Knives - craft or rely on uniques? Plus other questions (hard difficulty)

[bati]

Hey everyone

I'm playing UnderRail again, this time with a build that I've never done before, which is a knifer. I've played more or less all other variants that rely on stealth so I'm quite familiar with the mechanics of the game, but I'm currently in a bit of a dilemma - I'm making a full time saboteur character and for now I've limited myself to these skills & feats: http://underrail.info.tm/build/?GQMQCgQDAwcAMgDCh8KHwoLCh1k8ADwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAE8kJx0WEgZBPgsQPDA

I'm very familiar with grenades and traps and I'm sure I'll be able to get by with the supply I find out in the wild and on merchants, so the crafting aspect of that does not particularly worry me - I will of course invest enough to craft bear traps and high quality leather armor, the only thing I'm not sure of is crafting knives is worth it - the reason I'm asking is because there are some good unique knives available, Kukri in particular looks like a very strong debuffing tool, plus it saves me some feat slots because I don't have to take recklessness or weaponsmith then. Another thing I'm not sure of is if bleed is worth it - I had it on my previous character which was a psi-monk using Claw, and the damage increase was noticeable, but I didn't have access to knife specific feats like Eviscerate so I'm not sure how good these are. I'm aware that if I wanted to utilize bleeding I'd pretty much have to resort to crafting if I wanted to keep my weapons up to date.

Thoughts?

[HulkOSaurus]

How's it going.

Don't worry, somebody who knows more than me will post soon.

As far as the word goes, in simple layman terms, you always get the best weapons crafted by yourself.

[newageofpower]

Non-crafting builds get to dump INT and save the skill points invested into crafting. If you're not planning on dumping Crafting Skills, crafted items will generally be better.

IIRC, you can't get a crafted knife past 11% crit chance, but using q150 parts it will be much stronger in DPS than the Kukri overall, especially with electroshock considered.

On some old build threads, it was generally agreed Knife was one of the weaker builds, especially late game; fast melee attackers usually want to be psi monks using fist weapons. Cutthroat is situationally useful especially on some zones/quests, but overall the build doesn't scale as well.

That being said, a good player can clear Underrail with pretty much any build, and I think it's plausible to finish DOMINATING with a knife build.

[bati]

I definitely plan on taking some crafting, the reason I ask is because deciding between unique and crafted knives would dictate the selection of at least 3 feats I'd have to take. As you pointed out, crafted knives have pretty low crit so Weaponsmith would make sense, maybe Recklessness too - and because bleed is easy to get on crafted knives I could also get Taste of Blood, if not even Eviscerate.

I am thinking about skipping Cutthroat too, it's very situational and you can generally rely on Cheap Shots incapacitate proc if you need to keep the target cced.

[newageofpower]

With the new Expedition veteran feats, it might be possible to still have Lightning Punches while wearing Metal Armor, so consider getting bladed armor/boots to further increase bleeding procs.

[Bruno]

I play a character very much like this now.
Assassin/saboteur with knife, critical boosting feats, various throwing utilities and various traps.

I only craft armor and some drugs (focus stims). There are not enough skillpoints for everything, and I wanted both persuation+mercantile and decent dogdge+evasion.

So far I do not miss crafting weapons. The +5% critical chance would have been nice but you can't have everything. Instead I have Fancy Footwork and Blitz/Adrenaline, for more chances to hit and crit.

I could not play this w/o Pack Rathound, I carry all kinds of different utilities to be ready for anything. Paranoia, 10 Agi, 10+ Dex means you win initiative when stealth is unavailable.

Both starved for feats and skills, but very fun and powerful build.