Is a melee build viable?

Hey ya'll,

I'm picking up Fallout4 in a couple weeks, and I've been doing some digging to get an idea for what character I might want to play. I'm thinking I want to be a primarily melee based build, but nothing I've found online says whether or not it's actually any good, only that it's doable. So, has anyone here tried to go mostly melee? If so, what was your experience?

I'm playing a character that's all punching and she kills things faster than most guns. You just need a lot of endurance and armor. Bring a companion with a gun with you to deal with wall mounted turrets.

Some enemies have suicide bombs...that could be an issue...

@bombedyermom: I'm playing a melee focused character for the first time in an RPG (I finally decided to mix things up after ONLY ever being the stealthy archer/ranged guy) and I'm enjoying it a lot! I'm around level 30 so I've done a good amount of stuff but don't have an hour count. As long as you get the Big Leagues perk and upgrade it as soon as you can, and also find a good weapon, the melee build can be really powerful. I one shot most lesser enemies and can pretty quickly take down bigger ones. However, I've found I've had to rely on drugs and alcohol a lot more, but that only makes it way more fun. Any time a particularly rough fight is coming up, I down some whiskey and inject some buffjet/psychojet and go to fuckin town. From both a roleplaying and gameplay perspective, I love being this character.

Unfortunately, there was one point where I faced a boss that I simply couldn't use melee against without power armor on, so I was slightly screwed. Had to switch to guns that I just wasn't good with and took forever to do any damage. Still, I've taken down deathclaws one-on-one at this relatively low level with just a bat and power armor, so there shouldn't ever be a situation that's totally unwinnable.

TL;DR: Go for it. Hope that helps!

Yeah, I've heard of that. Strength is also used for heavy weapons, so I figure that should solve those particular problems.

@bombedyermom: You've basically only two options for those enemies, run away until they're no longer a problem or use a gun to stop them. They kind of suck hard because they don't really have to get all that close to you to kill you. The first one I encountered got me through a wall and before I even figured out what was going on I was looking at the loading screen.

@willwithskills: Kind of sounds you should maybe add demolitions?

Anyways your character sounds hilarious and I think I am going to go with that kind of character when I eventually restart the game when more mods come out.

I found a spiked baseball bat and used it for a bit. I'm not a melee build or anything. The issue I ran into was I kept getting radiation when I had to get close to Ghouls to kill them.

My first build was a STR/Luck based character. He was pretty hilariously awful, because I played catch-up on endurance and agility for the first twenty levels or so. With Blitz and your usual array of STR perks, it should be viable. Maybe pop a couple of points into luck for that Grim Reaper perk. That seems like it would be useful for a STR build.

Sounds like me IRL.

Except I call it "Fallout 2015".

You may need some throwing weapons to handle a few things, but, as most others have said, it's completely doable.

From what I've seen melee is incredibly overpowered. I've heard of upper-level melee builds taking down deathclaws and super mutants like its nothing. A drugged up melee dude with a knife can do more damage than most guns in the game. Definitely something to consider.

The game gives you so many points I don't know why'd you'd exclusively use one weapon type. My character is pretty useful with guns, laser weapons, melee, and can talk himself out of most situations that allow for it. The fact that you can distribute points to your SPECIAL levels pretty much makes all characters a jack of all trades, unless you're specifically working against that idea.

That said, melee seems much better implemented than it was Fallout 3 (though I barely touched it there), but maybe slightly less sustainable as an exclusive choice. There have been multiple occasions when I've been in enclosed areas and decided to conserve ammo by pulling out a machete or something.

Pro-Tip. Stack Strength and Endurance, but also dump 9 points in agility. Get the skill that allows you to teleport to enemies farther in VATS. Done. It almost becomes boring though. I have to mix it up, because watching things happen in VATS can start to lose its appeal (unless the bodies go flying sky-high which is always hilarious).

@stonyman65: I think it's less that melee is overpowered and more that combat in this game is a joke after awhile and most of the perks are way too good when fully leveled up. Nobody is going to have trouble with combat at the upper levels unless they completely ignore combat based perks. Especially when you start getting some of the better legendary weapons. You find a bleeding pistol and or explosive shotgun and combat is officially a non-issue.

Right, I started playing on Hard and after 30-ish hours bumped it up to Very Hard. Good thing it doesn't affect the trophies and even offers better rewards in terms of more frequent legendary drops.

As for the melee - as others said it's definetely doable, if you do a lot of side stuff you can acquire a lot of perks - it's much easier to build a character with multiple "talents" this time around and the perks are really powerfull.

Haven't really messed around with Fallout 4 yet, but 3 and New Vegas were incredibly easy to do Unarmed combat with, I'd imagine Melee isn't too different. The perk combinations you can get make things super broken, especially when you get 1 every level up in 3 and 4. You just need to stick to Strength and Endurance, with a bit of Luck for better criticals. Always use Bloody Mess. Cazadors in New Vegas were the only real assholes, since the poison would fuck you up, no idea if there's anything like that in FO4.

I basically played all of Fallout 3 with a Power Fist, a shotgun, some mines, and a Fat Man for kicks.

If you get levels in the Melee damage perk and Ninja you can sneak attack anything for about 2000% of your base damage. Pretty strong.

Danny O'Dwyer (relatively) recently did a playthrough of FO3 on his YouTube/Twitch channel where he used guns* or armor. My understanding is that it worked a lot better than he expected it to. For one thing, he always had a TON of caps on hand for healing items since he could sell all of the armor,ammo, and weapons he came across.

*The run was called "Naked and Gunless" so I assume he may have used melee weapons.

Started my 2nd character this weekend and went for a melee build. So far it's been incredibly fun! I will say that I've been using Jet and Psycho quite a bit on this character and it makes for some really fun moments.

Yeah, caps are never a problem when you're constantly selling weapons, and unless you are in Hardcore mode in New Vegas, ammunition has no weight, making them incredibly useful since you never need them. The only downside is that melee and unarmed weapons are slightly rarer, so they'd be harder to maintain through repair, but FO4 stripped out weapon degradation, so that caveat is gone too.

Not only is it a viable build, I played specced for rifles and wound up suddenly using melee a whole lot with no points toward it becase it was astonishingly effective. I would just make sure you also put points in stealth. That's what's going to allow you to get to guys without them being dug in and firing at you before you reach them.

But do be aware that Bethesda's recent games seem to be made with the intention that you eventually learn everything. (even if it takes 500 hours of gameplay to get there.) That is to say, nothing is ever to far away from your current spec if you just up and decide to change your mind.

The only issue I see here is having enough stuff to put perk points in to. Eventually I had to branch out because my sniper build was complete by level 30.

thanks for the info, gang! I'm anticipating being a bad ass lady in power armor with melee and explosives. Should be fun!

The sole survivor that I'm playing is almost pure melee using the fist-thing from Swan. Have only seen a few incidents where the enemies are out of melee reach. Same thing goes with the previous fallout game (NV) with the ballistic fist. Outfitted all my companions and settlers with melee weapons too.

Seems like it would be tough to deal with supermutants, unless there is armor good enough to withstand nuclear bombs.

The Blitz skill that lets you VATS teleport is pretty huge. High agility helps too because if you're good at sneaking, it's much easier to get some sneak attacks with it.

yeah I've done it and it's pretty much fine. 9 strength 9 endurance 5 luck so you can get idiot savant and keep your int at 1 but still level at a good pace. Only exception I've made are molotovs/grenades for certain enemies mentioned in the above posts.

I'm level 38 and I think I've only fired a gun when there are people on roof tops I can't get to. Pure melee build has been so much fun. Make sure you get the perk in agility called Blitz. You can be 30 feet away from someone and just teleport to them and knock the shit out of them. Strength, Agility and Charisma are my top skills. And charisma is mainly for the base building stuff

Melee is viable in all of the Fallout games. Even more so in Fallout 4.

It's fun as hell. Do it. It's the real way to play Fallout.

@oursin_360: X-01 Mk.VI power armor makes you practically invulnerable, especially when you mod it with lead paint for rad resist and auto-stimpack. Latter is necessary because when you don't need to worry about damage or health, you stop paying attention to it but with no health regen, it will eventually go down. With the int perk for increased duration, power cores become non-issue and you can use power armor all the time.

I've been having no trouble with my electro-sword ninja build. Every now and then I need to throw a grenade at enemies I can't reach, or a large group that I can't divide and conquer, but I'm getting rich selling all the ammo I don't need.

Because of this thread and multiple direct messages I received after my last blog, I wrote this for anyone who is interested in a melee/unarmed build.

THANK YOU.

At this point the only question I have is, Fist weapons or melee weapons? Any preferences out there?

Do you mean melee or unarmed? Because those are different. Unarmed is definitely viable as I am playing it on Survival but I don't know about melee.

Absolutely! I slugged my way through the game with a legendary bat and a maxed blitz skill. Sometimes employing stealth and ninja-stuff to deal with the heavier and harder parts.

Unarmed seems viable too which I'm playing now.

I can vouch for a melee-focused build. I started out stealth-focused but it bored the shit out of me. Now I'm playing like I'm goddamn Grognak (gotta get that Idiot Savant perk!) and having a blast.

melee is broken op

So I started another character figuring the game wasn't so hard that I couldn't play a couple characters up to a decent level to see what I wanted out of the game and mess around. I did this with Skyrim a bit too, playing one character as more of a hero and the other more shady. That way you can see more of the game and have that feel natural in a RP kind of way which I like, even if the game doesn't have a Karma system this time out..

Went melee with weapons and more of a raidery look. I think melee is the better option just because you have more options and ways to upgrade most of them. I use a few different ones (fast and slow options) which is nice. I may actually just put some points in unarmed later for fun considering I had a few different weapon perks on my other character. For stats I did mainly strength with low int and charisma, solid PER, 3 END (to get the perks you want to be more of a tank), some agility and good luck. I am going Idiot Savant as soon as I can and it's fun seeing that silly random progression after seeing the standard version for a while. When you hit it is so rewarding. I haven't started yet but plan on grabbing the critical boosting perks soon.

If you upgrade melee weapons and mess with some chems or alcohol you can really crush most things in one hit. The melee combat itself is alright though a little faster and looser feeling than Skyrim in a way. I think you too often get stuck in kill animations and some of them are pretty lame (although others are great too). I did just become an alcoholic for the first time but I'm just rolling with that and having my guy be a real scumbag. Without spoiling the quest, he just happened into a shitload of drugs so we will see if that stuff gets sold or just used for a bender.

I also have some issues with enemies at range with big guns but I'm figuring out how to deal with that more. Just had some trouble with a Supermutant with a rocket launcher and had to sneak up on him a bit. I also am going explosives with this character to have grenades as a ranged and crowd option.

It's becoming less of a problem as I upgrade my armor (I also am using a mod on PC that allows you to wear armor pieces with anything, although I'm not wearing heavy armor or anything. But that helps). Also with a companion. I was using Dogmeat and he was more useful than before I would say holding enemies and letting me smash them easily up close. Dogmeat often got me seen when sneaking with my stealth character and holding enemies wasn't making much of a difference shooting. I just started using Cait for the first time with this melee character and when she has her bat we both do some serious damage and cover a lot of ground.

Had some trouble with the big tough melee enemies Legendary type enemies but I could get through it by buffing like crazy (using Jet especially) and using criticals.

I am playing stealth with my other gun character so with this one I'm going out of my way to hardly ever stealth (just use it as a crouch) but there are agility perks I really want higher up the tree so may dump points in there to get those. Sprint has become something I use a lot so the sprint related perk would be great.

I also just discovered that you could have a companion lockpick or hack so I think I'm bailing on pursuing those skills especially since I also went both those ways with my other character.

It's been a fun new way to see the game. With my other character I am really into Settlements which is cool but this is a nice break from that and just running around smashing stuff and being more of a jerk in general. The Green Monster is yellow now and I did it on purpose just to be a jerk.

Anyways: yes it's viable! It seems like late in the game it could be ridiculously powerful (though I think my ranged character can be too, that stealth will perhaps seem silly when my melee character can sprint around and Blitz attack enemies from 30 feet away though).