Underrail Forum
Underrail => Builds => Topic started by: NumberTJ47 on December 18, 2025, 07:18:30 pm
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Hey everyone. In case anyone missed it, a new major update has just dropped. Looking forward to seeing what build people make with the rocket launcher, but I mostly want to focus on the feat changes and how they affect our builds.
"Changed the crafting requirement base from fixed 80% of component quality to ranging from 77% to 112% component quality, scaling with the quality itself (curving up); Tweaked the specific modifiers for various components."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this means that we'll need to put far more points into our crafting skills to get the highest tier equipment. With the new intelligence feats I'd imagine that crafting great equipment will be extremely costly for low int builds now.
I don't know much about a lot of high DEX builds, but I'm pretty sure this tweak is a big deal: "Minimal weapon usage action point cost changed to 5 (up from 4)"
It looks like there's been a lot of changes to the feats we use for melee builds. Expose Weakness, Fancy Footwork, and Cheap Shots have all been given big nerfs. Stasis has also been nerfed (finally.) Looks like my idea of using psi or guns to support melee builds might become much more viable. There'll be a ton to experiment with now that Exothermic Aura can help resist some CC and Psychokinesis is getting buffs.
This might also interesting for melee builds: "High-Technicalities now also increases damage from energy edge and electroshock modules".
Contaminated, and therefore Toxic Gas Grenade, has been nerfed to require 20 stack instead of 10 to reach 100% increased damage taken.
Other tweaks that might interest you:
"Reduced damage of grenade launchers across the board by about 20%"
"Forcefield now has resistances that scale with skill"
"Psychosomatic Predation - killing the target now also resets the cooldown"
"Skill-based damage bonus for light weapons (those that have their AP cost reduced by Dexterity, which are: pistols, SMGs, unarmed, fist weapons, and knives) changed from the standard 0.7% per skill to 0.5% per skill"
Hopefully everyone's handling the nerfs well. Personally I'm happy that hard mode is has more of a reason to exist and dominating might actually feel hard again.
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Let's be fair, the fist and knife builds were a bit silly.
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Personally, I believe the Domination difficulty level should live up to its name, dominating and challenging less experienced players. However, as with more experienced players, this mode shouldn't be too friendly, but should instead continually offer increasingly sophisticated countermeasures against unbalanced formations, forcing and training players to think tactically and giving them the satisfaction of winning in this mode they deserve. Therefore, I personally agree with the changes in the new patch that increase the difficulty of this mode =)
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The changes are good. Some builds have to actually try now, and there are now alternatives to many of the existing meta builds (mainly, 10 int).
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I'm currently retrying my Jin-Roh build on DOM from square one, ditching CON and it's feats for the new INT ones. First impression - Polymath is amazing alongside hacking, I am never sleeping on it again. But in general, the only difficulty spike I've noticed is with the HP increase which does hit bullet based weapons early on the most, with psi bugs and robots and their high DR/DT, you now need more bullets and I had to switch guns and ammo types a lot, right until I was able to get the Unique Bren. Good thing there is just enough money to stock up on bear traps, caltrops and nades, but it did feel like a F5-F9 slogfest up till Junkyard, after that it was a rather smooth sailing.
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Not sure if I'm understanding this correctly: It seems like the melee build took a brutal nerf in 1.3. Hit and Run and Fancy Footwork now grant about half the MP, while the minimum AP cost increased by 1, reducing damage output opportunities by nearly a 1/4. In comparison, the reduced damage bonus from skills seems insignificant. Is pure melee build even viable anymore?
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Not sure if I'm understanding this correctly: It seems like the melee build took a brutal nerf in 1.3. Hit and Run and Fancy Footwork now grant about half the MP, while the minimum AP cost increased by 1, reducing damage output opportunities by nearly a 1/4. In comparison, the reduced damage bonus from skills seems insignificant. Is pure melee build even viable anymore?
In short, yes.
Though it depends on what you mean by "pure melee" and "viable". Melee without using any psi, traps, or grenades has never been practical, and any build that does use them is gonna work fine.
I've played melee builds that didn't include Hit and Run or Fancy Footwork, and only 50% of melee builds use DEX over STR, so those aren't affected by the minimum AP cost changes.
It's a significant nerf for sure, but unless you're on dominating and really wanted to play a non-psi glove or knife build, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Also, Hit and Run and Fancy Footwork haven't had their movement points halved, they work exactly the same way as before the first time they get activated in a turn. Fancy Footwork can only give 36 MP without specialization, and 55 MP with it. That's obviously worse than before, but that's more MP than Sprint can give, so it's definitely worth taking. Not sure how the rounding works for Hit and Run, so I don't know how much MP it can give per turn, but it's never been as consistent anyway.
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Hit & run is half; 25, then presumably 12, 6, 3, 2 or 1
specced its 40, 20, 10, 5, 2 or 3, 1
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So when do we get an updated character planner? I know we can just put on some feats as placeholders, but it would be nice to see and plan with the additional skill points as you pretty much need around 200 points in your equipment crafting skills to make use of any of your components with 150+ quality. My build already had 8 INT even before the update, so for me this update tax is just a feat switch to Polymath in order to be able to craft the same gear as before. Which is painful, but there's no helping it. Yet updating it accordingly would be nice.
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https://cannedbean29.github.io/UnderrailBuilderRemake/
its finnicky, though
like for specialist, you have to level to 16, take it, then level the rest of the way
probably need to take polymath at first then level as well
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Not sure if I'm understanding this correctly: It seems like the melee build took a brutal nerf in 1.3. Hit and Run and Fancy Footwork now grant about half the MP, while the minimum AP cost increased by 1, reducing damage output opportunities by nearly a 1/4. In comparison, the reduced damage bonus from skills seems insignificant. Is pure melee build even viable anymore?
In short, yes.
Though it depends on what you mean by "pure melee" and "viable". Melee without using any psi, traps, or grenades has never been practical, and any build that does use them is gonna work fine.
I've played melee builds that didn't include Hit and Run or Fancy Footwork, and only 50% of melee builds use DEX over STR, so those aren't affected by the minimum AP cost changes.
It's a significant nerf for sure, but unless you're on dominating and really wanted to play a non-psi glove or knife build, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Also, Hit and Run and Fancy Footwork haven't had their movement points halved, they work exactly the same way as before the first time they get activated in a turn. Fancy Footwork can only give 36 MP without specialization, and 55 MP with it. That's obviously worse than before, but that's more MP than Sprint can give, so it's definitely worth taking. Not sure how the rounding works for Hit and Run, so I don't know how much MP it can give per turn, but it's never been as consistent anyway.
Yea, the Contraction tin-can Sledgehammer builds are thriving with 1-turn cd, 0 ap pummel and with LTI also on both Infused Cave Hopper Tabis Sprint and Super Slam cooldown. Other than the Stasis nerfs that hits most of the builds, it's nearly all upside for Sledgehammer stonks imo. Pummel accuracy buffs on low cd is big too. The nerf to Expose Weakness from 50% to 40% isn't that big (read the min INT scaling), and it is possible to skip the feat and not really cry about it. I like to instead slot an Energy Spear with Impale on the off-hand and one-tap to proc Hit and Run at 2-range, and to have the energy damage type available and two different "energy magazines" to skip a battery reload ap cost. You'll miss out on a spiked sledge, but the electroshock generator will often damage-match the empowered super slam anyways as dumb as it sounds (with Psi empathy). The LTI also resets the Impale too which feels great. You also don't need INT 5 if you drop Expose Weakness.
In other news, I really don't think it made sense to nerf the Fists/Unarmed so crazy hard and also leave Firearm Pistols generally untouched other than the (fairly reasonable) moderate light weapons nerf. I know the movement points on punching builds are crazy but they also got nerfed from low-ap attacks by 25% in 4 ap -> 5 ap, Expose Weakness cd nerf, Heavy Punch becoming cooldown-based and Cheap Shots incap nerf. On top of all that is also the light weapons damage nerf and the melee builds vs. +50% increased enemy health "nerf" on Hard and Dominating, melee builds being "feast or famine" due to proximity to enemies means a failure to kill is punished harder. Melee also got hit the hardest from the nerfs to stasis since they would use it aggressively, self-cast to cover their engage. I guess those melee nerfs also hit sledge builds a fair bit too. It's a lot of fist nerfs, but maybe it's not actually that bad? Idk for sure.
I think the biggest winners of the patch are Throwing Knives builds with high INT and full PSI builds with high INT. And obviously also builds that use both of those :P . I think a build similar to this with "Pack Rathound" swapped out for "Polymath" being pretty damn cheesy (you can't take PSI feats or Disassemble at level 1, although some other crafting feats are on the table, and also the build is just a placeholder to reference off of):
https://underrail.info/build/?HgMQAwMDCggAwqAAAAAAPEo0Ml8uaDxRY8KgAADCoAAATy8nKz9AFlFcKiFewojChlg-wrNyduKitQLipoYK4qi7A9--
Flashbang, LOC mental breakdown with Temporal Distortion damage bonus headband is really fucking cheesy, especially since the pop happens when their turn ends when it awakens them, so you have full freedom to proc Fatal Throw on their stupid heads if they barely survive.
Oh yea and full INT 10 builds with High Technicalities can get doubled spec points if they take "Specialist" at exactly level 16. I don't think any builds other than Laser Pistol or Chem Pistol are particularly stat-min-max'ed for doing that though. Maybe you can make an Energy Knives build op at INT 10 though. I think other INT 10 melee builds will generally just over-kill enemies and have bad ap-target finding economy and are kind of meh. The energy edge on Energy Spears does deal a fuck ton of damage though, so it might one shot sometimes, being fairly decent when it does so against medium health targets. I forgot that fist weapons get an electroshock generator, but I feel like pushing the fist build to INT 10 is a bit of a stretch personally. But I could be wrong.