Payday 3: Best Skills to Get First

You’ll need a toolbox full of valuable talents to mitigate your inevitable failures and maximize your chances of striking it rich in Payday 3, the third installment of the popular heist series. In Payday 3, you can choose from a wide variety of abilities. They are structured into trees, with most requiring you to spend a point on the tree’s foundational ability before you may unlock the rest. In this essay, we’ll go through the finest strategies for achieving victory in Payday 3:

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How Skills Work in Payday 3

Prior to beginning a heist, players must select multiple skill trees from which to gain experience and finally learn the tree’s foundational ability. Then, pick the root ability from any tree and keep leveling up to gain access to its further abilities.

With enough skill points and prior investigation into the skill tree, you can advance along many skill trees simultaneously by choosing various foundation skills.

It’s a little difficult to understand at first, but you’ll get used to it. Fortunately, this means that you can focus on specific skill trees and get to the skills you prefer more quickly if that is your goal.

Furthermore, when you first begin your criminal career in Payday 3, you will have very little skill points to use. To give you an idea of scale, at Level 38 I have 11 skill points to distribute despite having thoroughly explored every skill tree.

No matter how low your level is, you will always have access to any talent you have researched as soon as it becomes available. This necessitates early-game forethought into which research paths to choose and which skills to prioritize in your build.

You can activate and refresh a new trio of bonuses with certain skills in Payday 3, and they play a significant role in the game.

• Advantage: Your damage is increased by 10%
• Grit: 10% damage reduction
• Increased speed when moving around

Whatever you decide, remember that you may always return your skill points if you change your mind about your build.

Best Skills to Get First

We think these are the most important abilities to master first in Payday 3:

• Secure Loop (Hacker)

In a heist from Payday 3, only death, taxes, and surveillance cameras can be relied on. You’ll encounter them whether you’re casing the joint or trying to gun your way through it; they’re everywhere. The second hacking ability is called “Secure Loop,” and it lets you to loop the film from a camera so that it doesn’t catch you sneaking up on a vault in a restricted area, or doing anything else illegal.

Secure Loop is a lifesaver if you aren’t yet skilled at wooing a camera’s perspective or don’t have the patience to wait.

• Quick Fingers (Infiltrator)

The simple lockpicking minigame will also be present in Payday 3. It’s usually the last line of defense between your heist gang and a large sum of money. If you have the Rush buff active, using Quick Fingers just requires one successful jiggle to end the minigame immediately. Although it requires the Infiltrator foundation skill to utilize, the reward for unlocking it is Rush, which can be used after picking a lock or killing an adversary with a throwing knife.

This mostly implies that after picking one locked door, you can crack the rest in quadruple time and escape before the next assault strikes if you’re in a room with numerous locked doors or a bank vault with a ton of deposit boxes.

• Battering Ram (Escapist)

The final ability in the Escapist tree is Battering Ram, which allows players to run full speed at any locked door and smash through it if they have one of three boosts active. The basic Escapist talent grants Rush after 3 seconds of continuous sprinting, making it a useful chaser for any Edge or Grit build.

This has numerous practical applications and occurs naturally in many contexts, but it also allows you to gain the benefit of Rush by running in a circle, at which point you can forcefully enter a room that would normally require you to spend a long time lockpicking.

• Open Mic (Grifter)

The Grifter tree’s primary focus is on facilitating maskless stealth runs, in which you enter and exit a building without activating your disguise. While every ability in this tree is helpful for stealth, Open Mic is particularly versatile because it speeds up radio responses by 50% regardless of your build.

If you need to eliminate several guards before being discovered, this increases your odds of responding to each guard’s radio and buying you some time.

• Stockholm Syndrome (Manipulator)

Whether you’re brazen or stealthy, you’ll be engaging with citizens in some way, making the initial ability, which lets you tie up and swap hostages 50% faster, worth leveling up the Manipulator skill tree for.

However, if you’re more of a gung-ho fighter, it’s worth it to max out this branch so you can learn Stockholm Syndrome and revive yourself by shouting at prisoners or scared civilians. Since the AI bots’ pickup accuracy tends to be low, this is of particular use on solo runs.

• Glitch Protocol (Hacker)

There is a good justification for include a second Hacker skill on the list. With Glitch Protocol, you can intercept a guard’s radio transmission and divert their attention for a full five seconds. Primarily, this opening can be used to steal an important item or sneak into a restricted area without being noticed.

It’s useful if you ever get caught, though. When being escorted, it’s a good idea to hack a guard’s radio so they forget about you and go back to patrolling. Even if they have you cornered and are about to make an arrest, they can be tricked into switching to Search mode.

• Bagger (Infiltrator)

You must secure your booty after tying up your hostages, picking all the locks, deactivating cameras, and answering guard radios. Bagger in the Infiltrator tree gives you a 50% speed boost when picking up valuable cargo, which might make the difference between escape and death when besieged by an army of cops.

The Infiltrator tree’s basic talent activates this benefit if you pick a lock or kill an adversary with a throwing knife, but you need the Rush bonus. The fundamental skill Escapist lets you sprint to trigger Rush, making this easier. When compromised and need to escape, the speed increase will help you stealthily or loudly.

FAQs

What are C stacks in Payday 3?

You can’t buy C-Stacks (Crime.net Stacks) with real money, but you can earn them by completing challenges and then spending the reward money you receive from those challenges on purchasing them through the merchant Setaggi, the currency broker.

Can you unmask in Payday 3?

It’s important to remember that once a player puts on a mask, they’ll have to play through the heist again if they want to take it off. Because of this, lone wolf players should consider carefully about donning a mask before attempting a theft.

How many heists are there in Payday 3?

Once Payday 3 is out, gamers will have access to eight different heists, each with its own setting, objective, and set of challenges.