I've finished game once with stealthy sniper psi and it was breeze. Looking forward for some more challenge and would really interested to play pure melee/heavy armor/sledgehammer build. Your second build looks pretty interesting, Wildan, but may I have some questions about it. How would you manage to avoid all these traps, especially these annoying coil spider's, with such low perception and zero investment into trap skill? You've mentioned stealth plays important role for this build, and I do agree stealth is awesome, but I simply cannot see how would you use stealth if you use heavy armor most times. Should I plan to use particular secondary weapon, because I found it very difficult to progress at early stages with sledgehammer when you can perform only two or even one attack per turn :/
Some tips would be appreciated.
Traps? You walk over them. Well, not deliberately but with a solid super steel armor, preferably with a sturdy vest (100% of quality translates to bonus hitpoints), infused siphoner leather tabbis, 10 CON and Juggernaut your hitpoints and resistances will be good enough to survive the worst acid traps easily. As for the frag (Mk V) mines, while they have the highest damage potential, most of it is mechanical damage and you have exceptional resistance against it. Not just because of the armor but also because of the resistance that gets applied after it.
These stack together: Conditioning, Stoicism, lifting belt, infused ancient rathound leather (5% on armor and tabbis each), mushroom brew, aegis and morphine drug.
You'll have: Conditioning 15% + lifting belt 10% + mushroom brew 10% = 35% resistance against mechanical damage that you will have all the time. With the armor and this alone, Carnifex - the last arena opponent will do little harm as he deals only mechanical damage (plus he can't stun you with Combo).
In encounters where you expect alot of mechanical damage (like after your shield goes dry) and have full or close to full health you can take the morphine drug to bring it up to 85%. But watch the side effects with it. With aegis it will bring you to 95%. A full sniper critical hit will only scratch you at this point.
One downside of using drugs with this build is that it always costs you 10 AP vs 2 AP if you were wearing a doctor's pouch, which is better than the lifting belt but as a sledghammer fighter you need the belt. Pure sledgehammer builds benefit more from the mushroom brew then anybody else. You don't only get the 10% damage resistance but also +1 STR and the -2 DEX malus won't hurt you at all because you don't rely on DEX and you couldn't care less about PSI. In the recent patch food duration was increased but mushroom brew still lasts quite a bit shorter so make sure to hoard on it. You can buy it from the barkeeper in Rail Crossing but it's also found in food loot now and then.
Thanks to infused siphoner leather tabbis (seriously these are so OP) and Thick Skull, coil spiders are no threat as they no longer can stun or immobilize you.
For trap detection you don't have to rely on traps skill:
http://www.underrail.com/wiki/index.php?title=TrapsA good pair of motion detection goggles will boost your natural detection (which scales with your level) enough to detect not all, but still most common traps.
Just because you wear metal armor it doesn't mean you have to walk around with 95% armor penalty. Super steel armor with a blade or two on it will be good enough to keep close to half of your stealth skill and still qualify for Juggernaut.
As you surely know, there are other means to bump your stealth besides putting points in it: Cloaking device, black balaclava and if really needed you can switch to ninja tabbis occasionally. Unlike a sniper you don't need high stealth for damage, you only need enough to get into melee range.
Don't plan to use a secondary weapon if that means for you to alter the build by wasting stat or skill points into something you won't use later anyway. This is how I like to start with a sledgehammer build:
After doing the initial quests in SGS I go straight to Junkyard and buy a lifting belt which brings your 25 AP sledgehammer swings down to 20 AP so you can hit with two regular hits plus one with Pummel. If you have tabbis at this point use a serrated (shock) knife for 11 AP per swing. That way you can always hit 2 times with the hammer (2x19 AP) and once with the knife. If you don't have the tabbis simply leave your second slot empty and use fists fot 10 AP.
If you can afford it either buy or craft a tactical vest with an armor plate in it. It will be superior to metal armor at this point and makes more sense for the upcomming encounters in GMS compound. You're likely to be immune against most bullet hits, even from those AR bandits in the 3rd level caves and because your armor penalty is above 50 you can plan to take Juggernaut for extra hitpoints at level 4.
Later when you go back to Junkyard to get the drill parts you can focus on making a proper metal armor.
Looking at my chart above I think it would be better to rearrange some other feats as well and make a focus on super steel sledgehammer stuns (15% chance). Critical hits are mostly for Bone Breaker so Heavyweight can be swapped with Opportunist:
This brought me to an idea about a new build: A critical hits/damage focused PSI Sledgehammer build.
The basic idea is to get as high as possible critical hit chance and damage while still being mobile and hard to kill. Being able to cast Force Field in order to bottleneck/ cut off enemies is immensely valuable as well. I took all the critical hits/damage feats including Weaponsmith but unfortunatelly Survival Instincts became unavailable because of 7 CON. To bring it back to 9 would cost 2 STR which is not worth losing. 1 point in STR had to go anyway to bring INT to 6 which is needed for Weaponsmith and more imprtantly Premeditation. It's used for 0 AP stuns with Electrokinesis which, thanks to Psychostatic Electricity debuff, gives you +15% critical chance against the main Electrokinesis target (providing there is one other target for the bolts to jump).
So to sum it up:
Basic critical chance is: 5 from the Sledgehammer + 5 from Weaponsmith + 7 From recklessness + 1 from DEX = 18% - That's nearly 1 critical in 5 hits. When you use Eletrokinesis and have 2 near targets it climbs up to 33% (initial hit + 4 jumps = 3 hits against the first target = 5*3 = 15%) - That makes on average 1 of 3 hits a critical. This is very good already. If you take the focus stim drug (second best drug in the game) it will jump by another 15% making a total of 48% chance to hit critically. That's almost every other hit. Now we're talking. Thanks to Cheap Shots, Heavyweight and Critical Power a tungsten steel sledgehammer will do about 425% (!) critical damage. That might be even more damage then snipe. Downside of this build is that the hitpoints are considerably lower thanks to 7 vs 9 CON and PSI so Superslam falls out, especially on hard difficulty but I'm convinced that insane critical chance and damage can make up for it. Skillwise you don't have to invest alot into Psychokinesis and thanks to 6 int you need less for crafting. Just get enough so you can qualify for Telekinetic Imprint which is awesome to have.
In any case of a pure sledgehammer build always use a TiChrome sledgehammer for your second slot. It has 3 less base AP cost. With the belt + tabbis it will get down to 16 and when you reach maximum Taste for Blood stacks it will get further down to 14 AP. At that point when you pop in an adrenaline shot you will be able to swing it for 5 times within the 70 AP pool - pretty sweet. In case of the PSI build, when you get the fatigue penalty just cast Force Field and maybe the Imprint to block the enemies and try to get a distance. Till they catch up with you fatigue will be over in most cases. The same applies to situations where the enemy uses adrenaline shot but you're unlikely to kill or stun him in one round. Cut him off with the field and let him cool off to fatigue.
