Introducing the Plague Runner build for Cyberpunk 2077! If you’re a former corporate employee with a passion for viruses, poisons, and experimental weapons, this build is for you. With the use of poison grenades, launchers, and the contagion hack, you’ll be able to create a smoke cloud around your enemies. Plus, the heavy cybernetic enhancements will make you nearly indestructible, despite the risk of Cyberpsychosis. Get ready to dominate the streets of Night City with this deadly build.
Character concept
My character is an Ex-corpo specialized in poisons and viruses. This build is futuristic plague doctor build that uses combat hacks and can also tank, we will be using primarely CONTAGION, HERCULES and granades as our main sources of damage. And we will focus on cyberware that give us hack crit damage, and more tanking options as for this build we will need to enter head on combat.
Perks
Atributes Distribution
Body
For Body we are interested in the adrenaline line, as we will be front into combat we need health regen and more ways to tank foes attacks.
Perks for body:
Painkiller
This perk will allow us to health regen during combat, the more we use OVERCLOCK the more we will need health regen and health recover options.
Comeback Kid
This will be extra usefull after we spam quickhacks during OVERCLOCK, our health will be depleated very fast and this perk will recover it just as fast.
Droph-head
We will use blood pump as our main source of healing, this perk will also give us damage mitigation during its usages.
Speed Junkie
This one is not mandatory, but I personaly like to always be moving in the battlefield and this sinergyses well with my play style.
Adrenaline Rush
Our core skill from body, adrenaline rush give us more life, health regen and give us another health bar when using blood pump or blood monitor allowing us to take 50% more health overall.
Calm mind
Give us more time in adrenaline mode
Juggernaut
This one is here for the extra damage while on Adrenaline
Pain to Gain
This will give us back health item CD when killing enemies
Technical Ability
For tech we are interested in granades and health itens augmentations as well as cyberware capacity. This build uses a lot of cyberwares for tanking and for ram recovery so we need to be at maximum capacity at all times.
Perks for Technical Ability:
Glutton for War
This perk give us a small chance of reseting our CD for health and granade itens
Transfusion
+30% Health when using the final charge of our blood pump, this can save lives on higher dificulties.
First Aid
More recharge rate for blood pump
Health Freak
We get this one for the +1 health item usage, now we can use blood pump 3 times
Borrowed time
Small change to recover health item charges on kill
Coming in Hot
More recharge speed when we have no granade left, our build wants to use all granade charges as soons as the combat starts, so we will always have this perk active.
Demolitionist Surplus
Give us more charges for granades but not for projectile launch systems.
Pyromania
This skill give us explosion radious, damage and recharge for granades and it’s a core skill for the build.
Burn this City
We can consume pyromania to instat recover a granade charge
Friendly Fire
We don’t want to die to our own granades, right?
Doomlauncher
In case you want to use projectile launch system instead of granades, this will make the other perks work with it.
All Things Cyber
Cyberware capacity
Renascence punk
Cyberware capacity
Driver update
Give our cyberware more status
Chipware Connoisseur
Allow us to chose our cyberware status on upgrades
License to Crome
Unlocks more cyberware slots and give our cyberware more status
Ambidextriys
Unlocks more cyberware slots
Built Diferent
Unlocks more cyberware slots
Cyborg
Reduced CD for all cyberware, this will be usefull for bloodpump and ram recovery
Edgerunner
Cyberware capacity, more damage, crit chance, more crit damage and if above cyberware capacity we can enter fury state. Simulating cyberpsychosis
Intelligence
Last but not least in intteligence is our main source of damage, while in body and tech we wanted utility and be able to tank, the intelligence tree will boost 90% of our damage sources hacks and smart weapons.
Perks for Intelligence:
Eye in the sky
Better usage for camera hacks
Hack Queue
Allow us to upload multiple hacks in sequence onto the same target
Data Recycle
Recovers the ram that would be lost if the target would die before all hacks upload
Feedback loop
Give us more recovery for each quickhack in queue
Queue Acceleration
Give us more ram, more que size and upload speed a good overall choice for our build.
Blood Demon
Alloow us to recover health for each killed enemy, this will synergize well with the tank part of our build
Optimization
Ram recovery
Embedded Exploit
We give more damage if the atarget is affected by control quickhacks, allowing us to do some interesting combos
Speculation
We recover ram when killing enemies
Overclock
This is the CORE skill for this build, OVERCLOCK allow us to use health instead of ram to upload quick hacks, this is were we synergize all parts of our build, we have so much health that we can always upload.
Sublimation
All ram recovery also affect health
Spillover
Chance to spread quickhacks to aditional targets, this synergizes with contagion very well.
Smart Synergy
While in OVERCLOCK smart weapons inta lock on targets.
Target lock transfer
Target lock speed
Acquisition Specialist
Reloading speed
Optional Perks and stealth
You can use other perks with the remaining points to increase the efficience of this build. I would recommend speend then in reflexes to improv our smart assault weapons but feel free to use on the perks you like. I like to use pistols once in a while so I just dumped most of the points in there.
Cool
Reflexes
Stealth Option and viability
If you have more perks in cool you can use poisoned daggers as an stealth option for this build, but keep in mind that contagion and our smart weapons will alert the enemies almost instantly. Even after inumerous tries to mitigate contagion huge track speed I was unable to make it viable in stealth. So whenever I wanted to stealth in a mission I just used daggers. I recomend the Blue Fang as it give more poison damage on hit.
Relic perks
This build don’t have a lot of ways to make use of relic perks but there some that can be used.
Skills
Netrunner
In 50 Netrunner we gain 40% duration for overclock, this is a must because we only want to hack in overclock.
Netrunner
In 60 Netrunner we gain the ability to hack enemies from behind walls, this is a great utility speacilly for thight places.
Egineer
In 20 enginner we gain 20% damage with granades, this will help us a lot with our biohazard granades.
Cybernetics
Overview
For this monstruous build we will be using all available cyberware slots but only some of those are REQUIRED for the build to work. But try to fit in you prefered cyberware and always prioritize health, ram and crit.
After all cyberware is in place we will be almost at 339 cyberware capacity, making us susceptible to Fury(Cyberpsychosis).
Frontal Cortex
In our frontal cortex we want more ram and we need to take the hacks can crit cyberware. Is a must in this build. As this cyberware takes out a lot of our ram, we need to compensate this in other cyberwares and ram recovery.
COX-2 Cybersomatic Optimizer
Allow our quick hacks to crit, this will almost double our damage output and allow CONTAGION to be extremely deadly in all dificulties. Also there is a unique version of this cyberware that give us 100% crit chance.
Ram Reallocator
Recovers a % of our max ram when we get under 20%. Usually we will be using quickhacks only in OVERCLOCK but sometimes we need a little extra ram when OVERCLOCK is in CD. This cyberware saves this build in this situations.
Skeleton
Skeleton we can increase our ram recover while boosting our armor and health, there is a lot of good synergies that we need to make use of.
Ram Recoup
We can recover ram whenever we take damage, this is another cyberware that creates that tank hack synergy for this build.
Feen-X
Give us 250% ram recovery when our ram is depleated, remember that we took some perks that also apply to our health recovery and this will make us pratically imortal when hacking.
Nervous System
We want crit and utility, feel free to put whatever you want here, no big obligatory cyberware in this category.
Visual Cortex Support
Increases our overall crit chance, this will work with both hacks and our smart weapons..
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Integumentary System
Here we want armor and ram, this is the part that we can use to increase how tank we are, there is a lot of synergies with ram as well.
Chitin
Increases our health regen to a maximum of 200%, multiply this to our other buffs and we have extreme amounts of health regen and ram regen.
Cogito Lattice
Give us armor when low on ram.
Cyberdeck
Our cyberdeck need to be one that spreads our quickhacks.
Raven Microcyber MK.3
This cyberdeck increases the spread distance of our hacks, and as CONTAGION is our main hack this improves it greatly, also allow us to spread to +2 additional target and affect all those targets simutaniously.
Face
Kirosh “Cockatrice”Optics
This will increase our crit change by 30%
Hands
We can use anything that give us access to smart weapons and crit chance.
Smart Link
We can use any smart link here, we just want to be able to use smart weapons
Circulatory System
Here we will focus on the heeling aspect for the build, we want the maximum healling and health recover possible.
Blood Pump
Our core cyberware, blood pump will work as a great subistitute for health items and synergyze with most of our tech perks and body perks, allow us to make full use our the tank side of the build.
Biomonitor
This simple utility allow us to not worry about using health items because will automatically activate those for us. When in OVERCLOCK this will activate all the time..
Heal-On-Kill
We heal 7% of our health on enemy kill, this will synergyze with blood demon and other kill effects of the build.
Hacks
Contagion
The main hack in this build, our main way to deal damage and our signature skill will be contagion. This quickhack allow us to infect 4 enemies with a virus that deal poison damage per second, with OVERCLOCK we can have +2 enemies and with our cyberdeck we can have +2 enemies making 8 affected enemies instantly and at the same time with this hack.
Quick Hacks
Cyberware Malfunction
This is a must to dealing with cyberpsychos, Maxtech and most bosses in the game as they tend to use a lot of cyberware effects and boosts.
Overheat
This is our second way of dealing damage, overheath deals burning damage per second and it interacts with contagions. If you overheat a enemy already affected by contagion the chemical damage of contagion will explode in area dealing massive damage.
Ping
Good utility quick hack that hight light all enemies and hackable devices in the area.
Short Circuit
As robots cannot be damaged by poison, usualy, we need another damage type to deal with then, short circuit is the perfect choice as it deals bonus damage to robots and can disable then.
Weapon glitch
Another good utility that works great with bosses, disabling their damage for a few seconds can give you space to breath and recover health+ram inside the combat.
Weapons and Granades
Hercules 3AX
This is our main weapon, synergizes well with quick hacks, deal a lot of area poison damage and will work with all our perks. Just get into the fight and fire without mercy and let the clouds of poisonous smoke finish the rest.
Weapons
Dived we Stand
This is a good early game alternative to hercules 3AX, As hercules is only available at the end of Panthon LIberty we will be using this alternative for the most of the game. It deals a good base damage, but after some hits this weapon releases a poisonous smoke cloud around its target, once that smoke has being released you can expect everybody inside it to be dead in a few moments.
Kappa X-MOD2
I personally like to use pistols so I added my favorite here, the Kappa X-MOD2 is a iconic pistol with a lot of damage and allow us to personalize it with mods. Can’t go wrong here.
Chaos
Another pistol but this time this tech pistol has a chance to deal poison damage on hit until you reload it and it turn into another type of damage. Good for early game.
Molodests Biohaz Grenade
This is the best granade for this build as it create more poisonous smoke clouds, at this point the battlefild its nothing more than poison and smoke.
Toxic Projectile Launch System
This is an alternative to the Biohaz granade, but i find it very dificult to land and deals less poison damage and more explosion damage.
Combat
The combat with this build is pretty simple, you will start teh combat by turning Overclock on, will upload CONTAGION on the most centered enemy you can see, remember CONTAGION spreads from the target point outwards, after that you will launch all you 3 granades spread in the field and finally start shooting with Hercules or Divided we Stand.
Remember to always keep CONTAGION up at all times. This should be enought for most battles.
On bosses try to use cyberware malfunction ate the begining of the combat and wepon glitch when any boss uses it speal movment.
And that wraps up our share on Cyberpunk 2077: Build: Plague Runner. If you have any additional insights or tips to contribute, don’t hesitate to drop a comment below. For a more in-depth read, you can refer to the original article here by Torack, who deserves all the credit. Happy gaming!
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