If you are not familiar with the Payday Series, or if you are having troubles understanding some of the game’s concepts, this guide is intended for you. The idea behind this Payday 2 guide is to provide you with all the necessary information to understand what the game, and your crew, might expect from you. This is not a guide that will tell you how to stealth every single heist, that is something you will have to figure out on your own. However, with this guide, you will understand some of the concepts in the game that will allow you to stealth.
Looking for a weapon’s guide? We have one.
When the going gets tough, get tougher.
Notice: I am still producing relevant pictures for the Guide, as well as performing a few small tests. The Guide will be steadily updated.
When you first enter the game you will have the option of going to the Safehouse. This is, in essence, your brief tutorial where you learn how to throw items, move around, use objects, and if you choose to try out the different rooms also how to unlock doors, place and restart drills and use the ammo bag. The controls in Payday 2 are very simple. In many ways it is just like any standard FPS. You move around with the AWSD buttons, jumps with the spacebar, crouch with ctrl, interact with objects through F, throw currently held items and deploying specials with G and performing melee attacks with any weapon with E. The F button is also used for highling special enemies and during stealth rounds you can point to guards, in order to highlight them.
Left mouse button fires your weapon. Currently none of the guns have alternate firing modes, so you are stuck with whatever the weapon has. The right mouse button makes you use the ironsights or scope (if you have one mounted) increasing your accuracy and control. You can also sprint with Shift, but how long you sprint depends on your skills as well as the mobility and weight of your equipment. This will be explained in more detail later.
In Payday 2 you and your friends (or at least fellow heisters) perform different tasks for money. There is nothing else to it but the money. In order to get money you need to perform heists. As you level up you will unlock more heists. There are two types of heists, standard heists and pro jobs. A standard heist, if failed, can be retaken time and time again. It has four difficulty ratings, starting from standard, hard, very hard and overkill. Pro Jobs are a “win or lose” scenario. If you fail during any of the days of the heist you cannot retake it from the last checkpoint. Your host will have to find it again on Crime Net and start over from the beginning. The higher the difficulty the more experience and money you earn. Each heist has assets that the host can purchase. Assets include useful information, additional ammo and medical bags, or useful equipment or perks to use during the heist. In order to find out which of these assets are useful you will have to experiment.
Taking a closer look at how much experience and money will a heist give you will help you decide whether it is worth your time or not. However, the size of the payday does not reflect how much spending money you will get. To calculate that you should divide your payday by 20. That is more or less how much you will earn (though you could earn more through bonus loot).
Not every asset is useful for every occasion. For example, the Bad Music asset on Nightclub is only useful if you want to attempt the stealth approach. If you plan on going in loud there is no reason for buying this asset. In the same way the Medical Bag on Bank Heist spawns outside the bank, and on higher difficulty settings this might make it useless, since the sheer number of tough enemies will not let you reach it. Each heist has a number of random factors that influence how the mission will play out. The location of mission items will change, where and how many guards there might be, where the civilians will be located, even how much loot is present. In Nightclub you might attempt the stealth approach, only to find the manager’s office filled with gangsters, while during the loud approach it might be completely empty. Payday 2 calls for a lot of practice, in order to learn what to do when a certain situation arises. At the same time it’s not a bad idea to have a backup plan. For example, if you get discovered there is no need to use a silent drill that could take five minutes to open a safe, you might instead use C4 in order to escape much sooner.
There are different types of objectives. Just like in the previous Payday you will find recovery and waiting tasks. However there are also far more objective types in Payday 2. For example, in Mallcrash you have to destroy property, that is your primary objective. In Rats you have to cook meth, and later trade it. Escort tasks appear to be gone (at least as far as I have played) but there are many more tasks you will have to pay far more careful attention to.
Let’s take a few steps back.
Heist assets can make things go much smoother. A lot depends on whether you actually need the asset and whether the asset will help you. For example, the Ammo Drop by Alex on Big Oil could be completely wasted when all of the ammo ends up in the canyon (thanks Alex).
When you finish your Safehouse introduction you will be free to find a crew or try and perform heists offline. Crime Net does not allow for you to pick any heist you like, on any difficulty, instead different heists will appear on the world map and you will be free to join a crew, or pick one of the empty heists, thus becoming its host. As the host you can kick people from your crew and buy assets for heists. Other than that everybody is equal.
Each heist has a number of objectives. Sometimes there are optional objectives that you may choose to complete. Usually this concerns loot. For example on Watchdogs you only need four bags of coke, but you could try to save all the nine bags in order to get a bigger payout. In four stores you need only $15,000 for the escape van to be called but you could empty out every safe and cash register for more money. While on lower difficulty settings the payout for loot is smaller on Overkill you will see a clear difference, especially on such missions like Watchdogs or Rats. Being greedy is not always the way to go. You have to understand your own limits and those of your crew. If you keep dying try to take less. You will still get a payout for completing your core objectives.
Some Heists have multiple stages. After each stage you will get experience. You will not always get any money for earlier stages, especially if no loot was involved in them. During Rats you might be attacked by cops while transporting meth. During that mission you can save your meth supply but it will not give you any extra payout.
Once the Heist is complete you will get your money. You maximize your profits by taking or transporting all the possible optional loot and escaping with all your crew members alive. How much experience you get is primarily influenced by the heist’s difficulty, but you can earn additional experience when more crew members escape. Then comes the time for the Payday card game. You choose one of three cards and you get a random reward. This might be more money, a weapon mod or mask item (mask, decal, material or colors). Due to the unpredictable nature of the card game you never know what to expect from it, and the rewards will rarely be what you would hope them to be, especially when it comes to weapon mods. Still, gathering all the mods you can opens up new options in the future as you unlock new weapons. Masks are much less useful, unless you care for looks. Extra money does not hurt, but after an especially long and difficult heist where you earn $500,000 (Rats on Overkill) getting a $12,000 card bonus seems petty, to say the least.
You earn two types of cash. Most of it goes for the Overseas account, the smaller fraction is your spending money that you will actually use on buying equipment and skills.
With four classes to choose from a lot depends on what you want to be more focused on. The Ghost is better for stealth heists, though he is still very useful during ordinary combat. Technicians have the means to help in both stealthy and loud heists, due to their choice of equipment, but before they can unlock all of it you will have to decide which equipment is most important to you. Enforcers are all about combat. If you want a class where you deal and can survive massive damage you want to play as the enforcer. The Mastermind is a good choice for people who do not only enjoy crowd control but also being crew leaders. His skills allow for cheaper assets which might make a difference on harder heists. Certain assets can only be bought by a Mastermind as well.
The Technician, as you can see, has many different useful skills. However in order to unlock a new tier you need to spend a certain number of skill points (how many you need to spend is shown on the right). Each unlocked tier also offers a certain bonus, to you or your crew. You can jump over tiers (as I did) to invest in skills that you might prefer.
While none of the classes has any weapon limitations (with the exception of the saw) some of them specialize in specific weapon types due to their skills. This might also be an angle for you, but since certain weapon skills have a mildly low level you could opt to multi-class to improve most of your weapons.
Let us talk about your equipment. Payday 2 has a wide variety of weapons to offer you. You have a main weapon and sidearm slot. In total you can have eighteen different weapons in your armory. What weapons to choose? That is up to you to decide. Of course, you should take weapons you feel confident with and which might better fit your skills. For example, the Mastermind class has different skills benefiting pistols, so you might prefer to take a Crosskill over an MP-5.
Each weapon has different statistics. You might notice that certain weapons have higher level variants that are in some way better. This is especially the case when you compare the Car-4 with your Amcar. Your starting rifle quickly becomes obsolete, as will your pistol. Since you can add all manner of mods to any of your weapons there is rarely any reason to keep your starting weapons in the armory once you buy brand new guns.
Among the weapons you have the following stats: Damage, Mobility, Accuracy, Visibility, Recoil and Noise.
My small armory. Each gun is slightly different, some are more powerful than others. Having a wide choice of firearms allows you to prepare for a heist in a number of possible styles. Once you save up enough cash you might choose to fill up your armory with different guns, and as you play along gather the necessary mods for them.
Damage is self explanatory, the higher the damage the better the quicker you can dispatch enemies. Some skills increase your damage with specific weapons.
Mobility is the weapon’s weight. Low Mobility means that a weapon will slow you down. If you have two low Mobility weapons and heavy armor you will find yourself walking and sprinting far slower than before. You will also drain your stamina quicker. On some missions higher mobility will be sought more than damage or protection.
Accuracy is also self explanatory. Usually higher damage weapons have lower accuracy, but the M308 and magnum can be both highly accurate and devastating.
Visibility is also influenced by your armor. You can have low, medium or high visibility. If you have high visibility guards will detect you far quicker. In some cases you may find yourself automatically detected when you bump into a guard with full armor and heavier weapons. Civilians appear to react far quicker to you, once you put on your mask and your visibility is high. Low visibility normally benefits stealthy heists, since you will be able to move much more freely and not fear quick detection.
Recoil is, in other words, how much your gun will go off target if you continue to fire rapidly. Certain weapons have higher recoil than others. The M308, for example, has extremely high recoil, but since it is used as a semi-automatic sniper rifle you will rarely fire it rapidly, normally taking short pauses before each shot to ensure clean headshots. Certain rifles, like the AKs, have mildly high recoil, but when it comes to firing at targets a short distance away their recoil will not bother you too much. The further away your target the clearer the problem with recoil.
Some mods are better than others. Surprisingly enough some more expensive mods appear to be worse then other cheaper mods (such as the Stubby and the Tank). While you can detach a mod you should not throw money away by installing a mod you do not need. Experiment with them if you are looking for different gun builds.
Noise is only a factor during stealthy heists. Killing a guard can be done with melee but a pistol might be a better option if the guard saw you from a certain distance, or if you want to destroy a camera and cannot approach it. Most weapons have some type of silencer that can be attached, even shotguns. This makes it possible to take almost any weapon with you on a stealthy heist. However, once you get detected, the silencer will reduce your weapon’s damage. It is usually a better idea to have a silenced sidearm than a silenced main gun, just in case you need something with proper firepower.
It is not a bad idea to have one or two guns of the same type, if you wish to modify them to different tasks. For example, you could make an M308 that is lightweight and silenced, for stealth missions, and another with improved accuracy and damage, for loud heists. If you do not need a weapon anymore you can always sell it.
You unlock different types of armor, as you level up. Your default suit has very little armor, but it does not restrict your mobility or speed at all. The heavier the armor the slower you will move and the higher your visibility. Everything depends on your role in the crew and the heist. For example, during the Ukrainian Job you can steal the objective tiara and escape in less than a minute from the heist’s start. However, if you carry heavy armor and weapons you might not make it to the escape van before the cops arrive, if you were the ones tasked with stealing the tiara from the back rooms, thus forcing you to wait for the van to return in a few minutes. While your armor will allow you to soak up more damage the very reason why you suffer more damage might be due to your lower speed.
There are many different types of armor. Which one you choose should depend on your role and the heist itself.
Each Class has at least one piece of unique equipment that can be improved through your skills. The Enforcer has the ammo bag and saw, although the saw counts as a primary weapon instead of equipment. The Technician has C4 and Turrets. The Ghost has the ECM. The Mastermind has Medical Bags.
The Enforcer’s Ammo Bag is much sough after, especially on higher difficulty heists where ammo will quickly become scarce. Your skills will allow you to increase the capacity of your ammo bag as well as carry two of them. The saw is useful when completing certain objectives, although a lot depends on the heist. Some heists need the saw to speed things up greatly. One such example is the Bank Heist: Deposit Boxes where the default method of opening the deposit boxes (lockpicking) takes an awful lot of time. The saw will be far quicker, even if it will break eventually.
A simple safe, yet three ways to crack it open. The drill is your default method, that is something any member of your team can use. A technician, once he is able, could use C4, which is much quicker but loud. A Ghost could use a lockpick, but this will take a while (it will still be faster than the drill). Different objectives may be approached in a similar fashion. Such as ATMs or Bars, that can be opened with a saw, or doors that may be hacked open with an ECM.
The Technician’s C4 at first is used as a booby trap against law enforcers. The usefulness of the C4 in its basic form is debatable, because it can be triggered by civilians and until it is upgraded it will usually kill a single enemy at a time. Later on, when you increase its explosion radius, you will be able to halt enemy movement far more effectively. The C4 becomes an almost priceless addition to your crew when you unlock a skill to use it on safes. Small safes need only a single C4 charge, larger safes need four. Most doors also need only a single C4 which makes life incredibly easy during some heists (remember that certain doors can be blasted open with guns, to save the C4 for later). The turret is also a useful piece of equipment. It might not be the best against heavier or special cops (such as the shield) but it has other uses. For example, special cops tend to focus on the turret. You can drag attention away from your crew by deploying a turret within eye sight of a bulldozer, giving your team enough time to take out the foe. In tight spaces that are bound to be smoke filled (such as the first floor on Rats) the turret can tell you where an enemy is coming from, even if you do not see him, because it will fire in his general direction. The turret has many upgrades and you can end up with two very useful additional “team mates” if you choose to specialize in them first.
The Ghost’s ECM is a device used for a number of things. In its default form it can disable some electronic devices in the area, such as pagers and mobile phones. If you are about to take a lot of civilian hostages using an ECM can make your life much simpler, since they will be unable to call anybody for help. They can also take out alarms and cameras, but remember that you do not have much time, so act as soon as the ECM is in place. I have yet to verify this but it seems that guards will become suspicious when an ECM is active (due to Pagers malfunctioning). An upgraded ECM can be used to stun enemies but it may also be used as a silent method of hacking open doors locked with cards, when you buy the correct skills.
The Mastermind’s Medical Bag is just as useful as the Ammo Bag. Usually having both during a heist allows for much easier survival, although a Medical Bag is usually needed when a crew clearly keeps getting downed. While a Medical Bag can let a crew member regain health it’s more important use is that it can restart the down-counter before a player automatically goes into custody. In other words, if you get downed enough times the next time you get downed you will go into custody (this is hinted by much greyer vision). Using the Medical Bag restarts how many times you were downed to zero.
In Payday 2 you have more enemies to watch out for. Some of them are very similar to one another, while the rest get steadily harder.
Police Officers, Security Guards and FBI agents are very similar when it comes to weapons, armor and health. Each of them comes in an armor-less and armored type but they will lack any head protection. Even shooting their armored chests with especially powerful weapons could kill them instantly. These are the first enemies you will tend to encounter at the start of any heist. To experienced heisters they should pose absolutely no problem at all, but be careful if you run into a mob of them. Another thing to remember about Security Guards and Police Officers is that if you put on your mask right in front of them there is a decent chance that they will automatically cuff you. Try to put on your mask a short distance away, then fire at them with a silenced pistol or melee them.
The “Spec Ops”, as I call them, are some of the deadliest enemies in the game. They are incredibly tough to take down, and you are in a deep pickle if they outflank you. If you cannot flank them aim for the head.
Swats and Heavy Swats appear on Standard and Hard difficulties. Swats are only slightly tougher than your regulars from the previous paragraph. Heavy Swats, on the other hand, are far more challenging. You can quickly tell them apart by their white helmets. Unlike regular Swats they will have much more health and much more dangerous weapons. Aiming for the head will save you a lot of bullets. They tend to be accurate, even at long ranges, so try not to expose yourself too much. On Hard difficulty settings Heavy Swats will carry Shields.
The final type of regular enemies you will meet feels like military special forces, so we might call them that. Spec Ops are heavily armored, carry very, very deadly guns and tend to have even more health than other regulars. One of their most annoying features is an impenetrable chest plate. Any shots fired at the chest will recoil, causing absolutely no damage (even the bulldozer is not that heavily plated). You have to aim at their other limbs, groin and head. Firing at them from the side or behind at their torso will work, it’s only their front that is armored. An M308 is capable of killing these enemies with single head shots. Other guns will need more bullets to achieve the same. You can tell these cops apart by their camouflage, which is light brown instead of dark blue. On Very Hard and Overkill settings Spec Ops will be the ones carrying shields, making it even harder to take them out.
There are a few different Special Enemies, though not all of them have been released yet. The Bulldozer is the most familiar one. He wears a big and heavy bomb suit, and has a double layered face shield. His only real weakness is the face, but getting to it will take an awful lot of bullets, still less than trying to shoot him in the chest. The bulldozer can down a player in just two shots. The first shot will usually take out any armor, while the second one will deplete any and all health. The bulldozer does have to be close to achieve that though, so keep your distance, or if there is nowhere to run tell your teammates to fire together to quickly kill it.
The Tazer is a far more common foe. He wears dark blue armor, much like the Swat, and has a rifle and tazer. The tazer is capable of paralyzing one crew member at a time, but you can still fire when tazed. This means you could take out the tazer, while being tazed, thus freeing yourself. If you are tazed for too long you will be downed but a fellow crew member can revive you.Tazers spawn in pairs, so it’s usually a bad idea to go hunting for them alone. Another thing to remember is that they need to be mildly close to taze you. On the positive side, they are on the level of Heavy Swat, which means killing them is not that difficult.
The Shield comes in two forms. The Heavy Swat and Spec Ops forms. Their equipment is similar but the Spec Ops Shield will have a bit more health. Shields are impenetrable from the front, and in turn they will fire their SMG at you. Up close they can be easily outflanked. At longer distances it might be difficult to hit a Shield’s exposed limb. They tend to be deployed in groups so if you see one Shield expect a few more close by.
The Cloaker has come back, and he is DEADLY. Cloakers normally appears at Threat 2 and 3 Missions. You can tell there is Cloaker somewhere nearby through the strange electric signal they produce. It is difficult to describe other than “Electronic High-Pitched Static”. When a Cloaker sees you and he prepares to charge you will hear a building up of the Static (as if he was charging his attack). He will then quickly run toward his target and knock him out. Cloakers are not the toughest, but they are very dexterous and quick. You could have a hard time hitting them, especially when they start rolling around. What makes them even more annoying is that they can enter the map through special insertion points, such as vents. While you and your team might be holed up in a room a Cloaker could jump down right between all of you, giving you precious second to react.
It should be noted than unlike in Payday 1 in Payday 2 once a Cloaker knocks down somebody they will start looking for a new target. Take out the Cloaker first before you help a friend or you could be the next downed criminal.
While stronger cops will have better guns the one weapon that you should never underestimate is the shotgun. An ordinary police man with a shotgun might just be able to take out your entire armor with a single shot, much like the bulldozer. To do so they have to be very close, so try to fire at them from a safe distance, instead of trying to take them down up close.
Stealth heists are more difficult than your regular heists, if you want to keep them stealthy. There are a number of mechanics you have to be made aware of to perform well in these heists.
Detection is, in other words, how quickly will cameras, security guards and civilians detect you, but this also applies to damage done by you.
Before you put on your mask only security guards or cameras will be able to detect you. The heavier and bulkier your gear the sooner you will be detected, if within line of sight. Armour is easy to gauge on the visibility spectrum. The heavier the suit of armor the higher your visibility. Weapons can me modified to reduce their visibility, but some upgrades will increase it. Some weapons by default have a high visibility and you will need mods to reduce it. Once your mask is on how quickly civilians react to you or spot you also changes. This might be troublesome when trying to control an entire street, since a civilian might spot you while you are not aware of it, and you will not have enough time to catch up to him or her.
Any damage you cause, such as blown up safes, damaged windows or destroyed cameras will alert security guards. Sometimes the range of spotting such damage is ridiculous, and you could find yourself being detected by a guard on the other end of the map (this might be an unintentional bug). Most doors or windows can be lockpicked or drilled open. Opening a door with a lockpick will not cause any suspicion. Using C4 will (mainly due to the noise).
Your Drill is also something that can be spotted, so you have to make sure that if somebody enters an area where your drill is visible you have to take care of said person as soon as possible.
Aside from visual detection there is also noise. Noise comes from gunshots, explosions and drills. Surprisingly enough breaking glass will usually not trigger any suspicion. Gunshots, even silenced ones, might be heard by bystanders. You should try to fire single accurate shots, and not whole series of them. Since almost any weapon can have a silencer you can sneak attack pretty much anybody, taking into account that stray bullets smashing into random objects might still scare civilians.
Even when you have silenced weapons a trigger happy guard is capable of alerting the entire area with a single shot. Explosions from C4 are also a big beacon for panic. Drills can lure civilians or guards but a drill hidden away from customers, or with the technician’s silence upgrade can remain undetected for the entire heist. One such example is the Nightclub heist where the drill in the manager’s office will never attract any of the dancers below.
In general, keep noise to a minimum. Running or walking will not alert guards or civilians, but pretty much anything else might.
Any dead body or cuffed civilian will quickly catch the attention of guards and other civilians. You should try to kill troublesome npcs in areas where nobody can find them. If you have a Ghost he could pack the body into a body bag and hide it, in a dumpster for example. Tied down civilians will also cause a reaction, and the worst part is that you cannot move them around once they are tied down. Remember that when you tie somebody in the middle of a busy street.
With the exception of Four Stores, every heist that has a camera system will also have a camera room. The way cameras work is that if a camera sees something suspicious (gun shots, corpses, destroyed property or you) the information will be passed onto the person in the camera room, who will then call the authorities. You can render the whole camera system useless by killing the man operating it. After that the cameras should pose no problem to you. Usually you will have to drill your way into the security room but if you found a keycard you should be capable of getting inside far sooner (and more silently).
Every downed security guard will have a pager call. You will have to quickly answer this pager, otherwise the alarm will be sounded. You answer a pager by walking up to a highlighted guard and holding down F. An important thing to remember is that your ENTIRE crew can only answer two pagers. Trying to answer a third pager will always result in the alarm being sounded. The Mastermind’s Smooth Talker skill allows ONLY HIM to answer two more pagers maximum (it’s between one or two).
This is a clear problem, because most heists will have more than two or three guards. You can try forcing a guard to cuff himself but this will not always work (a mastermind might prove priceless here as well). You can either try to evade all the guards (not always possible) or try to force them to cuff themselves (very difficult).
In this day and age it is unfortunate that absolutely everybody will have a mobile phone. If a civilian talking over the phone spots you (or anything similar) he will automatically call for help. You can use an ECM jammer to briefly stop any outgoing calls, thus giving you the time to quickly subdue anybody with a phone.
The other big problem are alarms. These are, thus far, present only on Bank Heist, and the male among the two cashiers tends to always jump for the alarm, even when you are screaming at him at the top of your voice. It might be better to kill both of them, since then only the security guards will be able to activate the alarm through their pagers.
During a Heist a number of events could happen, or you can organize your crew to quickly perform objectives, or to organize an effective way of moving loot around. Below are a few tips and tactics you could use in your own games.
The Loot Centipede – Some loot items are heavy, or there might be a lot of them. Moving there and back with single bags might take too long and might even be too dangerous. What do you do? The simplest answer is to form a line between the loot and the van/wherever you wish to transport it, and pass the bags from one person to the next. In some cases you could have more people passing the loot to a single person who will then load it onto a van. This is a possible case with Watchdogs when you have to throw coke into the truck, next to the crane. Instead of making the whole team move to higher ground three team members could throw their bags up to the fourth, who will then throw them down to the truck. The three crew members below will clear the local area so that the fourth can then join them. This calls for a bit of practice and some loot bags might be too heavy. Gold, Fusion Engines, money and guns are simply too heavy to be thrown around.
ALWAYS communicate – Payday 2 is not a game of individual bravado. You will usually fail by playing alone. Stay in contact with your crew, keep them informed of special cops, the situation on drills/hacking, etc. Plan who will take what equipment, who will carry the loot, what is the general plan. Of course this works better with friends, who will actually listen to you. Still you might have an opportunity to find some decent randomers who will have the need to communicate just like you.
Doors – There are different types of doors. In your safehouse you get to see some of the most common ones. Doors can normally be drilled open, lockpicked, detonated with C4 or sawn open. Some special doors need a keycard. There are a handful of doors that a person might not be familiar with. One such example are the metallic doors on Watchdogs, closer to the crane (not the orange ones, the rusty metal ones). While the game suggests they can be only C4ed or sawn open you can actually shoot the lock with your gun to force it open.
Plan Your Progression – As you gain levels you might begin to wonder just what exactly do you want to specialize in first. You may choose to focus on one class, or take a bit of every class, to have a more versatile layout. Even if you focused on a single class it will take a lot of time and money to gain all the skills you desire. Because of this you will have to sit down and think what to focus on in your coming levels. For example, as an avid fan of the Technician Class I have a decent choice in skills to improve my drill, C4 and turret. C4 is initially used as a mine, and I have to invest 12 levels worth of points (not counting bonus points for every 10 levels) to turn ordinary mines into door breachers (well, not counting all the skill points I have to spend to unlock the necessary Tier to buy said skill). If I choose to do that I will be unable to take all the skills associated with my drill (silence drill being the key dilemma here). If I choose to, in first order, focus on the drill and C4 then I might not have a turret, thus being stuck with just C4 for a very long time. Other classes have similar dilemmas so it boils down to your own choices and preferences. What about being a generalist? Having a few skills in each class? That works as well, but you might have a hard time unlocking some very good skills and perks that might not become available to you if you do not focus on the one class. If you suddenly have a change of heart, or you want to try something different, you can reallocate your skill points, at a cost.
Sooth your nerves – Aside from possible bugs the game has, you might have a hard time finding a group to play with, especially when you lack friends who also bought the game. I was lucky, since the people I play with now are the same (and a few more) that I played with during the Beta. We work like clockwork, we communicate, we work together. You can imagine my frustration when I end up in a random group, and we fail in the simplest heists, on standard. Then you might find a half-decent group, but it turns out the host does not like you and kicks you out before the heist ends. All I can say is, stay calm, take a few deep breaths and try playing a few heists offline, or with at least one friend (if possible). While most heists need four people, there are a few where just two players and two bots are enough to make a difference.
Memorize your Heists – While Heists have certain random variables certain elements might be recurring. For example, it might be useful for two people to bring C4 to Four Stores in order to more quickly crack open safes. However on Watchdogs you might want to swap the C4 for Ammo/Medical Bags or Turrets. ECMs are the one item that can often be exchanged for something else, because it does not have any uses outside of stealthy heists until much later on. Saws and C4 are the two pieces of equipment you will often wish you had, since both can greatly speed up different objectives. The best example I can think of Ukrainian Job, where with the use of C4 you can finish the entire heist in less than a minute (normally it would take a couple of minutes).
Cooking Meth – Cooking Meth in Watchdogs seems easy enough. You listen to Bain’s instructions and add the correct component. In practice Bain might be uncertain of which component to add. If he keeps stuttering you might by mistake add the wrong ingredient, thus causing an explosion/fire. You have to listen to Bain until he says that “Add X to continue the cooking process” or “I am 100% it’s X”. You can take certain risks when Bain underlines you need to add acid, soda or a gas (you clearly have one bottle of acid and soda and hydrogen chloride for gas). While you only need three meth bags the more you produce the bigger your income at the end of the heist. Stealing the Meth back on day 2 is also an option, but it is very risky.
Security Guards vs Gangsters – Despite what you might think only security guards have Pagers. Gangsters do not have them, so on stealth missions against gangsters you do not have to worry about answering pagers (the bodies can still be detected however). However, when it comes to general combat, gangsters can take you out much, much quicker than security guards. Try to kill gangsters as soon as possible.
Don’t Kill the First Responders – First responders are the police officers who arrive in first order. Killing them at the start means: 1) The assault waves comes in sooner, and 2) They will be substituted by much tougher cops. If you want to make life easier on Overkill try to kill only those first responders that enter your defenses. In other words, don’t clear the streets until it is necessary. This also applies to extending assault waves. If you kill off an assault wave too quickly you might have to defend yourself from one or two more while you are still preparing the loot. You can influence when an assault ends, based on how many cops are still around, by not killing them as quickly. While the assault is still in progress but you know it is about to end is a good time to carry any loot to the van.
Hostages – Much like in the first Payday taking hostages is important when your crew members are in custody. Hostages have another important element to them though. The more hostages you have the less reluctant are the cops to send assault waves. You should cuff all the hostages you can. While this will not stop assault waves from happening you might have much more breathing space, when it is needed.
Bulldozers and C4 – Bulldozers are some of the deadliest enemies you will meet, but did you know they could die from a single C4? A bulldozer that trips on your C4 is as good as dead, regardless of whether it was already wounded or brand new. The problem is getting the bulldozer to land on your C4, especially if he arrived with an entire retinue of weaker cops who might trigger the C4 first. It does not hurt to try. You could try planting the C4 right in front of the bulldozer, then try to lure him to move forward.
While there is still more content under way (such as cloakers who have not been added yet) and some of this information is bound to change with upcoming updates this is all the information that I think you might find useful in Payday 2. A lot of your knowledge on weapons will come with time, and through asking other players. I would say, experiment. Do not buy the most expensive weapons available. Certain weapons, such as the Crosskill or Bronco remain as some of the best pistols in the game. Among rifles the situation is more complicated. Juggling between the different carbines, AKs and shotguns will leave a lot of doubt whether your current weapon is the one you will feel confident using.
I will try to write a general weapons guide, to help you decide in your purchases and upgrades. I can already tell you I have a few set faves, as well as a few pleasant surprises.
Destiny: the best weapons and armour to upgrade with Etheric Light and Exotic Shards
Super Mario 3D World Stamp Location Guide
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 – Achievement List
The Darkness 2 Bragg Boss Guide
. Plays, 17th January 2014