Overview
This guide will detail the zombie’s damage, speed values and misc information.CORRECTIONS: A zombie child does 8 damage, not 7.Cheers to BenkoGambit for pointing that out!
Animation & Speed
Each animation that the zombie has is different, by the pose he’s doing and by the speed.
Not all the zombies are “frozen” in one speed value, check this out.
walk1: Common and slow, low priority
walk2: Common and slow, low priority
walk3: Common and even more slow, low priority
walk4: Common but quite a bit fast, medium priority
walk5: Unusual but slow, low priority
walk6: Common, quite fast, medium priority
walk7: Common, really fast for a shambler, high priority
walk8: Unusual but slow, low priority
walk9: Common but slow, low priority
walk10: Unusual, gets to be fast at the middle of the animation, medium priority
run: Only for fallen survivors or runners, pretty common and extreme priority
crawl: Only for zombies that can’t use their legs anymore, high priority
Attacks & Damage
Each zombie attack delivers a certain amount of damage, runners always does more damage rather than a regular zombie, so always prioritize them!
- attackA: The most less lethal attack, it can finish off a survivor if he’s really in low health (red health/black and white vision) and has a low chance of opening a wound in somebody
- attackB: Dangerous Attack, can finish off a survivor if he’s in medium health (dark orange health)
- attackC: LETHAL Attack, a runner can finish off a survivor if he’s in medium-high health (light orange), if you’re lucky you can try to dodge the first attack that he does, if you don’t, you’ll more likely lose 80 of your health, or 30 if a shambler does this attack
Crawlers and the zombified children has some difference when it comes to damage, see below
Tips
The most boring part of the guide, I think.
- Walk_7: Always take down the zombie with the “walk7” animation first, you may not notice but they’re still pretty fast for a shambler, specially if you’re doing a objective such as using a welder to unlock a door in cleopas or using the fire extinguisher to clear the fire in broadway. Most times that I get infected it was because of these very specific bastards.
- Infection Chance: Taking two or three hits of a shambler and getting bitten after that, it’s very likely that you’ll be infected, depending of the difficulty.
- Brightness vs Crawlers: Brightness is your friend against a crawler, I like to play in windowed mode since that I use the “no-browser” option for steam, since the new interface just eats the ram. But because of that, they blend-in/camouflage with the scenario pretty well, specially in dark areas.
Vignette may also give you a bit of disadvantage, for me it’s a huge problem, so I recommend you using Dysphie’s No Screen Vignette mod. You can also remove the screen shaders in advanced options but I wouldn’t recommend it since it disables the infection screen and the black & white vision. - Fire may not be reliable: if you throw a molotov in a group of zombies of course they’ll be burning, but they won’t die that quicky and they’ll run to get your teammates/you, to take them down you can easily use any melee weapon, even your own hands will do the trick, ALWAYS push them before attacking you don’t want to risk a hit by them, if you take a hit from him, the damage will be the double (meaning you can make your entire team die because of a silly molotov, or die alone with the flaming zombies you just made. This is totally situational)
- Children: No, just because they are children doesn’t means they’re easy to take down, in fact, a group of them is dangerous (example being, broadway2’s basketball court, suzho’s escape point and junction’s tunnels and sewers), a few hits and you could be bleeding already, it’s even worse when their “dads/mothers” are with them and they’re runners. (This completely depends on your own skill, and on your team’s knowledge about the map and each teammate’s experience with the game)
- Hope: Got infected and already telling your teammates to spare a bullet to take you down?, don’t lose hope that easy, you have one minute and twenty seconds of life before turning and you’ll have +3 minutes and 20 seconds once you take a phalanx pills. Precious time if you ask me.
- Lag: You can’t hit a zombie because the hit-registration is really bad? (The case of several players that have their ping in the skies, such as 150-240), yeah I feel you. Always aim in the zombie’s hair/forehead, works for me. It always guarantees a decent head damage against him.
- Runner Repellent: Runners are easy to dispatch if you have a fast melee, doesn’t even needs to be strong. A hatchet, baseball bat, pipe, wrench or knife can already take two or three runners down, just don’t forget to PUSH before attacking, and also charging your melee.
- Fast Reflexes: Always predict the direction that a runner/child will run towards you, if you predict it right and hit before the zombie gets there, you’ll kill him very easily, leaving him no time to react to your attack.
- Fooling the Map: Many people doesn’t knows this but, if you see a area that is swarmed by zombies (example, the underground part of Fema), kill some zombies and RUN back to where you came from, the .nav system of nmrih is wanky and likes to delete many zombies in a area to spawn them where you’re going. After you do that, get back immediately and do what you have to!
- “Curing” the infection of your teammate: Oh no, your teammate is lying on the ground and he’s getting up, quick, shove his body before he gets up. Because for some reason, the game likes to think he’s in the “idle standing” animation, so when you do that, he’ll be shoved when he finally gets up and you can just kill him with your melee, or gun.
- Fire may be reliable: Zombie soldiers, shamblers and runners will die of burning after twenty seconds.
- Watch your aim: Hey, your teammate has the right of living his five minutes and twenty seconds of his life (if he took the pills, it gives him 3 minutes and 20 seconds, infection transformation takes two minutes.), don’t put a bullet in his brain just because you want to. Only do when there’s no more pills around and if he asks to be put down.
- Bypassing the Infection effect: Remember what I said about screen shaders and how you shouldn’t disable them?, yeah I take that back. If you disable it, the infection screen won’t show up, the music is still going to be playing though, so you know when it’s your time of turning.
It’s useful only turning it off when everything is completely dark, atleast you have a chance of getting the pills that your teammate dropped in the floor to you, that is if you don’t turn first. After you use the pills you can turn the screen shaders again.