throwing knives or pistol for stealth netrunner

[Buurt]

I wanted to do a stealth hacker and first I tried Pistol + Knives + netrunner but there are not enough perks in the game to make that work, you are either short on pistol or short on knives or short on netrunner.

So I wanted to do something else like pure pistol + Netrunner or pure Knives + Netrunner.
I can think of that the knive stuff gets boring because you only have like 3 knives while you can choose between 30+ iconic pistols or something.

If someone of you has a build like that would you say pistol or knives ? or still try to do both somehow

[Bogmore]

A Silenced handgun with a high single shot damage, then spec into pistol stealth damage modifiers.

[Tokenn]

IMO a silenced pistol is a necessity in the game. But even without a lot of perks, you can accomplish plenty with throwing knives. High Tier punknives are very powerful, esp. after being modded.

[ShelLuser]

I'd say it depends on your level and how many perks you can apply to your gun.

In my current build I heavily rely on a tech pistol which doesn't have a silencer because it's iconic, but thanks to my perks it's not too much of an issue because I can literally disengage combat by using my optical camo.

But in the beginning, for example during Konpeki plaza, I didn't have any of that yet so there I heavily relied on my knives + the stealth bonusses.

[Bishop-Six]

Knives are OP, absolutely savage.

[Battosai]

some of the iconic knives are very good, the game also gives you an iconic knife during the konpeki plaza mission (before you only got the satori sword in the AV, but now you can also get the nehan from Saburo's body), another bonus is that you can pretty much never have to pick up ammo and basically salvage all weapons you get. imo knives do not require the mods as much as with pistols. There is the zero G mod which can be nice, but with all of the stealth perks, it realistically isn't necessary to be hitting headshots with throwing knives from really far away, and even if you had to the drop on the knife itself isn't too bad and is fairly consistent. The main way this comes up is to destroy cameras, but if you aren't going sandevistan then you can just quickhack them anyways.

On the flipside knives have more of a risk reward playstyle until you can spec into juggler, which is at the 15 tier i think so unless you are reliably hitting headshots and running around to grab the knives again, its going to be difficult to clear larger rooms esp in comparison to pistol. That being said with cyberdeck you can do a significant amount of work with quickhacks depending on your RAM and things like that so it isn't a huge deal one way or the other imo, just depends on which you like more.

Some of the iconic knives are quite good, headhunter, bluefang, and agaou are the ones i like, and PL has a new knife from Hansen called Fang.

[Sassanid]

I focused my main builds on a stealth karenzikov knife build with strong silenced pistol and sniper as backup weapons but usually everything gets done with just the knife.

But If I want to go netrunner hacker build I just have to remove any perks and attributes that went into focus, air karenzikof, etc, and redistribute it into hacking perks.

There's a mod on nexus mods called infinite attribute resets that lets you just remove and add perks however many times you want, which lets us play around with our builds once we've finished the game, instead of having to start a whole new play through again just to experiment.

I'm doing a new playthrough anyway, but it's a good mod to have just to I can try new things with those completed save games.

[NorthernDavid]

Personally I go with the silent smart SMG from PL. The things you need most for stealth netrunning are a purple (I think) tier memory wipe, and patience. Also hacking vending machines and getting the enemies to walk over alone and then using stealth takedowns on them works. (No perks, specific quickhacks and not much ram needed for this.)

[valium]

I think knives are better than pistols for sneak builds. In the situations where stealth is no longer active, pistol's damage drop off significantly, while knives can still one-shot with headshots. You also have Agaou for big aoe damage in brawls.

Base Knife is better than the iconic throwing knives, because it gets a 200% headshot multiplier to the rest's 150%, which is a huge difference in damage. Unnecessary though, the iconics are more than good enough. Being able to put a Zero-G mod on your knife is a massive quality of life thing, so I still greatly recommend it.

[WALLZ]

Hope yall playing with crosshair off, makes it more challenging for throwing knives and really rewarding getting back to back headshots while hipfiring with pistol like johnnys malorian

[Bjørn]

I've been using netrunner stealth builds and thrown weapons since the start (for 2 half playthroughs now), and I love it. But since I don't know other builds I might not be the best to give advice

But as a tip, there is an nice iconic throwing axe on top of the roof of the pyramid building (the nightclub?) in Dogtown.