Despite its many, MANY problems, there were several things that gamers were looking forward to in Cyberpunk 2077 when it first came out in 2020. One was how you could augment your character, V, to suit your needs in this Cyberpunk world. Specifically, you could make V as robotic as you wanted or keep them human if you desired. Through your augments, you could make “builds” of V that could do all sorts of damage on a physical or technological level. As you would expect, gamers have debated what the best build to do in the game is.
In an interview with IGN, Cyberpunk 2077 director Gabe Amatangelo was asked about his favorite builds in the game and which ones he felt were the “most fun,” and he gave a surprising answer via the “Warlock Netrunner”:
“There [are so many fun builds], but I’d say the netrunner, spreading hacks with the monowire from the Relic Tree,” Amatangelo noted. “That one’s so much fun, especially if you are able to work in the combos and the rhythm for refunding your memory and your cooldowns. When you do it in concert with the monowire, you get the bonuses from the spreads.”
Hacking enemies in the game is a clever way of making them unable to strike back. After all, almost everyone in Night City has augments that they’ve used to make themselves better. But when those augments don’t function properly? Then, they become liabilities, which is why the Netrunner is popular. But the catch is that the base form of a Netrunner needs time to recharge after doing the hacks. That’s where the Warlock element comes in, as it helps players recharge quickly and thus keep doing more hacking damage:
“Basically, the bonuses you get from combos happening, you set a debuff hack on one person, you spread it to a few, and then you do a follow-up hack on all of them — you get the bonuses and memory refunds from all of them.”
The good news is that you can get this “new build” via the Phantom Liberty DLC that’s out now. In fact, you need certain skills from the DLC to make it work, which might be intentional. The other good news is that the DLC is much better and more refined than the base game, and as a result, you can dive into the title with fresh eyes and desire a new build and make it what you want it to be.