Completing a heist is difficult without understanding Payday 3 best perks and skills. Even if you have some powerful guns in your loadout, you’ll have a hard time finishing a heist without a decent skill set.
During the Payday 3 beta, many players have also realized that they can survive better by creating balanced team compositions. Usually, two heisters will have stealth-based perks and the other two will simply focus on shootout and mayhem perks.
In this guide, we’ve compiled the best perks and skills to match your character build. You can even mix and match these skills to balance out the other weaknesses of your Payday gang.
Payday 3's best perks and skills
Based on what we’ve gathered, your build will definitely become more effective if you focus on skills that raise the Edge attribute. While the official perk deck - a selection of removable perks - is still unconfirmed, we know that in Payday 3, skills act like perks, since they can be swapped on the fly between heists.
Here are some of the best skills for your build:
- Steady Hands (Medic Tree): Medic bags heal you for an additional 20% of your max health.
- Replenish (Mower Tree): Automatically picks up ammo as long as you have Edge.
- Negotiator (Manipulator Tree): Get an extra First Aid kit if you trade a hostage for First Aid.
- Cutting Shot (Sharpshooter Tree): Armor penetration is increased as long as you have Edge.
- Armor Up (Tank Tree): Interacting with any armor bag will restore an extra chunk.
- Dual Sentries (Engineer Tree): You can now make two sentries but they overheat faster.
- Coup De Grace (Tactician Tree): You deal 5% more damage against staggered and stunned enemies if you have Edge.
Those are the ones we would recommend focusing on. Other attributes such as Grit and Rush are still helpful, but Edge can truly define your build.
How to gain new skills and perks in Payday 3
You can gain new skills by completing Payday 3 heists and challenges. Heists will reward you with points that can be used to raise skills, and challenges can give additional achievement bonuses.
Just remember that completing challenges is more difficult than finishing a heist. Some challenges will require you to kill enemies with a specific weapon, while others need to be finished within a short time frame. Think of challenges as feats that you can aim for.
By knowing Payday 3’s best skills and perks, you can now make a build to finish one heist after another. But before you organize a Payday heist, feel free to check out our guides on Payday 3 weapons and masked characters.