Cyberpunk 2077 is not a linear game. Night City has too many side gigs, choices, and lifestyles to funnel players down a singular path. The game is classified as a first-person shooter, but even that can be altered to become a first-person stabber. If you’re wanting to take a knife or katana and dice your way through underworld mobs and corpo overlords, you’re in the right place.
Look, every single skill in the blades tree is fantastic. Seriously. There are no wrong answers. But, unfortunately, the game is reluctant to give out skill points, so you will likely not be able to select everything you want by the time the credits start rolling. So we must face the fact that some of these answers are right-er than others. If you only get ten skills to dabble in, these should be your top contenders.
Deathbolt
- While wielding a blade, defeating an enemy restores 20% health and increases movement speed by 30% for 5 seconds.
Restoring 20% of your health is absurd. Even on the highest difficulty settings, this essentially ensures that you can walk up to any mob, haphazardly slash them down, and, by the time the last body falls, you’ll still be topped off on health. The movement speed makes this even easier to achieve, allowing you to hack the frontlines down and then chase down the snipers immediately afterward.
Shifting Sands
- Dodging recovers 15%/25%/30% stamina.
- The ability has a 2-second cooldown.
The cooldown is unlisted in the tooltip, but even with the two-second limitation, you’ll essentially never had to worry about stamina again. You can dodge anytime, even if no attack is incoming, and the movement will still satisfy this skill. It’s really helpful for establishing a rhythm in battle. Dodge toward an enemy, slice them down, then dodge again and repeat.
Float Like A Butterfly
- Dodging increases damage with blades by 25%/50% for 5 seconds.
This works in perfect tandem with the last skill, it simply operates offensively instead of defensively. If you’re dodging every couple of seconds as you should, then you’ve essentially increased your damage by 50% without ever having to break your stride. It really sets the blades apart from the guns, since most of those trees settle for 5% incremental damage increases whereas this is a whopping 50%.
Sting Like A Bee
- Increases attack speed with blades by 10%/20%/30%.
Blades are already viciously fast, with most fully upgraded varieties doing five slashes per second. You can bump that up to almost seven per second with this and you definitely should. Each slash has a chance to crit and apply status effects, so squeezing an extra 30% attack speed in will yield a damage result even greater than 30%.
Offensive Defense
- Defensive blade attacks deal 200%/400% more damage.
If you’ve invested your points correctly, you can reliably slice away your problems without ever having to enter a defensive stance for almost all of the game. There are times, though, that you’ll fight a high-threat boss or cyberpsycho and won’t have any minions around to restore health by killing. In these situations, you’ll want to remain in a defensive stance and get your attacks in at the perfect time. This skill makes it so a fifteen-minute boss fight might only take three minutes, so it’s worth the investment.
Roaring Waters
- Strong attacks with blades deal 30%/40%/50% more damage.
There is no shame in using mostly primary attacks from this weapon, but you should always lead with a strong attack if it’s possible. Snipers like to think they have the market cornered on one-hit kills, but this skill will put you right there with them on a majority of the targets in the game.
Blessed Blade
- Increases crit chance with blades by 20%.
Crit chance on armor and mods don’t seem to stack very well (the community is still trying to figure out the math on that), so getting a 20% increase to crit chance via the skill tree is a nice, clean way of getting an extra crit in. If you think about it, with five attacks per second, this skill makes it highly probable that at least one of those attacks will be a critical hit. Doing critical damage once per second is not something even medium threat targets are going to endure for more than one flurry.
Judge, Jury, And Executioner
- Increases damage of blades by 50%/75%/100% against enemies with max health.
If you’ve been following along, you’ve been able to make it so you can one-hit kill your standard goons. But what about the rest? Put three points into this and bosses will fall no differently than the hordes of mobsters they employ. A strong attack doing double damage, even if it doesn’t outright kill a cyberpsycho, will leave it so crippled that the rest of the fight will snowball heavily in your favor.
Fiery Blast
- Increases damage with blades by 1%/2%/3% for every 1% health the enemy is missing.
The tooltip on this skill reads incorrectly as of the current patch, stating that blades do 1% damage for every 1%/2%/3% health missing, which would technically reduce the damage for every skill point spent. Never fear, it functions correctly and you’ll be doing more damage as fights last longer. Threatening targets count on drawn-out fights, and this skill effectively flips the table on them, giving you the advantage as targets start taking more damage over prolonged engagements.
Bloodlust
- While wielding a blade, recover 7%/10% health when applying bleeding effects to an enemy or hitting an enemy with a bleed effect.
You’ll be applying lots of bleed effects. Even with a bad knife or katana, you’ll average about one bleed effect per second. After getting that effect to go off, you’ll have lifesteal. In groups of stronger enemies that require multiple swings, this ensures that your offense is your best defense, absorbing back health in even the heaviest firestorm of bullets. As a secondary bonus, this also frees up cybernetic spaces dedicated to healing abilities so you can focus on doing what you do best: Turning the goons of Night City into 1×1 inch cubes.
NEXT: 10 Lingering Questions We Have At The End Of Cyberpunk 2077
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Hodey Johns is a writer for Game Rant based out of the Rocky Mountains in North Ogden, Utah. He’s had a passion for video games and literature since he was a child growing up along the beach in San Diego, California. As a graduate of Theology from Liberty University, he puts his experience with religion, philosophy, and debate into his work. His other interests include sports, bike riding, and good old-fashioned barbecue.
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