None of the below should be construed as supporting the ideas of level scaling, durability loss, or death penalties; I post it only in hopes that you may find it of assistance.
Davih said:
Everyone's saying if you upgrade and keep your weapons repaired you will be fine but this isn't true at all. I have a level 24 wrench of some assortment with Impact mod and its level 4 but it still takes a good 3 hits to kill a walker. And considering you fight 4+ zombies at a time that's 12 hits and weapons have about 50 hits until they break, I have to carry 3 weapons that repairing costs a nightmare.
Some mods reduce durability, I don't know about yours in particular, but give it a look.
Hitting the head deals additional damage, or is supposed to.
Consider picking up the 1-point Combat tree skills, and then using kick to push enemies away or jump + kick to knock them down, followed by a stomp for a kill. These do not use your weapons, and so do not cost durability. As you seem to be playing Sam (you mention blunt weapons), your Tackle can also knock enemies down and I don't know its stamina cost relative to jump+kick (I play Xian), so test the two and see what works best.
Davih said:
Why do you lose money when you die. This adds to the frustration losing $1k every time you die and then you don't have enough money to repair the 3 weapons your carrying.
Most games have a death penalty (beyond the unavoidable interruption in play) to tell you that you fucked up, and you should go ahead and not repeat it. The death penalty in this game is moving you to a different location (that may be right beside a Ram, that was quite the shock), and what seems to be a ~10% gold penalty.
If you take the above to heart and use your weapons less, you will have more money.
The Furies of Xian and Purna both provide an alternate weapon for their duration, I assume Sam's does too. Use this ability to avoid using a weapon when you otherwise would have to, such as special zombies.
I don't know if this is the case for you, but it can be tempting to try and keep 3+ current-level weapons fully upgraded and possibly modded; I don't think that is a sustainable strategy. 2-3 weapons between n and n-3 fully upgraded with 1 modded should do you.
The game claims that it costs more to repair a broken weapon than a weapon with some durability left, might as well follow that (I haven't noticed it being any cheaper).
Davih said:
Also why do you not need to repair guns? I'm thinking the gun expert has it cheap here. Health packs are scarce and you're damned if you think its possible to afford them on top of the repairs and all the money you are losing from dieing.
Think of ammunition as the durability of guns: Both are expended as you use the weapon, when you exhaust the supply it becomes useless, and both can be replenished with gold. Ammunition is replenished by finding it (so fighting humans refills ammo), or by crafting it, which requires raw materials in quantities I'm not sure you can expect to have enough of without buying them from NPCs.
Right now I have a stack of tier2 med kits, which I purchased to replace my tier1 ones. I'll be picking up a second stack next time I encounter an NPC who sells them, since I'm trying to faze out the tier1 kits as they no longer heal enough to be worth the bag space.
If you don't want to alter your style of play to accommodate the mechanics of the game, the Survival tree has talents that will modify the mechanics of the game to accommodate your style of play. I don't actually recommend this, because you end up with a character who is weaker relative to other characters of the same level; however, if you are playing the way you find fun, it may well be the better choice.
Best of luck.
