XIII/IAmRisen Guide
(Originally written by IAmRisen for new and would-be Gore Corps members. No longer to be found on the RRF wiki, it is reproduced here.)
So, You Want To Be A Death Cultist?
Here are some build order suggestions, courtesy of our friend IAmRisen.
Whenever you put together a build order, you have to strike a balance between speeding up growth and actually making yourself useful to your horde (like when a harman decides to pick up Construction, which gets him no XP but is vital to the survival of him and his buddies). The stuff on the Vigour Mortis tree will speed up your growth, while your survivor skills will make you a more proficient cade-hopping Death Cultist without giving you much XP (halved XP from PKing and all that). Lurching Gait and Ankle Grab will do both; not only do you have more AP to spend on murder and mayhem, but you become able to efficiently bullet-sponge.
This build order is biased very heavily towards utility as opposed to growth. It will enable budding Death Cultists to jump straight into hybrid killer mode, but with rather slow skill advancement. In other words, the road of an out-of-the-box Death Cultist is a long one that sacrifices quick XP gains for quick lethality. Some players might find it better to just play a straight zombie for the XP before going Death Cultist.
Making a Death Cultist is very, very similar to making a zombie. So similar, in fact, that a Death Cultist is really nothing more than a zombie-plus with no Brain Rot. The zombie-side build is exactly the same as your average siege zombie:
1. Vigour Mortis
2. Death Grip
3. Rend Flesh
4. Lurching Gait
5. Ankle Grab
...then whatever you want. I recommend going to the Memories tree next. And you may even want to put Lurching Gait and Ankle Grab before Rend Flesh if you find yourself getting revived a lot, to help with parachuting.
At the same time as you're building up your zombie skills, you'll be picking up survivor skills:
1. Free Running (to grab a Flak with a quickness, and enable parachuting virtually immediately; ultimately, you get more out of this than you do with Bodybuilding first, as Bodybuilding and a Flak do virtually the same thing by themselves.)
2. Diagnosis (beats the hell out of the ENTIRE Scent tree, and it's actually more useful when you're a zombie than when you're alive)
3. Body Building (gotta get it sometime)
4. Hand-to-hand combat
5. Knife Proficiency (congrats, you are now a certified Master of GKing)
6. Firearms Training
7. Pistol Training
8. Advanced Pistol Training
9. Shopping
10. Bargain Hunting
11. Shotgun Training
12. Advanced Shotgun Training
...then get whatever you want.
This build is in no way to be considered dogmatic, as the utility of the stuff past the first few (usually two or three) skill levels is always going to be highly situational. If you're up against a revive-happy bunch of defenders, the survivor skills become more useful and you may want to save your zombie XP for them. On the other hand, if you're rolling a poorly-defended area (generally, anywhere not near a mall), or up against an enemy with good revive discipline, just stick with the zombie skills, as you'll be using them more.
A few basic pointers, though:
1. Vigour Mortis and Death Grip are the first zombie skills you buy.
2. Once you get Free Running, Ankle Grab becomes very, very desirable, and vice versa.
3. GKing is more important than shooting. So get stabby before you get shooty.
4. Until you max your Pistol skills, stabbing for damage is more efficient than shooting... but swinging an axe for damage is more efficient than stabbing after you get Hand-to-Hand, although buying Axe Proficiency for this purpose isn't really worth it... but searching up an axe might be. Honestly, though, I recommend saving your AP and just stabbing instead of trying to get an axe, because you won't have much opportunity for axe-based PKing anyway.
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
It's possible to start as a survivor and do the Death Cultist thing, although it's a little trickier. For one thing, survivors gain XP fastest when they do stuff that is helpful to survivors (in fact, a Scout who did nothing but run around distributing FAKs sans First Aid was probably the fastest-advancing character I ever wrote). And we don't want to help the survivors, do we? But here's what you can do:
SCOUT METHOD
Write a Scout and get yourself a Knife. Now find out who the dedicated defenders are in the building where you're hiding, and stab them down while they're swaying in the revive queue. You'll catch some grief for this, but nowhere near as much as you would have caught if you were PKing. You're still helping the zombie cause, as you're forcing a survivor (who probably doesn't have Ankle Grab) to spend loads of AP standing up, and causing them to be on the ground when the revivers come calling. And you're getting full zombie-killin' XP.
Once you're good and knife-happy, go shooty. That means pistols first, mallrat second, shotguns a distant third. Keep killing Mrh-cows for XP. And do your ammo-searching in PDs instead of Mall Gun Stores until you get a Flak Jacket AND the Mallrat skills.
Instead of going shooty first, you can take the NT route. Just remember: Firearms Training + Pistol Training + Advanced Pistol = 225 XP, while NT Employment + Lab Experience = 300 XP (because Scouts are Military). You can guarantee your Death Cultist buddies revives while picking up a nice, steady stream of 10 XP per revive. Then go shooty off of this XP. Just remember to stay out of the target buildings, mmkay?
Once you've got everything in the firearms tree, plus the Mallrat skills, it's time to go zombie. Pick up Body Building and Diagnosis, then save up at least 400 XP for Vigour Mortis, Death Grip, Lurching Gait, and Ankle Grab. Now kill a generator, scream "Allah Akbar," and enjoy your newfound notoriety.
In all honestly, I would't be averse to newbie Death Cultists simply taking the Scout -> Stabbity Skills -> NT route as a matter of course. The only question is whether the group has a healthy enough killer : newbie reviver ratio to make this work. A glut of newbies should probably be ushered into the zombie route, while a single one could probably do more good as a reviver until he's got enough XP to start hurting things.
