How does everyone feel about knives as a main weapon?

[Gnasty Gnorc]

I’ve honestly never used knives for anything outside of harvesting dead animals. Wanted to give them a try as my main weapon next to the bow, and I understand the concept is weak but fast + bleeding, but they just feel wildly underwhelming.

Granted, I’m only using a bone knife right now, but I guess I just expected a little more.

Do they get significantly better with more perk investment?

I just have a hard time straying away from the sledge which is always useful immediately.

[Dies Fourth]

no range and fighting more than 1 its a death sentence

if you have to get close i'd use a stun baton instead

[Max Headroom]

I used a machete for a while back in a20. The sweeping motion made it a natural vs birds. Pretty good against bipeds, not so much against dogs. And yes, I didn't have to carry a separate tool for harvesting meat.

[Darren]

Since we had massive stamina issues in the first few days, it's my weapon of choice. It hardly consumes any stamina, is quite effective if you use it correctly and even saves space, since you always carry it around with you for skinning anyway. That makes running a lot easier at first, I learned to love the knife, even before the T3 (I always thought that was really cool)

(used Translator for this because i'm lazy today)

[admos]

The damage over time (DOT) mechanic isn't great due to how fast zombies move in the later stages and how weak the DOT damage is even at full stacks.

It's always best to stick to things that have reliable hard crowd control (stun, knockdown, knockback) or things that have high damage, best of both worlds is both, of course.

With all this, they are good for early game or when you set zombie movement to walk/jog/sprint (as long as you can outrun them). It also pairs well with parkour, much like every other build out there, honestly.

[Brevan]

I've played a few long-term Knife builds, but not yet in A21. There was (is?) an occasional bug where things that bleed to death don't reward you with XP, but I think it's just a minor issue. Relying on bleeding-out worked fine for me when I was out and in the open, and was great against larger groups (tag each one, then you're free to leave), but I'm not sure what play style would let it shine while inside a POI (generally harder to run around, especially against faster Zs). If you get Parkour to level 2 quickly, then you can at least reliably get to the safe higher ground while you wait for things to die.

I found the best for me was to keep Bars (the thin plate-like wood shape you can shoot through) on my belt, and stick them to a wall on the 3rd block from the ground with the bars sticking out from the wall along the bottom of its block. This way you can jump onto the bars, Zs walk under them (they can attack it from below, but generally won't) rather than try to jump up with you, and you can shoot through the bars if you feel like it.

[Lord-Knight Fandragon]

I like the knives for melee cuz the bleed effect. Fighting is tedious, stab, run, turn, stab, or just back away stabbing, hoping the zombie doesnt do that BS lunge thing where it covers 30 feet in 2 steps and always smacks your ass 3x, complete with some kind of injury before you can do anything about it.....

Knives I can stab, stab, run and let the bleed wear them down, then stab stab, run. Machetes are even more obnoxious and fun.

[Blue Hasia]

knives are amazing as main weapon. the power attack will often stun the zombies giving you time to jab them more.

it also saves space since you dont need another meele wepaon and a knife to harvest bones

[Prisoner 76561197992841073]

fkin love knives

[Gnasty Gnorc]

Seems to be a fun mix of love and hate, lol.

I believe they fixed the glitch where you didn’t get xp for them bleeding out. That was my main issue with them in 20.

But my other issue is, as someone pointed out, getting trapped and having to fight multiple zombies. It’s ♥♥♥♥♥♥ me over a couple times now.

I’m trying to do an entirely different playstyle than I have in the past, but I just don’t know if I can bring myself to enjoy knives.

[thestile]

I personally don't feel that they are good at all. I don't really like the bleed style because it's too slow. Unless that changed in 21? It would be cool if they were good, but they weren't too great the last time I played.
If we could duelwield knives and they were super fast, that would be pretty darn fun, imo.

This conversation actually partly depends on the difficulty you're playing on. If you're playing on the lowest difficulty you might one-shot everything with the knife because enemies take way more damage. In that case the knife would almost end up being better than the sledgehammer because everything's dying in one hit, and it's faster. But if you're playing on warrior and higher it gets increasingly difficult to kill with a knife.

[Gnasty Gnorc]

Originally posted by thestile:

I personally don't feel that they are good at all. I don't really like the bleed style because it's too slow. Unless that changed in 21? It would be cool if they were good, but they weren't too great the last time I played.
If we could duelwield knives and they were super fast, that would be pretty darn fun, imo.

I’d love the ability to use knives in each hand. Or, honestly? A sword. Swords would be cool.

But I agree. The bleed just doesn’t seem that great.

[The Man, The Myth, The Verda]

Because the bleed/slow may be really helpful early on when you have limited stamina, I typically use the bone shiv at the beginning of the game. The lack of knockdown and a longer time to kill than most other melee weapons are the primary problems I have encountered with the knife in the later levels. It doesn't help that a strength build is more time efficient than stealth while looting POI's.

[Subasu]

Bat(club) power attack to knock them down, stab with the knife, repeatedly, back off, regen stamina, wash rinse repeat as necessary.

Knives are really good early tier.

[Crashtian]

By perk level 4 It's a beast of a weapon on Warrior. The knock down chance is suprisingly high on a head shot, and the guaranteed bleed stacks add enough of a slow to let you day kite. Big bois get power attacked a few times then I can ignore them as they bleed out and I 1-2 shot the little dudes around them. Never, EVER out of stamina because you regenerate what you use to attack and killing a zombie gives you back stamina.

It's very headshot reliant though, you gotta stab those zombie skulls and Ideally fight where the environment benefits you when majorly outnumbered . (door ways, hall ways, classic Art of War stuff)

I find them pretty over powered, even using a level 5 bone knife doing a DR4 Poi in the snow Biome is a joke on day 8.

[Demios]

At higher knife guy perk tier the advantage is to do 2 power attack to the zombie's head and let it bleed to death, do that to every zombies in a group and they will all bleed out eventually and is somewhat faster than sledge (you can do 4 knife power attacks while you do 1 power attack with sledge) + give you a margin of error if you miss.