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Find More Weapons But With Less Durability


uberevan

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As I was scrolling through my topic about finding weapons in a house I realized there are a lot of weapons in one house, albeit not being in perfect condition as they are in game.

 

I'm suggesting that more weapons are added to each house, but with less durability, thus improving the need to be able to repair.  How about a slightly chipped baseball bat, or a rusty frying pan?  It just seems to make more sense to me compared with real life.

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i have a hard enough time keeping my current weapons working. dropping the durability, to me, would be a bad thing. even with more weapons.

 

i would actually like to see it go up. hell, i've broken crowbars in the game. now how did that happen?

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i would actually like to see it go up. hell, i've broken crowbars in the game. now how did that happen?

 

Because crowbars aren't actually meant to be used as a blunt-force object =D

 

Believe it or not, they aren't all that hard to bend or break (not that it's particularly easy, but ya, it happens).

 

I actually suggested a while back that each weapon start with a slightly randomized durability since it would be more realistic. The range could be, for instance, +/- 20% of what the normal starting range is now. Thus, for each one you find under, you might also find one over, leading to an over all balance and some more variation.

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I think there is a bit of a lack of stuff period. During the apocalypse I doubt everyone would pack up 95% of their belongings and run.

 

Also I think everyone owns a few flashlights and everyone owns a hammer and a toolset, though in PZ they seem to be impossible treasures to find.

 

PZ had roots starting with barricading your first home and the zombies smashing their way in. Now even hammers are rare.

In the 1.5d you basically were given a hammer.

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i would actually like to see it go up. hell, i've broken crowbars in the game. now how did that happen?

 

Because crowbars aren't actually meant to be used as a blunt-force object =D

 

Believe it or not, they aren't all that hard to bend or break (not that it's particularly easy, but ya, it happens).

 

I actually suggested a while back that each weapon start with a slightly randomized durability since it would be more realistic. The range could be, for instance, +/- 20% of what the normal starting range is now. Thus, for each one you find under, you might also find one over, leading to an over all balance and some more variation.

 

that they aren't meant to be used as blunt forced wearpon may be the reason why they actually would be arkward to wield (like mentioned in one or the other thread)

but for the durability i would have to say, you could probably bash in zombie heads for years without a crowbar breaking. They are solid steel rods (if they are cheap) and probably more often made of chrome vanadium or something similar, more durable. They are meant to pry things open so bashing in heads would be more of a kindergarten task to a crowbar. even with a regular steel rod you could probably bash in heads for weeks befor it really starts to wear off...not talking about the amount of skulls it would need to break it in half. if it would even break.

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Crowbars in game are already pretty damn solid. I carried the same crowbar across three servers resets on the testing server (it kept the durability each time because it was stored in the player inventory). After a few hundred kills, it was only down to 80% or so. That's pretty damn tough as far as melee weapons go,

 

I'd still like an 'alt-fire' attack, so I could cram the sharpish bits into a zombie's temple or eyesocket though...

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i would actually like to see it go up. hell, i've broken crowbars in the game. now how did that happen?

 

Because crowbars aren't actually meant to be used as a blunt-force object =D

 

Believe it or not, they aren't all that hard to bend or break (not that it's particularly easy, but ya, it happens).

 

I actually suggested a while back that each weapon start with a slightly randomized durability since it would be more realistic. The range could be, for instance, +/- 20% of what the normal starting range is now. Thus, for each one you find under, you might also find one over, leading to an over all balance and some more variation.

 

 

+1 on this, not everyone keeps their tools in perfect condition and others are fanatic about it

Sounds like real life to me :D

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It does seem like houses are rather empty of good things

Who doesn't have a hammer or nails at their house?

Like maybe two people?

So by adding in more items you could find more hammers and such because of how common they are, but most people don't know how to take care of them, making them rusty, which would slightly lower the durability.  I say slightly because rust is worse on blades than on something already blunt.

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Typing this one fast so there might be some typos.

 

 

Imo tools like saws and hammers should lose durability when being used, along with being more common as mentioned above.

 

Early on on a server You would be able to build a lot of stuff, but as hammers and saws break, we might be seeing more survivor battles to aquire the tools. Would also force us to actually do something later in the game cause right now its > aquire saw, hammer, nails, trowel -> sit in your base till the end of times.

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Crowbars has two uses which can whittle it's durability down:

 

You hit the zombie from a good distance, or you hit them from a bad distance.

 

This is due to the hook digging into the zombie and piercing them.

 

So from a closer distance, you end up hitting them with the blunt solid rod and can risk bending it.

 

The same with the fire axe, you can cut with at the end of the reach on the swing, or it ends up coming short and you end up hitting them with the handle, but partially cutting them too.

 

Every weapon has a certain effective distance, you can even crit a lot at that distance.

 

For knives and the likes, it makes no sense you stab from close up and break your weapon before you kill it... You go for the head, not their torso...

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Crowbars has two uses which can whittle it's durability down:

 

You hit the zombie from a good distance, or you hit them from a bad distance.

 

This is due to the hook digging into the zombie and piercing them.

 

So from a closer distance, you end up hitting them with the blunt solid rod and can risk bending it.

 

The same with the fire axe, you can cut with at the end of the reach on the swing, or it ends up coming short and you end up hitting them with the handle, but partially cutting them too.

 

Every weapon has a certain effective distance, you can even crit a lot at that distance.

 

For knives and the likes, it makes no sense you stab from close up and break your weapon before you kill it... You go for the head, not their torso...

Good ideas, but that's essentially another suggestion :P

The knives should have more durability if anything...If they broke as often as they did on this game my mom would need to buy another kitchen knife every week.

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Crowbars has two uses which can whittle it's durability down:

 

You hit the zombie from a good distance, or you hit them from a bad distance.

 

This is due to the hook digging into the zombie and piercing them.

 

So from a closer distance, you end up hitting them with the blunt solid rod and can risk bending it.

 

The same with the fire axe, you can cut with at the end of the reach on the swing, or it ends up coming short and you end up hitting them with the handle, but partially cutting them too.

 

Every weapon has a certain effective distance, you can even crit a lot at that distance.

 

For knives and the likes, it makes no sense you stab from close up and break your weapon before you kill it... You go for the head, not their torso...

Good ideas, but that's essentially another suggestion :P

The knives should have more durability if anything...If they broke as often as they did on this game my mom would need to buy another kitchen knife every week.

 

 

Your mom kills zombies with kitchen knives?

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Good ideas, but that's essentially another suggestion :P

The knives should have more durability if anything...If they broke as often as they did on this game my mom would need to buy another kitchen knife every week.

 

 

Ya, no :P Kitchen knives are utterly useless when it comes to sheering forces along the sides- they snap incredibly easily.

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Personally I think kitchen knives are one of the best weapons in the game into you get into tier 1 stuff like the Axe. Shanking zombies with 1-hit kills all day every day.

 

As far as reducing durability and increased weapon drop rates, I'm not a fan of this idea. It's realistic but would make for mighty awful gameplay. You don't want the player do have to loot the same equipment, over and over and over and over. This would just make for extremely boring gameplay. At the moment durability seems fair enough so you think "alright i used this a good amount of times, need another one" instead of "wow i just looted this thing 3 houses down and now this piece of garbage is broken".

 

Looting is one of the major fun factors in the game and getting the same items over and over again only to have them break over and over again doesn't sound fun at all. As far as randomization of weapon durability, i'm pretty sure this is already implemented. When you attack a zombie, tjhere is a random chance that a piece of the star will go off. This pretty much indirectly translates to "weapon quality".

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I was thinking you could adjust the percentage yourself. W more items for X chance for a Y-to-Z amount of damage on it.

Like 12% more items on the Map.

15% chance that said items could have a 5-25% damage rating.

 

Also, there is that random chance but that doesn't really involve weapon quality.  It's just a random chance that something you do MAY affect the item you're using, it doesn't really have much to do with the item itself.  I made this idea to diversify the kind of weapons you might find,  where you'd find Mint Bats or Quality Bats or Decent Bats or Average Bats or Weakened Bats or Damaged Bats or Why Are You Still Using This Bats.  Depending  on their chance rating they can have random modifiers like:

A: Damage

B: Speed

C: Durability Chance

D: Repair Effeciency

You can find all sorts of bats in real life but most won't be the exact same

I figured this would be a good way to add in more RPG feel, but if wanted could be completely ignored, like zombification.

Edit: Reading this over, I forgot to mention that your person wouldn't be able to recognize these traits right off the bat, but the traits would still be applied, and over time you may notice one weapon might be better used than another just from experience, thus making you favor one over the other.

"Hmmm, Old Bessie smashes them skulls in 1 hit, but Chainsaw Destruction Mayhem: The Bat repairs much easier..."

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Kitchen Knives don't break, they bend. So in a way they become less and less effective on killing a enemy the more hits you land.

 

But every hit would be deadly because it's a knife, and with a zombie apocalypse you got for the face with a knife... Or the spinal cord.

 

We should enable some sort of backstab effect though because slicing a zombie's spine should have the same effect as shooting them in the head.

 

See, slicing even the muscle of the spine would outright disable or kill the zombie, as the nerves connecting the spine takes damage due to the blood loss and muscle contraction.

No muscles on the neck = the head collapses on itself, and damages the nerves, which are very sensitive.

 

So in that case, a kitchen knife would last 10x longer due to 'smart' use of it in a stealthy way to dispatch zombies. But zombies tend to aggro you in a solo situation, so backstabbing only works in groups of 2 or more! Currently zombies engaging a target, re-aggro whoever is the closest so that might not work.

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Lets look at kitchen knives. Most people, especially when looking at the trailer parks and small houses in the game, would probably not own a great set of kitchen knives. They will have a cheap set at best. Now kitchen knives are designed for cutting. And unless butchers hatchets (which would be cool *hint* *hint*), they are generally designed for slicing, and are not strong weapons for stabbing.

 

Bearing in mind they are not designed for stabbing, lets look at the strength of human bone. Compared to concrete, it is stronger. Now you want to hit the skull, which if you hit on the dome of your skull, is the strongest structure, the same reason eggs are egg shaped. You hit a low quality knife onto a skull which on average is stronger than concrete and over half a cm thick, unless you have a huge force and a plum hit, you are like to either glance off, doing soft tissue damage (useless against a zombobble), or snap the tip off your knife leaving it in the skull and a useless knife in your hand. Also assuming you get it in the skull, it is likely to get lodged. If you are lacking in a knife sharpener, hitting bone every two minutes is going to turn it into a blunt object very quickly.

 

Thicker kitchen knives and hunting knives would work because they would be better quality, generally thicker, and so have the strength to not snap along the blade, with hunting knives even being built not especially for, but with stabbing in mind. While things like hatchets, machetes, hand axes etc, work on a principle of a cutting edge with a lot of weight behind it, causing momentum to force the thin sharp edge through solid material with the weight behind it. These are the weapons that you would want, and even then, trying to pull your hatchet or machete from a zombies brain when you have another zombie trying to eat you is a scary prospect!

As for cutting through the spine with a kitchen knife, forget it, it would be difficult to do with somone lying face down not struggling. The spine is one of the best defensive cages out there, because it protects probably the most important part of your body, the spinal cord. The brain could work fine, without the spinal cord it is useless. Like having a PC but the irreplacable ethernet cable is cut. It is designed to protect, and it does it fantastically well. The best way to hit a zombie would be through the ear with something like a sharpened screwdriver shank, again, an extremely difficult target when movement, adrenaline, and fear come into play. Or through the eye, again a difficult shot under stressful circumstances.

 

There is a reason zombies are scary, destroying the brain, one of the best defended organs in the body, is no easy feat.

I personally would like to see a climbing pick, perfect for piercing skulls, long handle, max force through a tiny point. But again, try and get that out of a brain in a hurry.

 

It kind of seems to me that a one shot knife is very appropriate, if it is meant to represent slamming a kitchen knife into a zombie then leaving it embedded. The only suggestion I could make with that sort of thing is, is there any way that using a kitchen knife to kill a zombie would, instead of destroying it, make it disappear from your inventory and spawn one in the zombie you downed? Representing that after you kill it, if you have time to loot, you have time to pull your knife out! Great for solo kills, not so great against hordes.

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Agree with the vast majority of your points here, but you might not see a whole lot of climbing picks around in real life. As best I can tell Muldraugh is about 120 miles away from the foothills of the appalachians, so probably not a whole lot of local climbing gear- more likely at a major sporting goods retailer in a bigger city, though.

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one thing Lotan is missing, is the actual movement we make when using a knife in the game. the killing blow is usually the up and under move, going thru the jaw and into the brain from below. not trying to penetrate the actual upper part of the skull with the blade.

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Aye, the way to go would be under the jaw, in the ear canal, or through the eye sockets. But the fact of the matter is, with a kitchen knife, there's almost zero probability that you would ever get your knife back- and that's something I think would definitely be neat to see in the game. It's going to be either broken or lodged in the bone almost certainly, due to the shape of kitchen knives.

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Agree with the vast majority of your points here, but you might not see a whole lot of climbing picks around in real life. As best I can tell Muldraugh is about 120 miles away from the foothills of the appalachians, so probably not a whole lot of local climbing gear- more likely at a major sporting goods retailer in a bigger city, though.

Yup, again, it's one of those things that would be cool but extremely rare to get your hands on, I'm more in favour of a machete or hatchet!

 

one thing Lotan is missing, is the actual movement we make when using a knife in the game. the killing blow is usually the up and under move, going thru the jaw and into the brain from below. not trying to penetrate the actual upper part of the skull with the blade.

That may be the case, but again I think it is highly overestimated how easy this would be to pull off. Unlike things like the walking dead etc, it is not just the mouth you have to worry about, but the arms too. Scratched and die. Against a single zombie, yes, getting the "up under the jaw" hit is going to be a useful way of killing a zombie, but again, if you miss the killing blow, where is your hand, your entire arm is sitting under the zombies jaws.

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one thing Lotan is missing, is the actual movement we make when using a knife in the game. the killing blow is usually the up and under move, going thru the jaw and into the brain from below. not trying to penetrate the actual upper part of the skull with the blade.

That may be the case, but again I think it is highly overestimated how easy this would be to pull off. Unlike things like the walking dead etc, it is not just the mouth you have to worry about, but the arms too. Scratched and die. Against a single zombie, yes, getting the "up under the jaw" hit is going to be a useful way of killing a zombie, but again, if you miss the killing blow, where is your hand, your entire arm is sitting under the zombies jaws.

 

oh absolutely. i only refer to what we do when playing the game. anyone crazy enough to try the up and under on a "real" zombie would certainly pay a price for it. but as we know, for the game many things get simplified and accuracy is way higher than it would be in real life.

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Focusing on the durability of an item does break up the flow of gameplay, and for some games become a rather significant hassle such as Oblivion. Honestly, a larger variety of weapons with a great disparity in durability would be preferable. A baseball bat, axe, crowbar, etc should have no issues cutting down zombies all day long. Especially since the bones in zombies should be significantly more brittle than healthy living bones if we want to be realistic about decomposition. If you want to make these weapons more rare, alright. But I do want to see some sort of notification come up or status bar that shows durability while you are playing so a broken weapon doesn't sneak up on you.

 

Dead Island was nice enough to actually show weapons breaking and falling apart, and while they obviously can't do that for this game I think it shouldn't require having to open the menu up to see the status of your equipped items.

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we already have a durability bar, and a number system (0-100) telling you the weapons strength. you just have to open the inventory and click the same spot you do to check on how the food you are cooking is doing to see the durability bar, or hover your cursor over the weapon to see it's numerical strength value

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