Help with knife build

[meiam]

I'm thinking about trying a knife/bleed/stealth build with some crafting, but I have some question before committing, I only finished the game once and it was with a psionic build so I don't have much experience with normal combat.

First I avoided dodge/evasion, on paper I found those somewhat underwhelming, they sound really good when fighting against weaker enemy, but strong enemy probably have attack skill similar to your dodge/evasion, so you'll get, what, maybe 10-20% chance to avoid there attack even if you heavily spec into them. Instead I'm trying to spec into guard/board up/parry/shield arm, which require high str (probably something like 10). But I'm welcome to be proven wrong on that. Is it still worth grabbing nimble?

I was going to go dex 11 for 6 attack at Ap 12, but I'm not sure if I'm missing something with those number. Is expertise worth it in this case?

I'm going for something along those line, probably will play on hard, oddity

At 20
http://underrail.info.tm/build/?FAsLBwUDAwUAKABuKABubm4AAG5uDw9uAAAAAAAAAA45T8KZBjwLwqsQE1LCgt-_

At 30 (this I'm really not sure about so I put it separately)
http://underrail.info.tm/build/?HgsLBwUDAwYAKADCoCgAwqDCoMKgAADCoMKgAA_CoAAAAAAAAEEOOU_CmQY8C8KrEBNSwoJCAEvCthLfvw

Some quick question:

Is it worth grabbing dirty trick? A stun every 6 sec seems nice, but feats are in high demand

How useful is crippling strike?

I'm not grabbing ripper since I'd rather spend the will elsewhere, mistake?

How much throw skill do I want? I'll probably use grenade a bit, at least for flashbang.

How high do crafting need to get, I don't remember how much of a diminishing return there was. What about lockpicking/hacking?

In my last game I had no problem leveling persuasion, but with low will I'll probably skip it, am I gonna miss anything big? I could put more point in it if I drop it out of crafting, but at 3 will it'll probably be near useless anyway.

[Drokmon]

I'll try to address this in the order that you wrote it.

Dodge/Evasion worth it?
I've always found them to be useful if you go all-in on them (at least 8 AGI, tabi boots, Nimble for 0 Armor Penalty and 15% bonus, Jumping Bean, etc). It's true that on higher difficulties and against stronger enemies, they don't seem to perform as well.
To help Dodge, get Uncanny Dodge. Guaranteed misses on X number of melee attacks for a few turns is fantastic, especially against Crawlers.
To help Evasion, just use good combat tactics (line of sight abuse, lure them into traps, stun/kill accurate ranged targets first, use a strong High Freq Energy Shield). Plus, reduced damage from explosions (along with a Blast Cloth Balaclava) means no instant death from mines or grenades.
If you don't have decent CON, I'd still build up both skills since it may save your life.

Guard / Boarding Up / Parry / Shield Arm with a Knife:
Split focus between STR and DEX isn't great, in this case. Better to get DEX where it needs to be for items/feats, then pump STR and wield a sword or spear. Since Guard and Shield Arm need decent STR, you may as well focus on that and use a weapon that gets more benefit from it (knife STR damage increases are the lowest).

Nimble worth it?
For this setup, I'd say no. You have Sprint for movement points. Use the environment to draw ranged attackers into melee range with you. Melee attackers will come to you anyways.

Expertise worth it?
For Knives, maybe. Crit immune mobs tend to have high mechanical resistance, which you'll bypass with Knife attachments (Electroshock Generator, Energy Edge Emitter). Otherwise, you'll be wanting tons of crits to kill. Add in Cut Throat or bleeds / Taste for Blood and you may not need it. It will certainly make the early game easier.

Dirty Trick worth it?
I never thought it was special, unless for some reason you're packing Metal Boots (which you wouldn't on a stealth build). Just craft a Taser: always hits, half the cooldown.

Crippling Strike worth it?
It's better for weapons that deal more damage in fewer attacks, which is the opposite of a Knife. You're all about many attacks for lower damage, fishing for critical hits and incapacitation via Cheap Shots.

Ripper worth it?
Unless your build already has some WIL for a bit of PSI, don't sweat it. Crits with Knives are nice, but some enemies are immune to crits. Also, for bigger targets you should be using a Knife with an Electroshock Generator or Energy Edge Emitter. The special damage from those attachments won't ever crit, as far as I know. Cheap Shots and Critical Power will do the trick, maybe a Tungsten Knife if you need more critical damage.

Throwing Skill:
50 effective skill will help you land grenades reliably from a few spaces away.

Crafting:
Not sure how high item quality can go in Expedition. In the base game, Q160 was the limit, and most item requirements were 80% of quality so you never needed to exceed 128 effective skill (unless you were making items with optional bits that would add X% of item quality to the crafting requirement). For Riot Gear, max would be Mechanics 128, Tailoring 144 (if you added cloth to it), plus any weird requirements from using a Biohazard or Regenerative carrier vest. Shoot for 128 effective crafting skills by level 25 and see if you find anything higher than Q160 in Expedition content that you'd like to use.

Hacking/Lockpicking:
Again, Expedition content may have higher requirements. For base game, Hacking 130 max for console checks and all locked items using best hacking tools. Lockpicking 130 for everything using best lockpicking tools and Jacknife from GMS.

Persuasion:
Without it, you might miss some story stuff and a few opportunities but it won't make the game super hard. If you manage to save points on crafting, I'd rather drop them into Mercantile in order to access special inventories from certain vendors, plus it helps in some conversations just like Persuasion would. Q160 stuff is hard to find but higher level merchant loot is one of the best ways to come close to finding it (realistically, shoot for Q130 stuff for endgame).



Opinion:
It's a neat idea but the gear selected is split between two different builds.

Knives are typically DEX heavy for skill increases, crit chance and AP reduction.
I've had decent experience pairing them with Dodge/Evasion and Stealth, partly since Leather Armor can be built with Stealth boosts so that you don't need to invest as much in Stealth. Also, you can make Infused Rathound Leather Armor for crit chance boosts, or Infused Siphoner Leather Armor for Dodge/Evasion boosts. Ninja Tabis are great for Stealth and will save you a ton of skill points.
You have decent control options outside of items. Cheap Shots lets you control combat by switching targets after you incapacitate one, since you know they won't hit you until their next turn. Cut Throat lets you delete one opponent from combat straight away. If you can flashbang your remaining opponents, get out of sight and restealth/exit combat, then Cut Throat again!
Defense can be decent. Uncanny Dodge as described above. The new Parry feat gives you a block chance that scales with DEX and blocks double damage for Knives, so even more melee defense for you.
If you go for Knives, take a look at this. Some spare skill points, feats and specializations are open to taste. Get Stealth to ~200 effective skill (all items included).

http://underrail.info.tm/build/?HgMQCQUDAwcAFwDCoMKgwqBLYDIAL2ZmAABmAAAAAAAAVE8kMSldMMKZBhITQTwLS8Kz378



I can't comment on STR based Riot Armor (likely paired with Sword/Spear) since I haven't played one. All of the blocking feats make it sound like you can hold your own against multiple melee opponents. Give it a whirl since everyone is experimenting at this time; just don't be surprised if things don't quite work out. We're all trying to figure out new things right now.
If you go for STR and Riot Armor, drop DEX down for feat requirements only, then build STR and CON. Both will enable you to survive or block hits better, since with no Dodge/Evasion, practically everything will hit you.

Hope this helps!

[Serendipitous]

Stick the pointy end into your enemies.

[meiam]

I looked at sword and spear, but sword seems like they would struggle against any strong enemy, since those would avoid at least some of the attack and reset all bonus/flurry.

Spear just didn't seem to have a lot of damage and seemed to have the same problem, where you'd need a good amount of dex/str/agility to be able function. But I might give it a shoot with something like this (20)
http://underrail.info.tm/build/?FA8HBwUDAwUAbgBuKAAAbmwgAGReAABPAAAAAABhAMKCOcKVwq8TwpTCq8KsBkvCkxLfvw

Probably have too much throw in there, might be worth to invest a tiny bit in temporal manipulation to get the CD reduction ability for more spear throw/impale/sprint/expose weakness

Otherwise maybe I should try to focus more on bladed fist weapon, maybe still grabbing cut-throat, start a fight with a knife and then switch to fist.

Thanks for the pointer, I'll keep thinking and thinkering

[Serendipitous]

What do you need Dex 7 for? It's not doing anything for you. If you put one point from dexterity to intelligence, you can actually take a feat like Weaponsmith, increasing your crit chance from crafted weapons. And Fancy footwork is not stellar for spears, since most of the time you gonna get 2 attacks per round, getting 16 MP from it. And it requires 7 Agi. Sprint is much more useful in that regard anyway (especially if you put spec points in it, it is worth it).

Take 1 from dex and from agi, and put them in Int and con, depending on what crafting feats you gonna take.

Cheap Shots is good for increasing you crit damage bonus mainly (and stun chance for those with lots of attacks per round), but you never took crit increasing feats like Recklessness or Weaponsmith, so it's not gonna play as much as you would want to.

This build feels all over the place, tbh.

[Serendipitous]

Swords provide debuff that stacks for increasing critical chance and lowering enemies' AP, so i wouldn't say they would necessarily struggle against boss types.

[meiam]

Originally posted by carashi:

What do you need Dex 7 for? It's not doing anything for you. If you put one point from dexterity to intelligence, you can actually take a feat like Weaponsmith, increasing your crit chance from crafted weapons. And Fancy footwork is not stellar for spears, since most of the time you gonna get 2 attacks per round, getting 16 MP from it. And it requires 7 Agi. Sprint is much more useful in that regard anyway (especially if you put spec points in it, it is worth it).

Take 1 from dex and from agi, and put them in Int and con, depending on what crafting feats you gonna take.

Cheap Shots is good for increasing you crit damage bonus mainly (and stun chance for those with lots of attacks per round), but you never took crit increasing feats like Recklessness or Weaponsmith, so it's not gonna play as much as you would want to.

This build feels all over the place, tbh.

yeah I changed the dex, wiki said spear throw needed 7 dex, and I dropped fancy footwork for a point of int to get weaponsmith. Since spear has impale I figured I could skimp a bit on crit chance and skip reckless for a bit more defense but I'll see how it plays.

I don't think its going to be exceptional, spear don't feel that good compare to knife/fist but I'll see.

As for sword, it seems like they mostly derive they're strength from flurry/onslaught, which require you to never miss, seems like a generous assumption.

[Serendipitous]

Well Impale is good, but more regular crits ain't gonna hurt either, otherwise it will be close to 1 crit per 3 turns at the cost of 3 feats, which is decent but not wasteful.

I don't think its going to be exceptional, spear don't feel that good compare to knife/fist but I'll see.

Before the last update knife was the weakest melee weapon. Now i don't know but probably still is.

As for sword, it seems like they mostly derive they're strength from flurry/onslaught, which require you to never miss, seems like a generous assumption.

You don't want to never miss, just missing less often and you will already derive a good power from those feats.

I tried spear only a little yet but boy it's pretty good against those rathounds that want to gang up on you.

Also, i'm not entirely sold on taking decrease in damage for using spear with shield. Spear already has guard that could be made to 100% chance of blocking, adding shield on top of that seems like it would hit diminishing return

[meiam]

Originally posted by carashi:

Also, i'm not entirely sold on taking decrease in damage for using spear with shield. Spear already has guard that could be made to 100% chance of blocking, adding shield on top of that seems like it would hit diminishing return

I'm not 100% sure how blocking work, I though it could only block a certain amount of damage before being used up, so I figured in most encounter the spear shield would get used up very quickly (or at least in most encounter that are dangerous) and so more blocking wouldn't be bad. I though they could also proc independently, so that any damage that goes over one could potentially be stopped by the next one.

[Seven ate you]

Originally posted by meiam:

snip

I'm just going to say you're build on daggers doesn't focus on the strength of daggers, which is crit damage/chance. I'm not saying you can't play as a combat knife. I'm just saying that if you were to put strength on a dagger build and make it try to use heavy armor, you might as well use a sword. Mainly because you wouldn't be able to stealth that well, the only difference is that by adding stealth in your build, you can kill people with cut throat.

If you want to be good in combat, I'd advice to look at other weapons. Because knives are only good at being a assassin type character, that always uses knives, grenades, traps and maybe some other gimmick that someone decides to add.

To answer your questions

Nut shot is bad, crippling strike is bad, ripper is required to be good, you want throwing for accuracy on grenades, and crafting needs to be as high as the quality of items you'll find requires.

I forget what it requires for a good knife and stealth suit though.

level 10 build that I use

http://underrail.info.tm/build/?CgMMCgMDBQYAPAA8AgA8NB4APDQANAA0AAAAAAAAADE5JjAGXAvfvw

Once you hit level 10, you'll figure out by yourself what makes the build strong and what to focus on. Although, you can easily replace cut throat for something else if you want.

But early game, you want to focus on mines, bear traps, grenades and obviously knives. You use your utility and high damage output with stuns to wipe people out before they get to fight back.

My build doesn't have Electronics, so you won't be able to get shock knives, taser, EMPs, and other gadgets, but I don't regret it. And you can add it in if you want.

Also, general advice, never put both points into strength and dex, unless it's for a feat. Either pick strength for heavy armor or dex for the utility, picking both hurts you a lot more than helps.

EDIT: TL;DR what the first guy said

[Seven ate you]

Oh, I actually read some of your other posts and realized you don't seem to want knife anymore.
If you still wanna use stealth, but not focus on it, I'd recommend fists. Easy to build and plan. You just max out DEX, put 7 into INT, and either put 7 into strength for glass cannon or 7 into CON to be able to take hits in a fight.