Building a Better Ranger: Weapon Choice and Party Selection

[ehrgeix]

Hi,

This is the first of three articles I’m planning to write while putting together a party for Supreme Jerk ironman (no-reload) run. It will cover weapon choices and party composition. The second will cover optimal attribute point spends for melee characters, and the third optimal attribute point spends for ranged characters.

Part 2 (melee characters) is available at: viewtopic.php?f=40&t=9820
Part 3 (ranged characters) is available at: /viewtopic.php?f=40&t=10065
Another useful link, SagaDC's weapon stat list, is available at: /viewtopic.php?f=40&t=8677

The first choice you have to make when building a ranger is 'what weapon will this character use?'. This is a sensible place to start because your choice of weapon heavily influences where you’ll spend attribute points - if you want to use melee weapons, high strength is important. If you’re planning to use energy weapons, you can get away with less AP than if you’re using assault rifles (because you cannot use extra AP to headshot with energy weapons), etc. That said, before you can choose what weapon you want to use you also have to know what kind of damage it’s likely to put out. The tables below should cover that.

For the numbers given here I assumed melee characters had 9 strength, and ranged characters had 4 coordination. From what I’ve seen in character optimization threads this is pretty typical, but I’ll investigate stats in more detail in future posts. I also assumed people were using typical Arizona mods (long barrel, underbarrel flashlight, grip tape, light weights), and that they had an extra 5% chance to hit from leadership but were not in cover/crouching. It’s totally reasonable to start with some other set of assumptions, but there are only really three major changes - weapon skill rank (maybe you have less than 10 and miss more bursts), available mods (California mods give an extra 17% ranged hit, or 15% bladed/blunt crit), and enemy armor (If the enemies have armor 1 higher than your penetration value, you lose 20% damage. If they have armor 2 higher than your penetration value, you lose 30% damage. If they have armor 3 higher than your penetration value, you really need to go buy some new weapons).


Without further ado, Melee Weapons:











edit: Note that at very high levels, the extra crit multiplier on Metal Nails makes them look like they do more damage than Dragon Claws. This is not true vs many targets in reality (because Armor exists).

The playstyle for these three weapon types is basically identical, so here we can see that Brawling is the best option by a rather wide margin. Bladed isn’t bad early game (you can pick up a Combat Knife just after finishing Ag Centre or Highpool), but it doesn’t scale particularly well with the exception of This Is A Knife, which unfortunately comes too late to compete with Brawling. Blunt is… kind of sad? The advantage is high armor pen, but actually the damage is just so far behind Brawling that Brawling ends up doing more damage vs high armor anyway. On a sort of similar note, in California you can pick up Grand Slam Weights, giving Bladed/Blunt +15% crit, but again, it’s too late to compete with the massive advantage Brawling picks up from +1 weapon min/max damage per level. So uh, basically, if you want to make an optimized melee fighter, accept the power of punching things.


Serious Ranged Weapons - Assault Rifles, Sniper Rifles, and Heavy Weapons:













These three weapon types share pretty similar ranges and functionality - characters with them want to hang around in the backline away from enemy melee, because if someone is in tile to tile contact with them they suffer from an ‘Under Pressure’ debuff, reducing their chance to hit and potentially forcing them to move.

That aside, it turns out they don’t share very much. Heavy Weapons use more ammo than Assault Rifles, to deal less damage than Assault Rifles, and cannot be modded (so will jam occasionally). Hm. Sniper Rifles, on the other hand, use a lot less ammo to deal a lot less damage than Assault Rifles. Penetration aside, apparently the T3 Assault Rifle deals more damage/AP than the T6 Sniper Rifle. It’s possible that penetration might actually be a saving grace for Sniper Rifles, but it would appear that requiring pen above 7 is pretty rare? So there’s that. (edit: Actually, after some further experience being at 80% damage from Armor vs Penetration is not that rare with Assault Rifles - Sniper Rifles do gain a little here, but it doesn't really make much of a difference overall).

Assault Rifles, as many posters here have claimed, are the absolute kings of ranged combat. Decisions like the G41 burst fire accuracy penalty sitting at -5 (compared to the Spaz 12’s -50 or the AK97’s -35), burst fire only costing 2AP, the crazy damage ranges on the T3 M16, and the low damage critical hits getting overwritten by the x2 headshot multiplier lead to them putting out more damage than everything but Brawling, Explosives, This Is A Knife, and T6 Shotguns hitting 2+ people. In Arizona, you’ll mostly be using normal bursts, but as soon as you start picking up California weapon mods headshot bursts start to hit very consistently and the damage goes from great to stellar.


Oddball Stuff - Shotguns and Energy Weapons:













Energy weapons are mostly junk, but there’re a couple of noteable bits and pieces: Herbicide is rather good through much of the early game, and the Pulse Rifle is pretty reasonable too. The reason you’d consider using them, though, is the Gamma Ray Blaster, which puts out ridiculous damage at the time you initially pick it up (it’s basically a Tier 6 weapon you can get before Damonta!), and continues to do so for the rest of the game. They also run on cheap ammo, which is a nice little perk.

Shotguns are pretty much junk until T6. Over Under seemed like it’d be good, but it only has capacity 2. The Spaz 12 looked kind of ridiculous, but then it turned out to have a -50 burst penalty. Also, you cannot mod away the jam chance on shotguns, and they have less armor penetration than Brawling/Assault Rifles/etc. That said, the Jackhammer is really, really good, and I’d maybe consider starting to level up shotguns on a character who didn’t need anything else midway through the game and using it vs clumps of enemies later on.


Short Range - Handguns and SMGs









The high point of Handguns seems to be that their T6 weapon gets to do just over half as much damage as a T3 Assault Rifle. Probably never use these things.

SMGs, on the other hand, look surprisingly competitive, especially if we start getting +12 accuracy short range bursts. That said, they use a lot of ammo, the accuracy drops off quickly at range, and if we’re shooting someone at point blank range we should probably be punching them instead. Maybe they’re okay as a secondary weapon for someone who uses EW? (We kind of want to avoid wasting skill points on secondary weapons though, so…). Final note: the T1 SMG is super great. Like twice to three times as good as most other T1 weapons. So that’s pretty neat.


Party Selection:

edit: This is pretty barebones. I end up talking a lot more about it in the ranged character optimization article, especially in the postscripts. I still agree with the core AR/Brawling focus with 2~ melee 5~ ranged, though.

So, knowing what we know now, what do we do? Successful SJ parties (see: Tyraforce, Frozyx, me?) tend to run 0-1 skill and/or charisma focused character, and 3-4 combat characters. Typically the ranged will have 4 int, and melee will have have either 1 or 4 int. This gives required skill coverage and a lot of combat power.

So, combat characters:

We definitely want at least one guy with serious ranged weapons. It turns out Assault Rifles are the best candidate for this by far (I guess this surprises zero people at this point).

We also definitely want a melee character with high strength (edit: This is somewhat more debatable. I know Tyraforce does not run one. I find it makes the game a lot easier though, you just kill any enemy melee stuff and can distract scary things). Someone who can soak damage, and make some encounters way easier by drawing slicer dicer aggro, peeling melee mooks off our serious ranged weapon character, etc. We’ll run a Brawler here. Later in the game they’ll end up doing 1.5x+~ the damage/AP of Assault Rifle users, but will have to spend more AP on movement.

So, so far our party is:
* Assault Rifle character with combat stats.
* Brawling character with combat stats.

After this, we run into our first real choice. What to do with our third combat character? Options include giving them Energy Weapons and picking up the Gamma Ray Blaster asap, or doing something else and recruiting Pizepi Joren to use the GRB.

The ‘something else’ could include:
* A second AR user.
* A second brawler.
* An oddball character that used shotguns and tried to pick up two Over Unders (from CoT, I think?) pretty early for 4 total shots in a fight, then transitioned into a Jackhammer asap in California [I think this option would be pretty bad until they get a Jackhammer, then good].
* Or uh, something mediocre but not too bad - an SMG user looking to eventually pick up The Eviscerator, an Anti-Materiel sniper, or a Heavy Weapon user.

Options are listed (debatably?) from best to worst. I think there’s very little else you could do that would not be explicitly terrible (handguns or some other joke tier weapon).

So we end up with:
* Assault Rifle character with combat stats.
* Brawling character with combat stats.
* Either a Gamma Ray Blaster EW character with combat stats, or another Brawler/AR character with combat stats. Or a shotgun user. Or a mediocre SMG user or Sniper.

Finally, we have our party leader. This is kind of difficult to optimize because so much is left to personal taste. If you want 10 int 9 cha, you end up with 7 AP 7 CI, and your weapon choice doesn’t matter very much because you get to act approximately never. Lately though, people have been starting to use 4 int 6-7 cha leaders (just enough for Pizepi), or a 10 int 1 cha skill-focused character who still has solid combat power.

I think whatever we do here it has to be ranged - cannot lose that many stats and be an effective brawler. I’ll go into this in more detail when looking at optimal statistics for ranged characters in a future article.

In terms of NPCs, I don't think there's a great deal of choice -

* Pizepi is superb, and using the Gamma Ray Blaster on her rather than an EW PC lets you run 2-3 solid AR users.

* Rose or Vulture's Cry are necessary for skills (Rose is better, of course, but Vulture's Cry is fine if you do want to go save Highpool).

* After that, there's a host of mediocre melee NPCs (Takayuki, Chisel, Corran, Lexcanium), and mediocre ranged NPCs (Gary Wolf, Ralphy - ignore Brawling on him and pick up ARs). What you use here should probably depend on your own party - if you have 3 ranged and 1 melee, I'd pick up a melee guy. If 2 melee 2 ranged, I'd pick up Ralphy.

* There're also some California NPCs, but Pistol Pete has Handguns (so is instantly worthless), Ertan looks great but has a 70% rogue chance, and the others aren't really worth waiting for when you could just pick up Arizona NPCs and balance your skills around them.

Anyway, I hope people enjoy reading this stuff as much as I enjoy the analysis/writing. And finally, thanks to SagaDC for putting together a lot of the weapon stat information, and to Tyraforce/Frozyx for posting about their SJ experiences.

Cheers,

Phil

P.S - (If you’re interested in how I ended up with these numbers, the spreadsheet is available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/afat65wmix774d5/WL2.xlsx but it’s nothing particularly complex, just summing sources of hit/crit, multiplying likely crits by the modified weapon crit multiplier, etc).

[ragbasti]

Amazing work, looking forward to the follow up articles.

I was currently running the same kind of tests and was about 80% done. Now I can scrap all my data since you put it out there earlier and probably alot more visually pleasing than what I would have ended up with

[Grend]

If I do a replay I think I will do 2 AR, 1 Energy and 1 brawler, and use ralphy for leadership + rose and schotchmo.
I`ll use Ralphy as sniper just for engaging enemies, rose will get an AR as well, maybe I´ll just up her awareness since burst is king late game anyway. Scotchmo can do shotguns + an energy weapon or maybe a smg, or heck maybe Ill just put AR on him as well. Not sure. Then I´ll just skip all the skills and go kill everything. Ill have some lockpicking, demo, safecracking for opening doors, and use toaster to get the GRB. Maybe I´ll get barter just to be able to afford all the ammunition I will need.

[themell]

brawler sucks. It has high dmg per AP, but you spend a lot of your AP running around like an idiot. Also, you can't ambush with a brawler unless the enemy is a retard.

Better to get 1 EW user + 3 AR users.

EW user = 2164843 = 8AP 15CI
AR user = 4164841 = 9AP 15CI

recruit ralphy, scotchmo, and rose. Make sure you get ralphy and scotchmo before you go to AG. Bonus points, you can pick up two famas and an HK33 from RNC, which makes AG super easy. Extra bonus points if you savescum the radio tower for manglers, and then use the manglers to kill raiders around RNC because the raiders drop HK33 for you. Just use two manglers on the rifle raider, then kill the other raiders like normal.

With careful planning, you should be able to get every worthwhile skill in the game with this team. And you have 4 main characters that can easily kill everyone in the game. Also, you get your entire team within an hour of gameplay, so you can plan what skills each character should get.

[Shining Hector]

Shotgun is actually best used as a backup weapon for a melee character I've found. Brawlers really need the enemies to close first unless they're going to be out front in the open and a pincushion, and you can't ambush melee attacks even if something comes up next to you, but you can ambush with a shotgun. Also, brawlers tend to either maneuver into or have enemies politely line up for those sweet 2-4 enemy blasts. A max skill brawler with a backup shotgun with a goal of maybe 6 skill would be quite powerful and also have more than one useful close-quarters combat option. It's really a great synergy, an exception to the usual backup weapons suck rule.

[ragbasti]

I usually run 2 Brawlers with shotgun and SMG. The combo works great.

More than 2 AR is not viable imho because of ammo bad economy

[frozyx]

Shotgun is actually best used as a backup weapon for a melee character I've found. Brawlers really need the enemies to close first unless they're going to be out front in the open and a pincushion, and you can't ambush melee attacks even if something comes up next to you, but you can ambush with a shotgun. Also, brawlers tend to either maneuver into or have enemies politely line up for those sweet 2-4 enemy blasts. A max skill brawler with a backup shotgun with a goal of maybe 6 skill would be quite powerful and also have more than one useful close-quarters combat option. It's really a great synergy, an exception to the usual backup weapons suck rule.

That is really good in theory and exactly what i did with my Brawler in my playthrough - always having the best available Shotgun in the secondary weaponslot and always spending some points in Shotgun.

But in practice i used it so rarely. B/c those fights where you actually get opponents to cluster really nicely and/or those where you really needed or wanted to do huge AoE damage (b/c it was pretty tough otherwise), i didnt use the Shotgun anyway, but instead threw a grenade or fired a rocket - that was even better and also ofc more reliable than shooting the shotgun.

But i want to figure out the usefulness of Shotguns in my next playthrough, where i will pick up Scotchmo early and plan on using him till the end.

@ehrgeix:
Very good read and interesting points and esp. data! Im planning my next playthrough currently - via Highpool and doing it the non-diplomatic 'hard ass' way feat. Scotchmo, Vultures Cry and Chisel - and came up with these 4 PCs:

1+2: 4162A41 AR-user sharing Kiss Ass, Field Medic, Weaponsmith and Alarm Disarm (need the latter due to CPU lag issues)

3: 2162A43 early SMG-, Late Gamma-user with Demolition and Leadership. 3 in CHR for Scotchmo mainly, some leadership range bonus and a few extra XP. The difference being 8 AP compared to 9 of the AR users, which is alright b/c the Gamma burst will need exactly that. And thus all 3 are maximum efficient gunner with 20 CI on lvl 40.

4: Prolly running a 2149A11 Brawler with Comp Tech to hack those nasty robots! I feel like this is the best char to run that skill. Btw, while i used a 10 STR Brawler in my last playthrough, i am now convinced that despite the extra dmg and crit from STR, its more efficient to run 1 more AW and keep STR on 9.

I will be running Perception, Outdoor, Animal, Surgeon and possibly sth else on Vultures. Make Scotchmo the Lockpick/Safecracker and figure out if 2 INT is enough to run Brute and Hard Ass on Chisel. Also using Ralphy as backup Toasterino.

Still bit unsure about the Brawler b/c i will have Chisel as melee already. And i only have 2 ARs with that setup. Making my mind up if Chisel is actually viable, b/c he is a suboptimal melee stat-wise and might not be able to keep 3 skills up high with his 2 INT. However he is fairly interesting as Angela replacement with his skillset ... and he would fit to the 'hard ass'-theme. But maybe i will either decide for another NPC, someone who can otimally run an AR. Or i just skip the Brawler plans and run a 3rd AR-user as PC. Not sure yet ... but one important thing to not underestimate is weight capacity. And maybe thats what makes the Brawler somehow mandatory.

Finally, i think its worht of note, that setting up your party really depends on your choice of NPCs ... for non-combat skill choice, weapon choice and even the amount of CHR you want.

[Dark]

It’s possible that penetration might actually be a saving grace for Sniper Rifles, but it would appear that requiring pen above 7 is pretty rare? So there’s that.

My experience thus far is that Sniper Rifle penetration scale better than Assault Rifle penetration. I've never run into anything that my Sniper can't penetrate, but my AR guys are regularly running into problems.

Currently I'm right about to enter Hollywood, having otherwise completely explored the map. I only have AK-97s (so Pen 6) but enemies are regularly showing up with Armor 7 or Armor 8, which is not an issue for my sniper or energy weapon users.

[fedprod]

... and you can't ambush melee attacks even if something comes up next to you...

Well you can actually, but the chances are a bit slim, they need to get into your range AND you need to get that initiative roll for the ambush. I have found out that it works pretty well against Slicer Dicers though
But I agree, Shotgun is a very good backup weapon for melee chars.

[Pluvio]

Firstly, great post! It seems that I used all the best damage weapons on my play-through without knowing which ones were the best so fancy that!

@frozyx
I did an entire play-through with Scotchmo and if you manage to pick up a jackhammer through one of the early random encounters in California (in my case the one where you save a mans life and then rescue his two dogs) you find out just how useful shotguns really are... just give him the ring of choice for +5 initiative and have him up his intelligence by 1 and speed by 2.

Oh and upgrade the jackhammer with the max range minimum cone attachment as the cone is already quite large to begin with and the added range often catches 2 to 4 enemies!

[frozyx]

Firstly, great post! It seems that I used all the best damage weapons on my play through without knowing which ones were the best so fancy that!

@frozyx
I did an entire play-through with Scotchmo and if you manage to pick up a jackhammer through one of the early random encounters in California (in my case the one where you save a mans life and then rescue his two dogs) you find out just how useful shotguns really are... just give him the ring of choice for +5 initiative and have him up his intelligence by 1 and speed by 2.

Oh and upgrade the jackhammer with either the max range minimum cone attachment as the cone is already quite large to begin with!

Ye, i am really looking forward to try that out

Regarding the choice of choke: I always picked the one that increases the cone but reduces range, mostly to be able to hit more enemies. And the range wasnt supposed to be an issue b/c i ran it as secondary weapon on my melee. But would you generally rather suggest a choke that tightens the cone and adds range? And why?

[Pluvio]

But would you generally rather suggest a choke that tightens the cone and adds range? And why?

Firstly Scotchmo doesn't have a whole lot of AP so his position when the fight starts is very important, for this I found range more useful than a cone upgrade, secondly the jackhammer has a very wide cone imo, and adding range befitted me far more than adding spread. Put it this way, you can always position him at an angle to target 2 or more enemies, using the Ctrl function and moving him around a bit, however you can't make his angle of fire smaller which can lead to friendly fire at times. Another important thing to remember is, the longer your range, the wider your cone spreads over distance, so once again you have the the upperhand in positioning by just pulling him back a bit you can probably hit enemies that are apart anyway.

[Tyraforce]

Amazing job Ehrgeix,

I would just add that the damage output is largely affected by Combat Initiative and AP opimisation, which is however quite imposible to cover in your first post. New player should realize that a 20 CI Handgun user will outdamage their 10CI Rifleman / Gamma user.

I started posting damage output taken from dossier, which I consider the ultimate weapon class effectivness indicator. I have 2 identical characters and their results are 28600 and 28900 so it looks like a pretty accurate way to compare builds and weapons. Just make sure those characters never leave the team as it resets the counters.

I'm looking forward to the melee section. I don't run melee characters cuz I see no way to create a dedicated tank and convince those enemies with apparent speed of 6850656052 to stop and bother the first guy they encounter. They are quite happy to run past him and get shot in the back. I'll be quite excited if frozyx could post the damage output of his new party so we can see how that brawler is doing.

Btw, anyone who follows your tips should consider making the game harder somehow. I'm going with a 4-men SJ team now and it's easier than with my 7-men flawed low CI team I used for the first game. I'm considering going only with 1 character + recruits next time. Btw, can anyone confirm that you can have 6 recruits at the same time? I'm not sure if the devs counted with this.

[Pluvio]

@Tyraforce

As far as I know you can only have 3 NPC characters as each time you have 3 NPCs you have to swap one out for another.

[frozyx]

@Pluvio: thanks for the advice That makes a lot of sense as Scotchmo ofc isnt a melee.

@Tyraforce:

I just checked my last game, where i also had a Brawler, for stats. Note that this is a VERY questionable way to find out about combat efficiency, as this is no reliable data! There are several influencing factors there, e.g.:

- the order in which weapons of the same kind are distributed (like who gets the new tier weapon first?)
- use of trinkets (who gets to use the Choice trinket for example)

However, the raw data is as following for my lvl 45/46 party, right before the end:

1. AR-user 1 (2 STR, 10 SPD at start; currently base 9 AP/20 CI): 71k dmg = 100% (he is the benchmark - and he was using Choice at the end)

2. AR-user 2 (4 STR, 8 SPD; 9/19): 64k dmg = 90% (note that he got the weapon upgrades 2nd)

3. Brawler (10 STR, 9/16): 44k dmg = 62%

4. CHR-leader with AR (9 baseline CHR; 8/15): 33.5k dmg = 47% (getting new ARs 3rd! only using Anarchy late)


From raw data, the matter seems clear, but there are few points of note:

- Differences werent that huge between the brawler and the AR-users up to when Burst/HS-ing got very viable from mods and esp. the low burst-malus from G41 Up to that point the Brawler was more like on 80% in AZ and 70% mid-Cali (AK-97 time) - i checked some older savegames

- The AR1 man totally got away after getting Choice, which happened fairly late for me though (somehow i missed that shrine for a long long while )

- Brawling is not only about the damage: Note that being in melee range to riflemen and snipers suppresses them just like it does to your party. Oftentimes chasing them will help you mitigate a lot of damage that would have otherwise been dealt to your party - either from misses or from those enemies that have to run instead of shooting.

- Furthermore, it sometimes help to actually have a true tank with high HP to sink opponents damage into. Damage that might have downed someone else but only brings the tank to like 30-40% HP.

- And finally you have to have in mind that the Brawler doesnt shine in the 'standard', i.e. rather short and easy fights. B/c your AR-users will just rape those enemies before the Brawler actually gets in range. But these are actually not the encounters that are really critical. I found the Brawler to be really helpful in the tougher fights. And he will dish out lots of damage there - or help otherwise. Think Meson Cannons or Scorpitron. He will spend one turn running ... and prolly still getting one swing in. From then on he will just hammer the Cannon or Scorpi while standing still. And you see from ehrgeix' charts, that there is nothing doing more dmg than tier 6 Brawling weapon. You just do 300 dmg each turn with your lvl 40 Brawler on that Scorpi. Then think DBM HQ. Perhaps the toughest fight in the game. Chasing the 2 or 3 riflemen that are taking cover on the roof, can be really helpful there.

Now so much for that. Just wanted to make clear that having a Brawler is more than raw damage - esp. raw AVERAGE dmg. He allows tactical maneuvers and he shines in the longer fights vs rather stationary, high HP enemies. The best thing i can tell is to just try it out yourself

EDIT: I might take that party and do some random world map encounters. Maybe 10 or so. And track the damage. Thats much better data imo. Even though you dont get to simulate those special encounters with Scorpitrons and the like. Maybe i repeat the Dugan fight also and track damage there as well ...

[Tyraforce]

I can't imagine chasing guys around DBM base lol. I did it by staying under the balcony so didn't have to worry about those guys.
Some damage data from long fights would be useful. Short fights really don't matter so much. Also, what is your melee build?

[diivil]

So what's the best stat distribution for a brawler? Preferably with 4 int.

[Tyraforce]

I believe ehrgeix is working on a few pages on exactly that topic now Patience.

[frozyx]

I can't imagine chasing guys around DBM base lol. I did it by staying under the balcony so didn't have to worry about those guys.
Some damage data from long fights would be useful. Short fights really don't matter so much. Also, what is your melee build?

Well, that was just an example. It can however be still helpful, if you for some reason dont want or cant hack the turrets (that could do the job and take out the riflemen up the roof). But you will otherwise be having a tough time taking them out from below and at least cost a ton of ammo.

And my melee built was 213AA11 from the start and 217AA11 in the end. But i would now advise to rather go 2149A11 instead, b/c i feel like the 1 CI is more effective than the 10th pt in STR.

@diivil: i cant really recommend on 4 INT for a brawler - tried it when i started the release version on my 1st try before i stopped to restart with improved stats. And going from 4 INT to 1 on my Brawler was one of the improvements i made. Reason is that he needs every attrib pt in SPD and STR to be really good at his job, while still maintaining a solid number of CI. If you still want to go for it, then 111AA41 would prolly be the best. But 11 CI isnt a whole lot. Thus i would rather give someone else the skill you plan to give him and keep his combat stats high instead.

[frozyx]

I believe ehrgeix is working on a few pages on exactly that topic now Patience.

Aright. Gonna be silent from now on