Brawling, blunt and bladed weapons - no reason at all to use these in a game with guns unless they can be the equal of guns; I doubt this is one of their goals.
Heh. I take it perhaps you didn't play Wasteland?
This isn't a blobber like Wasteland. The rules change when you add movement within combat.
Given that for melee options, you still had to close the distance between the party (or individual combatant) and the enemy in the original WL, what is the significant difference that renders melee weapons usable in the first, but pointless in WL2?
And pugilism and knives are worthless, hope you enjoy proton axes because that's your only final option.
Proton Axe was the best melee weapon at the end game - There is no argument there. But that didn't make the other options worthless unless you are defining worthless as "there is something that is better" instead of something more sensible like "is not reasonably usable". Knife
Throwing was worthless - not necessarily because of the damage it would deal, but because of the mechanism used for it (Ammo taking up a single inventory slot each meant a very limited set could be carried, and (IIRC) the requirement to reload after each throw meant you only got one throw off every 2 rounds.)
I admit that it has been a while since I played through the end with a pugilist and a knife-fighter, so I don't recall if Pugilism (7) held up too inside Cochise itself, but it was perfectly fine for the rest of the game.
Knife fighting had no problem for the entire game, including Cochise - you would want to drop the knife and use other brawling weapons at some points during the game because you would want a higher brawling for the extra melee attacks, but outside of leveling brawling, there was no need to use any weapons other than knifes.
In my run that had a pugilist (7 Pugilism, 7 Brawling) and a Knife Fighter (7 Knife fight, 8 Brawling), those two melee characters were always dealing the most damage in combat unless the Energy Weapon carriers went full auto. I don't recall if the pugilist was actually using fists the whole time or if I switched him to the Proton Axe, but I know the knife fighter was using the Knife the whole time. They also leveled up the fastest because of the whole double XP thing.
Though that's not limited to melee, all weapons and armor had a linear progression, like a JRPG.
There were also a limited number of each weapon - If memory serves, 2 Proton Axes, 1 Ion Beamers, and 1 Meson Cannon
if you found them all - likely only 1 Proton Axe without already knowing where the second one was. Top level energy weapons also were not a strict linear improvement - it was a tradeoff between single shot damage (Meson Cannon) and overall damage per power-pack (Ion Beamer, Laser Rifle(?)).
