PAYDAY 3: The Grenadier – The Best Overkill Grenade Build

Grenades in PAYDAY 3 are a big part of the builds you can make, although frag grenades seem to be on the lower side of usage among heisters…

With The Grenadier build, it’s all about killing cops up close and personal! With this build, you’ll always have all 3 buffs active nearly all of the time, you can throw grenades at your feet when surrounded by cops without taking any damage AND you’ll frequently refresh your grenades, armour and ammo just by being the ultimate slayer for your teammates (you also have hostage skills, don’t worry, you’re not that selfish).

The Grenadier is the ultimate frag grenade build for Overkill difficulty and below.

Build Focus:

• Ammo
• Armour
• Close Quarters
• Frag Grenades
• Hostage Trading
• Overkill Difficulty

See The Grenadier for yourself…

Throwing a grenade at my feet instantly explodes, taking out a large group of cops while I take no damage from the explosion, all buffs constantly active. Notice how my armour regenerates when the grenade blows up as well.

Replenishing 2 grenades after killing three cops with a single grenade…

• Primary Weapon – I’d recommend an SMG for this build, something that has a good ammo pickup, while also allowing you to reload quickly. You can use an assault rifle if you like, just make sure it’s quick enough to reload and that the ammo pickup rate is good.

  I’d usually use the ATK-7 (Boys in Blue DLC weapon), but if you haven’t got the DLC, the Ziv Commando is a great choice as well!

  Make sure you equip a suppressor, it helps with your buffs which I’ll go over below.

• Secondary Weapon – You can take anything for your secondary slot, but I’m using the Bullkick as it’s possibly the strongest secondary weapon in the game right now.
• Overkill Weapon – I’d recommend the HET-5 Red Fox as your Overkill weapon. This build isn’t very effective at dealing with Dozers, so prepare your overkill weapon as soon as you get it. The HET-5 Red Fox should kill Dozers in two hits.
• Armour Lining – Adaptive Armour Lining is recommended for this build. I’ll cover why later in the guide.
• Deployable – Armour Bag, bring it with you. It’s an armour build, so it’s necessary.
• Throwable – Bring the Frag Grenade obviously.
• Tool – Take whatever you like, it doesn’t really matter.

The skill list is down below, but you can also find the interactive skill list here[pd3.gg]. Further down I’ll talk about how all of these skills work together.

Optional Skills:
While most of the skills are necessary, you can drop the hostage trading skills (Manipulator skill line) if you’re confident you don’t need them or if a teammate is already using them. Pick whatever you’d like to use after that, I’d personally use Transporter skills if I’m not using hostage trading skills.

With this build, you gain all three buffs extremely fast and you should have them all pretty much all of the time.

• Grit – To gain Grit, simply kill two enemies within 5 meters in 4 seconds or less (Enforcer).

  This is easy, just keep close to enemies and take two of them out fast, you’ll then gain Grit.

• Edge – To gain Edge, simply kill a single enemy within 5 meters while you have Grit, and you’ll gain Edge (Enforcer Aced).

  Once again, very easy, as soon as you get Grit, kill an enemy up close and you’ll gain Edge.

• Rush – To gain Rush, kill an enemy with a suppressed weapon. (Assassin).

  Pretty self explanatory. When you kill an enemy with a suppressed weapon, you gain Rush.

• Grit and Edge – You refresh Grit and Edge by reloading your gun while you still have ammo in the magazine. This means you need to use guns with short reload times and enough of an ammo return so you don’t empty the magazine entirely.

  Your ammo skills should add ammo directly into your gun upon kills, but it shouldn’t fill your magazine completely, just enough that you can keep killing for a good bit longer before needing to reload.

• Rush – There’s no way to refresh Rush with this build.

  However, since you gain Rush by killing with a suppressor, refreshing Rush isn’t really necessary, since as soon as it runs out, you almost gain it instantly upon your next kill.

Here’s an overall view of the buff sources. Don’t worry if it seems confusing, I’ll cover some of the more vital skills down below.

So how do you use this build?

During an assault, this build is all about killing groups of enemies up close and getting in and out of situations fast. You’re not there to complete objectives, you’re there to kill as many cops as possible and keep the heat off of your teammates.

In-between assaults, you have hostage skills which should allow you to help your team by gaining massive amounts of resources via hostage trades. While you haven’t got every hostage skill, the ones you do have should give your team plenty of resources for the duration of the heist.

As long as you have your buffs, you can make great use of your grenades, improve your damage output, reduce your damage intake and keep yourself moving fast to avoid enemy attacks.

Armour is what I’d recommend for this build, and you should have a lot of it.

Adaptive Armour is the best armour to use for this build, and you have plenty of ways to keep your armour.

• Chunk Regeneration – With this build, when you kill an enemy, you’ll instantly regenerate your current armour chunk as long as you have Grit and Edge.

  This is because Plate Up restores your armour chunk on ammo pickup when you have Grit, and Replenish automatically picks ammo dropped by enemies you killed as long as you have Edge.

  These two skills combine so you can kill enemies, and instantly regenerate your armour chunk.

  This has a cool down of 2 seconds.

• Repair Kits – Thanks to the Clean Slate skill, you can restore one chunk of your two armour bars, if you have no armour at all, via armour repair kits.

  Armour repairs kits can be earned all over the map as you play through the heist. When you trade hostages, you have a good chance of getting armour repair kits in return, you should get a few of them for each trade.

  Armour repair kits also drop from a Dozer or a Techie when they’re killed, these will also allow you to restore your armour if you lose it.

• Armour Bag – With Tank, Extra Plates and Stockpile, your armour bags have a MASSIVE amount of uses. Each use will restore a chunk of your armour, don’t be afraid to drop and use them!

Your grenades are extremely powerful.

• Grenade Usage – Try to keep your grenades for groups of enemies, rather than using them on a single enemy, at least 3 enemies minimum.

  With this build, as long as you have Grit, you can jump into groups of enemies and throw a grenade at your feet.

  Upon doing so, the grenade will explode instantly thanks to the Overcooked skill, you’ll consume Grit to negate any damage from the explosion because of the Blast Shield skill, but you’ll gain it back IMMEDIATELY because you just killed two enemies within 5 meters quickly, which triggers the Enforcer skill. This essentially refreshes Grit.

  Any damage you took to your armour plate rushing into that group of cops, will ALSO regenerate due to Plate Up, as chances are you’ll pick up some ammo from the enemies you just killed.

  As long as you have Rush, which you should most of the time thanks to Assassin, the Blowback skill will cause your grenades to strip armour away from any non-special enemies injured by your explosion, but not killed. This allows you to quickly clean up anyone left that your grenade doesn’t kill.

  Grenade, big group of enemies, throw at feet, all dead, no damage, no buffs lost, good job!

• Grenade Replenishment – You spawn with 5 grenades thanks to Extra Munitions, and you have several skills which will help you replenish your lost grenades.

  The skill Scrounger gives you a 10% chance of replenishing a grenade when you pick up ammo. Again, you pick up ammo when you kill an enemy with this build thanks to Replenish, which again, automatically picks up ammo from enemies you kill if you have Edge, which you almost always will.

  Scrounger and Replenish work together, allowing you to replenish grenades often from just killing enemies. While 10% might seem low, it actually replenishes them pretty frequently.

  As well as Scrounger, the skill Frugal Thrower gives you a 20% chance to instantly replenish a grenade after it blows up. Again, it seems low, but I’ve often retrieved 2 grenades at once thanks to both Scrounger and Frugal Thrower when killing a group of enemies with grenades.

  No damage from the explosion, armour chunk regenerated upon explosion, grenade replenished after explosion… what’s not to love?
  

You should have no problem dealing with most special enemies with this build. I’ll list the two that you should be aware of however.

• Dozer – You will not be very strong against Dozers, and your grenades don’t do much damage to them at all. To deal with Dozers, I’d recommend you have your overkill weapon ready near you, and pay attention Shade announcing their arrival.

  Your overkill weapon should take them out in two hits.

• Shields – Shields are easy to deal with for this build, but I thought I’d mention why and how.

  Instead of wasting time trying to break through the glass on a shield, instead throw a grenade behind them.

  The grenade should cause them to stagger, and you’ll then be able to quickly take them out. Throwing grenades at the front of shields doesn’t work as effectively as they can sometimes block them, so be aware of that.