Focus on your constitution and reflexes – with our skill guide for Cyberpunk 2077 you can effectively finish off enemies in close combat with the katana.
In Cyberpunk 2077, sneaking and hacking is something for cowards who are afraid of a few explosions and bullets. You are in the middle of the battle – no, you are the battle! Fat armour, regeneration and abnormally high melee damage make most confrontations an absolute breeze.
You can slaughter even the toughest enemies with ease. When in doubt, use a target-seeking shotgun to send enemies to the brink in seconds and keep groups of enemies at bay with plenty of explosives.
You have no time for tact and unseen penetration. You go in and only finish when you have destroyed everything around you. To play this way, you need to increase your constitution and reflexes. You use mostly bladed weapons like katanas and machetes until you reach Street Cred 20 and switch to Mantis Blades.
Our Cyberpunk 2077 Melee Guide gives you tips on what you’ll need for this character build, which we’ve affectionately dubbed “the Bicep”.
Table of Contents
Attributes and Advantage Points
The biceps: strengths and weaknesses
- Strengths: Comparatively easy to play with very good damage effect. Many locked doors you open with brute body strength
Weaknesses: You can forget about any clever hacks. If you can’t break down a door or override a security system, you’ll have to go through the roof or a window.
Athletics: Keep moving
In addition, you will find some excellent perks in the Athletics tab. We have marked the respective perks with numbers in the image and in the text so that you can find them more quickly.
- Let’s go with Regeneration [1] to passively restore your health during combat.
- Since you’re a melee fighter who’s constantly on the move, it’s also worth running off your neck [2] for faster regeneration while you’re running around.
- Steel and Chrome (3) grants you more melee damage, while Epimorphosis (4) improves your regeneration outside of combat and regenerates all of your health over time.
- I am a leaf in the wind (5) lets you dodge without using up stamina.
- In this context, marathon running (6) is also worthwhile so that sprinting no longer costs stamina.
- War dog (7) improves the regeneration in battle even more.
- Invincible (8) is also worthwhile, especially on harder difficulty levels, for more maximum health.
- You can now work towards Wolverine (9) for faster onset regeneration in battle.
- If you reach a whopping 20 skill points in Athletics during the course of the game, Badass Motherfucker (10) increases your armour and resistances at the start of combat. Survival is everything!
Blades: Long-distance destination Mantis Blades
Since your ultimate goal is to wield Mantis Blades, you distribute your advantage points in the Blades section in the Reflexes section. We have marked the respective perks with numbers in the picture and in the text so that you can find them more quickly.
- Blade Whirl [1] increases attack speed with bladed weapons, Tireless (2) reduces stamina cost when attacking, Gale (3) increases damage of heavy attacks.
- Offensive Defensive (4) makes defensive attacks significantly more powerful, and Brachial Footwork (5) grants you an additional damage bonus after using a dodge.
- And because that’s not powerful enough, Fiery Counter (6) increases your blade damage the more severely your target is injured.
Bloody Dance (7) generates Bleed damage that can be further expanded via Carnage (8) and Bloody Surge (9), while Magic Blades (10) improves your critical strike chance and Judge and Execute (11) increases your damage against enemies with full health.
Drifting Sand (12) gives you stamina from dodging, Bloodthirst (13) and Death Arrow (14) heal you when you make enemies bleed, beat up bleeding enemies or take them out completely.
- If you are good at parrying, you will receive plenty of healing for counterattacks via Unyielding (15). In principle, you can take everything in the Blade Talent Tree without worrying.
When you get your blades to level 20, Dragon Strike (16) gives you a bonus to critical blade damage.
Destruction: If necessary with shot
If you are satisfied with your toughness and your melee damage, you should also take a look at Destruction in the Constitution attribute. While you prefer melee, too many closely entrenched enemies can sift through you, so it may be worth taking some of them out from a distance with a homing smart shotgun.
We have marked the worthwhile perks with numbers in the picture and in the following list so that you can find them more quickly.
- At the top [1] (more body damage)
- Heavy Lead [2] (enemies are knocked back harder)
- Hail of Bullets (3) (more damage), Massacre (more critical damage)
- Middle in the face (4) (faster reload)
- Bulldozer (5) (more critical hits).
There are additional advantages under Destruction that make your shotguns even more effective, but these require a fairly high character level because you primarily increase your melee combat to the maximum first. If you have the appropriate points at hand, you can of course gradually unlock everything under Destruction. However, we primarily use shotguns to control troublesome enemies and to pick off and eliminate outsiders from large groups of enemies.
The right weapons
With this style of play, we rely primarily on bladed weapons, so anything from a simple knife to a full-blown katana. Bladed weapons are great because they make enemies bleed if you specialise them correctly. This causes damage over time, can heal us and makes fights easier against bosses who like to run away or temporarily turn invisible because we can keep track of them by their popping damage numbers (if the option is enabled in the interface menu).
Secondarily, we rely on shotguns with the Smart trait. Basically, shotguns are only really effective at close range because they miss enemies at medium range with most projectiles due to their wide dispersion. A Smart shotgun ensures that the pellets all dutifully follow your target and catch it fully, which makes shotguns extremely effective and deadly.
Of course, for this to work, we need appropriate cyberware. Our suggestions for suitable cyberware are therefore as follows.
Matching Cyberware
- Frontalcortex: Terribly many options we don’t have here due to our low intelligence. Heal-on-kill we can also bog down with the mental capacity of an average doorstop, restoring some health through kills. Really cool cyberware like Visual Cortex Support and Improved Limbic System (more crit damage, respectively more crit chance) support your playstyle if you want to increase your intelligence to eight to nine points, but have absolutely no priority until your constitution and reflexes are powered up.
- Ocular system: Again, our choices are so limited due to our attributes that you’d better get used to the Kiroshi look from the prologue. At least you can modify the glubber with a danger detector that marks enemies who have tracked you down.
- Circulation system: Blood pump and biomonitor grant active and passive healing if you have the necessary money. For a smaller budget, you can also use the microgenerator, which shocks surrounding enemies if your health drops too much. If in doubt, add a cheap synlung for better stamina regeneration. You can also smoke with it.
- Immune System: Shock-N-Awe will sometimes fry surrounding enemies with an electric shock when you take damage. Cataresist, meanwhile, increases all of your resistances.
- Nervous System: Kerenzikov is great because you can use it to slow down time when blocking, aiming and attacking during a dodge. It also allows you to aim and shoot while dodging. A reflex modulator slows down time when your health drops to a critical level.
- Integument System: Subdermal armour makes you tougher, which is always handy for close combat. Supradermal tissue makes you stop bleeding. Also comes in flavours with other immunities. Basically, you can use anything you can get your hands on in this section.
- Operating system: Being squishy in the head, we don’t have much to choose from here. At 18 Constitution and above, you can bung Militech Berserk MK.5 to activate the Berserk ability, which increases your melee damage and armour and resistances, reduces your weapon recoil, gives you more max health and heals you through kills.
- Skeleton: Compact Bone Marrow increases your melee damage (but also stamina costs), Synaptic Signal Optimiser grants extra health, Micro Engines increase your attack speed. If you’re on a budget, you can also buy a micro-vibration generator (more melee damage), alternatively, the bionic lung increases your maximum stamina.
- Hands: Smart Link, otherwise the Smart Shotgun won’t do you any good. A high quality smart link improves your accuracy and critical hit chance. If you’re chronically broke, the cheap, rotten smart link without additional bonuses will do for a start.
- Arms: Mantis blades, logical. You don’t spend the whole game trying to increase blade damage to the maximum in order to install hacking gadgets in this slot. The better the quality level, the higher the damage, but also the price. Check several Ripperdocs and decide for yourself what suits you best.
- Legs: We’re really into reinforced tendons because you can do double jumps with them. This helps immensely with play styles that don’t hack very well and often require you to climb your way to hard to reach areas. For 45,000 Eddies, however, the parts are unfortunately anything but a gift.
Procedure in battle
- Tank through on normal: On normal or easier difficulty, you’re so tough with this play style that you can chop your way through most situations quite safely. Enemies fall in the blink of an eye, and bleed stacks and in-fight regeneration will keep you alive.
- Dodge on Hard: On harder difficulties, you must make liberal use of dodges to increase your damage output (Brute Footwork). Mantis claws grant you a sprint attack that can take out most enemies with a single hit and from a relatively long distance. Heavy attacks also often result in an instakill animation, but you should avoid this if possible if you are surrounded by enemies.
- Seek cover: On hard and very hard, many enemies will finish you off with just two or three hits. Here it is safer to seek cover and flatten closely packed enemies from a distance with the Smart Shotgun. You should also make sure that your clothes have as high an armour value as possible – even if this can lead to strange looks, as the following picture shows.
As a melee fighter, stats come before style. Clothes with good armour stats rarely go well together. - Against groups: If there are too many enemies in a small space, rain grenades. You’ll find tons of them around every corner, so use them liberally!
- Against single enemies: You can slaughter single enemies in close combat with a sprint attack. This is quick, but if possible, always approach from behind or from the side and don’t run straight into the enemy’s sights
- Fighting bosses: Story bosses are best tackled via Hit & Run in Hard mode. In other words: Charge briefly, start with a heavy attack, deal out a few stacks of bleeding with light attacks if possible, run away, heal if necessary. Such an overlord can sometimes knock you down with a single hit. Patience and agility are everything. Hide, use cover, attack only from ambush if possible. Never get too greedy. Don’t pick on the boss for too long and get out of there before he fights back.
Besides shotguns, you can theoretically also use LMGs. But they rarely pop as nicely as a target-seeking pump action. Gameplay Variant: The Gorilla
If bladed weapons don’t appeal to you, you can also specialise entirely in Constitution and boost your stats there with blunt weapons via the Street Brawl talent tree. Instead of knives, katanas and mantis blades, you then logically rely on bludgeons like baseball bats and finally on gorilla arms.
You’d better leave precision weapons and extreme ranged combat to your AI colleagues. Biceps has neither the time nor the talent for that.
- If you still want to go double-tracked, put a few attribute points into Technical Ability. This passively increases your armour. In addition, you can easily expand the talent tree Item Production and assemble your own equipment instead of shoving your hard-earned money down the throats of traders or having to rely on loot.As a gorilla, you may not have the same coolness factor as someone who slashes enemies with mantis blades, but no one criticises the Incredible Hulk for not being cool. At least not for long.
