Fists

Busting someone up in a bar fight is a matter of having the brawn to deliver the hits, and the endurance to take them.

This skill governs the accuracy and damage of your attacks with your fists or fists-related weaponry.

Advantages

 * Speed - Most Fist weapons are either fast or very fast. Some can be dual-wielded; double jawbreakers can bury opponents in a flurry of punches before they can fight back.


 * Ease of acquisition - Even the most labor-intensive crafting for Fists weapons is pretty straightforward. Knuckle Busters and Jawbreakers are your bread and butter, and both are bought for cheap in NPC stores. Jawbreakers don't even need modding to be effective.


 * Ease of Use - If you can wrap your head around the concept of maxing Endurance, Brawn and Reflexes, you can make a good Fists class. All three of these stats also have good utility; a newbie playing Fists will be able to climb cliffs easily.


 * Mutation Flexibility - Most racial mutations can work in a Fists class. See the section on Racials for more details.


 * Excellent Top-end Damage - Jawbreakers deal copious amounts of beat damage in addition to stun, Patas deal more slash than a shiver sword and Tesla/Edison Gauntlets deal large amounts of electric, a very difficult to soak damage type.


 * Accuracy - Most Fist weapons have very good to-hit. You'll rarely miss in PvE, and as long as you pick your battles carefully in PvP, you'll smack most non-gunners just fine.


 * Parry Class Coverage - Jawbies and Knuckle Busters cover PC0, Edisons are PC1, and Pata are PC2. Fists is the only class in the game that can boast a viable endgame weapon in all three parry classes aside from Whips. Fisters can make almost any non-gunner fight on their terms with this flexibility.


 * Grabbing Synergy - Jawbreakers and Knuckle Busters are one-handed and fisters have good wrestle, which means that fisters can grab people with their off-hand and beat them up while keeping themselves out of danger. This doesn't work with the 2-handed fists weapons.

Disadvantages

 * Weapon Variety - Fists does not have a wide weapon pool. The big three are Jawbreakers, Edisons and Patas, while Knuckle Busters and Abom claws get honorable mention. There are few other weapons, and they (Uru pounders, for instance) are all trash.


 * Damage Options - Fisters have the choice of beat, slash and shock. This is usually enough, but there's no exotic damage types like acid and bleed.


 * Vulnerable to dodge - Fists has no real answer to high dodge outside of gaming parry classes. Hooligan is a nice idea but it's inconsistent, slow and laughably easy to counter. If a fister is not careful to engage a high-dodge opponent with a PC that's the same or lower than theirs, they'll struggle to land a hit unless they can stun and get a grab.


 * Vulnerable to parry - Spears can stall out fisters with their parry bonus, and if you don't bring Patas, you'll be stuck trying to dodge their hits with your terrible dodge skill.


 * Damage roulette - Most Fists weapons have extremely wide damage ranges, which makes them less consistent than other classes. Top-end damage is fun, but it means little when your Jawbreakers bounce off someone's triple leather armor three times in a row.

Notable Weapons

 * Fists - You will always have these unless you are holding an actual weapon (or you have claws). Damage is buffed by taking the Lithodermis mutation.


 * Claws - Ripper claws are uninteresting but the mutation gives +1 fists. Zombie claws are very slow but scale well with brawn. Chud claws can spread diseases the Chud is infected with. Abomination claws (and fangs) are fast, scale excellently with Brawn and get good to-hit. They also do exotic irradiation damage.


 * Knuckle Buster - Cheap from Ammu-Nation. Deals good beat damage at good speed with good accuracy. One-handed, PC0. These are essentially jawbreaker-lites.


 * Jawbreaker - Knuckle Buster +1. Better damage at a faster speed with more accuracy, and a huge 35% beat crit rate on top. Also one-handed and PC0. Sometimes bought from Pegleg Pete's rotating stock in Botany Bay. The bread-and-butter Fists weapon, this is a good choice for most PvP and PvE situations.


 * Edison Gauntlets - High, exotic shock damage, capping at about 5-45, plus 35% base crit, which is Torture-buffable. PC1, two-handed. Craft-only and not too hard to make. Heavy, at 7kg modded. Good in PvP for its exotic damage; not very useful in PvE besides ghostbusting.


 * Pata Gauntlets - Very high slash damage, capping around 3-48. Fair speed, with a high crit rate of 40% that's Torture-buffable. PC2, two-handed, and heavy at 6kg modded. Craft-only but easy to make. Useful in both PvE and PvP as a defense against PC2 opponents; with high Fists accuracy, fights can be stalled out using parries.

Modding
Fists mod pools vary a lot from weapon to weapon.
 * Jawbreakers can only take gyro and a shock module. Gyro is important for PvP jawbies, but stock is fine for PvE.
 * Knuckle busters have a huge mod pool, but their chief use is cheap PvE, so the only essential mod is a force enhancer.
 * Patas also have a wide mod pool. Gyro is good for getting the most out of PC2 parries, and sharpening kit is a pure damage buff. Everything else is optional. Swapping gyro for balanced is also an option for PvE without drugs.

Racial Synergy
Abomination - Abom is unpopular, but fists and abom do synergize well. The mutation itself boosts Fists by 1, and gives you the scary, radioactive Abom claws. Aboms also can't kill themselves with drugs, which means they can buff themselves like crazy. No armor and cheap or free weapons makes your clones very disposable, too.

Chud - Chud minions spawn with their claws, which scale on Fists. Their stats mirror your base stats, so they'll get their claw damage boosted.

Hideous Freak - Gives good focus and stress immunity, which means you can spam, and  in between smacking them around with jawbies. You can also screech and burn while holding a grab!

Vampire - A stats match made in heaven. The vampire mutation's +4 brawn is a huge boost; +2 to weapon skill on top of big bonus damage. Also includes the +4 endurance that most others have to fill two mutation slots to acquire.

Zombie - Solid soaks, which help with your lower fister dodge if you can't set up or land a. Also easy access to high, fist-and-wrestle-friendly buff numbers with.