Rum & Gun – Guide to Playing a Melee Character

This guide is to help players who seek to play a melee character on Rum & Gun and relying on guns less.

How to Play Melee Character

All credit goes to Feron!

Pros and Cons of a Melee Character

Pros

• Very high survivability in the endgame when set up better.
• Extremely high damage.
• Gear is decently easy to find and replace.
• Lots of synergy skills, so the odds of getting a good perk choice while playing isn’t bad.
• Can push stage 50 consistently of arena.

Cons

• Very squishy at the start.
• Gotta get up close and personal with the enemies you face.
• Getting bad perk choices can really bring you down while levelling.
• Keeping frenzy active will be annoying in some areas that have less powder crates when you have no power/min.
• Will make you mad.

Perks to Choose While Levelling

These skills are pretty much needed for a melee character trying to get to endgame.

• Distillation path for Rum Capacity.
• Brawler path for Melee Damage (Fire and Steel path works too, also provides gun damage).
• Payback path is a MUST for a melee character, getting the “Drunk With Fury” skill will help keep you alive as a melee character.
• Black Sprinkle path, I know. “Why do I want Powder per Minute when I use melee? The simple answer is Frenzy use takes a lot of powder, and when you don’t have powder boxes dropping 24/7, you’ll really want this.
• Thick blood path for bleed resistance, bleed will do a lot to you as you play through the game, so I always recommend this.
• Duelist’s Ego for 15 HP per parry.
• Wet Clothes path can also come in handy for act 3 mostly.
• Otherwordly servant is amazing, providing damage for enemies that are ranged is awesome, ticking them down while you’re with the melee enemies is sweet and makes everything so much easier.

Gear Options and General Tips

In this section, I’ll go over some of the gear or stats you want to aim for.

You’ll want a sword with the highest damage value, speed does not matter nor does the “DPS,” the reason is because we use frenzy which gives us all the attack speed we need, putting life steal runes on it is also pretty nice, but not too huge.

Always have a shield that provides HP per second, life on kill, and so on to help with survivability.

Generally chest pieces will give you mostly armor or HP, but these are also very nice to have.

Go for livers with life/sec, bleed resist and drinking speed, lots of runes can give you powder/min which you’ll want the most though, take a liver with an orange and blue socket any day over a better liver, unless ofc you do not have runes that provide anything good.

Go for any helmet with a high melee/base damage stat, runes with base damage and melee damage will be the best to socket here.

For a bottle you want whatever gives the most rum capacity, rum loot and first sip stats.

Boots generally suck, but go for one with a high life, armor or stamina stat.

Use capes for melee damage or if you lack powder/min, use backpacks instead.

Using eggs that spawn multiple summons is usually the best option, I usually use them to take aggro off of me so I can heal or focus on damage a little more.