Start a new game, take off the shirt that the character has, congratulations, that is the equipment that this character will use for the rest of the game. No weapons, no clothing, no magic; with only bare fists, punch thugs, soldiers, champions, mutants, beasts, robots, serpents, gods as the character journeys through the entirety of Underrail.
(Except the belt, just use any belt to your liking. I used Large Waist Pack for carry capacity)
The impetus for this build is because I am very lazy, and one day I got irritated too much constantly repairing my weapons and armor and keeping track of the number of repairs kits in my inventory. I decided to make this build psiless too because too lazy to keep track and maintain the two bars (PSI points and PSI reserves) and the items to replenish those two bars. Also no crafting skills at all, I'm too lazy to keep track and gather ingredients and recipes.
Buildhttps:// underrail.info/build/?HgMPBwoDAwUAwqAAwqDCoMKgwqDCglDCoG4AAAAAAAAAAAAAAABPJGMgHQ1OFsKoBhITB8KzDD454p-EAeKfhQXiqKYF4ragBN-_
Build ExplanationAttributes
- 3 str - although every point of strength above 5 will increase bare fists damage by 5% MULTIPLICATIVELY (meaning at 15 strength it is a straight +50% damage, its huge!), this build does not have spare attribute points to invest into strength. Bare fists related feats which have strength requirements (e.g. Wrestling) are also not as important as those bare fists feats with dex requirements. So strength becomes a dump stat.
- 17 dex - increases melee precision and damage, decreases AP cost of punches, increases multiplier of multiple useful skills (throwing, melee, lockpicking, pickpocketing, traps), fulfills the dexterity requirements of some of the best feats in the game (Cheap Shots, Grenadier, Escape Artist). With 17 dex and the Lightning Punches Feat, without any Tabi Boots, AP cost of bare fist punch is reduced to 4. Dexterity is the best stat!
- 7 agi - fulfills agi requirement of 2 important feats: interloper and fancy footwork. Rationale for feats explained below. As a bonus, increases multiplier of dodge, evasion and stealth, the 3 skills included in this build.
- 10 con - all of my builds have 10 Con and Thick Skull. 10 con offers a good amount of health not to die in 1 hit from all the bullshit that Underrail throws at you. Thick skull explained below.
- 3 per - dump stat. Useless for this build.
- 3 wil - dump stat. Useless for this build.
- 5 int - Solely for 2 extremely important feats: expose weakness and cheap shots. Rationale for feats explained below.
Skills
- 160 (336) Melee – of course
- 160 (200) Dodge – Defenses for a naked guy without any protection from equipment
- 160 (200) Evasion – Defenses for a naked guy without any protection from equipment
- 160 (336) Throwing – for all my other builds I find 110 effective to be enough, but for this character, what else is he going to spend his skill points on? A minor benefit with such a high throwing skill is, even when intimidated by yell throwing skill remains high enough to retain 90% precision.
- 160 (200) Stealth – for all my other builds I find 100 effective to be enough, but for this character, what else is he going to spend his skill points on?
- Pickpocketing – 160 (336) - for all the faction oddities and health hypos. For all my other builds I find 160 effective to be enough, but for this character, what else is he going to spend his skill points on?
- Lockpicking – 135 effective is enough for the whole game
- Hacking – 135 hacking is enough for the whole game
- Traps – still too many points left over, dumped leftover points into Traps. Allowed me to retrieve Plasma Traps from Black Sea to use against the Natives in my playthrough.
Feats
- Expertise – Bare fist damage is so low that expertise can account for about half of the damage output of this character at times. This build probably does not work without this feat. Take at level 1.
- Expose Weakness – this character's only tool against armored enemies. Without this feat, it's 0 damage against Colossal and Psi Crabs, Strongmen, Dreadnoughts, Naga protectors, etc.
- Lightning punches – Combined with 17 dex reduces ap cost of bare fist from 10 to 4, resulting in 12 punches a turn.
- Cheap Shot – For one on one combat against an organic target, this feat allows one lone mob to be incapacitated indefinitely while being punched to death. If lucky, sometimes this feat can also incapacitate a small group of 2 or 3 all at once.
- Fancy Footwork – Allows kiting of slow moving mobs. Punch a mob till movement points are maxed out, run away, mob spends all AP chasing the character down and can't attack, repeat. Abused this especially for the Black Sea against crabs and strongmen.
- Combo – double damage every third hit. The double damage can be useful in overcoming armor sometimes. For example, a normal hit can hit for 4 to 5 damage, the combo can hit for 40+. Helps against some armored enemies when Expose Weakness is on cooldown. The stun also procs more than I expected and helped quite a bit.
- Improved Unarmed Combat – More damage, get it.
- Thick Skull – all of my builds have 10 Con and Thick Skull. Getting stunned in this game is a death sentence, and I don't like using bullheads because my fights typically last longer than 3 turns, and crafting them requires fishing. If I am too lazy to manage durability on armor and weapons, I am definitely too lazy to fish for fish to craft bullheads.
- Nimble – More dodge and evasion, the only defenses this character has.
- Interloper – the stealth speed increase turns some unavoidable fights into avoidable ones. It also allows for way easier sneaking up to small groups to assassinate them.
- Dirty Kick – I love this feat on melee builds. Its a very good CC move that uses up no utility slot. Lasts 2 turns on human males, which occurs more often than not, because a huge chunk of enemies in the game are human males. Also, I always use this feat to cheese the arena. The arena consists of only human males for the gladiator fights, and a 2 turn stun is a guaranteed death sentence for all of them, except for the last one, because he has a very high mechanical DT that is hard to overcome with this build.
- Escape Artist – Getting entangled means being a sitting duck while ranged enemies freely throw machine gun fire and magic spells at the character. Dodge and evasion also drops to 0 when entangled, further cementing the character as a sitting duck. This feat is very important not to be a sitting duck.
- Grenadier – I found this feat most useful fighting against the natives in the Black Sea. Among the natives, the Sormirbaeren Sppaeters and Oyetsppaeters are the biggest threats to melee characters, and the Grenadier feat allowed enough cooldown reduction to spam frag grenades to insta-kill these enemies on sight, before they get any chances to cast bilocation.
- Deflection – Great against a multitude of dangerous mobs: crawlers, melee natives in the Black Sea, strongmen, crabs, etc.
- Sprint – I had encountered many situations which Sprint would have helped, but with this build being so feat hungry I somehow managed to get to the end of the game without using this feat. Still recommended though.
- Increased Dexterity – Dexterity is best stat. This build also requires this feat to reach 4AP attacks.
- Expert Unarmed Combat – More damage, get it.
Specialization points
- 1/1 Expose Weakness: Duration – The most important specialization point. Some mobs require more than 2 turns to kill.
- 5/5 Expose Weakness: Resistance – Going from –50% DT/DR to –60% DT/DR does not seem like much, but considering this is the one and only utility against armored foes, may as well.
- 4/5 Improved Unarmed Damage – Just more damage
- 5/5 Expertise – Each point of damage counts, considering how low base unarmed damage is.
Equipment
- Weapons – naked! Nothing in this slot
- Helmet – naked! Nothing in this slot
- Armor – naked! Nothing in this slot
- Belt – thankfully belts have no durability, so I equipped this character with a Large Waist Pack for increased Carry Capacity. I would prefer Utility belt for an additional belt slot, but with 3 strength and no pack ratbound feat this character has a very limited carry capacity.
- Boots – naked! Nothing in this slot
- Energy shield emitter – naked! Nothing in this slot (don't tell me shield emitters have no durability, I still have to charge it after every combat encounter, too lazy for that)
Why no crit feats? Because both the damage of bare fists, and the critical damage bonus on bare fists are abysmal. A normal hit with expertise hits about the same as a critical hit. The following combat log shows it best, note that my char is at level 25, with 5/5 spec points expertise, 0/5 spec point cheap shot and no critical power perk:
Naked Puncher hits Sormirbaeren Krigsfar for 54 mechanical damage.
Sormirbaeren Krigsfar resists 9 mechanical damage.
Naked Puncher critically hits Sormirbaeren Krigsfar for 58 mechanical damage.
Sormirbaeren Krigsfar resists 10 mechanical damage.
Build Review I played this on Normal Oddity difficulty.
Pros
- No need to manage ammo, durability, repair kits, scraps, medicine components, Psi reserves and inhalants, etc.
- No need to worry about wasting durability/ammo on trash mobs such as rathounds.
- No need to worry about a certain high level mob ruining your armor with rusting acid. What armor?
- Damage scale as your level. No need to look for higher quality crafting components to upgrade your weapon damage, as unarmed damage automatically scales with level.
- Enjoy 4 AP attacks by level 26.
- Very good DPS against unarmored targets, especially when approaching late game.
- Able to indefinitely lockdown a single mob with cheap shots incapacitation. With up to 12 hits per turn and 15% chance to incapacitate per turn, this character can reliably proc cheap shots incapacitation one or two times in a turn.
- Unarmed inflicts a dizzying array of status effects.
- Cheap shots has a 15% chance to incapacitate per hit
- Combo has 20% chance to stun every 3 hits
- Improved Unarmed Combat has a 5% chance to daze per hit
- Expert Unarmed Combat has a 5% chance to stun per hit
- Silent assassinations: unarmed is one of the most silent attack types. Stealth up to a lone mob, kill it in 1 turn. Stealth up to a group of 2, kill 1, incapacitate/dirty kick the other, kill it in the second turn.
- You are Evelyn's worst nightmare.
- Go anywhere, unlock anything and everything. With no points in crafting, lots of skill points are available to invest in lockpicking, hacking, pickpocketing, stealth. Faction oddities can be stolen, containers can be picked to get oddities, doors can be hacked to access oddities lying around in locked rooms, vents can be opened to get around to secret areas. This build is very suited for an oddity run.
Cons
- Biggest bane of this build has to be groups of armored enemies. Armor drastically reduces the damage output of this build. Expose weakness is the only thing mechanism available to counter armored enemies, and it is on a 4 second cooldown. When there are multiple armored mobs, this character can only kill one, then employ other tricks to delay mobs until Expose Weakness is available again.
- This build performs great on base Underrail, but Expedition is downright treacherous for this build for reasons:
- Expedition is full of armored enemies that commonly appears in groups:
- Crabs: this character does 0 damage to Colossal Crabs and Psi Crabs without Expose Weakness. With Expose Weakness, this character still need 2 turns flailing on a Colossal Crab to kill it. Psi Crabs are the worst; with Expose Weakness, this character still need an adrenaline shot and 2 full turns flailing on a Psi Crab to kill it.
- Strongmen: does 0 damage to strongmen without Expose Weakness. Thankfully, they walk slow and have no ranged abilities, hence it is easy enough to kite them using Fancy Footwork while waiting for Expose Weakness to cool down.
- Plasma turrets: usually come in pairs, does a lot of damage, and have a long range.
- Naga protectors: Nagas are so heavily armored that even with Expose Weakness, half of my attacks still did no damage. Only Combo hits did some decent damage. Had a lot of trouble against the 2 Naga fight on Normal difficulty, used 9 EMP grenades and 6 Mark III HE grenades total. And that was with the help of the plasma turrets, activated via hacking.
- It is difficult to fight on maps which feature both land and water. (Actually this applies to all other melee builds) i.e.
- Sormirbaeren temple – Sea wyrms spawn in the pools around the map. No jet ski in this map, totally cannot reach and attack them.
- Fetid Marsh – Sea wyrms, serpents, and locusts roam the waters adjacent to the land that the character walks on, melee attacks cannot reach them while they spit all kinds of spits at the character
- Parts of native village in Black Sea – forced to make beach landings while in full view of the natives
- Abandoned Waterway Facility – there will be enemies in the water riding jet ski shooting guns while the character is on land, and there will be turrets and snipers waiting on land when the character is riding a jet ski.
- With 0 DT, this character is especially vulnerable to mobs spamming light attacks, e.g. SMG fire and the locusts in Fetid Marsh.
- No looking forward to upgrading the gear on the character as there is no gear to upgrade.
All in all, I had too much fun with this build, so much so that I managed to complete the entire campaign for both the base game and Expedition, something which I had not been able to do with other builds that I made. [/list]
