IRUS'S BIG GUIDE OF MELEE

Before I start, as we all know, Gun's reign supreme in ZP. There is no denying this. If you choose to be a Pure Meleeist then you are currently at a disadvantage. You will in no way be able to kill hordes as efficiently as a Player wielding a mini gun and so forth. You may be killed easier, and you will end up using more SP.

These are simply the facts of it. If you want to be a Melee Expert then this Guide will show you everything you need to do it. If you however want to use Melee for when the battle comes to you, then this guide still may be helpful. It's aim is also to help you understand more of what Melee is capable of, and how much you can rely on it.

There are still features being planned that will possibly alter Melee or how its used, with Perks, abilities and new weapons etc. Down the road. I'll update this as those changes happen, But for now I'm outlining with what we've got.


STATS:

There are not many things More important to a Melee user than Stats. The 3 most important stats are Agility, Constitution, and of course Close Combat. I'm Going to abbreviate these to AGI, CON and CC.

Agility:

AGI is the most important skill for melee. It's entire purpose is so that you don't get hit, and if your any kind of melee user your being hit a lot. It plays a huge part in Combat. With a high enough agility you can get hit at a lowly minimum of 5%. Meaning the Zombies will hit you far and few between while you beat the living crap out of them.

I advise if your starting off as a Melee user to up this first to a respectively high level. A good 50-60 will last you a while, If your just starting out however 30-40 will Do you alright for lower level zombies.

AGI can be trained at Mercy Hospital (47, 07)

Constitution:

Even with the best agility you will get hit, Because of this CON is a must for melee. There is simply no other way around it. This skill is most useful when engaging with hordes. Since they have so much health themselves and attack so many times per turn they are our anti-melee. Without some health to back up your ninja like agility your as good as dead, you simply won't be able to outlast them.

I advise upping CON whenever you get the chance and are comfortable with your AGI and CC levels. Note that you can only Upgrade your CON with level up points since there is no training station for it. Try to plan around this and set aside points for it.

Close Combat:

The heart and soul of the Melee user, CC is obvious because without it you won't be able to hit anything. You will want to keep it at a moderate to high level. having it at 50-70 will get you through most enemies just fine.

You can train CC at the Baseball Stadium (21, 04) and at the College Campus (36, 30)


WEAPONS:


Currently the Zanbato Is the best Melee weapon. It is available at Blades of Steel (27, 08 for $10,000

#I'll Update this later.#


Armor:

Armor is your next best friend to your sword. It is useful for every occasion and you never have to think about it. Armor decreases the damage done to you based on a percentage. Remember however that armor doesn't deduct decimal points of damage, so try to go in 10% or 5% if you can.

The ideal thing to half would be 50% armor which means you only take half damage from everything. So you combine that with your agility and surplus of health and you are a force to be reckoned with. I depend on Armor to do its job. Sometimes I like to look back at all the damage done to me and double it to see just how much armor helps. The results are amazing.
For where you can get the best armor I suggest checking out a Armor thread.

TACTICS:


Basics:

Using melee there are a few thing you will notice. First being using melee means you don't have to reload. 2nd that you don't need to really worry about the range Enemies are at because you advance straight to them, So judging distances between zombies isn't as crucial as it is with Guns.

Healing:

Stock up on healing items! Try to have healing items on you at ALL times. Anything you can scavenge or find will work.
Stimpacks work the best but are a little pricey, they can be bought at Mercy Hospital (47, 07)or College Campus (36, 30) for $220. They also can be scavenged from ambulances. Cat and dog food is really helpful too, and abundant with pet food trucks. The downside to them is their weight, a simple encumberance bag from the Hunting Gallery (23, 20) can fix that though.

Hordes:

Whenever you Engage a horde and it is questionable if you will win or not, try to bring it down to half it's health and then run away. Heal up with healing items, then attack it again. This time you should have the advantage being preferably at full health and it at half health. This can also be used to clear out other zombies of a group, leaving only the horde for you attention.

This is possible because Enemies if injured before can only regenerate health back up to half of their health. (So doing more than half damage will not help you out more.)

Killing:

Because melee doesn't use bullets you don't have to worry about wasting ammo on smaller enemies. Because of this you can go all out, cutting down all of those easy kill zombies and racking up a good amount of EXP doing it. This is also great because the lower level enemies are less likely to hit you than say hordes, So clearing out areas of lower level enemies can be profitable. basically becoming hell's janitor. The downside to this is that it does require patience and sometimes can be boring.

To make it easier I advance to the furthest enemy in the group and then just x3 attack everything. Because of my agility I don't get hit, and all I have to think about is just clicking that one button.



Questions:

If you have any questions on Melee, comments, concerns or would like to contribute your input, as always Feel free to post your replies. ~Irus

you can buy stimpacks at the campus

Really? Cool, I never usually go around that area. I'll put that up then.

Don't forget the strength stat. It's important so you don't get hit as often.
I think it affects your close combat and defense skills.

he has 200 agility and 11 strenght, and 5% hit rate from hordes
strenght just doesn't work that way

According to Helo it does

http://blog.zombiepandemic.com/Foru...fault.aspx

" Strength is used to defend against close combat attacks."

yeah, but it doesn't

Someone make a Gun/Melee guide! lol This actually helps me as well.

I'm still thinking of adding things to it.

I was also wondering about the thing about the strength. I'm pretty sure it does have nothing to do with evading zombies though, that or I am extremely lucky with dodging them 95% of the time....

Posted By kemeD on 28-05-2010 11:29 AM
he has 200 agility and 11 strenght, and 5% hit rate from hordes
strength just doesn't work that way

With only 11 in Strength a normal horde should only hit about half the time. It is supposed to compare zombie Closecombat and player Strength, but there could be a bug that causes it to use the wrong stat, I havent looked at that part of the code in a long time.

I will check when I get back to my own machine tonight.

So your saying that I could only be using half of my potential?

I don't understand really... under skills It doesn't say any of that under strength.

Agility

The agility skill indicates your physical agility and affects your close combat skill (avoiding attacks), your chances of fleeing from combat (not done yet) and game play including quests related to agility such as climbing buildings etc.

Strength

The strength skill indicates how physically strong you are affecting your close combat skill, your encumbrance (how much you can carry), and game play related to physical strength in the game such as moving obstacles etc. (currently not available in beta)

It says that it does affect close combat, but just does not list how like agility. I assumed that since the page looked unfinished that it might be referencing to doing more damage later on.

Irus tell us in myth thread when you will start dying, ill change info on savior's church then

Ha, I'm going to be very sad if some fatal error was fixed that was keeping me alive this whole time.

petition for a respec of 200 str 11 agility if it happens

Lol. I'd be pretty buff. I really do want to know the feedback from all of this though. Will i need to re-do parts of my character? Have I just had the luck of the Irish? I'm anxious to know.

If i remember correctly, the bit about strength having an effect on defence shows up when you hold your mouse over strength stat on your character sheet. Theres a pop up tool over window that mentions it.
With a melee and agility as high as yours it shouldn't be too much problem to up your strength a bit if it gets "adjusted".
There was a discussion a while back about agility mainly being for defence verses ranged weapons, which seems a bit odd as everything except the psycho shopkeeper and wallstreet broker guy use melee to attack you.

i think strength should define how good you are to "take" attacks, like blocking, if that ever gets implemented, its not really blocking, its more of resisting getting your ear torn off xD

and if i were Irus, i would very much like to keep my ears

at you Carl.

OK, I just took a look at the code, it seems I don't know my own code half as well as I think I do. We are compare Close Combat skill with Close Combat skill which is not entirely unreasonable but I remember doing CC vs Strength. I'm trying to figure out if we have made a design decision at some point which I have forgotten about.

I will probably end up changing it to CC vs Strength. It lends more importance to Strength which I think we need.

Oh, and its Marksmanship vs Agility when shooting.

Well it makes more sense and it makes strength more important

(well, its actually quite important already, as its the key to ENC )

So how have I been dodging hordes so well? I have always had a low strength and close combat....

So if It's CC vs. Strength then I would want my Agility swapped with my strength. Or something along those lines. A re distribution would be cool though.

This is pretty crazy, I've been unknowingly playing it wrong the entire time and doing just fine....

Guess I'll have to re design the guide when the changes come out.

I've decided that If changes are implemented I'm going to revamp the entire melee guide and make it much much better. So in doing that I'll delete this thread, And remake it in the Question section. Or it can simply be moved there if that's easier.

Still waiting for the feedback on what's going to happen to The Stats.

Poor Irus xD

(it might take a while, the mods dont have as much time on their hands as us, and i dont think they wanna use all their time on the forums )

Just you two talking back and forth. I'm sure you can fight through the pain.

Wow this guide was very informative. I'll add my two cents now:

It is a no brainer that a melee fighter gets close in order to attack. Whenever a player attacks multiple enemies it behooves the player to attack the closest one first, after the first enemy is taken care off, the player either advances to the next enemy or the enemy will have already advanced close enough to attack the player. This tactic reduces the chances of being attacked by every enemy at once. Elementary.

I myself am not a pure-meleeist for a few choice reasons:

One, I am able to attack with more than just melee if needed.

Two, when it comes to stats, a player can have a stat so high that it becomes redundant to go any higher. For example, if a player can hit every enemy at 95% accuracy with only an 100 in marksmanship, there is no reason for that stat to go higher. My agility, close combat, and strength is so high at this point, that any enemy that I face in both maps, I will still hit them with 95% accuracy and they can only hit me with 5% accuracy. What's the point of getting these stats higher? Don't get me wrong I still raise them higher, but from a strategic point of view, it would be wise to raise the other weaker stats like smarts, mechanical, dare I say marksmanship.

Three, just to add a little spice to game play. I've melee'd so many enemies that I forget how fun it is to blow them to pieces every now and again. But I still hold my allegiance to melee.

So how does it work now? CC vs Strenght or CC vs Agility? I don't know what should i train

With the new enemies like the Armed Raider and the Gangster, AGI becomes more important than before. Still, AGI is a good stat for CQC, for a 20% chance to run away is taken when at 0 range. So running away from hordes after lowering them to half health than you think with only a 30% chance to run away.

are you saying that?the most important partner stat of close combat is agility?but when i read in the character details is agility is avoiding ranged attacks and strength avoiding melee attacks so for me close combat for strength and markmanship for agility....PUTANG INA NIO!!!!