I recently made a spearman character and put a point into Piercing.
Unfortunately, when I get close-range with the wooden spear the dialogue shows me as “hitting” the enemy, and it does hardly any damage (4-8). Also, my piercing isn’t leveling, but my bashing is.
I know that weapons with bash will occasionally use that instead of what’s intended (hilt slam!) but I am never stabbing with the spears, just hitting (and sometimes “whacking” which is also bashing)
With 9 strength, 1 piercing and 2 melee, my ranged guy seem to deal around 10-20 points of melee damage. The speed and block is nice, though melee damage is lacking. But yeah, I’m noticing even whenever you “whack” a person with a spear, the weapon can still get stuck as though you skewered them. I’m not sure if there really is a difference between when you poke and when you whack. The game just seems to combine the damage together then picks which verb it wants.
More importantly, I’m finding thrown wooden spears are a goddamn life saver whenever the game thinks it’s cool not to spawn any gun stores and lots of bears. Headshots regularly deal ~60 points of damage. Eat shit, Yogi.
The spear hitting the ground whenever it hits or misses the enemy makes 8 noise though, not so good for commando raids at night into zombie infested towns I find.
Yeah, wooden spears are ridiculous.
After power-leveling Throwing to 4 and Piercing staying at 2, I can actually run straight at a bear and headshot it with a spear twice. Then get the spears back, skin the bear, and live happily ever after.
Zombies en masse still provide a large problem, though. No amount of spears can/should change that.
with 10 spear, you can kite a horde of Zs easily and kill at least 10 of them.
decide a place that you feel safe to pick up stuffs, like corridor or a area with a few bushes.
Throw at the Zs when they approach that area. kite in circle and pick up the spears and repeat.
But usually when there is more than 10 Zs i will just cook them with molotov.