Payday 3 Is Now Incredibly Easy
I think it's telling that the only time I've really found payday 3 difficult was during the behind closed doors press beta back in June of last year obviously it was one of the first times i' played the game and without any real knowledge of the weapons skills or Heist I had this lightning and aortal experience whil playing with Marin a top hat that I've been chasing ever since it might have just been the novelty of it all but it led to me and many others at the event proclaiming that payday 3 would have that trademark, difficulty the franchise has been known for once more just look at the damn Overkill description, cut forward to Early Access launch we'd conquered Overkill the hardest difficulty within 12 hours of the game going live a couple of weeks on and we were using that hardest difficulty as a farming ground for racking up kills to work through those obnoxious weapon challenges.
And months on, it's the only difficulty I ever play because everything else is simply too easy, and now, as of update five, even though that's a joke. A few key changes have made our heisers virtually indestructible and our arsenal of weapons, extremely over powered payday 3 might now be in the most trivial state of difficulty the franchise has ever seen with only launch grinder and maybe leech even coming close in terms of their meta warping power as I mentioned in my update article the power fantasy is now kind of there I mean you have to play the game in a fairly janky and unintended way to achieve it so it's obviously not intentional, but you will feel almost unassailable, whilst doing so which has its charms but it's definitely not sustainable for the health of the game with mods already out there to revert some of the more mindboggling, changes.
Not to mention, they gave us seven more skill points to make any aspirational build possible. Today's article is going to run you through exactly what's broken about Heist builds and how you can abuse these skill changes in addition to their absolute limits to create the best build in the game and embarrass whoever's in charge of trying to balance things.
There's no way in hell half of these additions should have made it through testing. In my eyes, there are three core skills that have received changes, or buffs, that are really upsetting the entire balance of the game, alongside the obvious elephant in the room of adrenaline, which is just such a low-risk play.
Now, I see no reason to deviate from it first up most universally. Clean Slate allows you to replenish your first armor plate with armor repair kits, giving you a theoretically endless supply of armor bearing in mind dozers, and eventually techies will drop these kits upon death. We can also easily trade cves for multiple copies of these kits throughout the heist, and with the most recent manipulator, Buffs, this supply of armor might as well be endless.
Clean Slate is a massive build enabler sitting in the tank mastery slot, meaning all play styles have free access to it. Buffing one or two play armor types makes those heavier options virtually redundant, as it's simply easier to keep topping up your standard lining over and over again with kits off the floor than it is to gole your way through armor bag deployables.
There's no drawback to this skill, so it's pretty much excellent in all situations. In my opinion, it's stronger than the old version of Armor Up that allowed you to get two plates for the price of one at launch, which was ironically nerfed. Alongside the adrenaline mechanics and fortitude, the new skill line and health Focus play style, which leans into running one-plate armor anyway, you'll never find yourself starving for resources, and with the game deriving virtually all of its difficulty from that scaling attrition concept, with limitless health and armor, you're never really going to feel challenged.
I do think adrenaline is its own can of worms, as a single Nerf could make it pretty much an unusable gimmick with everyone flooding bats with pure armor and a heartbeat. But my bit of armchair balancing for what it's worth would be to either focus on it as a more pervasive skill such that adrenaline sticks with you more permanently but doesn't absorb 100% of incoming damage first, or make it more fleeting so that adrenaline spikes are more powerful but much shorter-lived.
Think something along the lines of the Kingpin injector from Payday 2. The problem now is that it's been of The Best of Both Worlds eating up all damage for quite a long time, which means there's no real skill expression in how it's utilized. Anyway, balance is not the main topic of this article. I want to focus on imbalance and how we can really take the piss with it, so moving on to more aggressive, overpowered skills The second one that received key changes was the cutting shot.
As usual, the details of this change were hidden behind closed doors, so we were left to crunch the numbers ourselves, but basically all we were told is that the cutting shot weapon penetration multiplier was being changed to assist lower base pen weapons. That sounded fine on paper, as we know that in the past, the higher the weapon penetration stat, the better it performed, unless it's specifically a shotgun.
But it turns out that was actually for a reason, as now three more weapons hit that all-important one-shot kill threshold and have benefited massively from this change. The Ku59, K-4, and SP Model 11 all now do so and have shot up their respective tier lists. As a result, I mean, the AK was never a slouch, but now it's up there as one of the top three weapons in the game.
It's absolutely mind-blowing to me how these weapons, which generally didn't need buffs, have ended up so much stronger after the update, but quietly. I believe it is even more so than the other two skill changes. Even though its application is niche, the Precision Shot Buffer is insane. Now it simply needs Edge to be active to gain its massive damage multiplier, which is proportional to the zoom of your scope, as well as penetrating a second target in addition to that extra damage.
The huge caveat here is that it only works on five and six-time magnifying scopes, which can only be equipped by marksman rifles such as the r900 S and SAA1, 144. But what it does to the SA is simply mind-boggling. With just the five-time zoom-floured Marksman scope equipped, you will deal enough damage to one shot every standard unit in the game in the body and to five shots a dozer through the face plate.
It's genuinely ridiculous how strong this thing is now, turning payday 3 into a shooting gallery and reaching a point on Golden Shark when in a team where there just weren't enough cops to go around as we turned Overkill into a snoozefest of difficulty. Again, it's limited, and only a couple of weapons are impacted by the change, but what's done to the already overpowered SA is downright nasty and has to be seen to be believed.
