A basic introduction to stealth

In this guide I'll explain some basics concepts about stealth, give you some tips and tricks and some useful mods.

Introduction

Hello there! In this guide I'll (try to) explain some basic concepts about Stealth, including general tips and even some tricks that will make your heisting life a lot easier.

What's Stealth and what makes Stealth go Loud?

Stealth is one of the 2 states a heist can be in, the other one being Loud. The main difference is that in Stealth you don't have to mow down countless teams of SWATS, instead you sneakily complete the objectives while avoiding guards, cameras and civilians.

The main things that makes you fail Stealth are people (civilians and/or guards) or a cam calling. In the case of a civilian or guard calling, you can avoid failing by killing them before they call or by placing an ECM Jammer. On the other hand if a cam sees you or sees a bag, you might as well restart since there's no way of avoiding going Loud (even if you kill the cam operator, it still calls for reinforcements).

The other common way of failing Stealth is related to pagers. Now if you are very new to the game, I would recommend doing the Stealth Tutorial, found on the story line or, alternatively, going to Crime.Net and searching on the upper left part "The Tutorial Heists", but just in case you don't want to do it, I'll explain how the system works.
When you kill a guard, the guard will start glowing with a yellow color, this means a pager is active. You have 11 seconds to answer this pager and if you don't answer it, well the alarm will sound and the heist will go Loud. But that's not all, if you stop pressing F while answering the pager, the alarm will also be raised, so be careful when answering a pager. Also I forgot to say that it takes 10 seconds to answer a pager.

Now you may be wondering "Wow this is going to be so easy, I can just kill all guards and answer the pagers, that way I can move around without worrying about getting spotted", well I have very bad news for you, there's a limit to the amount of pagers you are allowed to answer, this limit being 4, and one of the main things to watch out on stealth is to manage the pagers you have, so pro tip, never kill a guard if you haven't been spotted by him, or if you want to clear that area of the map. If you lost track of how many pagers you have, you can hit "Tab" and on the left side there will be a pager counter and it will say "0/4, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4", with the left number being the amount of pagers you have answered.
There are also guards that don't have pagers (like the bikers on Big Oil or Border Crossing, or the outside guards on Scarface Mansion), meaning that you can kill the guards without worrying about pagers.

Aside from this 2 common fails, there are heist specific things that will make you fail Stealth, this being lasers (like GO Bank, Big Bank, Black Cat, etc), killing/alerting someone (like Garret o Breakin Feds or killing the FBI Boss on Hoxton's Revenge before doing the eye scan), alarm buttons (great examples being Bank Heist or No Mercy), or specific ways that depend on the heist (like hitting the Gong on Ukrainian Prisioner/Mountain Master or failing to deactivate the Countermeasures on Midland Ranch)

Why should I play Stealth instead of Loud?

Well, there are various benefits.

First of all, stealth gives you a stealth bonus, varying from 3% to 25% extra XP for your next heist, meaning if you get a 25% stealth bonus and do a heist that normally gives you 4M XP, you will instead get 5M XP.

Second, the skill floor of stealth is much, MUCH lower than loud on higher difficulties, specially on DS (although the skill ceiling is also lower).

And third, is easier. Playing stealth on, for example, Shacklethorne Auction is a lot easier than playing on Loud (specially when you are playing offline, with or without AI).

Some basic mechanics you should know

Now outside of the ways to fail stealth, I'm going to explain some basic mechanics when it comes to playing.

First, what makes guards/civs/cams get alerted.

Guards and cams get alerted by the same things those being:

-An alerted guard
-An alerted civilian
-A bag (loot or body)
-Broken windows
-A hostage
-A dead body
-A loud noise (unsilenced gun, the sound of breaking a window, sawing etc)
-A broken cam (only below mayhem)
-A drill
-Specific things depending on the heist (like the vault being open on shadow raid)
- And, of course, you

Civilians are a little bit different since they don't get alerted to broken windows (only the sound) or to loot bags (although they still get alerted to body bags).

Now you may wonder what do I mean when I say they only get alerted to broken cams below the Mayhem difficulty, well even if there are 7 difficulties on loud, there are only 2 on stealth, those being from Normal (no skulls) to Overkill (Ovk) (3 skulls) and Mayhem (4 skulls) to Death Sentence (DS) (6 skulls). This is beacouse up to and including Overkill, the stealth mechanichs don't change but when you get past Mayhem, there are a few changes, the most notable one being:

-Titan cams. This cameras can't be destroyed since they are protected (and no, not even the 5/7 pistol/Snipers/AP Slugs shotguns can destroy them) meaning the only way to get rid of the cameras is to kill the camera operator and, if you are playing on a heist without an operator, you can't get rid of them. There may be exceptions like No Mercy.

-More guards and civilians. Of course, the harder the difficulty, the harder it will be to stealth since there will be a lot more civilians and guard roaming the heists. A great example is the start of No Mercy with the civilians. On lower difficulties you can just storm the lobby and tie the civs, meanwhile on DS you gotta run through the entire part of the hospital intimidating all the civs.

Another thingh to have into account is concealment.
Concealment dictates at which range and how quickly you get detected, with the lowest concealment possible being 3 and the highest being 75. This number indicates from which point you'll start to get detected and at which rate, since the detection system works like this.
Something starts detecting you at you concealment rate (if you have 3 they will start at 3, if you have 18, they will start detecting you at 13) and going up to 100. Once they hit 100, they become alerted, meaning you have to take care of whatever detected you.
The objective of a build on Stealth is always haveing low concealment, I would personally recomment a number between 3 to 10, or if you are using a saw, anything under 25 I would say is enough concealment.
Concealment also affects other thinghs like dodge or crit chance, but those are for Loud gameplay so in this guide we won't care about them.

Another neat trick is marking guards and cameras. If you press F while looking at a guard or a camera, you will mark them. For the next ~15 seconds (I don't exactly know the value) you will see a red outline around the guard/cam. This allows you to keep track of a guard, even if it goes outside your sightline.

Skills and Perks

Now this is one of the most important sections of this guide, if not the most important, skills and perk decks.

But before that, if you check on the bottom part of your inventory, you'll see something like "Profile 1", this allows you to have multiple profiles and change between them quickly, that way you can have various builds instead of changing the perk and the skills each time. Same applies with the skills, on the upper left hand corner you can see something like "Switch Skillset". I always like to have my sets match my profile, meaning my Set 1 is for my Profile 1, Set 2 for Profile 2 etc.

Now, what are Skills and Perk Decks?
Skills, or the skill tree is found on the inventory, on the upper right hand corner. When you get to infamy 1 you get a skill points reduction, it,s not very important for stealth since the Shinobi tree you are still going to get pretty much all the skills so the reduction doesn't affect that much, just noting it since it can be useful to know.
There are 5 trees and I will rank them depending on how important I think they are:

Mastermind: Has an important skill, Forced Friendship basic, which is pretty clutch for newer players that don't have enough money to freely kill civilians without a care in the world. This skill gives you more tie cables, increasing your supply from 2 to 6. It also makes you tie hostages faster, which isn't very useful but hey, at least it helps a little bit I guess.
Also depending on the heist, Stockholm Syndrome can be very useful, specially for heists like No Mercy (civilians remain intimidated for longer) or GO Bank (civilians get intimidated by noise you make a.k.a loud shots/saw)

Enforcer: Transporter basic it's very useful, allowing you to do some bag throws that help to make the heist faster, although the aced version is not that useful, if you have points to sink it could maybe help you.
Also on the Ammo Specialist tree can become pretty clutch, with Portable Saw Aced for more Saw damage and another blade, helping you conserve ammo. And this tree comes with ammo bags too! So it can be useful for heists where a Saw is required for deposit boxes or metal doors, like Big Bank or Breakfast in Tijuana.

Technician: Has Jack of all Trades aced on the Engineer tree, allowing you to bring 2 deployables instead of one.
On the Breacher tree you can get Drill skills, with the main one being decreasing the drill timer by 15% up to 30% and trip mines skills, useful if you are not very confident with the patternes of guards on a specific heist. The only mandatory skill I would suggest is Hardware Expert, the other ones I think are Heist Specific.

Ghost: Pretty much the Stealth skill section.
Shinobi, pretty much ace this entire tree ASAP, prioritazing ECM skills (either get all ECM skills or don't get them, since if you use ECMs you want lv 3 ECMs, those being the ones that block pagers) and lockpicking.
Artful dodger only has 2 mandatory skills, Duck and Cover and Parkour basic. Inner pockets depends on what weapons you bring, it may help you reach 3 concealment or have a lower concealment when you bring a saw.
Silent Killer may seem like a Loud only skill tree, but Optical Illusions aced helps with lowering concealment and High Value Target aced is very, VERY underrated, giving you 30 seconds of marked guards + it synergizes very well with Trip Mines.

Fugitive: Berserker aced can be very useful when you bring a Saw and Frenzy can help you reach 100% Yakuza (I'll explain what Yakuza is later)



Perk Decks: Perks can be found under the skills. The default one is Crew Chief and please, PLEASE, take it off ASAP for Stealth. (Also the perks are explained assuming they are 9/9, just read the cards you have unlocked to know which effects you have active on the perk)
If you don't have any DLC, equip Hacker, it's a free deck and one of the best, if not the best for Stealth. The way it works is you have 2 Pocket ECMs (PCM or PECM), with a duration of 6 seconds. It works like a normal Lv.3 ECM with a 90 second recharge time, with 6 seconds taken off for every kill (this part is only important for Loud)
If you have DLC, you have 2 more options, those being Burglar (comes with the Clover Caracter Pack and Yakuza comes with the Jiro Character Pack)

Let's start with Burglar. Burglar gives you faster pager answering and faster lockpicking. The rest of the perk deck only matters for loud, so we can ignore them.

The second one is Yakuza. The main thing with use Yakuza for is the speed boost when you are at low health. The skill frenzy it's very useful since it allows you to get you to 1 HP, meaning you have the maximum amount of "Yakuza" possible. To set the health up without Frenzy, get hit 12 times by a molotov. With Frenzy (basic) get hit 4 times, get out of the fire and wait for your armor to regen, then get hit 2 times more or, if it's easier to remember, 3 hits, get out, another 3 hits.

Now why did I say you should unequip Crew Chief ASAP, well the very first card gives you an 8% damage reduction, double when below 50% health. This messes up with Yakuza players and/or people who use Berserker (or zerk for short) with a saw, since it's a lot harder to get the low health, concluding on a down or less percentage for these players, and as someone who uses Yakuza a lot, it's very annoying.

Weapons, deployables and throwables

This part will vary a lot depending on what DLC you have, but I'll try to give some weapon examples for both with and without DLC. Also, always bring a Shotgun, since it allows you to launch guards and civilians when you shoot them while being very close.

Primaries: I would recommend bringing either a Saw with Silent Motor and Sharp Blades, or akimbo pistols. When I was new I used the akimbo Chimano 88 pistols with a "Size doesn't matter supressor" and a Micro Laser, this is if you don't have DLC.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1834670230655804948/ED0520B0379175DA84BF039CFCBDCFEE472C6F21/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

If you have DLC, I would recommend bringing a high concealment shotgun, I personally use the Raven Shotung (Shotun Pack DLC), modified for lowest concealment and a Compact Laser Module (Gage Courier Package DLC).

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1834670230655805418/DC8C905E7E6E8B9E5844E6AED05C90FA1321D1B9/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

Secondaries: Bring the Judge Shotgun, is pretty much the best weapon for Stealth (you get it by joining the Payday 2 Steam Community Group) modified for concealment, all attachments you need are DLCless, so don't worry if you don't have DLCs.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1834670230655806041/1F42F33815C421EB9D366C31873C855AD5C56DE5/?imw=256&&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

Throwables: If you are using Hacker, bring the Pocket ECMs, since the deck is useless without them.
If you are using Yakuza bring Molotovs to lower your health (without Frenzy 12 hits of damage, with Frenzy 4 hits, get out and wait for your armor to regenerate and get 2 more hits)
If you are using Burglar, bring Ace of Spades or Shurikens (Ninja Gage DLC), it comes down to preference)


Deployables: There are pretty much 3 deployables and one that depends on the heist.
The main deployables are ECM Jammers, Body Bag Cases and Trip Mines, with Ammo Bags only being necessary on specific heists, and it's usually more than enough on those heists if only one person brings them.
ECM Jammers depend on what skills you have, since they are pretty much useless without skills, specially without the ability to place them on doors or blocking Pagers. I would recommend having max skills ECMs (Lv 3 ECMs), since they can get you out of a lot of trouble and allows you to ECM Rush (chain ECMs in an optimized way, allowing you to complete the heist very fast without worrying about being sneaky while mantaining stealth)
Body Bags can help you in heists like Scarface Mansion where there are a lot of Civilians or GO Bank if you are not using the Stockholm Syndrome Loud Saw strategy.
Trip Mines are useful in heists where you don't feel confident on your knowledge of the pathing of guards or heists where you want to save pagers (like Breakin Feds or The Diamond).

Melee: Bring whatever you want, although make sure you can hit low concealment. Common sense is enough to be able to choose the melee, I personally use the Pen melee (it's a secret melee), and before that I used the URSA Tanto Knife.

Tips and Tricks to make your life easier

Now I will show some tip and tricks to help you make Stealth a lot easier:

Don't play on low difficulties: This is more some advice than tip, don't play on lower difficulties. This game has a very strange learning curve, and lower difficulties will put into you some very bad habits. So play from mayhem upwards (although you may as well just play DS since there are not many notable differences between the 2)

Ask before joining: This is pretty much just basic etiquette. If you are going to join a lobby and the host doesn't have "Join Prompt" (you can check it on the "Drop-In" section before joining the lobby" ask "Safe?" and wait for the host to respond (have some common sense and if he doesn't respond in like a minute just join, odds are he didn't saw your message". This is just so you don't join in the middle of a sticky situation and fail the heist (trust me, it happens a lot).

Silent Saw Trick: If you have tried to saw something on Stealth, even with the Silent Motor modification you will notice that the whole map gets alerted. "Why the hell is the saw useful if it alerts the entire map?" You may be asking well, there's a trick to avoid this. If you saw the air before starting sawing, for the next 1.5 seconds, you will not alert the whole map, so there you have it. With this trick you can get a lot more utility out of you saw.

Crouch Jumping: This is a way to mantain the detection while being crouch and at the same time have sprinting speed, you can achieve this with sprinting, jumping and inmidietly crouching mid air, that way you can mantain the momentum of the sprint while being crouch, since on the eyes of the AI, being crouch mid air still counts as being crouched.

Juggling Pagers: You can only do this with more people and it's a trick to be use on a worst case scenario. Picture this in your head, you are playing First World Bank, you waste 2 pagers before reaching the vault (DS btw) and you are playing with 2 other people, you go down to the vault and notice there are 3 guards, now if you do some basic math you'll notice that you don't have enough pagers to deal with them. Normally host would restart if more than 1 pager is used outside the vault, but you are a hardheaded host and don't want to restart. Well you can answer 2 pagers and kill the third guard, now you can't answer the pager since the alarm will be raised, but you need to answer it, otherwise the alarm will be raised. What you can do is start answering the pager and, 2 seconds before you answer it, a second player starts answering, once you notice he is answering, you stop answering and, since the pager it's still being answered, the game will not raise the alarm.
You repeat this process while the 3rd player does the objectives. You'll end up clearing the heist on Loud, meaning you won't get the stealth bonus but at least you will have completed the heist.

Duplicating items: There are some heists where some items are important ie keycards (like in Shadow Raid or Big Bank) and sometimes having more keycards will make your life easier. With this trick you can dupe keycards or other items (like Thermite or the Hard Drive on Transport: Train).
For this to work you have to be with at least another player and you need to take the item AT THE EXACT SAME TIME (to syncronize, use the in-game clock and say something like "We take at "X" (with x being the time)".

Sixth Sense: This is a mechanich intended and not a trick, but I still don't usually see people using it. On the Shinobi tree, there's a skill called Sixth Sense and it allows you to buy some special assets, but you can also use it's actual ability. Get into a corner, don't do anything for 3.5 seconds and you will start seeing a lot of marked people. This ability marks everything around a 10 meter radius, including guards and also civilians, and it remarks them every second after.

"How can he not see the hostage?": This is another trick related to how the game detects people a.k.a players and hostages. The detection is always on the head, thats the reason as to why you can go around a lamp post to avoid a guard and he cannot see you, since the guard cannot see your head. Now you may have noticed whille playing that some parts of a hostage video can go through walls or objects well, if you hide a hostage's head through a wall or inside some object, guards, cams and civs will NOT see the hostage, since the head is hidden out of the sight, since well, it's inside an object and guards don't have X-Ray vision (99.9 % of the time) so another way to hide a hostage.

Useful Mods

Now I will talk about mods. I'm not going to cover how to install mods, since there are countless tutorials showing how to install mods. This are useful mods for both Stealth and Loud.

-BeardLib: This is a crucial mod. It's basically a library that helps some mods function, so there are mods that require this mod to work.

-SuperBLT: Same ass BeardLib, some mods don't work without it.

-Huds: I would recommend bringing a hud, since it can help you by showing remaining loot bags, amount of guards or the most important, showing the ECM Jammer remaining time, allowing you to use them more efficiently. There are various huds and it just comes down to personal taste. I personally use VanillaHud +, but VoidHud or PocoHud are also some great huds out there.

-Chat Translator: If you want to communicate with people from other countries, but don't know their language, you will get a lot of usage out of this mod. I can't count the amount of times I couldn't interact with someone just beacouse I don't know their language, but with this mod you can translate text in chat and send text on other language. Note: The translation are not 100% perfect but hey, at least is something.

-CustomFOV: It allows you to set higher FOV than Vanilla game, so pretty useful if you are used to high FOV.

-CustomOST: Allows you to install custom music. Pretty cool if you want more song variety to choose from.

-Cheater Kicker: Pretty simple, kick cheaters and alerts if someone has a "cheat" mod.

MODS TO AVOID Don't be surprised if you get kicked/banned for using these mods

-Silent Assasin: A classic "cheat" mod. It changes the pager mechanich so that if you kill an unalerted guard, it won't have a pager. This is straight up cheating and makes you become worse at Stealth. Avoid using it and lobbies that have it.

-Carry Stacker Reloaded: Allows you to carry mroe than one bag. Do I need to say why it's cheating or is it obvious?

-GAB Mods: These are literally cheating, like actual no discussion about it cheating

-Pirate Perfection, P3D, etc: Mod menus.

-Berserker Lives Matter (BLM)/Stol3nHack: Allows you to set your health to whatever amount you have, this is another "cheat" mod. Some people say it's not cheating but still don't be surprised if you are kicked for using it.

-Any type of helper (Meth Helper is the main one, but there are a few that affect some stealth heists): A controversial set of moda, since it's technichally cheating but people say it's not. Personal opinion, just avoid them in general since it's not that hard to wait whatever amount of seconds.

The main site to donwload mods from is modworkshop.net, just click "Payday 2" and enjoy realizing half of the mods are weeby things.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading this guide, if you want more tips and tricks or want a guide to Stealthing a specific heist I 100% recommend Marcmb's content (https://www.youtube.com/c/Marcmb). He is in my eyes one of the best Stealth players when it comes to technichal level.

Also this is my first time making a guide so I would love any type of feedback on the comments.

And if you notice any spelling errors or weird sentences, English is not my first language so I would also love any corrections.

Once again, thanks for reading my guide and remember, this game is repetition: Fail, restart, fail, restart, fail... until you succeed, and you will eventually be good (or still be ♥♥♥♥ like me lol), so don't get frustated if it takes you a lot of practice.

Have fun and don't keep those helmets flying since, well, this is Stealth not Loud.