b42 spears

[Karina]

Anyone tried doing playthrough with spears? Fire hardened spears looks decent (30% crit chance for x10 damage) but durability is bad. There is also option to go into metal working, but actual spears you can make there surpassed by... pitchfork. Which i find very silly.

I play with a mod that adds new traits, including one for spears.

[Sunderbraze]

Near the end of my 42.8 character, yeah, briefly. Spears are great for poking zeds through chain link fences (tons in Muldraugh now) but get annoying as ♥♥♥♥ all when more than one zombie is in range, you start swiping instead of poking, and when you swipe instead of poke, you lose on the chance for the oneshot kill, which itself is annoying even when it does work because its a one second animation lock

[Sunderbraze]

Effectiveness demo around 6:13:20 - https://www.youtube.com/live/2OznPJIzN08?t=22400s

[Regent]

30% chance to instant kill any zombie no matter what is kinda nice.

[Bomjus]

unless you have a mod that makes spears easier to craft, i don't think they are worth building a character around. you need to chop down trees and get saplings, or forage saplings, to really craft spears. and their durability is just too low for how annoying it is to get saplings. i feel like long blunt is just far superior. you can make large handles > large handles with nails at low carving. and then at high carving you can carve baseball bats out of large branches. and bats last way longer than spears.

i will say, fire hardened spears are incredibly strong. and i think there are two ways i would invest into spears. one is to start with the carpenter profession+wilderness knowledge+fast learner. this gives you a massive maintenance xp buff and short blunt as a starting weapon. i'd wait until you have maintenance 6 and decently high foraging. and then you can try swapping to spears to make them your main weapon. saplings are just too rare to make spear you main weapon on spawn without higher maintenance to deal with their low durability. also don't forget, you need 5 carpentry to craft fire hardened spears at max durability.

second way is to fully lean into blacksmithing and wait until you can craft high level metal spears/garden forks. but if you're leaning this hard into blacksmithing, why not just use long blades? since they have xp books.

[kris40k]

I don't think you need to lean into Metalworking as hard as you do for Long Blade to get decent spears. Metalworking 4 gets you a nice spearhead that increases the condition and condition lost chance significantly over the simpler spears, so they don't break as often. The heads can also be sharpened and reforged, and the shafts themselves repaired with epoxy and rags which is fairly abundant in typical apocalypse settings. There is a slight damage upgrade at Metalworking 5.

Also, maybe its just me, but I feel once you start cutting down trees for any sort of lumber collection or carpentry project, I always end up swimming in Saplings for Long Sticks, which is good since a lot of things like drying racks use a bunch to craft. As long as you target older growth trees you should always get a sapling.

With that said, I do think its a lot easier to just grind out Carving 7 and make unlimited Short Bats. Knock some nails in them for a lighter, equally critty (20% x5) weapon with similar condition.

I think when they re-balanced Spears in B42, they swung a little too far. Now, I think you go Spears just for kicks.

[Bomjus]

yeah short bats with nails, long handles with nails, carved bats are all just slightly less powerful but are either easier to make or are far more durable. sometimes both. and short/long blunt characters can use carving to get through the early game, and then grind masonry later and transition to using stone maces. which don't have the damage/stamina efficiency of the fire hardened spear, but they have ~11x the average durability of a fire hardened spear and still hit really hard (40% 4x)

Originally posted by kris40k:

I think when they re-balanced Spears in B42, they swung a little too far. Now, I think you go Spears just for kicks.

100%

[Trenema]

spears still have a good range, and with 8 or more in strength the swipes one shot multiple zomboids if multi hit is on. i have a file thats 2 months in, with strength and fitness at 9 and spears at 8, i can swipe down well over 50 zombies before i need to rest.

[Makeithappen]

Originally posted by Bomjus:

unless you have a mod that makes spears easier to craft, i don't think they are worth building a character around. you need to chop down trees and get saplings, or forage saplings, to really craft spears. and their durability is just too low for how annoying it is to get saplings. i feel like long blunt is just far superior. you can make large handles > large handles with nails at low carving. and then at high carving you can carve baseball bats out of large branches. and bats last way longer than spears.

i will say, fire hardened spears are incredibly strong. and i think there are two ways i would invest into spears. one is to start with the carpenter profession+wilderness knowledge+fast learner. this gives you a massive maintenance xp buff and short blunt as a starting weapon. i'd wait until you have maintenance 6 and decently high foraging. and then you can try swapping to spears to make them your main weapon. saplings are just too rare to make spear you main weapon on spawn without higher maintenance to deal with their low durability. also don't forget, you need 5 carpentry to craft fire hardened spears at max durability.

second way is to fully lean into blacksmithing and wait until you can craft high level metal spears/garden forks. but if you're leaning this hard into blacksmithing, why not just use long blades? since they have xp books.

im lost as to why they made spears harder to make.