Baseball Bat Build (infinite damage, no ammo dependency)

The best weapons are the baseball bat and the police baton (mistress). These two weapons both have 3AP attacks, but can be used with Desperate Attack for -1AP = 2AP total. This means that a crit with Off Chance will completely refund your whole AP.

Desperate Attack is particularly valuable because it adds 15% crit (when under 35% health). Since it is possible to get above 85% crit with 1 fortune, Desperate Attack will help us cross the 100% mark. This means that with Desperate Attack we can attack an infinite number of times.

Other Off Chance builds suffer from running out of ammo because they rely on burst shots or similar. This build won't run the risk of running out of ammo since it doesn't use ammo.

Unlike H2H, Melee also has several valuable moves to compliment the high crit. Specifically, inspiring finisher will reset all cooldowns when used as the final blow. This means a 10 Guts build can use "Get Over Yourself" after ever kill. Since, you do infinite damage, you have confidence that every kill will add 2 AP to your total, which will help you move to the next victim.

Melee also has Damage Armor which is a critical skill for removing the Defense class that might cause you to miss an attack. Make sure you burn 1 AP to use this on enemies that have much Defense Class.

Your offhand weapon should be the Shark. This weapon gives +5 crit, which will help you get to the 85% crit hit chance milestone. Its not the highest +crit offhand weapon, but it gets the ability Blindside from the criminal tree. Blindside on shark costs 2 AP and strikes the enemy three times. This means that it generates 6 AP for the cost of 2 for a net +4AP. It has a 12 round cool down, but inspiring finisher will remove that. Combined with "get over yourself" this means each enemy will generate an additional +6 AP. A rank 6 Shark gets +5 crit, and keeping it at rank six will reduce the probability that you accidentally kill the enemy with it so you can finish the enemy with inspiring finisher and reset Blindside's cooldown.

This build benefits from increased movement. Do not take the hammer off Jack, its a trap. You get more benefit from Shark, and swapping weapons costs 1 AP (even if you have both tech 60 and deft hands), so you won't get enough movement out of the hammer to compensate for the 1 AP cost.

You can benefit from a brains 2 Bag of Hammers build by getting the additional .7 move speed from the medic tree. However, the rest of the tree is useless (you get more than enough medical items from drops). You also will have 1 Fortune so you won't get Savant. This makes brains 2 very expensive - I also don't like the Bag of Hammers dialog options, they are stupid.

I recommend playing with companions. Fox is a great companion because her initiative is very high. This means she can use castling + energize + disable robot at the beginning of the fight. You want to optimize companions for moving other characters around and having high initiative so they go before your main character and you main character goes before all the enemies. Jack has a bunch of good skills in contraptions such as harpoon and teleport, however his initiative is low so you need to build it up with items.

How to get 86% crit:

* Salieri Trait 20%
* Drunken Brawler (H2H 90) 20%
* Jackal Perk 12%
* Fortune 1 base 2%
* Fortune cookie 4%
* Lithomorph Relic 2%
* Red Shard Relic 13%
* Shark Knife 5%
* Engineering Helmet 5% (Is this a random drop? I forgot where to get it)
* Eng gloves 3%

This is a great build to play the game with because it gets powerful over time, and its not immortal at level 1. So you feel a better power curve through the game than other normal builds.

My preferred stats are:

* Strength 4
* Perception 4
* Guts 10
* Charisma 4
* Brain 8
* Deftness 10
* Fortune 1
* Psyche 4

Important Perks:

* 01: Off-Chance (F<2) If Crit: gain AP+2
* 01: Sun Child (Y4) From 10:00 to 18:00: Fortune +2
* 12: Jackal (P4 C4) Crit chance +12
* 12: Intensive Training (M4 B4) AP+1 (Starting, General). AP+3 (Max)
* 01: Adrenaline (--) If Hp<50%: D+2 and Close Quarters Damage +4
* 06: Marathon Runner (G7) Movespeed +0.25
* 06: Second Wind (G6) Active: Resets all other CDs for 300 fatigue
* 06: Distracting Presence (Y4) Enemies within 1.5m get -15 on defenses of all types

// Second Wind is nice to have for when you miss the inspiring finish.

// Distracting Presence is probably one of the best perks in the game and constantly under rated. -15 resistance is very commonly +30% damage. the important enemies will have 50 resistance and reducing th,at to 35% resistance will be the difference between 50% damage and 65% damage (a 30% damage increase). It costs no AP. Ironically, this build doesn't care about increased damage, so it is just nice to have and not critical.

As you can see this build isn't particularly perk intensive. Technically it could be guts 7 if you want to put the points somewhere else, but I feel like that is too cheesy and too reliant on the infinite damage aspect. I prefer the higher guts for the higher damage and increased, and not having to use alcohol + cookies + <35% hp every fight.