Cancerous115
Refugee
Wanted to start making a stealth build and with all the scripted spawn points in POI'S how is it? Anyone still playing it in the big 2026?
PC Stealth Builds. How are you guys doing?
- Thread starter Cancerous115
- Start date
Sapient6
Survivor
Did something change since 2.3?
I haven't tried it in 2.5 but it was still wildly overpowered in 2.3 (provided you built and played for it). The only things I can think of in 2.5 are: storms making zombies more active and eating applying smell. Both seem like they should be fine to me. Storms mean you'll need to either cool your heels a little or have a backup plan. Smells mean you'll have to suck it up and be hungry for a bit if you're in the middle of a clear.
Zombie spawns in POI's was the big complaint in 2.3, and I found that although that mechanic slowed me down it still managed to be a lot of fun to use stealth to foil those spawns and stealth kill them anyway.
zztong
Hunter
I'm doing stealth again. I'm up to AGL 7 and 4/4 in the stealth skills, running with Assassin/2. I just did "Calm Inn" (Tier 4) yesterday and only the final encounter was one where I had to trigger the zombies and face an ambush. I had already opened up exits to the room to let me flee and reacquire stealth, but I used an AK to clear them instead. I'm using a wooden bow/5 and iron arrows and a baseball bat/1.
I started the Calm Inn at night and finished up late in the following day.
That left me two zombies to track down that I hadn't found and hadn't otherwise activated. Both were hidden in ceilings. The one in the main entrance was a pain to reach a destroy the vent so the Z would fall out.
I couldn't tell you what the dungeon path was in that POI. For larger POIs I find it easier to clear and isolate in my own organized way.
As a note, I consider stealth successful even if they wake when I only get 1-2 zombies as I can quietly juggle them and not wake any others.
I don't expect my stealth meter to be very good yet. I think it's around 26, so I keep my distance as best I can.
I started the Calm Inn at night and finished up late in the following day.
That left me two zombies to track down that I hadn't found and hadn't otherwise activated. Both were hidden in ceilings. The one in the main entrance was a pain to reach a destroy the vent so the Z would fall out.
I couldn't tell you what the dungeon path was in that POI. For larger POIs I find it easier to clear and isolate in my own organized way.
As a note, I consider stealth successful even if they wake when I only get 1-2 zombies as I can quietly juggle them and not wake any others.
I don't expect my stealth meter to be very good yet. I think it's around 26, so I keep my distance as best I can.
4sheetzngeegles
Hunter
I love the stealth aspect of the game, but, I don't make a build for it, I like it to just
naturally evolve over time.
naturally evolve over time.
I use hearing in my headset, feedback from my turtle beach controller, sight of
the meter to play in stealth mode. If a zombie makes a breating sound I stop, and
wait for it to go back to sleep, I break up all garbage at the longest distance away.
I have a dead zone on my controller so I creep a lot slower with consistency than
most keyboard mouse combinations, I don't open and close containers until I am
sure all entities within or close to the open volume, meaning not blocked by a
solid closed door and walls are dispatched. Opening and closing things has more effect
on the environment than you think.
Most importantly, I remember that they have 180' sight, so even when I am using my
primative bow, I try to often position myself so that if in a closet, or a corner,
the block edges, lower their sight angle. And I will aim for the forhead as they wobble
in their sleep.
Out doors I use rocks, and approach from the back, With that I can approach from behind
squat running, rinse repeat. Even at no points invested, doing this I can get within a
step or two of them, before they turn, then I spike em and back up. Because they have a built
in insta swing. They rage for about 14 blocks or paces, then a single bow shot to the leg
and they go back to a normal pace. This is my process in all combat, at low strength and
allows me to spelunk high tier Pois early game without compensating with perks.
Most of my game, because I don't mind slow progression is based on stealth, that is how I
equate my success. And suppressors, are not silencers: meaning they lower the distance
sound travels, but they are louder that the twang of a bow string.
And quick repeated sounds give away your position. Most of this is carry over from when I
play Splinter Cell. TWD rules of engagement.
the meter to play in stealth mode. If a zombie makes a breating sound I stop, and
wait for it to go back to sleep, I break up all garbage at the longest distance away.
I have a dead zone on my controller so I creep a lot slower with consistency than
most keyboard mouse combinations, I don't open and close containers until I am
sure all entities within or close to the open volume, meaning not blocked by a
solid closed door and walls are dispatched. Opening and closing things has more effect
on the environment than you think.
Most importantly, I remember that they have 180' sight, so even when I am using my
primative bow, I try to often position myself so that if in a closet, or a corner,
the block edges, lower their sight angle. And I will aim for the forhead as they wobble
in their sleep.
Out doors I use rocks, and approach from the back, With that I can approach from behind
squat running, rinse repeat. Even at no points invested, doing this I can get within a
step or two of them, before they turn, then I spike em and back up. Because they have a built
in insta swing. They rage for about 14 blocks or paces, then a single bow shot to the leg
and they go back to a normal pace. This is my process in all combat, at low strength and
allows me to spelunk high tier Pois early game without compensating with perks.
Most of my game, because I don't mind slow progression is based on stealth, that is how I
equate my success. And suppressors, are not silencers: meaning they lower the distance
sound travels, but they are louder that the twang of a bow string.
And quick repeated sounds give away your position. Most of this is carry over from when I
play Splinter Cell. TWD rules of engagement.
Sapient6
Survivor
This is easily the worst part of running a stealth build. Would be nice if the final switch in a POI would activate any remaining sleepers/spawns (provided some percentage of clear were achieved). Or just go ahead and mark all the remaining zombies spawn triggers, even if there is more than one. SOMETHING so we don't have to know the golden path like the back of our hand in order to finish a Clear objective in a stealth build.
zztong
Hunter
Yes, the "saving grace" has been when its a "clear" mission I can see the red dots and get some idea of where to look for them.
Then the tragedy is that I have to destroy something to see them, which can wake them, though usually I'm down to just 1-2 of them again, so easily handled, once found.
As for the golden path, I like to call it the "suckers path" as it is guaranteed to lead you into ambushes and concealed zombies. If you take a different path, or even follow the path backwards, you get better lines of sight on zombies and have more success with stealth.
theFlu
Hunter
Nothing says stealth like an auger thru the vault door exit..
zztong
Hunter
Nothing says stealth like an auger thru the vault door exit..
Heh, yeh. I have sometimes activated a quest then gone around the perimeter poking holes so that there would be exits. Sometimes you take down an exterior door (like a vault door) and discover a loot room. If so, that's great as you can follow the sucker's path backwards and many of the zombies will be standing in the open because you're on their side of their concealment.
Lax
Survivor
Until they slowly materialize right in front of you once you're a few feet away from their spawn point and then magically disappear again if you slowly back away!
zztong
Hunter
Until they slowly materialize right in front of you once you're a few feet away from their spawn point and then magically disappear again if you slowly back away!
That can certainly happen. The range to horizontally activate a volume is 4m and that can be kind of close if you're moving fast. The reason for that distance is game performance. The vertical distance to activate a volume is 0m, which is downright nasty, but again, game performance. If they were to make it more than that you would be activating volumes on other floors.
But the end effect is you can get some surprises, so I say part of the stealth game is arranging NOT to drop vertically into a room and to be really careful with ladders because for some reason they turn off stealth.
The triggers are what make people cringe. Its one thing to have a trigger linked to something like opening a door. That lets us do things like wake up a zombie in a closet when you open the closet door. A couple of those little surprises are good clean fun, IMO.
The ones where you get a nasty ambush for crossing a magic line are harder to swallow. Looking at them from the POI designer side, its easy to envision a variety of plausible reasons as to what is happening. But on the player side those reasons aren't obvious or visible. So, while a POI developer might say to himself ... this minscript represents a bunch of zombies hiding in a long pipe, the player just knows wave after wave of zombies keep crawling out of the same box. That's where I think we as POI designers lose the players and perhaps we lose the stealth players earlier.
InfiniteWarrior
Survivor
I've seen this a lot. It's even happening near the game world ambulance with a zombie sitting/not sitting/sitting/not sitting next to it. Opening a closet with no zombie in it, only to find a zombie in it and headed toward you if you take one extra step, etc. Should we file that under janky but adorable? Or does something, maybe, need to be done about this?Until they slowly materialize right in front of you once you're a few feet away from their spawn point and then magically disappear again if you slowly back away!
InfiniteWarrior
Survivor
Correct me if wrong, but a veteran developer playing around with various game engines mentioned that Unity requires scripts for scenarios that would otherwise normally be hard-coded. I gathered that's why there are so many manual triggers in the game -- switches that you have to press or flip for zombies to spawn. Now, there are all these proximity triggers. If that's true of Unity, I'm not sure how they would do ambushes and the like any other way and still support stealth gameplay all the way through a POI.
The back off and re-establish stealth mode is awkward, but the triggers are probably better than the game being utterly predictable. Can't say I appreciate the sheer volume of zombies when playing solo myself, but so be it. I just won't play those POIs anymore unless I'm in a really, really good mood.
zztong
Hunter
That first sentence doesn't really mean anything to me as it is stated. While I was a software engineer in a previous career, I've never written code for Unity, so maybe the sentence would be clearer if I had.
What I do know many of those triggers are relatively new in the life of 7d2d POIs. That is, you started to get them in 1.0. The minscript feature is pretty new too, and I think that's probably the work of TFP developers, not Unity. That's speculation on my part based on my POI/Mod experiences dating from A19. I'm not privy to TFP's engineering decisions so I have to guess as my only method for filling in the gaps.
That is to say, we've had trigger volumes for quite a while, but we've not had key racks, buttons and minscripts that let them do things like make a volume spawn waves from the same sleeper placements, make cool sounds play, make things explode, etc. When minscripts came about we started to see much heavier use of these advanced tricks and TFP's existing POIs got refits, as they tend to get a little attention with each version.
I realize it might seem weird to characterize a feature that arrived a couple of years ago as new, but I don't recall triggers having a huge role in A19, A20, A21, and I saw 1.0 as when they started to ramp up. Though time and my memory can make things cloudy, so maybe I'm just not remembering things correctly.
theFlu
Hunter
I wouldn't blame Unity for anything wrt stealth vs triggers interaction. Some triggers are used to load in nearby zeds; what they do from there isn't mandated by Unity. I say that with confidence, without ever writing a line of code within Unity 
The evidence is simple, all the sleepers are loaded in via whatever mechanic; only some of them are given x-ray knowledge of the player location. Thus, the latter part is a decision by TFP. The locations where zeds are dropped after triggering is also obviously chosen by TFP (they've had some hiccups...)
The activating triggers are there to provide an interactive environment for the game. At about 90-95% of the time, that's for a non-stealther. They work fine in that sense.. stealth is a bit of an afterthought. Attempts to make them work with a stealth mechanic have proven difficult, but stealth isn't really a big budget focus here. I wish it was, but I'm just kinda happy it hasn't been taken out yet ..
The evidence is simple, all the sleepers are loaded in via whatever mechanic; only some of them are given x-ray knowledge of the player location. Thus, the latter part is a decision by TFP. The locations where zeds are dropped after triggering is also obviously chosen by TFP (they've had some hiccups...)
The activating triggers are there to provide an interactive environment for the game. At about 90-95% of the time, that's for a non-stealther. They work fine in that sense.. stealth is a bit of an afterthought. Attempts to make them work with a stealth mechanic have proven difficult, but stealth isn't really a big budget focus here. I wish it was, but I'm just kinda happy it hasn't been taken out yet ..
4sheetzngeegles
Hunter
I have had it happen a few times, but measuring it against how it was prior. I'd take this .
Prior the sleeper blocks, would appear, above the collider where it was to be placed. The result
no matter the material they landed on was a thump thump. They all appear the same way now,
but a lot that you don't see materialize, are just out of player render area. I have been in the open
turned then turned back and there was a zombie.
They just couldn't set them to appear for every pathing situation, and if there is more than one person
building POIs there may be variances. But yeah hitting a switch having a door in front of you open, and
10 ferals materialize right there is a code brown moment. Good Times.
I do, it is by far my prefered build for playing solo. It seems also the playstyle that is the most error-prone. One thing is that you have to learn to spot the traps locations in the POI and add the right counter-measure. I.e. if you have to drop down to a bigger room in POI it almost always will be a trap. And as an AGI player you either know how to run around in compact spaces and keep zombies off you while shooting (which often fails when I try to do it) or you need an escape route to back out fast and run away to some spot where you can restealth and clean them off one by one instead as a group. Sometimes I add such an escape route but then fail the jump to actually escape. Very very embarassing.
And sometimes the zombies surprise me by doing something totally unexpected and although there is a simple counter measure I could have done I try the wrong thing and get killed as well. It doesn't make me feel better that I know immediately after death what I should have done instead.
CoolJ
Refugee
I have found that there is really not much problem sneaking around in most POIs under T5. It's when you hit T5 that the BS starts to happen where TFP literally spawn Zs behind you in rooms you already cleared the second you pass some imaginary line. Some of them, like NDC #7 or something, there is a section of showers and you can clear out the first row completely, go all the way to the end, loot the lockers, turn back to go down the second row, and the instant you get in the hallway between the first and second row, 15 or so Zs spawn in the row you just cleared and all the ones in the second row wake up pinching you in the middle. There is no "stealthing" that away. You better have an M60 ready to mow the back group down enough you can slip back through the glass doors that lead to the section and back into the stairwell, or you are definitely a dead man.
pApA^LeGBa
Hunter
I mean even in Splinter Cell, a game that is about stealth, you didn´t stealth 100% of the game. Do a bit of mix up in your playing styles. Also gets boring fast if you do every POI the same way.
4sheetzngeegles
Hunter
Stealth in 7days, should not be used as a complete avoidance tool. But more as a fun
addition, specifically when you are at a lower level. As you progress, you use different
weapons and use other tools. Molotov cocktails, and spikes and spears and pipe weapons.
and knives. From the rollout of 2.5 I actually began to use nearly all weapons now.
Since I don't concentrate on exp as much, I just invest in looting and hunting, and 1 point
in archery to get parts for later, and one point in rifles to get the lever action. Just eat
a little something and exp will be delivered to you like DoorDash and pizza.
addition, specifically when you are at a lower level. As you progress, you use different
weapons and use other tools. Molotov cocktails, and spikes and spears and pipe weapons.
and knives. From the rollout of 2.5 I actually began to use nearly all weapons now.
Since I don't concentrate on exp as much, I just invest in looting and hunting, and 1 point
in archery to get parts for later, and one point in rifles to get the lever action. Just eat
a little something and exp will be delivered to you like DoorDash and pizza.