Quickhacks Combo guide - Cyberpunk 2077

With the release of 2.0 Update, using Quickhacks combos is essential in Cyberpunk 2077. Now, to get the most out of limited ammo and increased RAM costs, you need to be mindful of how and when to use it. Moreover, you can now easily create sick combos, that leave a group of enemies torn to pieces or have their cyberware friend without understanding what is happening. So Let's dig into how you can use Quickhacks and combo them.

Unlock the full Potential of Quickhacks

Quickhacks can be a challenge to use, especially once you see that they can cost 50% of your total RAM pool. I would like to walk you through some tips on how to best utilize combo quickhacks and make netrunner combat much more enjoyable.

Maximizing Combat Quickhack damage

At first, something like Overheat, Short Circuit, and similar ones may seem weak. And that is intended. We need to make a few corrections on how to use them. First, you will need an Embedded Exploit perk, which grants a 60% damage boost. For it to activate you need to have the enemy be affected by non-combat quickhack.

This is fairly easy, but a few recommendations are:

Item	Description
Cyberware Malfunction	One of the cheapest quickhacks. DIsables enemy cyberware increases damage against them, and stacks for stronger effects.
Sonic Shock	It can isolate the target from the group and leave them easy picking for a fast kill. This will not activate tracing from Tier 3.
Reboot Optics	Makes the enemy almost blind, making it easier to approach them and their shots miss.

So having one of these uploaded first will make you quickhacks already do much more damage.

Second, with Race Against Mind and Overclock, you can further boost the damage by sacrificing your HP when uploading Combat quickhack. The bonus is up to 50%.

Third, use correct Cyberdecks. For example, you can get a 40% damage boost with Tetratonic Rippler Mk.5 if you use a non-combat quickhack after a combat one. So again, you can follow up with the previously mentioned cheap options to further boost the damage. There are other cyberdecks that give bonus damage, but none of them provide this big.

Fourth, with Queue Mastery we take one more damage boost by filling the whole quickhack queue (4 quickhacks). So what we can do is include all the previous points, and fill the queue like this:

1. Sonic Shock/Cyberware Malfunction
2. Any combat quickhack - Burnout Synapse, Short Circuit, etc.
3. Cyberware Malfunction
4. Cyberware Malfunction

And now you deal a huge chunk of damage. Although this is expensive to use, I will show some combos, which will make these easy to pull off once you are higher level. So let's dig into the combos

Contagion, Burns and Explosions.

Explosions are a good source of area of effect damage, that deal decent damage and can be very cheap to use. The easiest source is red containers found in the environment. You can either explode them with quickhacks or weapons. Be sure to have Warning: Explosion Hazard to increase the damage of environment detonations.

The next option is to create explosions yourself with quickhacks. Once you get Tier 4 Contagion, it can be detonated to create explosions. This is a very simple combo, that is easy to pull off and usually, base RAM will be enough. I also recommend taking Pyromania and Warning: Explosion Hazard​ perks as it works well with explosions and can further boost their damage.

Sequence	Action	Description
1	Contagion	Setting up the combo, by releasing the poison from the quickhack. The quick hack will spread to other enemies creating even more confusion.
2	Overheat	As you can see there are a ton of options for how you can set off these explosions. And as the Contagion spreads, you can create a second and third, if anyone is still alive. Just be aware, that weapons and Monowire, have a "chance to burn" meaning that some of them are not as effective. For example, Monowire has a 20% chance to burn, and its slow attack speed makes it a problematic choice.
	Thermal Monowire
	Incendiary Grenade
	Errata
	Prototype: Shingen Mark V

Explosions with Detonate Grenade

Now we can go a step further and incorporate Ultimate quickhack - Detonate Grenade. Into the sequence. Although it is expensive by itself, we can reduce its cost by creating additional explosions reducing its cost to 4 RAM.

Be sure to have a Warning: Explosion Hazard​ perk for the highest damage bonus possible.

Sequence	Action	Description
1	Explosion	Creating explosions from one of the sources that was mentioned earlier. This can be a red exploding container, grenade, or Contagion + Overheat combo.
2	Explosion
3	Detonate Grenade	We finish off any straggler with ultimate quickhack Grenade Detonation. It gets decreased RAM cost after 2 explosions.

Reboot Optics with Headshots

This is an effortless combo, that plays well with guns. This is especially useful with pistols, revolvers, and sniper rifles - weapons that are related to the Cool attribute tree and utilize headshots. Moreover, if you get Smart Weapons, with some perk upgrades they can constantly target for weak spots or heads.

Sequence	Action	Description
1	Reboot Optics	Simple combo that enables +15% or 30% bonus damage with headshots based on Reboot Optics quickhack tier.
2	Headhosts or Weakspot Damage

You can take this a step further and add Cyberware Malfunction and Cripple Movement to the queue. The result is even more damage and disabling enemy cyberware so that it would be easier to hit.

Melee Finishers and Suicide

This is a very fun combo and you could say playstyle. Suicide has a unique combo with a melee finisher where each of them reduces RAM cost by 10. So a 24 RAM cost ultimate quickhack can only cost 4 RAM, making it instantly eliminate a foe

 

Action	Description
2x Melee Finishers	A deadly combo, that encourages melee playstyle to fuel one of the most powerful ultimate quickhacks.
Suicide

This, of course, works with any weapon not only Monowire, but its finisher Finisher: Live Wire also restores RAM allowing it to fuel the next set of quickhacks.

Electric Shocks - good for anything, especially robots

This combo is especially effective against Drones, Robots, and mechs. Moreover, I also use it against normal enemies, that I want to be deleted instantly without a big hassle. It's pretty straightforward, and we need Cyberware Malfunction with Short Circuit

Sequence	Quickhack	Description
1	Cyberware Malfunction	Use it one or two times to weaken the enemy.
2	Short Circuit	Short Circuit will create a combo and deal additional damage. Moreover, this will also activate Embedded Exploit​

Burnout Synapse with Infinite Overclock

This is the most powerful combo that you can use to more or less never run out of RAM. For now, this looks to be the top combination of quickhacking in update 2.0. So what makes it powerful? Well, this is a combination of multiple perks and quickhacks. Let's go step by step

1. Overclock allows to use HP instead of RAM for quickhacks
2. Hack Queue and Queue Acceleration allow uploading multiple quickhacks in succession
3. Data Recycler returns 80% of RAM that has been used, so we are trading HP for RAM
4. Finally, Blood Daemon restores HP based on quickhacks in the queue, which we can be further used to fuel Overclock

This is just the part of it. The core of this combo is Burnout Synapse. It has unique effects, if you kill an enemy using it, the Overclock duration is extended by 5 seconds. As long as there are enemies you should be able to sustain it and use HP for Quickhack uploads.

So here are  recommended sequences based on the situation:

Most damage

Be sure to activate Overclock​ as this gives a huge damage boost.

Sequence	Action	Description
1	Cyberware Malfunction	This activates Embedded Exploit​ and Tetratronic Rippler's unique effects. Moreover, Cyberware Malfunction increases overall damage and disables cyberware. The big costing quickhacks are there to activate the bonus effect from Burnout Synapse.
2	Burnout Synapse
3	Cyberware Malfunction
4	Ultimate Quickhack with high RAM cost

Best when high-level in normal encounters

Sequence	Action	Description
1	Burnout Synapse	Once you get some good cyberware and can one-shot most of the enemies, using this one will net you the best results. You can recoup 120 HP from Blood Daemon, at the cost of less damage, as now Embedded Exploit​ will not activate. But this is perfect for simple enemies or in late-game normal encounters.
2	Cyberware Malfunction
3	Cyberware Malfunction
4	Cyberware Malfunction

Stealth Takedowns and System Collapse

If you plan on using a stealth approach, this is an extremely useful combo. Many cyberware and Intelligence perks help you to reduce trace or give bonuses after takedowns. To exploit this fully, you should also have System Collapse's ultimate quickhack that instantly knocks out an enemy.

Action	Description
2x Takedown	A stealth combo where you use silently killed enemies to fuel the System Collapse quickhack. It instantly knocks out the target with just 4 RAM costs.
System Collapse

Stealth approach

With the 2.1 Update, Sonic Shock was fixed, and the traceability mechanic was enabled if you uploaded more quickhacks on the target. For this reason, Memory Wipe Tier 4, became the new king.

Ensure you disable the Spillover​ perk; otherwise, quickhacks can spread to nearby targets, who did not have Memory Wipe uploaded yet.

Now at level 30, you will unlock Epic quickhacks. This is when you can get Memory Wipe Tier 4. It costs 10 RAM to use and does what Sonic Shock did - disable tracing on subsequent uploads. So if you want a stealth approach always use it first. This will most likely require you to activate Overclock​ more often. Here is the combo to instantly take out enemies:

Sequence	Action	Description
1	Memory Wipe (Tier 4+)	A very simple combo, that also has low costs. Make sure that you use Memory Wipe Tier 4, and Sonic Shock Tier 5. This way it guarantees the lowest RAM cost. At level 50+ you should be able to take out 2 enemies before activating Overclock.
2	Reboot Optics
3	Sonic Shock (Tier 5+)

Maintaining Low Tracing

Okay, so stealth does not always go perfectly, or you just want another flavor of stealth playstyle. What do you do when Tracing starts? Again, Memory Wipe is the new king and you can start using T3 memory Wipe, to constantly keep Tracing close to 0. How to do that?

Well, it's pretty straightforward. Just include Memory Wipe at the end of the queue, for example after using Burnout Synapse. This will instantly kill the foe, activate the Memory Wipe unique effect, and return 80% of used RAM if you have a Data Recycler perk.

No Tracing with insta-kills (might be a bug)

Okay, so you can do some crazy clearing of enemies with Stealth netrunning. How this can be done? There are a few conditions you have to meet:

• You need to kill the enemy with a single traceable quickhack.
• The sequence can contain quickhacks before, but they need to be untraceable (Sonic Shock, Request Backup, Ping, etc.

This allows you to kill the enemy instantly- and the tracing does not start, making it worthwhile to stack everything you can for huge damage bonuses.

Gun combat

In case you enter Gun Combat and want to maximize the effectiveness there are a lot of options. I would like to cover one of the simplest and most effective.

First, be sure to have a smart weapon, they target enemy weak spots and have a good synergy with some cyberdecks. Now, for quickhacks, I recommend using:

Item	Description
Cyberware Malfunction	One of the cheapest quickhacks. DIsables enemy cyberware increases damage against them, and stacks for stronger effects.
Overheat	Starts burning the enemy, but the most important effect is that it melts their armor and each shot against them gets bonus fire damage.
Reboot Optics	Makes the enemy almost blind, making it easier to approach them and their shots miss. moreover, you deal bonus headshot damage.

You can use all of them together against strong enemies like cyberpsychos, easily destroying them in a matter of seconds with a weapon like Yinglong.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading the Quickhack Combo guide for Cyberpunk 2077. I hope this helped you immensely on how to utilize hacking for maximum combat results in load and stealth scenarios. If you found any combo that is not mentioned leave a comment below!