buffs.
Bows/Crossbows:
These are just awful in the current version. While I assume the intent was to move away from them being 'forced' as an early game ranged weapon, and more of something you specialise in if you go Agility, the problem is they have been indirectly nerfed in many ways, and still have all their old weaknesses, while guns have lost a lot of their old weaknesses. I really don't see why you would use them, outside of maybe Exploding Arrows/Bolts.
First of all, the primitive bow is very weak, and you now need Bow Parts to make better bows/crossbows. The problem is, that this is the same as the way guns work ATM, yet Bows/Crossbows still have terrible DPS compared to guns, so it doesn't make sense to have the same amount of hassle associated with them when they aren't as good as the guns. It doesn't help that the bows/crossbows seem a lot rarer then guns in loot so it's hard to get enough parts early on. And brass is ridiculously abundant now (I'll talk more about this later), so the old reason to use a bow/crossbow, to save brass, is no longer relevant.
Steel/Fire/Exploding arrows/bolts need Polymer now too, so they are harder to make, which is pretty annoying. Again brass is more common then polymer, yet bows/crossbows are weaker then guns. It just doesn't make much sense.
On top of this, Crossbows are REALLY bad if you don't get Run and Gun, due to the constant reloading required, on top of the Archery perk. Further adding to the investment required. But even if you do bother, you end up with a weapon that is still worse then a gun. It feels like by the time you can get enough levels of Archery/Run and Gun to make Bows/Crossbows feel good to use, you are already facing Irradiated zombies, and Guns are just easier to use against those.
It REALLY doesn't help that Bows/Crossbows share attribute with Handguns, and the Pistol is easily the most common gun, and 9mm ammo is common and very cheap to make, meaning in practice even if you were going into Agility it would be much easier to just go straight to the Pistol.
Not sure how I would go about changing it, but probably at least start by trying to improve 'accessibility' for bows/crossbows. Make them less reliant on perks, make the parts much more common, make arrows easier to make, something like that. Their whole point has always been that they are weaker then guns but easier to get started with, and with all the changes in Alpha 17 and now in Alpha 18, I feel like that niche has been massively eroded with all the added hassle to use bows/crossbows, while guns have been made more accessible at the same time.
Some feedback on weapon balancing:
Melee Weapons:
To be blunt (har har) Bats/Sledgehammers seem to be way way way better then all the other melee weapon types. Knives especially are just godawful.
First of all, just comparing all the melee weapons at equal perk/stat point/quality levels, the bat/sledge end up playing better because fast weak hits don't work well in this game (you generally dip in and out of range to land hits, not stay in and facetank), and bats/sledges are the hardest 'single hit' melee weapons, so they mesh well with the way you melee in this game, at least if you don't want to get hit.
Also, in singleplayer, you pretty much HAVE to invest at least a few points in strength for mining, which means clubs/bats tend to be ahead of the stat curve early on.
It doesn't help that bats also have their own line of magazines for unique perks while other melee weapons lack an equivalent.
As for the problems with the other melee weapons:
Knives: These are just terrible, because again, fast weak hits don't fit this game's 'melee style'. I assume the bleeds are supposed to make up for it (ie you are intended to weave in and out and bleed up all the zombies), but frankly in practice they just don't do enough damage. This may be because I play on Survivalist (I'm not sure how the bleeds feel on lower difficulties), but even with a Rad Remover installed, trying to kill a radiated zombie with a machete, even with 5/5 ranks in it, is just painful (it just takes forever to bleed them, and the actual attack damage of the machete is awful), while a baseball bat can kill weaker irradiated in just 3 headshot swings even on Survivalist.
The Hunting Knife is even worse then the Machete since it is much weaker and faster, which only makes all the issues worse. I tried using a Hunting Knife in the early game and it was just completely unusable, I ended up either taking a lot of damage trying to land fast hits or running around forever waiting for them to drop dead when I could have already killed them a long time ago with a club. Ironically however, the rapid speed of the Knife does make it REALLY good for lawn mowing/breaking paintings, which is kinda nice.
Knuckles: Pretty much the same issues as Knives, except you can't even bleed targets, but with the caveat that Beer does buff them to be fairly decent, so in theory if you set up a massive beer farm and have 100% uptime on the buff I could see these actually being viable. This seems to be the intent as well, since Fortitude includes the farming perk, but frankly getting a huge beer farm takes time, and by the time you have it up, melee is much less important anyways. Still, this is probably the 3rd best melee weapon after clubs/sledges.
Stun Batons: Just a low damage club with a 'stun' that doesn't actually stun on occassion. Also you need to loot one, and it's tied to a relatively otherwise weak for combat attribute (Int, which also has turrets which basically aren't actually good until very high int lvls) which doesn't help.
Spears: Again just really low basic damage, and the throw isn't powerful enough to compensate for the time it takes to recover the weapon if you miss/if you are fighting a group. I could see the spear being effective on lower difficulties where the throw would 1 shot targets, but not on higher difficulties.
While I assume it's not necessarily intended all melee weapons are perfectly equal, currently the gaps are pretty huge. I can't even imagine trying to use Knives seriously currently, and while Spears/Batons aren't THAT bad, the only reason you would use them is if you had a lot of points in them anyways.
Not sure if ideas are desired, but I'd probably start by buffing bleeds, and improving the stun on the baton somehow (either proc more often, or be a 'full' stun, or making the stun do a bunch of damage over it's duration), and possibly buffing the spear throw damage a bit more to compensate for the drawbacks. I like the idea of different melee weapons being unique, so playing up the unique aspects would be the logical place to start rather then just blanket damage buffs.
Bows/Crossbows:
These are just awful in the current version. While I assume the intent was to move away from them being 'forced' as an early game ranged weapon, and more of something you specialise in if you go Agility, the problem is they have been indirectly nerfed in many ways, and still have all their old weaknesses, while guns have lost a lot of their old weaknesses. I really don't see why you would use them, outside of maybe Exploding Arrows/Bolts.
First of all, the primitive bow is very weak, and you now need Bow Parts to make better bows/crossbows. The problem is, that this is the same as the way guns work ATM, yet Bows/Crossbows still have terrible DPS compared to guns, so it doesn't make sense to have the same amount of hassle associated with them when they aren't as good as the guns. It doesn't help that the bows/crossbows seem a lot rarer then guns in loot so it's hard to get enough parts early on. And brass is ridiculously abundant now (I'll talk more about this later), so the old reason to use a bow/crossbow, to save brass, is no longer relevant.
Steel/Fire/Exploding arrows/bolts need Polymer now too, so they are harder to make, which is pretty annoying. Again brass is more common then polymer, yet bows/crossbows are weaker then guns. It just doesn't make much sense.
On top of this, Crossbows are REALLY bad if you don't get Run and Gun, due to the constant reloading required, on top of the Archery perk. Further adding to the investment required. But even if you do bother, you end up with a weapon that is still worse then a gun. It feels like by the time you can get enough levels of Archery/Run and Gun to make Bows/Crossbows feel good to use, you are already facing Irradiated zombies, and Guns are just easier to use against those.
It REALLY doesn't help that Bows/Crossbows share attribute with Handguns, and the Pistol is easily the most common gun, and 9mm ammo is common and very cheap to make, meaning in practice even if you were going into Agility it would be much easier to just go straight to the Pistol.
Not sure how I would go about changing it, but probably at least start by trying to improve 'accessibility' for bows/crossbows. Make them less reliant on perks, make the parts much more common, make arrows easier to make, something like that. Their whole point has always been that they are weaker then guns but easier to get started with, and with all the changes in Alpha 17 and now in Alpha 18, I feel like that niche has been massively eroded with all the added hassle to use bows/crossbows, while guns have been made more accessible at the same time.
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