Looking to Protect Yourself… or Do Some Damage?

Ah, so you’re the type that likes to get their hands dirty? Instead of hand-pressing bullets to send down-range at subsonic speeds, you’d prefer to just slit a throat? Hey, I can’t blame you. It’s the wasteland, after all, and we all need to find our joy where we can get it.

I’ve got some bad news for you though - in this apocalypse, there’s a reason ammunition is so plentiful, and the majority of the bad guys have guns of their own. Sure, you can solve some of your problems with a crowbar to the head - but you’ll soon find that flaming swords just aren’t a match for some good old-fashioned lead balls.

Big lead balls if you use a Broadsider, at that.

Being Blunt: It’s Situational

Honey! Take the chainsaw out back and trim the hedge. It’s grown teeth!

Melee in FO76 is unfortunately situational and it’s plagued by some poor mechanics. At the core, lag is at times an issue, and you’ll see a not-uncommon issue with bad guy’s health “rubberbanding,” ie: registering a hit but then going back to whatever level it was at before you took your shot. “Power Attacks” are significantly slower to land than normal swings, and nobody really likes to have a third of their DPS locked behind a system-defaulted swing rate.

The other big problem? The wastelanders you’re going to encounter will be using guns as much as they will their fists. While it is true that the three major boss fights (Scorchbeast Queen/SBQ, the Ultracite Titan, and Earle) are all melee-based, you probably don’t want to be up close and personal with them with slow-to-swing weapons. By the same token, harder-to-kill NPCsin Daily Ops will have mods of their own that increase the pain you’ll take from their bullets.

That isn’t to say that melee is pointless. With the right build and in certain situations, a good hand-to-hand weapon can be preferred to a minigun or a sniper rifle. Plus, in your day-to-day grind, it doesn’t really matter if it takes three swings of a Super Sledge to flatten something or four. 

Ultimately, with two exceptions on this list (and both are in the #1 slot), you aren’t going to get as much effective stopping power with a Ski Sword or Grognok’s Ax as you would, say, the Cold Shoulder or the Nuka Launcher.

But you do have some choice opportunities…

• The number one use for melee is when you encounter bad guys with the ‘resilient’ mutation in either Daily Ops or Mutated Events. This hostile mutation prevents your target from dying from anything other than a melee attack - be it a ‘bash’ from your primary weapon (which is slow and does next to no damage) or a swing from a dedicated melee weapon. The choice is yours but I prefer to roll in with a chainsaw and just save the ammo on things that won’t die to me using excessive ammo.
• The second? The Ultracite Titan battle. The giant Mole Rat of Doom can’t be harmed until the Ultracite Shards it spawns are destroyed by… a melee weapon. And since they have to be broken to begin with, there’s no reason to not just step up and get to cutting him up once they’re broken.
• Certain public events can also be handled effectively with a melee (specifically the #1 on the list). Heart of the Swamp, for example, has no enemies that use ranged weapons and the Heart itself is a damage sponge. Save time, stand still, and chew up everything that gets close. ‘Horde’ style fights can also be handled like this, as most of the time it's animal-based (not always, but mostly). A few areas like the Whitesprings Golf Club can be handled with short-ranged melee just because the confined spaces don’t lend themselves to ranged munitions.
• Keep in mind the Rule of Cool: if it looks cool and you can have fun with it, despite any downsides (meta or general), then use it! Fallout is full of FUN weapons that don’t get used very often.

Making a Perk-fect Cut in the World

Pick a card. Any card. But ideally these cards.

If you read my article on ‘Best Builds in the Game,’ you’ll see one I recommend for melee weapons - and it ranked as #5 of 5 on that list, so it didn’t do too badly. Most (keyword: most) melee won’t work in a lot of situations but it does have its uses and this build is based on that. You’ll find that with the right build, you can make a lot of things ‘work,’ in 76, even if they aren’t considered ‘optimal.’

With that said, I need to mention a couple of things before you go out there to reach out and touch someone. This build is designed for 2-handed automatic melee weapons, as opposed to 1-handed. If you go for manual 1h, swap out Slugger, Expert Slugger, and Master Slugger for Gladiator, Expert Gladiator, and Master Gladiator. You can also drop Stable Tools. You may want to consider adding the sneak attack melee perk cards, too.

One other thing: this build isn’t designed for our first (and weakest) setup below.

S.P.E.C.I.A.L. spread:
STR 15, PER 8, END 3, CHA 9, INT 5, AGI 15, LCK 11

Requirements

• STR: Slugger, Expert Slugger, Master Slugger are your three base 2h-melee perk base cards to up your damage.
• STR: Martial Artist reduces your melee weapon weight by 60% and gives you a 30% faster swing speed .
• PER: Glow Sight throws down an extra 60% damage on glowing enemies, making rad-sick bad guys go bye-bye even faster.
• END: Fireproof is 45% less damage from flame and fire, which helps against… a lot of things.
• CHA: Suppressor and Tenderizer debuffs your opponent for the few seconds they’ll live. Suppressor reduces their damage output, and Tenderizer increases the amount of damage they can take.
• INT: Stable Tools is a new card that makes your automatic melee weapons take 10, 25, or 40% longer to break when using. It’s a pretty useful QOL perk to have on for this build.
• AGI: Action Boy 3 helps you recover AP regen. Really useful if you’re using Power Armor and sprinting everywhere.
• AGI: Sneak 3 makes you 75% harder to detect, but you may not actually need this. Chainsaws really aren’t made to be quiet.
• AGI: Ninja 1 makes your melee sneak attack deal 30% more damage. Again, this isn’t major-major to have.
• LCK: Luck of the Draw 3 is a must-have. It auto-repairs your weapon as you use it, which means you can use it for longer.

5. Unarmed Power Armor

See it in action HERE!
It gave me more satisfaction than it should’ve to cave this ski-punk’s face in.

Look, this is just fun. It’s somewhat useful, but it’s fun. A change sometime around the 12/3/23 patch boosted unarmed power-armor damage. This means, in short, that if you’re wearing a tank and give someone a right cross, they’re actually going to feel it. It does take a mod on your armor - the Tesla bracer mods specifically - and there’s a few perk differences from the default melee build I recommend above.

On the other hand, some days you just want to punch someone.

Pros:

• You can punch someone and they won’t like it.
• They won’t like it a lot.
• You don’t need to grind out for a special weapon. Just get a Tesla Bracer plan, a suit of Power Armor, and Punch Out! your opposition.

Cons:

• It’s hard to land a hit, seemingly more so than other weapons. And punching in VATs is just weird.
• No legendary effects on this, so you’re shorting yourself some special abilities just by not having a weapon equipped.

4. Plasma Cutter

See it in action HERE!
Weren’t these used pretty extensively in Dead Space? Does Visceral Games know about this?

I’m not going to say what this weapon looks like - you can run the wrath of Disney yourself - but it seriously sits on the ‘Rule of Cool’ throne. Not only that, it can pack a wallop with the right effects. But what’s the downside?

This weapon is unlockable… eventually. You’ll have to win it as a rare random drop from a Daily Op once you hit level 50. Once you have it, you can head over to your nearest weapons bench and build the thing. You can also get a default one by working through the Brotherhood of Steel questline at Fort Atlas.

Base information: 1-handed, can be modified, the plans to upgrade it are sold by Minerva and the Secret Service from Regs, and the mods for it add either cyro, flame, or electric damage to your attacks.

Pros:

• Like other melee weapons, it hits reasonably hard. You won’t get many one-shot kills off of this, but it can be fun to swing around something that looks like a weaponized fluorescent light bar.
• It’s fully modifiable and has no base or unchangeable effects, so you can make whatever build you like around it.

Cons:

• It’s probably going to be low on the list of things you actually want to spend gold bouillon on, so odds are good you won’t pick it up right away.
• And you shouldn’t, considering how easy some of the other items on this list are to get.

3. Cryptid Jawbone Knife

See it in action HERE!
I’m not saying that you’ll get the Mark of Cain when wielding this weapon (you won’t), but I’d keep your eyes out for an angry Dean Winchester or Castiel when you wield it. Just to be safe.

I’m not going to lie to you. I, Josh the author, Josh the Wastelander, do not like this weapon. If this was Skyrim or if we were playing Planetside II, I’d be all over it. But we’re not. It’s non-automatic and it takes several hits to kill your target with it. Further, the main thing that it works against - cryptids - are not monsters you want to be in melee range with for an extended period of time.

That said, my playstyle is not your playstyle and it’s entirely possible to make this thing work… and when you do, it’s dangerous without question.

Pros:

• It’s not hard to get. It drops as a reward from the public event “Safe and Sound,” and it’s tradable so you can find it on other vendors.
• It has the vampire effect built in, meaning you’re regaining health with every hit you land. For melee, this is pretty bloody (and bloody build) useful.
• Stealth + Thorn armor + stealth perks turns you into a mass-murdering monster with it.
• Rule of Cool. Can you say Dean Winchester?

Cons:

• While it hits fast, you have to be very close to do the damage.
• Its main effect is to do 40% damage to cryptids. Cryptids, which I may add, are almost all entirely melee fighters themselves. I’m much happier putting a Sheepsquatch to rest from a hundred yards away than I am when I try to put a knife between its ribs.

2. Whacker Smacker

See it in action HERE!
I feel like if Harley Quinn made it through the apocalypse, she’d be in love.

2h melee suffers a downside that 1h doesn’t - it’s slow. If you know anything about DPS, it’s that slow weapons suffer an inherent penalty because if you miss with a slow weapon, you lose all of the potential damage that swing could’ve had. With faster-firing/swinging/automatic weapons, your lost-DPS risk is much lower.

The Whacker Smacker solves this by having a hidden 40% swing speed boost that isn’t listed on the other legendary effects. That said, there is one and only one reason why this weapon is higher on the list than the Jawbone, and it isn’t the speed.

Pros:

• The seasonal Scoreboard is one of the main drives for people to play Fallout 76 in the current state of the game (January 2024). To beat the Scoreboard, you need to complete daily and weekly challenges.
• Why do I say that? Because a semi-rare challenge is to destroy robots with a blunt weapon.
• If you’re going to use a blunt weapon, use one that doesn’t suck. This one doesn’t suck.
• It does have Executioners built in, so you’re doing an extra 40% base damage if your target is below half-health. That helps in taking something that’s already half- dead into full-dead territory.
• Common drop (I get it almost all the time) from the event Spin the Wheel. Can be traded, so player vendors may have one.

Cons:

• It’s heavy. A base weight of 20 lbs means you’ll want to have some weapon-weight reducing perks on to justify using it.
• 40% speed boost is still a lot slower than the Jawbone, Plasma Cutter, your fists, and our #1 weapon on the list.

1. The Chainsaw and the Auto Axe

See it in action HERE!
It is, honestly, my favorite ‘for funsies’ weapon in all of 76. And in all of several other games, too. 

These two weapons are why I can look you in the eyes and say that melee has a place in Fallout 76 and that melee builds are viable. Remember the 2h automatic melee build I referenced above? It is designed around these two weapons.

Let’s hit the basics: the chainsaw itself has no plans and can be freely found in the world in numerous locations (though my favorite place is inside The Foundry in The Pitt expedition) so whenever you can find it, grab it. It is an automatic weapon with no fuel or ammo requirements other than a default AP cost - so stock up on Company Tea or other fast AP-regen food items.

You do need to handle a couple bits of business first though. For starters, while you can’t make a chainsaw you can make one of the mods it requires to be the best it can be: the dual bar mod. You’ll have to scrap chainsaws until you learn it automatically, but that’s the ground-level change.

The next stop? Hunt around your NPC vendors at train stations and the like to get the “flaming bar” mod. This… look, I don’t even have to say it. A chainsaw is great, a chainsaw with two blades is amazing, and a chainsaw that sets things on fire is ****ing awesome.

The Auto Axe, on the other hand, is slightly better. Slightly. It is also much harder to get. While you can roll out with a chainsaw at level 25 or 35, the Auto Axe requires unlocking it via Stamps, which you can only earn in small numbers on the scoreboard or slightly better numbers in Expeditions. Plus, you’ll need to spend more stamps getting the right mods unlocked for it.

That’s an awful lot of work as opposed to just… picking up a chainsaw at the Ranger District Office in the Cranberry Bog area.

Pros

• You do damage. Even without melee perks on, this thing cuts through just about everything with ease.
• You look sick. Become the wasteland’s doom, guy, and unleash unlimited-gasoline-fueled hell upon thine enemies. (Rip and tear until it is done - oblig.)
• You can put your own Legendary perks on both of these. Vampires is great and anti-armor works really well. Vampires is my personal preference because you’re healing incoming damage at the same time you’re getting rid of those damage sources.
• This is, without question, one of the strongest weapons in the game with the right perks equipped.

Cons

• It is a melee weapon. You do have to get up close and personal. Sometimes, that kinda sucks. But not always.
• To make the most out of it, you really do need to build your perks around it.
• You need to be careful when you get it. Because it’s not craftable and is a wild world spawn, it may take you a few tries before you find one that’s based at level 50.

You can solve a lot of problems with a sledgehammer, but is it the right way?

Melee, as sad as it makes me to say it, just isn’t as useful in 76 as it is in other Fallout games. Because of how VATs works and most of the big bads in the game being close-quarter punishers, it won’t be something you’ll want to use at the start of your life in the nuke zone. However, when used properly - and with the right weapon - it can solve a lot of problems in a big hurry.

The game is packed with all kinds of “cool” melee weapons - from the Super Sledge to the Cattle Prod, from the Gulper Smacker to the Oathkeeper - but only a few are worth using. Hopefully this list helps you know when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em, and when you can get away with crackin’ heads up close and personal.

I do recommend keeping at least one melee weapon on hand at any given time. While you can 'bash' an enemy if they're Resillient, it does so little damage your target needs to be at 1% health - and bashing is slower than almost any other (almost) melee weapon in the game. Just for that reason, it's worth keeping an extra knife - or a chainsaw - in your pocket.

If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy these other three:

[Top 10] Fallout 76 Best Weapons in the Game

[Top 5] Fallout 76 Best Builds in the Game with Legendary Effects

[Top 10] Fallout 76 Best Armors To Use (Early To Late Game)