Preface: I made this guide for the employees of my PSF, thought I'd make it public after it gathering dust for 18 months. Aimed at players with not a great general game knowledge tbh, and is not as extensive as Mug's guide, nor really aimed at trying to replace or re-write the meta. Is not intending on telling people to play the game "correctly", and assumes that the reader doesn't really have great personal gear and nobody has ever talked to them about how to play the game well. Advanced players might be most interested in the flashbang interactions.
Note to faction leaders: PSF workers should be some of your faction's best warriors. Don't have a noob in your faction who is in a PSF and can't fight!
Wassup team, thought I'd make a quick guide on how to get the best out of the PSF specials and how to use them.
If you use the specials well you will easily be able to beat players with more stats than you without breaking a sweat, and similar stats (especially if they play mobile) will be losing to you and not sure why.
S Tier- super powerful
A Tier- very useful
B Tier- meh, has its uses
C Tier- avoid at all costs
1* Off The Grid
72 hour bounty protection.
There's really no need to ever be using this (actually maybe just for Halloween or other attacking event if you're a mugger/ troll).
Bounties can be good! Some merits like weapon experience, damage dealt, rounds fired and many others can be earned for free when you're being bountied. Equip something like a minigun and enjoy seeing your rounds fired stat go to the moon!
3* Tactical Breach
50% increased flashbang intensity (effectiveness)
Decreasing an opponents speed to 10% of their total is huge! This is imo the best perk for any kind of attacking situation (except NPCs) and will reduce damage received much more greatly than the armour bonus.
Make sure you have some dex (it isn't your lowest stat) and have enough speed that you don't need to rely on something like tear gas or pepper spray to hit your opponents.
If you are ever struggling with missions, use flashbangs more.
How to get flashbangs:
Buy them from Switzerland, the item market, bazaars, or Shoplift from Big Al's when cams are down or guards are out. Shoplifting when guards/cams are out also gives you a chance to earn special ammo which is a huge damage buff for fighting.
Note: I've done some testing on flash bangs and got the following results:
Player 1 had +44% effective speed at the start of the fight, flash bang reduced it to -86%.
Player 2 had +25% effective speed at the start of the fight, flash bang reduced it to -88%
Player 3 had +8% effective speed at the start of the fight, flash bang reduced it to -89%.
As you can see, flash bang with PSF perks reduces players with higher effective speed more than those with lower, and has diminished returns. I guess it bottoms out at -90% (so 100m speed becomes just 10m)
Next, I tested against someone using melatonin which provides a 500% boost to speed.
They had +39% speed at start of the fight, they used melatonin which increased to to +589%, then I threw a flash grenade and their speed was reduced to -31%.
Remember, you only get 15 seconds of flash time so use it well to get a good head start in damage dealt on your opponent. Unfortunately for dex whores, melatonin lasts a lot longer.
Do not use Flashbang on the first turn. If they use a smoke or a flashbang on you on the first turn too, then your flashbang is wasted.
5* Open Arsenal
Primary or Secondary weapon.
Nope. Just no.
7* Regulation
25% full set armor mitigation bonus
This is a really great perk if you have a complete set of RW armour.
A dune set is 250m and worth using if your faction armoury has it available for free. If you are a competitive player you will want to upgrade to assault or better eventually. If you are more casual then Dune will make you a lot tougher for low cost.
A riot set is ~500m and worth a buy if you can afford it. Riot armour reduces melee damage by 30%, which is great for missions and is better than dune for competitive warring, but you are probably better of with Assault if warring is more important to you than missions..
Assault armour is a little more expensive at maybe 850m-1b. It is very effective, but headshots hurt. It reduces bullet damage by minimum 30% which is massive vs. rifles which are the best weapons and used by the best players. Low face coverage on helm is a negative but overall the set is great.
The very best ones are Marauder (5.5b) (i currently have Marauder) and EOD (35b) for this perk, but honestly any orange+ (Vanguard, Sentinel) set is going to be nice if you have money to burn.
If you don't have a RW set of armour, combat armour is still fine, but the RW sets have higher base armour rating and body coverage so the overall armour gain is bigger. Avoid mixing armour sets.
A 40 rated armour will become 50, a 44 rated set will become 55, a 50 rated set becomes 62.5 and so on.
Armour rating is a % of damage reduction, so a rating of 50 reduces damage by half.
RW sets give additional bonuses which will also make a noticeable difference in fights.
10* Mercenary
Mission Credits (3 per Job Point)
The only thing you need to spend JPs on. This perk is really great and is especially good if you regularly complete missions to help you boost your overall mission credits. It is worth saving up a stash of credits because easter gives a purple egg which adds 25% to your total credits. If you have 4,000 you now have 5,000 after egg and so on.
Of course, if a really great book comes along then go ahead.
Special ammo and Weapon Mods are also fantastic purchases.
Everything else is garbage except maybe High Quality Blowguns or Macanas because they are quite cheap and pretty useful.
In terms of JPs in PSF, its purple, but it is not as strong as other companies JP points (though saving energy through not having to do missions as often is very good)
Budget PSF Attack Build (for people who no have RW gear) I recommend looking at Mug's guide here if you've never read it, if you have, you probably don't need to read this and will probably "Um, actually" me at this point.
Stats:
Pretty balanced stats probably gives the biggest overall benefit from being in PSF, but you probably want to aim for having special gyms open so you want one of Dex/Def to be your highest stat, then strength and speed pretty middling, with the other Dex/Def not too far behind.
Being balanced will make you hard to beat for anyone similar in stats to you when you are defending and when you are attacking you should be able to take down much stronger people than you after you have destroyed their speed with your Flash Bang (good internet speed is pretty critical)
Balanced Most overall benefit from being able to hit your opponent hard and fast while they are reeling from the flash bang. You need strength and speed to do that damage, you need dex to make their speed low enough to miss you, and defence helps you when the flashbang is gone and you need to see out the rest of the fight with your head start.
By balanced I don't mean perfectly even, just no stat left less than 1b with plenty of strength and speed.
Dex whore Beats def whore because of the flashbang; if they can't hit you, you ain't gonna die. You do still need some str/spd though or you will struggle. If they do hit you, your armour bonus will take some of the sting out of the hit.
Def whore Pretty decent but dex does more for you with the flashbangs. If you do have some dex though then it will still be really powerful. If you have like 500m+ dex then this is a green build because hardly anyone has super high speed and the flash bang reduction is that big.
Strength whore Bold move. you're making your armour and flashbangs do a lot of work for you when it comes to damage but if you can hit your opponent hard enough then maybe it will pay off sometimes if your dex/spd aren't miniscule compared to your opponent. Opponents will enjoy attacking you because they just have to wait 20 seconds for their eyes to work and then you're dead.
Never heard of a speed whore, maybe you are the one?
References:
Mug, https://www.torn.com/forums.php#/p=threads&f=61&t=16252083&b=0&a=0
Probably some other people too, tough luck
Thanks for reading!
Mentions: Fight better than a top 100 player | Feb 12 update