Who's Better? The Officer Or The Veteran In Project Zomboid

today I feel like disturbing the piece let's talk about the two gun Focus occupations and a min max metaslave analysis police officer versus a veteran if I had to quickly help you choose between the two occupations I would ask a simple question do you plan on Surviving long term or short term as always I'm talking about the basic apocalypse difficulty setting if you change something or add mods you'll have to account for the differences on your end long term I recommend you take the police officer short term I recommend you take the veteran now that I've answered it let's go way too deep into the reasoning for it first off is the actual differences between the two occupations police officers starts with three aiming one Nimble and two reloading at the cost of starting with negative four points veteran on the other hand starts with two aiming two reloading and the special trait desensitized starting with negative eight points now officially the traits tooltip states does not reach states of panic but really it only prevents Panic from zombies while removing your ability to take the other Panic traits you could still become panicked by a nightmare is the last time I played it for example a difference that is important when it comes to how a mod maker decides to create their new Panic generation system as it may completely ignore the unique trait thus ruining the advantage if you decide to play with that mod decent size is the reason to choose veteran over police officer it has no other advantage that begs the question is panic so bad of a debuff that it's worth losing out on extra points and trades the simple answer with no context is yes the highest level of panic decreases your Effectiveness with guns a complex answer is no the police officer has a deck of cards up their sleeves to deal with panic and I'm not even going to talk about beta blockers or alcohol because they are somewhat annoying to collect and use the first card up that sleeve helps out all characters except for veterans over the course of the first four months of survival the character's Panic reduction speed increases the first month is a surprisingly large difference and by month 4 it gets very fast so fast that in normal gameplay Panic generated by zombies barely matters but we are going for guns so there is a little more consideration necessary seen as a shotgun blast can pull in hundreds luckily police officer happens to cost four less points on veteran you can take the brave trade for Four Points which reduces Panic generated by zombies quite a bit too this effectively cuts the Panic from looking at a large crowd of zombies and F which is then almost immediately lost by The increased Panic reduction when you are only fighting stragglers or keeping up with the numbers rather than balling up hundreds of zombies the Panic never even registers that's not all though because the police officer does have one point nibble after all nimbala is one of the best combat skills it increases the speed your character moves while in combat stance this is great because as you level it up you'll have to turn around to gain distance on the zombies less often Every Time zombies enter your vision within your personal space bubble you gain panic and this significantly reduces how often you have to do it up until you never have to anymore why does one point in nibble matter so much it's just 75 extra experience gain it's way more than that check this out here's a character with no starting Nimble skill while walking around in combat stance there's a chance he gained some Nimble skill this is the slowest skilled level in the game it's not even a small Gap either it's insane how long it takes a level Nimble anyway when he gains Nimble experience he gains 0.25 at a time now here's a character who started with one Nimble when he gains Nimble experience he gains one experience at a time now I don't know about you but when I divide 1 by 0.25 it equals 4. that's not a 75 increase it's four times the experience gain the police officer is going to gain Nimble way faster than a veteran the veteran can of course spend five trade points by the gymnast trait but that increases the cost of the occupation even more in comparison next is the aiming skill Advantage this is where the police officer outguns a veteran assuming they can keep control of their Panic the important part here is the accuracy not only is the officer gaining more experience per hit but they are more likely to hit in the first place due to their higher aiming skill over time this adds up to the police officer leveling their aiming skill much more efficiently ammo wise deploying the apocalypse settings there is not enough ammo in the game which is a huge bonus to the police officer on the other hand anyone who actually wants to use guns consistently will either up the ammo rates or use a mod that does it for them meaning it's only a medium-term Time Advantage the officer enjoys if he gave a police officer and Veteran a shotgun each with unlimited ammo and unlimited zombies the police officer would initially gain extreme it's exponentially faster due to these factors until the veteran catches up to the accuracy cap with the shotgun that being said the shotgun gives the police officer get another Advantage you see hitting multiple zombies with one attack multiplies experience well beyond expectations for example I'll shoot four zombies separately with a modified shotgun that does 1.0 minimum damage and 1.0 Max damage and add up the experience gained 4.48 each which adds up to 17.92 now I'll shoot at all four zombies at the same time 71.71 did you notice something about that experience gain it's way more than it should be more accuracy in the case of the shotgun means even more experience gain as you land all four hits more often the bad news is that aiming and reloading have a soft cap at level 5 which means the veteran is guaranteed to catch up to level 5 aiming as it takes exponentially longer to hit Level 6 and Beyond compared to level 5. that being said once both are there the police officer will hit Level 6 first and gain all the benefits of having a higher aiming skill again and I'll mention the significantly more efficient usage of ammo again even if it's highly dependent on your settings it saves you time leveling up your skill to accurately use the more interesting guns too you may not have known about this but some of zero aiming still has terrible accuracy with the M14 for example instead they are much more accurate with the M9 and the M36 which is the opposite of reality as a rifles long barrel makes them much easier to be accurate with as for the last Advantage I get to recommend a trait I will likely never recommend for any other use you will have noticed the police officer doesn't have to take Brave to be effective which means they have access to all the Panic traits which also lose their sting after you've survived 4 months let's assume you did take the brave trade for the comparison's sake you can still take fear of blood that's right veteran can't take Fair blood but a character with brave can but rat don't you hate fear of blood I do not only does it stop me from manicking other players and removing the bandage from their neck wound or stealing the splint off their broken leg right before you honk your horn and drive away in LV it forces you to wash your character frequently to avoid the nervous Rec Moodle which reduces your melee damage and obliterates your foraging radius I actually like foraging and taking the time to wash each day is quite annoying however there's something special about fear of blood and guns when you shoot a zombie from a distance you don't get blood on your character that means a character who is dedicated to shooting can take fear of blood with significantly less consequences that's a solid W for the police officer and that is a long-winded way to tell you that if you just want to have fun grabbing a shotgun and going on a short-lived adventure with a friend you should take veteran you'll have a blast police officer on the other hand is more for someone who wants to put in extra effort and planning early on while coming out with the best character possible in a long-term run this does point out a very strong case for not using veteran purely for their unique trait I recommend trying out another occupation combined with the brave trade instead of taking veteran with absolutely no plans of shooting guns once upon a time I ran a poll asking how long players survived and if everyone followed my advice on this then there should still be plenty of players selecting veteran a full 35 percent of people responding emits a normally lasting less than a month that doesn't mean they're terrible at the game either when I play single player I keep upping the difficulty through settings and mods until I'm constantly on the verge of death no matter how good I get I don't want to last long I do need to tell you guys one last very important thing it's a game do whatever you think is fun in order to help you out with that fun I'd like to point out that guns in Project zomboid are in a much better position nowadays than they were before the build 41 multiplayer update was released not only are the majority of them quieter but their mechanics make intuitive sense you'll notice a lot of the older zombroid players think guns are trash they were legitimately trash back then they turned way more zombies while having some of the weirdest mechanics I've seen nowadays guns do flat damage no matter the range and your critical chance increases the closer the zombie gets since all guns have a fairly High chance of hit at Point Blank Range every single gun is viable in a pinch even with low aiming skill picking up any random gun feels satisfying even if you don't know the aiming skill requirements for them one gun in the game avoided all of the weirdness the shotgun has had a unique system the whole time and as such it's always been in a good place damage wise

Channel: Retanaru

Views: 236,190

Keywords: project zomboid, police, officer, veteran, aiming, nimble, reloading, panic, brave, cowardly, fear of blood

Id: c_cwg0lA1Gc

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023