I'm doing a blade build at the moment. Do you have any tips? It seems like I just run around swinging hoping I kill everything before I take too much damage.
Updated for patch 1.6
Attribute Spread at Full Build:
18 Body
18 Reflexes
16 Intelligence
16 Cool
3 Technical Ability
Perks and Cyberware:
Jinchu-Maru Spellsword - Character Build Planner & Calculator
Concept:
While Kerenzikov is active, Jinchu-Maru sets your crit chance to 100%. Legendary Short Circuit has a passive effect that aut-triggers Short Circuit on weapon crits. It has no internal cooldown and scales with quickhacking damage perks such as "Bloodware" and "Subliminal Message". With "Critical Error", it can also crit, where it will scale with your crit damage%.
Your combined blade + short circuit damage will reliably kill, which will proc Heal on Kill cyberware, which is how you survive after the patch 1.5 stat squish.
Kerenzikov/Maneuvering System interaction:
Kerenzikov disables dodging and jumping for its active duration. However, if you have Maneuvering System, you can activate Kerenzikov in the air. If you do this you can jump and dodge immediately upon touching the ground. Use this to move safely between enemies and chain short circuit procs. You can get in 3 procs per Kerenzikov (more if you have an opportunity to cleave).
While in Kerenzikov, air dodging will not decelerate you to a standstill. So both of these cyberwares restrict movement individually but break each other's movement rules when combined, allowing you to move in ways that are not ordinarily possible.
You cannot dodge while sprinting on the ground (dodge is only possible in jog, walk and sneak locomotion states). However we can sprint, jump and air dodge just before we hit the ground, then jump again to cancel air dodge deceleration to standstill. You will keep the momentum from your dodge and maintain sprint speed in the air, provided you minimize ground contact.
See
4:06,
4:26 and
6:35. You will see this a lot throughout the video. This is how you do it:
Sprint and jump towards your target. Do not double jump. While in the air, activate Kerenzikov by blocking + dodging towards your target. As soon as you touch the ground, jump then air dodge, then jump again and double jump as the time dilation wears off to propel yourself fowards using your air dodge momentum.
If you do it right you can jump and dodge twice while Legendary Kerenzikov is active (3 times if you count the initial jump + block + dodge).
Defensive attack has a narrow hitbox and very short range so you will whiff unless you are point blank. Use it always while moving or dodging forwards.
Reverse Attack has a huge hitbox and can be done in the air. Try to open with this because it can hit things further away that normal/combo attacks.
Kerenzikov is the only way to change or reverse direction in mid air. To do this you block + dodge in any direction other than your velocity vector. See
0:48 and
4:46.
Bugs:
This is new in patch 1.5:
It is sometimes possible to activate a finisher or die/revive (with Second Heart) during time dilation. This should not be possible but if it happens, the time dilation will end immediately and the finisher/death/revive animation will playback at time dilated speed. See
20:04. You cannot move or do anything until the animation cycle completes so it is pretty much guaranteed to get you killed. The only way to survive this is to die and revive with Second Heart (see
9:00) or get lucky and not have lots of enemies shooting at you when you get animation locked (see
16:23). This also occurs with Sandevistan.
Until it gets fixed, you just have to avoid doing strong attacks in Kerenzikov versus low health enemies, especially when the time dilation is about to expire.
Leveling guide:
Since gig order is different now, I have to do another playthrough to get the new leveling order down. Until then this is tentative/provisional.
I recommend playing on Very Hard from the beginning because you get more exp and level up faster, but the early game will be quite unforgiving.
Start with 6 Reflexes, 6 Intelligence and 4 Cool.
Act 1 goals:
1) Take Blades -> Flight of the Sparrow 2/2
2) Level up Engineering/Breach Protocol/Quickhacking to 2 and Street Brawler/Athletics/Ninjutsu to 3 for a total of +6 perk points
3) Take Breach Protocol -> Advanced Datamining 2/2
4) Get Reflexes to 8 and take Blades -> Shifting Sands 3/3
5) Get Intelligence to 7 and take Quickhacking -> Daisy Chain 3/3
6) Get 12 Street Cred and about 12k eddies then grab Stephenson Tech MK2 from Dr Chrome, or Dynalar Sandevistan MK2 from Cassius Ryder and go to Instant Implants in Kabuki to pick up some Sandevistan Heatsinks. (Depends on whether you want to go stealth or rushdown blades early. Rushdown is harder and you don't have Cyberdeck buffers so you can't get extra cash from access points.)
7) Farm access points and save for Reinforced Tendons and Memory Boost (uncommon), both from Cassius Ryder.
By the end of Act 1 you want to be around level 10ish and have 12 Reflexes and 9 Intelligence, or thereabouts.
Act 2 goals:
1) Get 10 Intelligence and go straight to Gig: Serial Suicide in Corpo Plaza. This gig has 6x access points that can all drop legendary quickhacks. The ones you need are Legendary Short Circuit and Legendary Cripple Movement. If you want to complete this gig while you are here, you need Legendary System Reset because the enemies are minimum level 38 and you won't be able to kill them otherwise. You will want to take Datamine Virtuoso 2/2 temporarily to double your chance of looting a quickhack.
1) Get Reflexes to 15 and get Maneuvering System and Kerenzikov (epic) from Octavio's Clinic in Arroyo. Take Blades -> Judge, Jury, Executioner and Fiery Blast. After this you won't level reflexes up for a while (getting it to 18 is more of an Act 3 goal).
2) Get Intelligence to 12 and take Quickhacking -> Mnemonic and Diffusion. At 14 Intelligence you also pick up Plague 3/3. This will turn Legendary Cripple Movement into a hard carry. You will turn entire groups of enemies into statues over a huge radius. They will not be able to move or shoot back.
3) Get Body to 12 for Athletics -> Like a Butterfy and Tenacious V. The first perk will eliminate your stamina woes forever. The second perk is necessary to benefit from passive HP regen stacking (which will do a lot more of as we reduce our reliance on quickhack support). The next power spike is 16 Body for Bioconductor (epic), Second Heart and Dog of War.
4) Get Cool to 12 to get all buffs to 3 stacks and make it so stacks fall off 1 at a time instead of all at once. The next power spike levels are 14 to gain stacks on crit, 16 for 5 stack buffs and all the legendary Cool cyberware.
5) Get Street Cred to 40 for Tetratronic Rippler MK4 and Netwatch Netdriver MK5. Rippler has higher quickhack dps due to the upload speed. You should use this in the front half of the game until you get Jinchu-Maru and while you are still reliant on quickhack support. After that, you switch to Netdriver for the +30% damage to your shock proc.
6) Get Jinchu-Maru. For this to replace your Katana full time, you need Maneuvering System, Kerenzikov and Legendary Short Circuit.
Goals can be done in any order and are basically listing the big power spike breakpoints while leveling up. So just feel it out and work towards the next closest breakpoint.
Until you get Rapid Bloodflow, Coldest Blood and Dog of War, your in combat health regen will not be insane. Also, it will not be viable until you have Tenacious V, otherwise taking damage will constantly interrupt your regen.
Legendary Short Circuit + Critical Error + Jinchu-Maru will more than double your blade strong attack damage. Getting Legendary Short Circuit and 16 Intelligence is a big power spike.
Until you get Jinchu-Maru, your crit reliability for Short Circuit procs will not be great, although I don't recommend rushing this as it makes the story rather unsatisfying. I would aim to get this around level 25 to 35. Until you get Jinchu-Maru you have other options: Scalpel will increase your crit rate by 50% but this means no Cyberdeck. This is viable when you have QianT Sandevistan MK4 + 3x uncommon heatsinks as the cooldown will be 3 to 5 seconds.
Another option is to keep the cyberdeck but switch to monowire, which has (imo) broken damage scaling in patch 1.6. It starts with 3 times the base damage of Jinchu-Maru and scales twice as fast. It also automatically levels up with you, so you do not need to spend components upgrading it. Even with low crit rate, it is an outlier among melee weapons. If you are interested in a Monowire 100% crit rate build, you can check it out here:
100% Crit Satori build | Cyberpunk 2077 | Nukes & Dragons (nukesdragons.com)
The attribute spread is different but the cutoff point where you have to choose between Satori and Jinchu-Maru is very late in the game - level 41. At this point your attribute spread will be as follows:
12 Body
15 Reflexes
16 Intelligence
16 Cool
3 Technical Ability
I generally prefer the Jinchu-Maru build because not stacking 40+ perks in Merciless gives you the freedom to max a secondary weapon. Shotguns are particularly good as you can weave in shotgun blasts to benefit from all the Annihilation movespeed perks then switch back to blades.
