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).