Buildcrafting is one of the main draws of any RPG. You agonize over every stat point, every piece of gear, and every equipped skill. Following its massive 2.0 update, choosing the best attributes for your build in Cyberpunk 2077 matters more than ever. We’ve ranked them all here.
The Best Attributes For Your Build in Cyberpunk 2077, Ranked
There are six Attributes in Cyberpunk 2077 if you include the new Relic tree available only to Phantom Liberty owners. While it’s possible to reach Level 20 in three Attributes by the time you achieve Level 60, you won’t have quite enough to max out everything.
You’ll have half a dozen or so points to spend elsewhere, but where you choose to invest depends on what kind of build you want to play. While I won’t go into deep build guides here (though we do have an article on some of the best 2.0 builds), I’ll be ranking the five core attributes based on their overall effectiveness and synergy with the new Relic tree.
1. Reflexes
Primary Foci for Reflexes:Â
- Blades
- Assault Rifles, SMGs
- Mobility
If you fully spec into Reflexes focusing on Blades, you can crack Cyberpunk 2077 like an egg. The Satori Katana — or any of them, really — plus a good Sandevistan or Berserk cyberware trivializes every combat encounter. When you get access to the “Apogee” Sandevistan (even more so if you put every Perk Point you get into Blades, then add in the air-dashing), you become literal Superman with a katana. Or swords for arms if you add in Mantis Blades.
Better yet, you can pair your blade and mobility perks with any SMG you enjoy using. If you own Phantom Liberty, I highly recommend the Erebus. It’s not only capable of frankly absurd damage, but it sends your enemies behind the Blackwall — a digital version of hell they can never escape.
- Put points into the middle tree until you unlock air dashing, then go all in on Blades. Any points you have left over can make ARs and SMGs more viable.
- The other two capstone perks in Reflexes aren’t as immediately valuable as Tailwind (the one for dashes). Between the two, the one for Blades, called Slaughterhouse, is a ramping damage boost thanks to the Bleeding DoT it causes. That said, your enemies will likely die before this perk becomes necessary.
- Investing in the AR and SMG tree is good if you want to make a gun build, though I find that Cool is just a better overall option because of the massive Critical Damage modifiers it provides.
- Reflexes doesn’t synergize amazingly with the Relic tree, but the one perk from the new system that is a nice-to-have is called Spatial Mapping.
2. Cool
Cool Primary Foci:Â
- Stealth
- Precision Damage
- Throwing Knives
Personally, I think Cool is the most satisfying attribute in Cyberpunk 2077. All three of its trees are incredibly useful, whether for story progression or for dealing raw damage. The left tree is all about precision damage, and having a good Tier 5 Pistol with a maxed-out Crit damage build makes almost every fight trivial if you can hit your headshots.
You can hit well over 2,000 damage if you’re undetected when you add in the middle, stealth-based tree to the already high Crit damage from the precision tree.
Then there are throwing knives, which have their own critical damage multipliers and other benefits. If you’re using Satori and Nehan and playing to those weapons’ strengths, it’s hard to die. Even if you’re not using that pairing, any thrown knife can kill.
The combination of Cool and Reflexes alongside a Sandevistan is probably the strongest build in Cyberpunk 2077. You can not only one-shot almost any enemy in the game, but you can do so with multiple weapons and weapon types, use a full half of the game’s arsenal, and turn even MaxTac into mincemeat.
Cool also has great synergy with the Relic tree. The entire bottom section provides benefits Cool can really use. From the Vulnerability debuff you can give opponents to guaranteeing critical hits and the massive bonuses to Stealth, there’s not much Cool doesn’t gain from adding Relic perks.
3. Technical Ability
Technical Primary Foci:Â
- Cyberware
- Healint and Grenades
- Tech Weapons
Technical Ability was once in a weird place, focusing on crafting and engineering. That’s all changed after 2.0. Now, this attribute is all but essential if you plan to equip any amount of cyberware. Not only does Technical Ability help lift the new limit on how many implants you can equip, but it also makes you more powerful the more you upgrade.
- The left tree is good for almost any setup, as it makes both grenades and health items recharge faster, be more effective, and gives you more of them.
- The Tech Weapon tree is interesting, as its primary gimmick is the Bolt rounds mechanic, which gives your Tech weapon bullets the ability to over-penetrate targets and go through light cover. The capstone makes Bolt rounds chain between enemies and apply Electrical damage.
- The real winner for the Technical attribute, however, is the cyberware middle tree. Not only does it make the implants you equip more effective, but it unlocks more slots to use. It also makes what you use more powerful, and the capstone, Edgerunner, grants the cyberpsycho state. Not surprisingly, being a cyberpsycho makes you a demigod on top of an already powerful build, though you will lose health over time, so you’ll need to be careful about using it too much.
There isn’t any synergy between Techniucal Ability and the Relic tree, but there doesn’t need to be.
4. Intelligence
Intelligence Primary Foci:Â
- Quickhacking
- Smart Weapons
Putting any number of points in Intelligence is a good idea, as the attribute primarily governs your netrunning abilities and empowers your hacking to absurd levels if you invest heavily. None of the Intelligence perks are nearly as flashy or as immediately satisfying as turning someone into mist with a shotgun or slashing at the speed of sound with a sword, but they’re safer and just as effective.
Related: Best Shotguns in Cyberpunk 2077
One of the biggest improvements Intellgience perks received in 2.0 was the quickhack queue. Now, you can stack multiple quickhack effects on a single enemy. Even better, the left-hand intelligence tree rewards you for doing so. If you spend enough Attribute Points in the middle tree as well, not only will your hacking be incredibly deadly, but you’ll be able to use them over and over in quick succession.
The Smart weapon tree isn’t as useful as the hacking ones, as it doesn’t provide nearly as many worthwhile benefits, and Smart weapons have always been more of a curiosity than anything else. That said, if you put the points in, you can do some wild stuff.
5. Body
Body Primary Foci:Â
- Shotguns
- Survivability
- Blunt Weapons
If you put points into Body, your plan is to body your enemies — squash them underfoot and smash their skulls with every blunt instrument you can find. You’ll always be in your enemy’s face, dealing as much close-range damage as you can eke out of your kit. And you don’t need any fancy cyberware to get you there.
- Like Reflexes, the middle tree in Body is the most useful in a more general-purpose build. The Adrenaline Rush ability can synergize nicely with other combat states to make you effectively unkillable.
- Investing in the left tree that’s all about Shotguns, LMGs, and HMGs makes you a walking, talking battle tank. Its capstone, appropriately called Rip and Tear, turns both your melee and Shotgun shots into miniature cannons.
- The Blunt weapon tree is the silliest out of the three, as it does for wrenches, hammers, and other such weapons what Reflexes does for blades.
- The Quake ability is probably the most satisfying out of everything in Body because who doesn’t love bringing down the hammer of God onto your enemies?
My biggest problem with investing in Body is that it benefits most from having already put points into other attributes first. Having dashes from Reflexes and cyberware improvements from Technical are almost necessities until you’re deep into the Body trees. The other attributes all function incredibly well and are only enhanced by adding additional points. Body needs a bit more help.
Unranked: The Relic Tree
The Relic Attribute tree is hit or miss. It’s only available to owners of the Phantom Liberty expansion, and even they don’t get massive bonuses to every build. As I mentioned in the Cool entry, that attribute is the only one that really gets any love from the Relic. The entire bottom section of the tree focuses on things Cool already does well.
- The bottom left section makes stealth a far more powerful option, with Emergency Cloaking giving you immediate disengage when you use Optical Camo. The second stealth perk, Sensory Protocol, gives you more disengage, letting you get out of being detected for free one time.
- Both of the bottom right perks, Vulnerability Analytics and Machine Learning, either add or improve your ability to perceive weak points on enemies. Shooting a Vulnerability applies a massive damage buff.
- The entire top part of the Relic tree has one perk for every arm-equipped cyberware, and while these abilities are powerful, none synergize with more than that one specific type of gear. Should you want to stay invested with all of the new systems in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, we did cover how to get all the Relic upgrade points here.
Those are the best attributes for your build in Cyberpunk 2077. While there are top-tier builds like Sandevistan-katana and Sandevistan anything, there are now so many amazing ways to play. For more content on the game, check out our guides on all the radio stations, how to get Gorilla Arms, and more in our Cyberpunk 2077 guides hub.
