Payday 3 does cater to any playstyle, depending on how players want to take on heists. Players who want to slam in the front door, guns drawn, will easily find the right tools for that approach. However, the criminals who prefer to be sneaky have a better time initially, and there are perfectly tuned stealth skills for that.
Best Stealth Build in Payday 3
While a build does include skills, they are the easy part to figure out. So, we are splitting the two up, and this section will cover purely what equipment you need to be as stealthy as possible.
Primary Weapon With Silencer
Regardless of your primary weapon choice, it must be compatible with a silencer. Despite the fact that shotguns are great for keeping cops at bay, they aren’t suitable for a stealthy engagement. There is a slight problem here for a small roadblock regarding silencers. Not all rifles get a silencer attachment immediately. The CAR-4 assault rifle you start the game with will need to hit level six before it can use one.
So, this just means your full stealth loadout might take a few heists to fully unlock. It will give you the chance to learn how your weapon handles without one so you can compensate for the difference in handling. All future rifles you choose to equip will have to go through this same process, and there’s not much of a way to counteract the attention gained by firing an un-silenced weapon. You gotta use it to level it up, though, so there’s no other option.
Secondary Weapon With Silencer
Fortunately, pistols don’t have quite the same limitations with silencers. The Signature 40 that you have from the start of the game has a suppressor you can grab for free at any time. It doesn’t have quite the same effect on handling but instead removes a small chunk of damage.
As your secondary should always be your most versatile and quick weapon, it should always be a pistol, and the silencer is a requirement. This means you are definitely skipping out on damaging revolvers, but a silenced pistol allows for much better mobility.
If you’d like an upgrade from only pistols that is available early, we recommend the Ziv Commando “Kick-Murder.” This SMG comes suppressed and provides terrific handling considering the fire rate. While it’s not as versatile as a pistol, it will get the job done when the cops start flowing in.
Quiet Throwable
Obviously, a frag grenade doesn’t quite fit in with this important loadout aspect. Instead, this one can be tweaked a little more. If you’d prefer to be quiet and damaging, the throwing knife is an excellent choice. If you’d rather cloak your actions while you move around, the smoke grenade is the better option. This depends entirely on whether you’d rather eliminate threats or blind and confuse them.
Any Tool
Considering every tool allows for either an extra pair of eyes or enemy mitigation, every single choice is a good one. If we had to choose just one, it would be the motion sensor, just so you get a better idea of enemy placement.
That’s not to say the other choices are any less useful, but they have limits that don’t match the utility of knowing exactly where the biggest threats and civilians are in the building.
Any Overkill Weapon
These are meant to be loud and damaging, so they are likely better kept as a last resort if you are pursued as you push for the exfiltration zone. If you can pull it off, the HET-5 Red Fox will help you rip through armored enemies, but does require a certain level of precision. As the game currently only sports two options, and neither is silenced in any way, just go with whatever flavor of destruction you prefer.
Light Armor Lining
The whole point of a stealth build is to keep yourself quiet enough that enemies never even bother you. With that in mind, you’re better off sticking with the Light Ballistic Lining. It doesn’t matter if it might leave you less protected, as that’s where skills come in to help alleviate some of the potential damage.
Best Payday 3 Stealth Skills
All Infiltrator Skills
This list of skills is perfect for when a heist just starts. They deal with lockpicking, looting speed, and throwables. If you chose the throwing knife as your throwable, the Retriever and Blade Bouncer skills that make it unbreakable (when it hits a wall) and bounce into enemies are essential. The latter helps you silently eliminate an enemy from around a corner, and there’s nothing that can really beat that.
All Hacker Skills
As with the Infiltrator skills, the Hacker skills are made for stealth. The base version of the first skill already lets you hack into the cameras without having to physically enter/find the security room, and that’s insanely good. Every subsequent skill only provides more and more benefits, though Secure Loop is the second best by far.
Security cameras are the biggest threat in the early stages of any heist, so anything you can do to mitigate that will make a huge difference. Using Glitch Protocol to entirely disrupt a guard escorting or detaining a player fixes several problems at once. The ending skill, Signal Catch, which lets you answer a radio yourself without having to perform a takedown on a guard, will save tons of time as you hunt around.
Discombobulate
If you opted for the smoke grenade over the throwing knife, this is a skill you need to have. If you’re caught and afraid of getting lit up by enemies, dropping a smoke grenade at your feet means enemies will do 40% less damage if they try to shoot through it. This is the best skill to have if you need to get from point A to B safely, which brings us to our next skill choice.
Swift
Once a heist starts, getting to where you need to go during time-sensitive moments can make a big difference. The Swift skill gives you just enough of a sprint speed boost that it will make getting around much less stressful.
Walk the Walk
While Hacker is all about controlling cameras, the Walk the Walk skill is all about hiding from them. As said, security cameras are a massive threat as they don’t take long to spot any criminals. The easiest way around this is to simply make it so they can’t actually see any criminals.
All of this should be the perfect recipe for a very useful stealth build in Payday 3. For more guides on individual heists and how to best use these stealth skills, check out our links below.
