new skill tree blows

[GSD Yahl]

so my playstyle and build is next to useless in new skill tree.

i use smart weapons, never use gorilla arms or the like, never melee, hardly have to use health stims, i heavily crafted, never quick hack and basically none of these skill tree perks help but one. Do the pistols and smg trees stack, if so they are still basically useless to smart weapons. IDK but these skill trees totally tank my build and playstyle.

[Oswald]

What did i miss? Did they nerf the builds with the new Tree?

[GSD Yahl]

yesterday they put up link for the webbased skill tree so you can see what your new build can be

[GSD Yahl]

Originally posted by Pyromancer Oswald:

What did i miss? Did they nerf the builds with the new Tree?

may not nerf your build, idk to me it depends on your playstyle, its great if you are melee, or netrunner, or use weapons other than smart weapons, and use grenades as well

[Oswald]

Originally posted by GSD Yahl:

Originally posted by Pyromancer Oswald:

What did i miss? Did they nerf the builds with the new Tree?

may not nerf your build, idk to me it depends on your playstyle, its great if you are melee, or netrunner, or use weapons other than smart weapons, and use grenades as well

I took a look, it looks strange to say the least. Well i do like melee, but i'm not sure i like the new tree xD

[Detective Costeau]

Yeah, the new tree looks like a solid improvement overall, but it does look like smartguns are kind of the dedicated netrunner weapon class now.

[GSD Yahl]

Originally posted by Detective Costeau:

Yeah, the new tree looks like a solid improvement overall, but it does look like smartguns are kind of the dedicated netrunner weapon class now.

ya like i said it depends on playstyle so can be really great change and not so much for others, idk maybe im a small few, i just ran through game tanking dmg and lettin my smartguns do their work, whether that was sniping or run and gun

[Detective Costeau]

Actually, assuming the SMG/assault rifle perks work with smart weapons in those classes (and why wouldn't they?), it does seem like there'd still be pretty decent support for a really mobile smartgun build using cyberware to be tanky. Something like this:
https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/build-planner?a=kkfk6&b=11111000000000000000031110000001&r=011111211121111000003111113110000111&i=00000000000000000000211000000000311&t=000000000211011000000311110000001&c=&e=
Though the Intelligence points are less useful if you're not using quickhacks.

[GSD Yahl]

Originally posted by Frostiken:

In general I like the new perk tree, however, I did notice that it's MUCH more specialized, which I kind of am not a fan of.

---

For example, Cool was always useful no matter what you were doing, because Cold Blood would help any build. Throughout the Cool tree were lots of perks that would affect different things, and you could pick and choose what was useful to you.

Now, Cool is basically only useful for 'cool'guy Street Samurai. The Focus tree is only for pistols and sniper rifles, the Scorpion tree is only for ninjas throwing knives, and the middle tree is for stealth and jumping around being a ninja.

So if you're not playing either of those things this whole tree has nothing to offer.

---

For better or for worse all the trees are like this now. The good news is the stupid crafting perks are gone. The bad news is that we're still probably pretty dependent on Tech, because it has all the cyberware perks... and nearly everyone will want Cyberware, so you're a slave to that attribute just like you were in the 1.0 game.

What I don't like is that Phantom Liberty is giving you all these new attribute points... the level cap in the vanilla game, combined with the 'spread out' perks, really meant you had to make serious decisions on your build. I played around with three different builds here:

https://nukesdragons.com/cyberpunk-2077/character?v=1&a=dfk3k&i=oz2l54f84f54f62l93n43c01i14ok4i24n22c81c42l22s23s52g04g43g54&im=-------------------&n=Corpo

https://nukesdragons.com/cyberpunk-2077/character?v=1&a=ka3ik&i=o04oz2l34l83f34l04s14s34g04g12c14c54c94g32f70f21n41n31i24i04&im=ie4im4il4-i04i22i51-io2rn4ri4-----------------&n=Nomad

https://nukesdragons.com/cyberpunk-2077/character?v=1&a=aifcg&i=oz2l44i24i04f14f24f73l72n04n13l14s24s52g43g54g04c62c51c21o94&im=-------------------&n=Street

Three different playstyles (I didn't fill in perks, but check the cyberware for an idea of what each playstyle is - bruiser, ninja hacker, street sam). I also wanted to try playing with some attributes basically zeroed out... playing the Bruiser with no Intelligence, so I can't hack anything. The Corpo without relying on OP crafted weapons and dumping heavily into Cool.

With 2.0, the way perks are gated behind attribute levels 9/15/20 means that taking 18 attribute points has no value anymore. In the old skill trees, 18 wouldn't get you a couple of the top-end perks, but the Level 18 perks weren't bad depending on the tree. Now, if you take 19 points, you might as well have taken only 15, because there's nothing you can do with those wasted 4. You're forced to invest one more to get anything worthwhile.

With the PL attributes, not only did I kind of have no problem making an attribute map for a playstyle, but I noticed once I filled in everything for a normal 'level 50' it said I still had 10 more attribute points!

Granted we don't know what the costs of cyberware will be (or if they're gated behind attributes at all anymore), but my Bruiser build was:

Body: 20
Refx: 10
Tech: 18
Cool: 20
Intel: 3

Now it's

Body: 20
Refx: 9
Tech: 20
Cool: 9
Intel: 3

And I still have 20 points left to distribute.

The real bottleneck appears to be the number of perk points.

I guess at the end maybe those extra 10 attribute points may unlock Cyberware (if it's still attribute-gated) but it feels weird that every character will end up with nearly the same attribute spread, because you can literally do 20/20/20/18/3 in any combination, and since some of the skill trees are too specialized for any given build, there definitely will be some you can ignore. So every single character is probably going to end with 20 Tech (cyberware useful for everyone), 20 Body (healing, stamina, endurance, useful for everyone), 20 Reflexes (movement, useful for everyone), and then Cool and Intel, which are both only really useful for specific builds (Intel's only useful part for non-deckers is the smart weapon tree, but you don't have to use smart weapons, and Cool has functionally zero value if you don't care to be a cheesedick EZMODE stealth exploiter).

i mean you said it, for you the crafting was useless, for me its how i made amazing weapons. you def seem like youll get more use out of the new tree, i myself am left with like 51 perk points that i dont see being put into anything useful.

the cyberware seems to be more of a thing on this tree so like you said hopefully we will get more use out of it but again requires me to spec into things i dont want to, so guess we will see how it all goes in actual gameplay on launch

[Detective Costeau]

I'm not going to tell anyone how to feel about the perk tree or anything- you're entitled to your own opinion, if you don't like it that's fine- but I do think it's worth noting that you don't spend the vast majority of the game at level 60. Sure, I'll *eventually* be able to have high scores in most attributes, but I am still going to have to make decisions on what I want to invest in when I'm levels 20-40 if I want to get access to higher-level perks before I'm mostly done the game.

[CoffeeBro]

OP, I'm sure you can play the style you like. You may have to go about it using implants and skills, but I can't see CDPR changing play-styles.
An option may be revert back to the standard version and wait for mods, then change back.

[Tokenn]

Gee whiz...it will be just like learning and playing a new game!! Just imagine!!

IMO, the more changes the better.

[5ean5ean]

IMO its a nerf to damage across all endgame optimized builds across the board.... but a buff in terms of gameplay. I already know what build im gunning for (pun intended) hint its revolvers.

Overall I like it eventhough I beleive melee will suck compaired to ranged in the end and that was my favorite playstyle up to this point.

[H3X]

For what it's worth (which this close to the release is absolutely nothing) I think that the loss of more specialised options in favour of pushing gameplay into action chains via perks that require other perks or certain actions to even activate at all, is a loss to the more free style of gameplay that could be had with the (as of now) current system.

For example, shotguns have basically no real perks that aren't tied into melee, screwing tech variants' actual gameplay advantages unless you want to also level tech specifically and take the electrical skills (only damage you can get in those trees) to bump them up a bit. Even those require chaining specific things to even get much out of. Something most of those do not lean into due to needing to charge each shot. I'd rather have Annihilation back.

All gameplay is seemingly being pushed into vaguely simple chains of actions that you will repeat over, and over, and over, ad nauseum. Because there isn't much if any room for anything else.

[H3X]

It's not like we didn't have chained stuff already; Cold Blood is the singular most powerful thing in the current builds. But it triggers on takedown or kill, so stacks naturally in gameplay. No dodge/stealth/ranged-melee alternation/whatever required.

New trees are all about "crouch-run at the first enemy to get X buff, knock them down with a blunt weapon to get Y buff then attack the third with a heavy to get a better armor counter value", kinda ♥♥♥♥. To look into Gorrilla arms and the kinda stuff I've been using on my latest toon in the existing build. VS just punching some stuff until one of us falls down or I need the Sandevistan, as my stats work.

Not convinced this is going to carry over well, at all.

[Lieutenant Dan]

Your playstyle of using just smart guns and ignoring everything else? dunno how they could've overlooked that, crazy