The way instakills work in fonline is you roll for crit, then there's a 1-100 roll on the crit table. If you have better crit perk its 21-120 on the table and any roll over 100 is an instakill. Technically if you have 100% crit its a 1/5 chance, but the reality is somewhat different. I haven't got an intakill in pvp since the wipe, might just be unlucky on my part but it seems to only happen in pve. It's great for farming if you have toughness x 2 and lifegivers as with the latent unarmed crit bonuses you can replace the 5% perks with more useful ones. Haymaker with faster hth means 4 ap for an eyeshot, with no perks thats 15% from haymaker, 30% from eye shot, 10 luck and finesse adds 20% and you can hit quickly in rt. The bonus is better crit makes disarming really easy as most possible crit effects on arms end up with crippling blows. just make sure you have 5 str minimum and 7 agi for haymaker. Finesse dr bonus gets bypassed by most crits so its not really an issue, but your non crits will be for like 3dmg. If you want raw damage you can always use mega powerfist, it's better than the ripper but harder to find/more expensive. Supersledge has good damage and doesn't deteriorate or use ammo, but it costs 3100 caps from vendors. If you are going high damage melee forego all crit stats and take heavy handed plus bonus hth dmg x3 and living anatomy that's +20 damage, 5 of which can't be resisted. With a ripper you're looking at 5 attacks with 10 ap per 5 seconds or 3 sledge attacks. Ripper would be 35-52 dmg a hit before dmg reduction and sledge is 38-56, but sledge has knockback which can be pretty intense and disables people for the duration of the slide. Only problem is you have to chase after them. You could try a melee crit build too but I'd lose finesse as without the super high unarmed crit rate you just too many shitty hits.
As for endgame melee you have ripper, cattle prod, super sledge and i can't remember if they added it yet or not but super cattle prod is total ownage. Pretty much nothing has electric resist but BA and even then it's really low. Plus awesome death animations.
FA is pretty much mandatory for a hth build, once you get strong enough to survive in rt it helps a lot for a quick heal in battle. 150 is ideal, but beware the new crit fails which happen too often for reliability if you have 1 luck. Doctor needs to be at 210% at 21 to have 100% success rate at curing weakness. It's awesome for never having downtime but also a huge point investment.
As for pvp you need to be on psycho and other drugs to ever have a chance, lots of stims/superstims is also required. But even then don't imagine you'll be rambo cutting your way through the enemy, BG builds/plasma nades/ sniper crits can all drop you quickly. Never go for aimed hits in pvp because once you select a part you walk to your target, and if they run you'll never catch up unless you run then re select, so it's hard to pull off. I mean i do it just to cripple and blind people on my unarmed char but i always end up dying, I just like trolling pvpers.
Hope that helped you out.
Hmm I have made my finesse unarmed char and slowly lvl it alongside my recent EW crafter, however i decided that id like to try experimenting
with the melee side also. Did you mean reducing luck to 1 by the forego all crit stats ? heavy handed doesnt indeed do wonders to crits, however
wouldnt losing toughnesses for example weight too much in the long run ?
if i were to think of a high dmg melee build with 1LK and 1 PE it would end up something like:
10 ST
1 PE
10 EN
3 CH
6 IN
10 AG
1 LK
Heavy handed, small frame
Perks
<3> Bonus hth dmg
<6> magnetic personality
<9> HTH dmg
<12> lifegiver
<15> hth attacks
<18> living anatomy
<21> bonus hth dmg
Well i was just thinking that taking 2 IN away to get 3 CH and sacrificing 2nd lifegiver for magnetic personality allows you to have
2 mercs or slaves for your melee damage machine, to counter the lack of toughnesses. Of course those who dont like mercs
can just drop CH to 1 and pump IN but i like having decoys.
At lvl 21 i can still have decently enough of skillpoints, i tagged outdoorsman because im lazy to run...
in the char planner i ended up with 198 melee, 94 first aid, 80 doctor and 150 outdoorsman, i doubt i would make the stats like
that in actual game, maybe outdoorsman at 100-120 and would pump melee and first aid bit more. Doctor is 80 because i needed the 60% for LA perk.
*EDIT* this is still all only in the char planner, havent tested out making actual char based on these.
