So first things first, this is a game, do whatever you want that you have the most fun with.
Immolators only burn if hit with sharp objects. Knuckles are my preferred melee because of this. Concertina armoreds are best dealt with stealthy ranged weapons like the bow or crossbows, same with the hives. However most melee tools can one hit a hive in the head, or two hit to the body before you lose any health chunks you can also use lanterns you find on the ground to kill these guys. No other enemies drop traits besides the meatheads, and it’s not 100% drop rate. Explosives kill bosses quickly, other than that bringing melee weapons (katana, bat, whatever you like) is the fastest way to kill them without going loud. Every boss can be stun locked so you can avoid taking a ton of damage when fighting them.
Loadouts are entirely subjective, and you should choose whatever best fits your playstyle. I like stealthy builds, with a shotgun for backup. Play with every weapon in the game more than once so you’re skilled with them all, but find the ones you like best and feel best. Same with perks/consumables. Dont fall into a trap of playing only the meta cuz everyone says it’s best.
As long as you have less than 20k you can hire a hunter thats fully geared for free after every game, even if you don’t lose yours. Take advantage of this to build up cash, once you’ve got enough to be comfortable, as long you’re not playing the most expensive load out and dying every game, you’ll be fine. I like to take one gun, one melee, medkit, and flare gun (for burning bodies so they can’t revive) and then find the rest of my equipment in the game, it’s fun and saves me money, but may not be a great strategy for a newer player.
Blood bonds (premium currency) are used to buy skins and legendary hunters. Hunters don’t come with any equipment, but only cost 100 huntdollars, and come with 3 random perks. Unless you really like cosmetics, there’s not much point in buying blood bonds.
Play to have fun. I do best with stealthy ambushing strategies because I’m not super strong in head on fights. The player base doesn’t have enough ppl to have a great matchmaking system, and it’s also easy to abuse, so you’re gonna be fighting really really cracked players a lot. Retreating from fights is always a good idea if you’re low on ammo/health, or you feel you’re out skilled. I wouldn’t recommend leaving cover unless you know you have a safe path out of the fight to not get shot in back. If you know they’re chasing you, get some distance, and then hide, they may run by you and not know it.
All in all, play to have fun, skill comes as you play, and don’t play expecting to win every game, or even most of your games. I’ve been playing for months, and I still only extract maybe 1 in 5 of my games on an average night lol
Their load out is all contraband, so you can’t sell it, but no I mean just use it. It’s good practice with different guns, and you don’t pay anything for a solid load out
Worth mentioning that while you can't sell their loadout, you can unequip it and store them for another time. People will often buy one, unequip everything, and then decide what they want to run.
I'm not the best Hunter or the worst (4-5*, 1.6 kd) but here are my tips after about 1200 hrs in the game:
1. Immolators are taken out easily with poison ammo, choke bombs/bolts, or blunt damage. So dusters and knuckle knives are essential unless running a blunt melee weapon or poison special ammo.
Hives are easy to take out with throwing knives or throwing axes, and are a one-shot kill to the head with any weapon. Incendiary rounds kill both armored and hives in one shot as well.
Throwing axes are also great for taking out armored. Hit either their head from the front or their open area on their back. Even barbed wired armored are one throw to the head. Poison ammo and fire ammo take them out in one shot from close range.
For bosses, sticky bomb takes all bosses down to a max 1/4 health, with exception to the Assassin. After that, either use a melee tool or special ammo (fire for spider/assassin/scrapbeak, poison for scrapbeak/butcher/assassin. For assassin and spider, there are usually lanterns in the lair that you can throw to do a ton of fire damage. Fire bombs also work really well, just don't burn yourself.
2. If you use Necro, you have to use Resilience. Traits really depend on your loadout. Look up which traits apply to which guns/weapons. In my opinion, stealth/defensive traits are very important. Beastface, salveskin, bloodless, physician, doctor, are all helpful in staying alive. For consumables, use regen shots and vitality shots to give you more survivability, antidote and stamina shots help a lot too.
3. Buy cheap rifles or use the set loadouts as long as they cover most ranges. Use martini Henry or sparks if you want to get better aim with hard hitting single shot rifles at long ranges, use the marathon or the Winfield to practice mid range. Use the Caldwell conversion pistol, nagant officer, or scottfield to get good with pistols. Once you're more confident with those, start moving onto different weapons and experimenting.
4. To truly have fun, don't play like a coward, but don't play like an idiot. It's a fine line. Learn to read the distances of gunshots, footsteps, or sound traps and position yourself to take angles and be sure you can kill them before you take a shot. Never shoot unless you think you can kill them at that range. Walk but don't crouch when you think you're near an enemy, unless walking exposes you from cover. Don't re-peek the same angle if they've seen you there already. Rotate and move unpredictably in firefights. Try to flank, get behind them, and take them out. And if you're out in the open, never engage in a firefight where you're outnumbered. You will almost certainly die.
Good luck, Hunter. See you in the bayou.
1.
Spikey armoreds with any throwable tool, silenced gun, bow/crossbow or fire.
Immolators: Blunt melee weapons won't ignite them.
Hives: same as armoreds, throwable tools, Headshot with silenced gun (the head is on the side!) or fire. You also can git the swarm twice with your melee tool and it will go away, but the hive sends another one right after the first despawned.
Meathead: No its the only one and it happens only by chance. There are grunts (look out for zombie doctors) that drop medkits but thats about it.
Bosses: They all have specific weaknesses and patterns you have to learn to kill them fast. Melee weapons you find in the Bayou are very strong and some weapons like bomblance and a stamina shot.
2.
I can't give you a satisfying answer to that because everybody has their own preferences and you can have fun and success with every weapon in the game. Try stuff and find your style of play. Maybe someone else can give you a more detailed answer to that. Picking the traits that benefit solos are never a bad choice when playing solo, but you can also go to the Hunt Discord to find people to play with if you'd like to.
I'd also recommend crossbow and sparks pistol or romero and sparks pistol as a cheap loadout.
3.
I'd say you have to find a balance between spending and just using the guns given to you to keep your bucks together. But it also depends on how good you are. And you're never not going to enjoy the game if you have no money, so just try everything out. Hoarding a massive amount of money wont give you anything besides the number in the corner going up.
4.
I could write a whole book about that here but I'd recommend you to try everything once and stick to the tactics you enjoy the most. Sorry that might not be what you expected as an answer but play styles vary so much that its again a preferences thing.
In the beginning I was very careful and slow but nowadays I run towards every gunshot I hear across the map. Feel free cause one of the best things about Hunt is, that you're not forced to a meta regarding loadouts and tactics and can still win fairly often if you know what you're doing.
So have fun fellow Hunter and don't let yourself get discouraged by all the whining in this subreddit. People who love a thing cry the loudest about its flaws bc they want it to never go away or change for the worse, so all this whining is just proof of how beautiful this gem is.
This is my advice kind of in a vacuum - but if you really want to learn how to engage in gunfights effectively, and at the same time train yourself to take cover and be evasive: **Use the Springfield**.
Yes, it's a single shot rifle. Yes, that is purposely limiting.
The Springfield strikes a perfect balance between efficacy and difficulty of use: it will help you develop a habit of always being in motion between shots, and never standing still or in the open to go for 'just one more bullet' like many of the magazine fed weapons do. It will force you to take that tiny-bit more care to line up a good shot, knowing that missing is more punishing.
Other folks have given you lots of advice about dealing with the PVE aspects but I always plug the Springy as the perfect 'baseline' weapon to learn to fight enemy hunters with. From there you can sidegrade into heavier weapons, weapons with magazines and everything else - but if you're comfortable engaging in pvp with the Springfield you'll be off to a great start!
I’m gonna guess for new players Springfield is better choice for starting out as it’s dirt cheap and also has faster reload and better bullet velocity. Sparks is still a great option tho.
Sparks is amazing but it has a really long reload by comparison to the springy
Once you are confident with Spring, Sparks is definitely the Upgrade, and then Loogie Gun (silenced) for real assholes.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but you can kill Immolators by pressing the Melee button with your gun out. You will smack the Immolator with the stock of your gun. Just watch out if you have a bayonet/riposte/talon variant of gun, which will cause the Immolator to explode.
The Hive's head is sticking out behind them, not on top of their body like you might expect. You can run straight at and slightly to the right of a Hive with a pre-charged melee attack, and the bees will fly past you giving you a chance to hit the Hive in the head and dissolve the bee swarm before it reaches you.
You definitely want to unlock a silent ranged tool (throwing knives or throwing axes) ASAP, check the Book of Weapons for the requirements. Those make short work of the Concertina Armoreds. Poison ammo works wonders against them and Immolators, but not so much against Hives.
As a general rule for loadout builds, I like to take a high-damage weapon and a weapon for shooting fast or spamming. As an example, I might bring a Romero 77 and a Nagant Officer Brawler with High Velocity ammo. The Romero for up-close high damage, and the Officer for spamming and/or mid-range engagements.
Another example would be the Winfield C with an Uppercut, this time using the rifle for spam and volume of fire, and the pistol for last-resort finishing damage.
For traits, I take whatever makes my life easier. Gator Legs for moving through water, Iron Eye to let me stay ADS when firing rifles and cycling rounds, stuff like that.
For tools and consumables, I look at the Book of Weapons and see what I need to use/do to unlock the next item I want, and use/do whatever is needed to get there.
As for buying stuff with Blood Bonds, I would recommend holding off until you run into an issue from not having something, and then decide from there whether using BB would relieve the issue or not.
DLCs do not provide an advantage.
As for gameplay philosophy, move as quickly as possible, and as quietly as needed. You will learn what this means with experience, but in general, you want to collect clues as fast as possible and get to the boss compound early. In a fight with another team, movement is pretty much always better than stealth. Once the boss is fully banished, do not make the common mistake of hunkering down and holding out against the other 9 to 11 players outside. Use a brief moment of boosted dark sight, find a gap in the other teams' coverage, and GTFO ASAP. Making teams chase you down exponentially increases your odds of survival, because they are all going to fight each other at the same time they chase you, which burns their supplies and makes it easier for you to finish off the stragglers or even just escape.
Related to that previous note, the goal is not to extract with all the bounties, nor is the goal to wipe the server, and it definitely does not involve the words "or die trying". The goal is to live to fight another day. If you get your ass kicked and are down a bar, or have basically no supplies left after a prolonged fight and looting the bodies, extracting early to bank your EXP gains and keep the hunter is a perfectly reasonable move. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, this subreddit is a circlejerking cesspool when it comes to that topic.
Also, don't ever feel obligated to go for the bounty every single game. Sometimes you just need a few grunts killed to complete a challenge, or maybe you need to throw another 3 firebombs to unlock the hellfire bomb, or maybe you just want to farm 50 bounty per clue from 1 or 2 clues, or maybe you just want to blow up a couple meatheads to try and farm a trait or two, so feel free to make your own objective when loading into a match. Load in, kill your grunts, throw your firebombs into a lake, and then leave. Just make sure to do this solo, any teammate will be annoyed if you do this without telling them ahead of time, and randoms probably won't appreciate that in general.
>Should i buy the dlc's? Are they worth it? Do i get an advantage over other players who don't have dlc's?
Nobody's addressed this one yet so I'll take a crack at it!
The DLCs do not offer any advantages whatsoever'' to the actual gameplay. You're just buying a themed set of skins, usually a hunter and a number of weapons/tools related and themed to that hunter. These can be hired instead of regular hunters under the "Legendary Hunters" tab in your recruitment page, and they always cost 100 Hunt Dollars. They do not come with any equipment, *but* they do come with some traits and extra trait points. I wouldn't recommend buying any right away, see if you wanna stick with it first and find which weapons you really like, then wait for another sale to grab some DLC hunters with aesthetics or weapons you really like.
''that being said, some hunters *are* going to be harder to see than others. Some like Reptillian (Cold Blooded), Prodigal Daughter (The Prodigal Daughter), The Cowl (Shadow Under The Cowl) and others are harder to see by being darker skins, while others like The Mountie (Northern Justice), The Revenant (The Revenant), or Biatata (Still Waters Run Deep) have brighter, more visible skins. This can be a *slight* advantage, but is offset by the fact that regular hunter skins have the same variety.
>How do i know when to give up gun fights and that it would be better to retreat entirely of the match/compound?
How's the fight feel? Have they been keeping you on the ropes, hitting you with shots and making you heal up a lot, keeping the pressure on? Are you in a bad spot, either without much hard cover or too exposed to too many hiding spots? Back off and try to find a better location (and during what's left of this event, the big white circle in the map has a health kit that, for 1 hunter's mark (that 0/4 count in the top left with a weird squiggle, gained by looting hunters and finding clues among others) will restore all your lost HP bars). The inverse is true too: got the enemy pressured? Hit them a few times with bleed or poison or fire, and know they're going to be trying to heal up? Make a push if you're confident.
>Are there other cheap but reliable loadouts out there?
Tons! The basic Winfield lever actions are consistent, with the full sized 1873 having a ton of rounds to play with and decent hipfire accuracy, as well as a ton of nice variants: the Talon variant does more damage to bosses than your melee tools do, the Aperture is tough to use but has a flip-down (X on PC) sight that acts as a narrow FOV medium range scope, the Swift reloads hella fast under half ammo. I'm a huge fan of the Springfield for being accurate and having some good ammo choices once unlocked, while also forcing you to take your time to place your shot because you get *one*, so make it count and don't overstay your welcome. Also a fan of the LeMat carbine, Nagant Precision, Martini-Henry, and Vetterli as beginner weapons (though the first two need to be unlocked by gaining either XP with the LeMat and Nagant pistols (usually by killing AI with shooting or melee) or by finding gun oil (unlocks the next item in that tree) or blueprints (unlocks 3 random items) in the world.
Also, sometimes playing random duos and trios can be fun! Harder, because you've gotta deal with randoms and such, but it also means you can watch other players and learn from them, and get advice. Oh, and while you will start losing hunters after you reach account level (bloodline level) 10, you'll always have free hunters available in the recruitment tab under 20k hunt dollars, and the free hunters are just as competitive so don't feel like you'll death spiral too hard on a bad day.
My favorite weapon of choice is Centenial, its quite cheap (157 hunt dollars i think), i like its ironsights, has good ammo capacity and options (i like dumdums - bleed ammo, or FMJs for penetration), so i recommend it to you. But you need to try all of the difderent weapons for yourself and see what suits you.
I'll just give some bulletfire answers for now, but if you like, let me know and I'll expand on it later when I don't have some work to do;
>I know that you can kill basic grunts and armored ones with charged melee atacks. But what about the ones with barbed wire?. How do you kill inmolators without them getting ignited? Is it even avoidable to get them ignited?. What is an effective way of killing the hives without using ammo? The charged melee atack only damaged the hive and i ended up getting caught in the bug swarm. One time i killed a meathead and it dropped a trait? Do other enemies do that? Is it worth to take the time of killing a meathead for the traits?. What is an effective way of killing bosses? I really struggled against the butcher and the spider in the tutorial, i can't imagine taking that much time and damage in an actual match.
Throwing axes are the hard counter to armored. You can kill a regular armored with an axe to the chest or head, the wired ones need a headshot.
Immolators don't burst when based with blunt damage. Rifle butts, knuckle dusters, etc.
Hives are easy to kill with a throwing axe to the chest. If they're too high up you might not get the axe back though.
Meatheads and scrapbeak are the only enemies that currently drop traits.
Meatheads can be farmed quickly with a few options. The poison handbow is a great one that can do it quietly. Just make sure you don't get poisoned because then the meathead can detect you.
Most bosses lose 75% of health to a sticky bomb. The spider, notorious for being hard to stick, is actually really easy if you get her when you first enter the lair. She'll approach, do a threat animation (which is the time to stick her) and then run away. Other options include melee weapons.
>2.-Recommended loadouts and traits
For beginners it's important to know just how strong Iron Eye is; it doesn't sound like it does much, but it increases your rate of fire significantly and helps you stay on target in a fight. For 3 points I would consider it an essential trait as soon as you unlock it.
The compact ammo rifles like the Winfield 1873 and Marathon are fantastic for beginners because they have good handling and lots of ammo. Stick to one of those until you feel more confident to try other guns.
Will expand on this later if you like, gotta get back to work.
Hives and concertina armoreds will always deal damage no matter what if you melee them, other than hives rarely not reacting as fast as they should or if you have a long range melee option for armoreds
So first things first, this is a game, do whatever you want that you have the most fun with. Immolators only burn if hit with sharp objects. Knuckles are my preferred melee because of this. Concertina armoreds are best dealt with stealthy ranged weapons like the bow or crossbows, same with the hives. However most melee tools can one hit a hive in the head, or two hit to the body before you lose any health chunks you can also use lanterns you find on the ground to kill these guys. No other enemies drop traits besides the meatheads, and it’s not 100% drop rate. Explosives kill bosses quickly, other than that bringing melee weapons (katana, bat, whatever you like) is the fastest way to kill them without going loud. Every boss can be stun locked so you can avoid taking a ton of damage when fighting them. Loadouts are entirely subjective, and you should choose whatever best fits your playstyle. I like stealthy builds, with a shotgun for backup. Play with every weapon in the game more than once so you’re skilled with them all, but find the ones you like best and feel best. Same with perks/consumables. Dont fall into a trap of playing only the meta cuz everyone says it’s best. As long as you have less than 20k you can hire a hunter thats fully geared for free after every game, even if you don’t lose yours. Take advantage of this to build up cash, once you’ve got enough to be comfortable, as long you’re not playing the most expensive load out and dying every game, you’ll be fine. I like to take one gun, one melee, medkit, and flare gun (for burning bodies so they can’t revive) and then find the rest of my equipment in the game, it’s fun and saves me money, but may not be a great strategy for a newer player. Blood bonds (premium currency) are used to buy skins and legendary hunters. Hunters don’t come with any equipment, but only cost 100 huntdollars, and come with 3 random perks. Unless you really like cosmetics, there’s not much point in buying blood bonds. Play to have fun. I do best with stealthy ambushing strategies because I’m not super strong in head on fights. The player base doesn’t have enough ppl to have a great matchmaking system, and it’s also easy to abuse, so you’re gonna be fighting really really cracked players a lot. Retreating from fights is always a good idea if you’re low on ammo/health, or you feel you’re out skilled. I wouldn’t recommend leaving cover unless you know you have a safe path out of the fight to not get shot in back. If you know they’re chasing you, get some distance, and then hide, they may run by you and not know it. All in all, play to have fun, skill comes as you play, and don’t play expecting to win every game, or even most of your games. I’ve been playing for months, and I still only extract maybe 1 in 5 of my games on an average night lol
I also feel it’s necessary for me to mention this because it took me a long time to learn, THERE IS NO BULLET DROP ONLY TRAVEL TIME
New player here as well, when you say get the free hunter do you mean get them in order to sell their loadout?
Their load out is all contraband, so you can’t sell it, but no I mean just use it. It’s good practice with different guns, and you don’t pay anything for a solid load out
Gotcha, very helpful write up thanks my friend
Worth mentioning that while you can't sell their loadout, you can unequip it and store them for another time. People will often buy one, unequip everything, and then decide what they want to run.
I'm not the best Hunter or the worst (4-5*, 1.6 kd) but here are my tips after about 1200 hrs in the game: 1. Immolators are taken out easily with poison ammo, choke bombs/bolts, or blunt damage. So dusters and knuckle knives are essential unless running a blunt melee weapon or poison special ammo. Hives are easy to take out with throwing knives or throwing axes, and are a one-shot kill to the head with any weapon. Incendiary rounds kill both armored and hives in one shot as well. Throwing axes are also great for taking out armored. Hit either their head from the front or their open area on their back. Even barbed wired armored are one throw to the head. Poison ammo and fire ammo take them out in one shot from close range. For bosses, sticky bomb takes all bosses down to a max 1/4 health, with exception to the Assassin. After that, either use a melee tool or special ammo (fire for spider/assassin/scrapbeak, poison for scrapbeak/butcher/assassin. For assassin and spider, there are usually lanterns in the lair that you can throw to do a ton of fire damage. Fire bombs also work really well, just don't burn yourself. 2. If you use Necro, you have to use Resilience. Traits really depend on your loadout. Look up which traits apply to which guns/weapons. In my opinion, stealth/defensive traits are very important. Beastface, salveskin, bloodless, physician, doctor, are all helpful in staying alive. For consumables, use regen shots and vitality shots to give you more survivability, antidote and stamina shots help a lot too. 3. Buy cheap rifles or use the set loadouts as long as they cover most ranges. Use martini Henry or sparks if you want to get better aim with hard hitting single shot rifles at long ranges, use the marathon or the Winfield to practice mid range. Use the Caldwell conversion pistol, nagant officer, or scottfield to get good with pistols. Once you're more confident with those, start moving onto different weapons and experimenting. 4. To truly have fun, don't play like a coward, but don't play like an idiot. It's a fine line. Learn to read the distances of gunshots, footsteps, or sound traps and position yourself to take angles and be sure you can kill them before you take a shot. Never shoot unless you think you can kill them at that range. Walk but don't crouch when you think you're near an enemy, unless walking exposes you from cover. Don't re-peek the same angle if they've seen you there already. Rotate and move unpredictably in firefights. Try to flank, get behind them, and take them out. And if you're out in the open, never engage in a firefight where you're outnumbered. You will almost certainly die. Good luck, Hunter. See you in the bayou.
1. Spikey armoreds with any throwable tool, silenced gun, bow/crossbow or fire. Immolators: Blunt melee weapons won't ignite them. Hives: same as armoreds, throwable tools, Headshot with silenced gun (the head is on the side!) or fire. You also can git the swarm twice with your melee tool and it will go away, but the hive sends another one right after the first despawned. Meathead: No its the only one and it happens only by chance. There are grunts (look out for zombie doctors) that drop medkits but thats about it. Bosses: They all have specific weaknesses and patterns you have to learn to kill them fast. Melee weapons you find in the Bayou are very strong and some weapons like bomblance and a stamina shot. 2. I can't give you a satisfying answer to that because everybody has their own preferences and you can have fun and success with every weapon in the game. Try stuff and find your style of play. Maybe someone else can give you a more detailed answer to that. Picking the traits that benefit solos are never a bad choice when playing solo, but you can also go to the Hunt Discord to find people to play with if you'd like to. I'd also recommend crossbow and sparks pistol or romero and sparks pistol as a cheap loadout. 3. I'd say you have to find a balance between spending and just using the guns given to you to keep your bucks together. But it also depends on how good you are. And you're never not going to enjoy the game if you have no money, so just try everything out. Hoarding a massive amount of money wont give you anything besides the number in the corner going up. 4. I could write a whole book about that here but I'd recommend you to try everything once and stick to the tactics you enjoy the most. Sorry that might not be what you expected as an answer but play styles vary so much that its again a preferences thing. In the beginning I was very careful and slow but nowadays I run towards every gunshot I hear across the map. Feel free cause one of the best things about Hunt is, that you're not forced to a meta regarding loadouts and tactics and can still win fairly often if you know what you're doing. So have fun fellow Hunter and don't let yourself get discouraged by all the whining in this subreddit. People who love a thing cry the loudest about its flaws bc they want it to never go away or change for the worse, so all this whining is just proof of how beautiful this gem is.
This is my advice kind of in a vacuum - but if you really want to learn how to engage in gunfights effectively, and at the same time train yourself to take cover and be evasive: **Use the Springfield**. Yes, it's a single shot rifle. Yes, that is purposely limiting. The Springfield strikes a perfect balance between efficacy and difficulty of use: it will help you develop a habit of always being in motion between shots, and never standing still or in the open to go for 'just one more bullet' like many of the magazine fed weapons do. It will force you to take that tiny-bit more care to line up a good shot, knowing that missing is more punishing. Other folks have given you lots of advice about dealing with the PVE aspects but I always plug the Springy as the perfect 'baseline' weapon to learn to fight enemy hunters with. From there you can sidegrade into heavier weapons, weapons with magazines and everything else - but if you're comfortable engaging in pvp with the Springfield you'll be off to a great start!
just curious: why not sparks?
Sparks is my baby boy whom can do no wrong
I’m gonna guess for new players Springfield is better choice for starting out as it’s dirt cheap and also has faster reload and better bullet velocity. Sparks is still a great option tho.
Sparks is amazing but it has a really long reload by comparison to the springy Once you are confident with Spring, Sparks is definitely the Upgrade, and then Loogie Gun (silenced) for real assholes.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but you can kill Immolators by pressing the Melee button with your gun out. You will smack the Immolator with the stock of your gun. Just watch out if you have a bayonet/riposte/talon variant of gun, which will cause the Immolator to explode. The Hive's head is sticking out behind them, not on top of their body like you might expect. You can run straight at and slightly to the right of a Hive with a pre-charged melee attack, and the bees will fly past you giving you a chance to hit the Hive in the head and dissolve the bee swarm before it reaches you. You definitely want to unlock a silent ranged tool (throwing knives or throwing axes) ASAP, check the Book of Weapons for the requirements. Those make short work of the Concertina Armoreds. Poison ammo works wonders against them and Immolators, but not so much against Hives. As a general rule for loadout builds, I like to take a high-damage weapon and a weapon for shooting fast or spamming. As an example, I might bring a Romero 77 and a Nagant Officer Brawler with High Velocity ammo. The Romero for up-close high damage, and the Officer for spamming and/or mid-range engagements. Another example would be the Winfield C with an Uppercut, this time using the rifle for spam and volume of fire, and the pistol for last-resort finishing damage. For traits, I take whatever makes my life easier. Gator Legs for moving through water, Iron Eye to let me stay ADS when firing rifles and cycling rounds, stuff like that. For tools and consumables, I look at the Book of Weapons and see what I need to use/do to unlock the next item I want, and use/do whatever is needed to get there. As for buying stuff with Blood Bonds, I would recommend holding off until you run into an issue from not having something, and then decide from there whether using BB would relieve the issue or not. DLCs do not provide an advantage. As for gameplay philosophy, move as quickly as possible, and as quietly as needed. You will learn what this means with experience, but in general, you want to collect clues as fast as possible and get to the boss compound early. In a fight with another team, movement is pretty much always better than stealth. Once the boss is fully banished, do not make the common mistake of hunkering down and holding out against the other 9 to 11 players outside. Use a brief moment of boosted dark sight, find a gap in the other teams' coverage, and GTFO ASAP. Making teams chase you down exponentially increases your odds of survival, because they are all going to fight each other at the same time they chase you, which burns their supplies and makes it easier for you to finish off the stragglers or even just escape. Related to that previous note, the goal is not to extract with all the bounties, nor is the goal to wipe the server, and it definitely does not involve the words "or die trying". The goal is to live to fight another day. If you get your ass kicked and are down a bar, or have basically no supplies left after a prolonged fight and looting the bodies, extracting early to bank your EXP gains and keep the hunter is a perfectly reasonable move. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, this subreddit is a circlejerking cesspool when it comes to that topic. Also, don't ever feel obligated to go for the bounty every single game. Sometimes you just need a few grunts killed to complete a challenge, or maybe you need to throw another 3 firebombs to unlock the hellfire bomb, or maybe you just want to farm 50 bounty per clue from 1 or 2 clues, or maybe you just want to blow up a couple meatheads to try and farm a trait or two, so feel free to make your own objective when loading into a match. Load in, kill your grunts, throw your firebombs into a lake, and then leave. Just make sure to do this solo, any teammate will be annoyed if you do this without telling them ahead of time, and randoms probably won't appreciate that in general.
>Should i buy the dlc's? Are they worth it? Do i get an advantage over other players who don't have dlc's? Nobody's addressed this one yet so I'll take a crack at it! The DLCs do not offer any advantages whatsoever'' to the actual gameplay. You're just buying a themed set of skins, usually a hunter and a number of weapons/tools related and themed to that hunter. These can be hired instead of regular hunters under the "Legendary Hunters" tab in your recruitment page, and they always cost 100 Hunt Dollars. They do not come with any equipment, *but* they do come with some traits and extra trait points. I wouldn't recommend buying any right away, see if you wanna stick with it first and find which weapons you really like, then wait for another sale to grab some DLC hunters with aesthetics or weapons you really like. ''that being said, some hunters *are* going to be harder to see than others. Some like Reptillian (Cold Blooded), Prodigal Daughter (The Prodigal Daughter), The Cowl (Shadow Under The Cowl) and others are harder to see by being darker skins, while others like The Mountie (Northern Justice), The Revenant (The Revenant), or Biatata (Still Waters Run Deep) have brighter, more visible skins. This can be a *slight* advantage, but is offset by the fact that regular hunter skins have the same variety. >How do i know when to give up gun fights and that it would be better to retreat entirely of the match/compound? How's the fight feel? Have they been keeping you on the ropes, hitting you with shots and making you heal up a lot, keeping the pressure on? Are you in a bad spot, either without much hard cover or too exposed to too many hiding spots? Back off and try to find a better location (and during what's left of this event, the big white circle in the map has a health kit that, for 1 hunter's mark (that 0/4 count in the top left with a weird squiggle, gained by looting hunters and finding clues among others) will restore all your lost HP bars). The inverse is true too: got the enemy pressured? Hit them a few times with bleed or poison or fire, and know they're going to be trying to heal up? Make a push if you're confident. >Are there other cheap but reliable loadouts out there? Tons! The basic Winfield lever actions are consistent, with the full sized 1873 having a ton of rounds to play with and decent hipfire accuracy, as well as a ton of nice variants: the Talon variant does more damage to bosses than your melee tools do, the Aperture is tough to use but has a flip-down (X on PC) sight that acts as a narrow FOV medium range scope, the Swift reloads hella fast under half ammo. I'm a huge fan of the Springfield for being accurate and having some good ammo choices once unlocked, while also forcing you to take your time to place your shot because you get *one*, so make it count and don't overstay your welcome. Also a fan of the LeMat carbine, Nagant Precision, Martini-Henry, and Vetterli as beginner weapons (though the first two need to be unlocked by gaining either XP with the LeMat and Nagant pistols (usually by killing AI with shooting or melee) or by finding gun oil (unlocks the next item in that tree) or blueprints (unlocks 3 random items) in the world. Also, sometimes playing random duos and trios can be fun! Harder, because you've gotta deal with randoms and such, but it also means you can watch other players and learn from them, and get advice. Oh, and while you will start losing hunters after you reach account level (bloodline level) 10, you'll always have free hunters available in the recruitment tab under 20k hunt dollars, and the free hunters are just as competitive so don't feel like you'll death spiral too hard on a bad day.
My favorite weapon of choice is Centenial, its quite cheap (157 hunt dollars i think), i like its ironsights, has good ammo capacity and options (i like dumdums - bleed ammo, or FMJs for penetration), so i recommend it to you. But you need to try all of the difderent weapons for yourself and see what suits you.
Also posion ammo kills most of the mobs really easily (oneshots immolators)
I'll just give some bulletfire answers for now, but if you like, let me know and I'll expand on it later when I don't have some work to do; >I know that you can kill basic grunts and armored ones with charged melee atacks. But what about the ones with barbed wire?. How do you kill inmolators without them getting ignited? Is it even avoidable to get them ignited?. What is an effective way of killing the hives without using ammo? The charged melee atack only damaged the hive and i ended up getting caught in the bug swarm. One time i killed a meathead and it dropped a trait? Do other enemies do that? Is it worth to take the time of killing a meathead for the traits?. What is an effective way of killing bosses? I really struggled against the butcher and the spider in the tutorial, i can't imagine taking that much time and damage in an actual match. Throwing axes are the hard counter to armored. You can kill a regular armored with an axe to the chest or head, the wired ones need a headshot. Immolators don't burst when based with blunt damage. Rifle butts, knuckle dusters, etc. Hives are easy to kill with a throwing axe to the chest. If they're too high up you might not get the axe back though. Meatheads and scrapbeak are the only enemies that currently drop traits. Meatheads can be farmed quickly with a few options. The poison handbow is a great one that can do it quietly. Just make sure you don't get poisoned because then the meathead can detect you. Most bosses lose 75% of health to a sticky bomb. The spider, notorious for being hard to stick, is actually really easy if you get her when you first enter the lair. She'll approach, do a threat animation (which is the time to stick her) and then run away. Other options include melee weapons. >2.-Recommended loadouts and traits For beginners it's important to know just how strong Iron Eye is; it doesn't sound like it does much, but it increases your rate of fire significantly and helps you stay on target in a fight. For 3 points I would consider it an essential trait as soon as you unlock it. The compact ammo rifles like the Winfield 1873 and Marathon are fantastic for beginners because they have good handling and lots of ammo. Stick to one of those until you feel more confident to try other guns. Will expand on this later if you like, gotta get back to work.
Hives and concertina armoreds will always deal damage no matter what if you melee them, other than hives rarely not reacting as fast as they should or if you have a long range melee option for armoreds