Payday 3 News: Adrenaline & Fortitude Skill Line Explained
Intro
This time it's Dev Blog Number 4, something with a lot more substance than last week, so normally, it has resumed because today we are talking about fortitude and adrenaline. Now I covered some of this in yesterday's article talking about the stream notes from Elizabeth and Moo's live stream on Payday's channels.
I did say I'd wait to break it down for you until this article, and lo and behold, we'll get to it in a minute. There is a full breakdown of that perk deck or skill line. I should say sorry, even though they're very similar. As well as some other bits of news, we're going to scroll over it, and I'll offer my thoughts on everything in the blog, so Let's get into it.
What is adrenaline?
So let's start off with adrenaline, which was previously mentioned as overheal, and that's the name that was used internally that I've mentioned in previous articles, but they've changed the name to better reflect some of the changes they've made to it in the meantime. Adrenaline is temporary health that you get whenever you heal above maximum health with a medic bag or a first aid kit, and your adrenaline is always equal to the maximum you can get to whatever your maximum health is, so if you have 100 Health, which is the standard health, you can also get up to 100 adrenaline on top of it, and with the new fortitude and skill line we'll get to in a minute, you can increase both of those by quite a bit.
Adrenaline is on the topmost layer of your defenses, so if you take damage, you'll first lose adrenaline. And then your armor, and then your health, but it does note that cloakers and gas grenades as well as zapper damage will take adrenaline damage, and then straight to health, they still bypass armor that's not changing, but it does still give you a bit of extra resistance against cloakers.
NES, and zappers, but it does also say that this health decays at a rate of one point per two seconds, so you lose one point of adrenaline. But it does say that if you take damage, the Decay will be paused for six, so there is a bit of a trade-off there if you take damage. As mentioned previously, medic bags and first aid kits will give you adrenaline if you heal with them.
Max Health medic bags give you adrenaline at a one-to-one rate, so gaining 20 health above the maximum will give you 20 adrenaline, whereas first aid kits will give you adrenaline at half the rate, so you gain 10 adrenaline where it would have been 20 health, so it's worth bearing in mind that there's some gift here of the drops now being fixed; they don't mention it in this blog, but you can see now that when you trade a hostage, you get several. Drops stacked on top of each other if you have any skills that increase the number of drops you get per hostage trade, the same thing for health as for armor, and you can also see the health being gained here and that increasing your adrenaline bar Adrenaline is green, base health is still white, and adaptive armor is purple, so in this gift, adaptive armor has been equipped.
The fortitude skill line
But here's the fortitude perk deck. With the introduction of this new mechanic, we also have the new fortitude skill line. I just called it a perk deck again, whatever, so let's take a look at the current skills. First off, at base, your maximum health is increased by 50, and whenever you heal two or above maximum health, you gain or refresh grit.
So it's important to note that every time your health increases, bear in mind that you also increase your adrenaline, which means overall you'd have 300 combined health and adrenaline. If you had max adrenaline, which is triple the base health, that's pretty interesting. Just at the base level of this perk deck, how many times am I going to call it a perk deck?
I'm going to keep catching myself up on it. I'm going to leave it in the article because I think it's purely funny that I keep getting them confused, but whatever, acing it, your maximum number of downs is increased by one, and your bleedout time is increased by 50%, so that's a recycled skill from Payday 2; you might recognize it.
Stockpile, Mastery If you have a deployable bag in your loadout, it has two additional charges. So these two charges are added before deep pockets, so deep pockets would give you up to six charges per bag. Basically, this will be applied. The most you can get per bag now is eight charges. That's how it will work, so another really good skill to have, but that's your mastery at the tail end, so here are the five skills in the middle of the line: first off Health is safe, and whenever a cute crewmate heals using your medic bag, you heal for 40% of the amount they healed, and if this heals you above full health, the excess amount will be added as adrenaline.
Next up, we have unyielding, which increases your maximum health by 15 for each down you currently have. This further plays into the idea that Mo was talking about yesterday. Where this tries to shift the armor matter, they want to put more focus on health-based builds, and so if you have weaker armor, you'll have more health as a result if you go for this fortitude style build, which I really like because it gives you a bit more options to your play style, something this game is solely lacking at the moment, but following on from that, we have super physiological.
Whenever you have adrenaline, you gain 10% additional adrenaline for each down you currently have. The wording of that isn't perfect, but I'm guessing that means that when you gain adrenaline, you're getting 10% more than what you would have originally, based on having one down, 20% for two downs, and so on and so forth, and again, you have more downs.
If you have less armor, again, it's playing into this less armor, more health style. I really like it. You can obviously make it work with full armor and full overheal, and I'd be interested in trying to figure out what ends up being the better play style. If you do get better defense overall for full armor and still the overheal, it'll be interesting to test that out and see properly how that all ends up working out, but next up, walking tall, your Jal IND degrades 25% slower for each down you currently have.
If you have any amount of adrenaline, you can use first aid kits to pause the degradation. For 10 seconds, that's a really powerful skill as well, especially if you have a lot of first aid kits handing you from trading hostages. You can effectively stop your degradation for quite a long period of time if you play your cards right and play carefully, but finally, we have pain, a symbol.
