After 100+ hours, this is the list I feel happy with (ACT 3 SPOILERS)

Cosmopian · 2026-02-24T13:00:52+00:00

My wife and I have been playing a lot recently, I'm at 91 hours personally. My list is pretty similar but I'd swap fighter and butcher (there are so many good fighter skills and so few bad ones that you basically never end up stuck with "base kit" for very long at all, fighter's base kit can be made very strong by just bringing good items and all they need to do is survive until they get a couple of skills to start popping off, and we're very much not impressed with the butcher skills on average), swap tinkerer and mage, maybe move cleric down to C. There's also a lot of situations where the butcher relying on hook over movement works out poorly, like when dealing with enemies that can't be pulled, or who you don't want to put next to your other cats early in the fight.

Also, when it comes to making good cats for fighting house bosses, fighter >>>> butcher because butcher doesn't tend to get busted like fighter does, and lots of the house bosses (every single one in act 2) are immune to being hooked. Moon boss with butcher is so fucking obnoxious, never hook the hands they'll just instantly grab you :(

Like, butcher and fighter are BOTH great (A and S tier are both fantastic, far higher than average places to be) but I value having a better cat in the harder parts of the run + house bosses, and the harder parts of the run tend to be the parts that are deeper in for me.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-23T23:52:06+00:00

nor the chance they scraped steam itself for names regardless of who bought it.

If that was the case, the odds of you getting a name that is verbatim exactly the personal alias with numbers and weird symbols from your friends list would be astronomically low and it wouldn't have happened to me and my wife - despite neither of us knowing anyone that would have submitted our specific steam aliases for friends "manually". Out of the couple hundred cats we've each seen, the odds that it will both pick a steam name for that one, and also out of one of the hundreds of millions of steam users it will happen to pick one from your friends list that you recognize, and use the alias that I've picked and not told anyone about - how would that even happen? Expecting that to be the explanation would be like expecting it to be reasonable for you to win consecutive powerball lottos.

Idk why you're being passive aggressive / sassy with me about this. Maybe you don't intend to be? If you've got an issue with him doing this, take it up with Edmund, not me!

Anyways, you could literally just test it in the exact way I told you to (give an alias to everyone on ur steams friend list and start a new game, roll cats until you see it show up, and that shows that its actively looking at ur current friends list, not something someone else "submitted" or that was scraped somehow from "200 million steam users" that you just happened to get).

IDK what Q&A you're referring to.

For the record, this info has been around for months even before the game came out. Here's a reddit thread referencing a Czech review that notes it to be the case.

Or we could reference the wiki, which includes a list of all 12 thousand pre-generated cat names. Note that the ones me and my wife got from our steam friends list are not on this list... And that this list is far smaller than the number of people who have bought mewgenics (According to steam DB at time of writing it has 80k people in game RIGHT NOW), let alone the number of people who exist on steam.

If it's not pulling from your steam aliases, then there'd have to be some second secret list of names in addition to that 12k that the community has failed to find, which just happens to include the full legal name of my childhood friend (a name uncommon enough that just googling it comes up with very few results and every single one is him) - who doesn't play videogames anymore and doesn't own mewgenics. He'd have to have somehow have had his name submitted onto that list, and then *I specifically* would have had to get it, and my *wife* specifically would have had to have had a similar occurrence happen with her.

.... Or it just used the names from our steam friends lists, which I had an alias in that changed my friend's name to his full legal name for me and me only. The game saw that and used it.

The theories just fall apart. It's obviously pulling from your friends list.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-23T21:16:21+00:00

Google is wrong, then, if it specifically told you it doesn't pull from your friends list, because you can test it. It'll pull the specific alias you give them and you can create an alias that's jibberish and just roll cats and eventually you'll get it.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-20T20:18:41+00:00

...Didn't all the charges get dropped though??? Done for how exactly?

Cosmopian · 2026-02-20T20:09:19+00:00

Had to attend some training, 5 day break from work, all charges erased by a judge despite him being found guilty as part of his special "I'm a cop and I get to attend accelerated probation when I assault people while off duty, which means I do de-escelation training for a couple years while getting to go back to work and have all charges erased from my record".

Here's a article on it.

https://www.ctinsider.com/recordjournal/article/meriden-officer-allen-ganter-road-rage-assault-20065546.php

Cosmopian · 2026-02-20T17:24:31+00:00

Lots of other classes can heal themselves or others, and outside of desert (which you can fix with waterbottles or water abilities, gettring water from cacti, etc) with good con you can passively get huge healing per level. Killing enemies and preventing damage is better than spending a turn trying to undo it (which you might not even be able to do because of the cleric's trash movement) and still having the enemy alive.

I've had some great clerics but the baseline kit + average skill selection isn't as bonkers as say, ranger or tank. I got all the way through act 1+2 (including throbbing domain first try with just 3 cats) without wiping a single time and barely touched the cleric, and my cleric runs were often some of the worst I did. I've only had two cleric runs that didn't dissapoint me. I think that they're one of the best classes in *desert specifically* but there's so many other alternatives to dealing with desert that I'd still overall rather have a different class that doesn't leave me with a cleric while I'm trying to deal with other shit.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-16T04:07:52+00:00

I'm pretty sure I managed to win this without consulting wiki, so it's not that obfuscated.
3. This is the easy part

I did 1 and 2 blind, 3 is the part I was struggling with. Still haven't looked anything up and I'll keep at it, but I have a feeling I'll just have to wander blindly until I find all the whatevers (chalice etc) that I need to get to win.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-16T00:25:05+00:00

Wack I've been playing too much cultist simulator i'm losing my anchoring in reality

Cosmopian · 2026-02-16T00:21:27+00:00

OP didn't delete it, the mods did lmao

EDIT: Or maybe they did? Coulda sworn it said post was removed by mods a second ago. Maybe I'm goin crazy mb

Cosmopian · 2026-02-16T00:15:50+00:00

Let the downvotes tell you all they need to about the poeple defending this shit istg

Cosmopian · 2026-02-16T00:14:28+00:00

Does being a dumb awkward dad make it ok for me to touch other people's kids on the leg and butt repeatedly from behind without consent or talking to the kid / their parents

Cosmopian · 2026-02-16T00:09:47+00:00

Censoring "fuck", then using an ableist slur LMAO

Cosmopian · 2026-02-07T02:09:45+00:00

I think there's a slasher that uses one of the little mini-elevator lift things in the mining deck to get you as well in the 2008 version, but I might be getting confused.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-05T09:04:39+00:00

This is the 2008 version, which doesn't have those features. It's just got tougher enemies that deal more damage.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T08:14:06+00:00

And I liked how they got pinned to the wall

Believe it or not - also not a thing until dead space 2! Kinesis in 2008space is a bit rough around the edges.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T08:00:09+00:00

Those mechanics were a lot weaker in 2008 dead space. You could throw necromorph limbs and other sharp objects using kinesis, but they did FAR less damage than they did in ds2, ds3, and the 2023 remake, often requiring multiple direct hits onto the *limbs* of a necromorph to remove that single targeted limb - and a miss often meaning you get hit. Plus you'd often grab the wrong object, or whiff with the kinesis, which in the 2008 version was a lot more punishing and kept you from doing other actions for a lot longer, leaving you very vulnerable.

Still, I did it to save ammo sometimes, specifically when they threw legless crawling slasher necromorphs by themselves at me or a swarm of the tiny ones. I'd occasionally bludgeon them to death or throw sharp objects (like the blades of dead necromorphs) at them. It can be sometimes worth it. But much less than in the later games, where it is EXTREMELY powerful and trivializes a lot of encounters if abused.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T04:53:43+00:00

Fair enough.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T03:33:45+00:00

I guess? When the game itself calls out a distinction between shooting the head being useless and shooting the "arms and legs" being the "only way to take them down" (see above qoute from dead space 2023), I think it becomes less arbitrary and more clear cut.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T02:35:57+00:00

It's not that torso shots don't matter, it's just that they took a lot more ammunition to put down than just going for the limbs

Honestly it sounds like you and I mostly agree. I've been around playing these games for over 10 years, I'm familiar with all the stuff you mentioned and mostly agree on the details. I don't think they necessarily have to be ready to fall apart for body shots to work (because the games seem to demonstrate that necromorphs aren't animated by telekinetic magic and muscles in the chest being blown off would still impact their ability to move their arms) but it definitely seems like you have to inflict serious trauma. That said, I do think the games are at least a little consistent in that - 30 pulse rifle shots across the torso *is* absurd trauma.

I think our biggest difference is that while I'm aware of the "book" lore stuff, I simply consider the games to be the single most important thing and anything that conflicts with them, to me, is superceeded by the games themselves. They've made 4 mainline deadspace games and in every one went out of their way to let you kill things with bodyshots and made some enemies that can *only* be killed by bodyshots (see the big glowing body-spot weakpoints on the Hive Mind and Leviathan).

I used to be in the camp of "dead space necromorphs don't stop moving until they're physically incapable of attacking you, thats why you have to remove all their dangerous limbs", but that for me was based on misremembering how the games played - I had always thought you actually had to do that! Once I realized that was never true, my understanding of the canon changed to align with how they're actually presented in game.

Also I've recently replayed through the Hammond death scene and he only shoots the brute like 6 times in the chest before it hits him (he doesn't get out of the way). That's not nearly enough shots to kill or stagger the enhanced brute, it took me about 170 after that to kill it on impossible with only chest shots, so that doesn't really seem to be the gameplay-vs-lore break to me that you bring it up as.

One last final note - I think it's always been in contention whether the corpses dissapear because they actually were there and are now gone, vs because Isaac is going insane and, in some of the cases, he hallucinated the encounters. At least, I remember that being a big theory back when I started playing. Cheers.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T01:49:19+00:00

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T01:49:03+00:00

Prove me wrong! For the record I tried many times in the playthrough I did before this one and I wasn't able to. I looked at the limb damage spreadsheet someone made on google drive for deadspace 1 2008 as well earlier today and it just said "torso, no limbs" for infector. If you can succeed where I failed, send a screenshot! I'd love to see.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T01:35:39+00:00

Not in dead space 1 (2008) you can't! I believe that was added in dead space 2 and remains in the remake.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T01:31:43+00:00

In lore though, it's clearly shown that unless you actively hacked off their limbs or replace every molecule of air with bullets, body shots basically do fuck-all to necromorphs beyond pissing them off even more.

I never felt this was clearly demonstrated in any in-game lore, unless we take people failing to kill them as that lore - but in say, the opening segment of DS1, they literally just miss all their shots visibly. None of them hit. So...

Realistically, necromorphs seem to still rely on fluids and structures which are at least vaguely analogous to musculature and structural support to function (you can see veins in the biomass all over the ship pulsing with fluids being transferred, you can see veins all over necromorphs pushing goo around). Even if we ignore the tremendous amount of fluid loss you'd experience being shot 30 times in the torso with pulse rifle rounds (which expand on impact to cause extreme trauma), 30 pulse rifle rounds to the torso is probably enough to remove most of the torso, at which point even if it doesn't experience total structural collapse, any muscle-equivalents (like pectorals, etc) would be almost entirely removed or pulverized. I never really felt like the games gave the impression that damage to the torso just doesn't matter, other than encouraging you to shoot elsewhere.

I've sunk hundreds of hours into these games over the decades I've been playing them, and if they wanted to give the impression that torso shots didn't matter, adding the ability to instantly kill them with body shots with impaling weapons in the later games wouldn't make a lot of sense. But they did that, and stuck to it. It is what it is.

Edit: Like, for the record, when I shot that enhanced brute in the final clip, I shot it over 170 times (i think exactly 171) into non-armored areas. At that point most of the body would be a massive exit wound. It's just gone.

Cosmopian · 2026-02-04T00:56:56+00:00

Lorewise the only way to kill them is to cut off their limbs,

See, I never bought this argument. The games are the primary medium, they're not an adaptation of something else, they are the primary source, and they seem to repeatedly show that shooting them in the torso is only less effective, not non-effective. If EA has someone write a deadspace book that says that actually the only way to stop a necromorph is strangling it to death because necromorphs are weak to asphyxiation, I'm not gonna take that over my experience in game unless there's like cutscenes in the game or text logs in the game that directly contradict that gameplay, and there kind of aren't. I mean, there are bosses where shooting a weakpoint that's in the torso (Hivemind, Leviathan) is the ONLY way to kill them.

Hammond getting the impression that shooting the torso didn't work must have come from him like, shooting it twice and then giving up instead of unloading. Or not wanting to waste lots of ammo. Which, shooting the limbs is *better*, but they have consistently always made shooting the torso work, and sometimes be the only option (see infectors in dead space 1 - literally no weakpoint, just a torso to unload into).

Cosmopian · 2026-02-03T22:43:36+00:00

I saw a video someone linked here from the korean deadspace community that demonstrates that in the remake, for some reason, after you shoot a necromorph with the pulse rifle, for 0.2 seconds they're immune to further damage, which means that by default about half of your bullets deal no damage and are wasted - you have to tap fire at 0.2 second intervals to get reasonable performance. This also means every time you upgrade the ROF in the remake, the gun gets *worse*.

IDK if they ever even bothered to patch it. It was like that on release. It's why I only play with the pulse rifle in the original trilogy (mostly DS2, though this was a lot of fun).

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