Payday 2 Melee Build

A guide on how to make a melee build in Payday 2.

Weapons

Your primary, secondary, and throwable is your choice. For melee I would use any high damage, high knockdown weapon you have access to, such as the comically large spoon. You should primarily use your melee weapon and use your primary or secondary to deal with higher health enemys or snipers.

Armor

For armor I would recommend the improved combined tactical vest for high armor count. This can help you survive for longer. There really isn't many other choices besides this as you will be taking large amounts of damage.

Skills and Perk Deck

The entire brawler skill sub-tree will be needed for any melee build. Pumping Iron aced will allow you to quickly dispose of any pigs in your way. Berserker and Frenzy will grant high damage output when at low health. They also allow you to tank incredible amounts of damage. You can use any remaining skill points to choose other skills of your preference. For your Perk Deck you should use Sociopath. If you do not own Hotline Miami 2 I would recommend Muscle, Armorer, or Maniac. Any other melee or survival based perk deck could also work in your melee build.

[Robert Banks]

Yeah i agree with most of the other people in this thread. Your ideas SUCK! I genuinely hate you as a person because of your horrible melee build!

[kokomo7.18]

Reccommending muscle with frenzerker is so, so stupid

[ty.r.salisbury]

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[Manhattan Cafe]

Just want to give my on insight of melee in general.

I'ts really hard to make use of melee as a main weapon, let alone not using Overdog from either Sociopath or Infiltrator. Being a horde shooter, it's not really ideal to go from one to another with just melee. Which is also limiting it's damage potential that comes from Bloodthirst Basic. Melee does have the potential to chip a large chunk or outright kill Bulldozer even on DS with the right skills and enough Bloodthirst.

Since it's not really recommended to use melee as a main weapon, this would mean weapons are back into consideration and means any deck can make use of melee. Awhile Brawler is effectively built around melee, Using Berserker and mainly Frenzy can hurt a build severely on specific setups like Health decks or even Dodge decks. Crit from either Low Blow or Unseen Strike awhile not consistent, It's the only other and safer option to boost melee damage for decks that can't make use of Frenzy at all.

[Manhattan Cafe]

Comically large Spoon of gold can't trigger Sociopath's Overdog at all due to being not fast enough. But non Melee decks make use of charged attacks to kill Bulldozers and the Spoon happens to have the lowest charge time of all 70(450) melees. Making it a good sidegrade for non melee decks and Infiltrator at the cost of being slightly slower.

I'm talking in terms of actually making the most of it in general and higher difficulties. It's far from the most optimal setup, but it's fine if you enjoy using it.