I got me some sparklepants. It's obviously all serious with party pants like these, whether on-the-go or for more formal meetings.
I need to get mods so I can actually fix the face, but that's not even really a part I see on the bike. I could use the ability to change the paint jobs on owned vehicles. What I really wanna do is get cheats so I can put my epic armadillos on lower level clothing. It would be *just* enough to be able to put what I really want on my character. I don't understand that limitation. It just makes much of the clothing you encounter unusable, whereas if you could put good armor boosting mods on with skill in crafting, that seems like it would be a fair tradeoff. That opens up what you buy and use of what you find, without giving it all away.
This one isn't even that dependent on armor from clothing - that little bit from a mod or two really would do on the weaker stuff. There are pretty nice percentage boosts from engineering skill trees and perks. The athletics tree in body holds stuff that can boost core survivability beyond the need for lots of armor. You need a certain buffer, past which point it's like over-sizing your liquid cooling res. You get so much in recovery, through perks, skill level buffs, and cyberware that even your base HP doesn't matter too much. You can use a movement-based combat strategy, quickly dispatching the most immediate threats - or you can try staying in place while using the cover to keep topping off HP. It starts really quickly and gains really quickly when you advance far enough with what's available to boost it. Between auto and semi-auto pistols, shotguns, and both power and tech snipers, the survivability-oriented perks basically leave me tasked with holding up this shield of pseudo-invincibility. It's a bit like the shield mechanic in say, a core Halo game. You can take offensive risks and bounce back.
The biggest danger to you is getting so pinned that you have several enemies hitting you at once, overcoming your recovery ability and quickly draining you down. That and big powerful attacks. That's where movement comes back in. If you can avoid by utilizing the fast movement of high reflexes plus double jumps, you can consistently take the bigger hits and stay in combat just fine. There is also a recovery cyberware made avaialable with lots in body - it's legendary, giving like 60% health at 0HP. Also low health damage-dealers that can say... keep the heat of a boss off of you while you go recover from getting your shit rocked. You could get a fat blood pump... the good ones give-back over 50% HP, the full amount, the instant you press the grenade/equip button. This is where you do need just enough armor. You need to be able to withstand a couple of major hits and from there you are starfish. So points in tech for the attribute's natural armor rating boost, legendary subdermal armor (increases said percentage boost,) perks that give action-based buffs to armor. I can probably slide into 7 or 8 cool and still pretty much max body, tech, and reflexes. I think I only really need 18 tech. Could get some cold blooded, you know?
There is a magic point where you start to out-range enemies just enough that they can't ever kill you, even though they keep hitting you, because of your mitigation and recovery abilities. Aggressiveness is really the way to go though. Especially with shotguns, which can be perked to boost movement speed with each shotgun kill, and then gain damage based on how fast you are moving when you shoot. No HP worries here. Keep moving, recovery doesn't slow when hit or while running. There are perks that enable reloading while sprinting, jumping, and dodging as well. So you literally run at enemies with the shotgun and hip blast them for huge damage. Blitz offense yields near-impenetrable evasion with the right stuf. Another one boosts damage to knocked-down enemies for a one-two follow-up with little damage loss from stopping. Flat damage boost to torsos for shotguns. Up the insta-kill chance by adding 20% to dismemberment chance with the 2-point perk in annihilation. I have 16 points in reflexes at this point for speed, too. So shotgun damage gets a lot of help in the hands of this quick, but golem-skinned character. Lizard-brain sandevistan-user.
It's time to re-build a bunch of iconics, just got tech up to 18 so I can make them legendary now. It's been worth it for those. Also, ricochet is super-deadly with the dying night, a good ricochet attachment, and the ricochet damage boost perk in the engineer tree. It feels like such a silly mechanic. You shoot at the ground in front of enemies and they get knocked on their asses by bullet uppercuts. You can mob clusters of enemies if you have the right amount of separation for the spread of enemies. The way to find that is to move back as you shoot. The rounds will fan across them semi-randomly as you strafe and shoot at the ground. It is actually extremely practical and effective. You handle things quick in more open settings, where it can really cause some chaos with automatic fire boosted by the right mods. You can get some good range - there are perks in handguns that cancel range damage loss and I think even add past a certain point. The accuracy needed to place the rounds where they will ricochet into distant enemies is significantly less than what you need to score good hits with sustained auto fire directly at them, and will probably hit for more damage anyway. It's actually the superior way to use the thing
You can also get enemies behind cover if there's an adjacent wall to bounce from. With a perk in engineering you can see the path and your target will turn green when the path lines up. There's nothing to lining it up, really. There's a pretty forgiving radius with an apparent 'lean' into adjacent targets that I admit is quite fun. The max lean angle can be increased by using the better muzzle attachments.
I have more tech stuff for heavy cover-based situations. The lizzie can be really good for the closer range indoor stuff with lots of corners and ducking spots. Once you learn to line up the charged bursts right, paint up to the head, one does it. The charge perks can add to the bursts and increase penetration - basically allowing you to run with charged volleys while disregading cover/obstacles you move across. I have the kiroshi eye mod that lets you see enemies who are engaging you with a red outline through cover to aid this tactic immensely. A while back I also found a fairly powerful legendary Nekomata tech sniper with 4 mod slots, which is great for perching up and picking down. Hold-charge perk for free acquisition too. I also got another iconic grad, the O'Five. It sacrifices a round in the mag for explosive rounds with additional direct damage and AOE. Very fun to use. You get it from the Beat the Brat quest. No perks in melee to accomplish that, just epic gorilla arms and a good Qiant sandevistan. Lots in body, a mix of cyberware from that, which heals me past a certain damage threshold, and dishes 40% damage to the enemy past a similar threshold. Huge edge up. Putting me near death will devastate tough enemies the most, and if I should die, I revive once per 2 minutes. It borders on a silly amount of fortitude. But man, I can always pull back for 5-10 seconds and recover a large portion of HP. Nothing slows it down.
I've learned that with this game - taking full advantage of cyberware to balance out. It can be versatile. I skip some HP boosting perks for weapon and crafting stuff, while also eschewing available HP boosting cyberware for a mix of carry capacity and weapon recoil reduction cyberware. I can get by without it due to a mix of other perks and cyberware. If you're speccing attributes appropriately, cyberware available can make up for weaknesses elsewhere that you may situationally swap to gain advantages. Like, I could put a good cyberdeck in and acquire some hacks if there is some mission where I need to disable things and be stealthy. Ping is almost vital for deep stealth. The Voodoo Boys quest in the mall comes to mind. I have very little in cool/stealth, but I can equip the best optical camo skin to help compensate - use powerful silenced weapons and chuck knives. Hack enemies and objects to gain stealth advantages with a whopping 3 intelligence. I can have those gorilla arms to handle Beat the Brat, and also fight very effectively where no other weapons are available or can be used. It can function as a built-in non-lethal, too.
I've wound up with a character that can handle a wide range of situations well. Doing without hacking outside of certain situations where I equip her with a deck. Between body and tech, you can get into a lot. Tech can let you disable guns and cameras when needed, too. Body-checks get you into so many good spots, too. You also get immunity to spark from tech... and I believe immunity to burn from body.
and zero DLSS or RT, but it still looks great.
