After having played through the game a few times with the best melee weapon, bare fists, I have refined my ultimate pugilist. Mobility, defence, offence, crowd control, it has it all - check it out.
https://underrail.info/build/?HgwMBwMDAwYAAwDCoGTCoFAADwAAZGQaMmQAAAAAAMKgS08kJiATBsKoBzzCgRJFRE7CqXzCtsKewp_CoMOO4p2MBeKfhAHip4IC4ragBeK2oQLfvwBuild Philosophy
I didn't start out looking to make an all-round effective build, it just came together naturally from the starting point of wanting to use bleeds and Taste for Blood.
Naturally, a suit of bladed metal armour was the means to accomplish this task.
At endgame, I realized that I would be able to create a suit of bladed regenerative super steel armour with 66% damage resistance whilst still retaining the AP reduction from Lightning Punches.
Low armour penalty would make dodge and evasion viable, which in turn would make the character pretty tanky in combination with the resistances from the metal armour and his tabis and health regen added on top.
Using metal armour would eat up feat slots and make boosting crit chance via infused rathound armour impossible, so I decided to forget about crits and boost unconditional, non-crit damage as high as possible through feats and specialization.
4 AP attacks and the multitude of on-hit status effect options available to bare fisted fighters (daze, stun, incapacitation, fear) meant that boosting the chance of inflicting status effects via specialization allowed me to reliably disable large groups of enemies one way or another and block choke points with disabled foes for as long as they could take a beating.
Before I get onto the last part of this section, I'll list the endgame gear of the build to give a clear picture of what you're working with.
Head: Tchortist Bioscrubber/Death's Grin - Boost healing, health, bio resistance + reduction and Brutality, respectively.
Body: Bladed Regenerative Super Steel Armour/Rathound Regalia - Metal armour decently boosts fire/energy resistance on top of aforementioned benefits.
Rathound Regalia for dealing the maximum damage possible to take down Nagas.
Belt: Serpent Slaying Sash - Unfortunately RNG-based but provides good boost to bio reduction and vital initiative.
Feet: Infused Greater Siphoner/Black Cloth Tabis - Infused greater siphoner tabis are almost always the best choice, providing lots of dodge/evasion, slowing effect immunity (more versatile than you might think), AP reduction and additional fire/energy resistance and uses leather available in very high quality.
Black cloth for sneaking, obviously.
Utilities: Taser and whatever else you fancy. Molotovs are always nice.
Weapons (main hand): Your mitts
Weapons (off hand): Kukri for applying Expose Weakness (EW) against those pesky robots, spear for bladelings, cuttlesnails and stabbing enemies caught behind choke points, Quake for dazing crowds.
Finally, there was the question of the bane of all unarmed builds: robots.
EW is always handy, but limited in Lemurian robot swarms.
Luckily, at high levels, the build deals such high base damage that it can even punch through the damage threshold of strongmen fairly reliably.
Handmaidens are taken down in 2-3 turns without any DR/DT reducing effects having been applied to them.
On top of this, the build has the survivability to whittle down crowds of robots whilst taking constant hits and waiting for EW to come off of cooldown and trying to weaken them with your kukri.
Videos of the build in action. I wouldn't recommend watching them all the way through as they're long and I managed both runs on my first attempt so they weren't very well planned out. They're more a proof of concept than anything else.
Grey Army Base being cleaned out, no reloads and no psi.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/MPqhOEDcHfb3/I'd say that the best part is 1:00 to 1:30, which demonstrates the amount of crowd control potential the build has.
Fort Apogee being cleaned out, with minimal psi cheese and no reloads (and 20 seconds of dead air at the start).
https://www.bitchute.com/video/5jhJqZrEZPdy/At roughly 0:50 and 19:40 my 3 CON character tanks plasma pistol crits, it's a pretty good demo of how good the combo of infused siphoner tabis and super steel armour is.
What about Wrestling?
Since I first made this build, I have come to the realization that Wrestling is a bloody good feat. Unfortunately, the build is very tight on feat choice and the only ones I'd be willing to switch out are Escape Artist and Yell. I'd still recommend taking Wrestling instead of Yell and putting spec points into Wrestling at the cost of unarmed combat daze chance and cheap shots incapacitation chance, as tackled stacks function as a superior version of daze anyway.
