Payday 3

Basics

• Player level does nothing other than unlocking some weapons and cosmetics early on. Players with card suit symbols by their names are in the prestige-y leveling system past the basic level 150 cap. These are entirely cosmetic.

• You will unlock "C-stacks" for leveling up, completing daily challenges or rarely for beating a mission. Note that once you hit level cap, these become extremely rare (yup, this was probably an aborted pay-to-win premium currency).

• Guns must be leveled by running heists with them equipped to unlock their mods; you do not have to actually use the gun. Overkill weapons are leveled up the same way. Most gun mods (other than silencers) currently have negligible effects. Gun XP is gained permanently and shared across copies of the same model.

• Some missions have undocumented secret loot items. Accessing these usually requires multiple players, and the reward is underwhelming.

• Many missions will have some mechanic to massively increase the value of lootbags one at a time in exchange for some sort of wait.

• Mission favors (other than basic deployables and ziplines) must now be won, at random, by beating heists. These vary from useless to absolutely essential; to make things worse, they're single-use. Some later heists let you buy favors from the ingame vendor system. These tend to transform the mission or add additional loot, and are generally much more fun.

Armor

• Armor is the central mechanic of the game's combat; enemies and players have it and when it's gone they (or you) die almost instantly.

• Your armor is made up of multiple "plates." You can mix and match different types. Generally, the more an armor plate type can recover, the less damage it can actually protect from. When most kinds of armor plate "break", they do not come back.

• Armor drops from enemies or hostage trades do not replace broken armor, only repair a plate that isn't broken. Only deployable armor bags can replace lost armor plates.

• Though it's counterintuitive, a full tank build with the armor type that does not recover at all is currently a strong option. Coupled with deployable armor bags and the skill that replenishes armor for placing them, you will be able to take far, far more damage than you will encounter in most heists.

Combat and enemies

• Each heist has a point in its script where enemies enter a "Final charge" - usually after you secure some amount of objective loot. At this point the basic swat are replaced with "heavy" versions and most enemy spawncaps are relaxed. The final charge deliberately breaks what passes for balance, and most builds cannot be sustained - this is the game trying to force you to escape. It's critical to learn where each final charge point is so you don't trigger it early.

• Grenadiers are the greatest threat in the game; they throw a poison gas grenade. The cloud from this grenade ignores armor and drains player health, killing everyone in seconds. The cloud is larger than it looks, lasts longer than it looks, and it drifts a bit.

• Having a hostage nearby causes enemies to use less dangerous attacks. The most critical of these is that grenadiers switch to flashbombs, which are nearly harmless. Hostage placement is thus essential for holding a defensive position.

• Snipers often will not be staggered by nonlethal damage and will just keep firing. They can take out one or more plate of armor with a single shot. Try to have a way to kill them fast.

• A "techie" may spawn and attempt to hide near the players behind an active camo shield, summoning an infinite supply of drones that will shoot you, stun you, and generally be a huge problem. Techies have a static, heist-specific set of hiding spots, and your HUD will glitch more as you get close to them. Learning their locations will make them much less of a problem.

• FBI vans can spawn during most loud heists. While the van's antenna is active, it will keep an assault going indefinitely and increase combat difficulty in various ways. There are only a couple places the van can spawn; learn them and get used to rushing them to take out their antenna.

Stealth

• Generally, get used to restarting and failing for reasons you couldn't anticipate. The game is shockingly bad at communication, and these problems are worst in stealth.

• You can play stealth masked or unmasked, but masking up is permanent. Under most circumstances, you are best served playing unmasked whenever possible. If you have multiple players, having separate masked and unmasked roles is often very powerful. Masking up is necessary to jump, mantle, take hostages, or use some objects.

• Locations are divided into public, private and restricted areas. Unmasked players will just be escorted out of private areas unless they are caught doing something illegal, and various skills and mission-specific conditions can let them navigate these areas with near impunity.

• In restricted areas, everyone will alert off of you regardless. In addition, running will cause guards to travel to your location if they hear you; this means you will have to walk or crouch almost the entire time in some missions.

• The number of pagers you can answer is determined by difficulty setting. On Overkill, you get one. This is usually best used for taking out the camera operator.

• The motion detector inventory item is incredibly powerful, allowing you to permanently know the locations of several guards. Unless doing a gimmick run, it's usually the item to take.

• A wide variety of conditions (including running out of pagers) can semi-alert guards and trigger a "searching" mode. When this happens, all guards begin patrolling the whole map randomly in high alert. This is permanent; it's effectively a failure state for stealth, and with the exception of one heist that forces a search, triggering it means you should probably restart.

• NPCs will instantly alert off of a seemingly random array of objects, and will see them from great range and strange angles. Many of these are only learned through failure, but a good rule of thumb is hacking progress bars are apparently a capital offense, but "I've finished hacking your computer" screens are totally anodyne.

• Some heists have a biometric scanner, requiring you to take a hostage over to open them. These suck and are reliably the worst part of stealth. Some missions silently give you ways to bypass or simplify these objectives; details are below.

• Special modifiers can apply to higher difficulty stealth missions. Of these, the "lead guard" is by far the worst. This special guard cannot be killed without effectively failing stealth, and his patrols are specifically designed to mess with you, including entering normally "safe" areas and changing his behavior to "check on" whatever the player is doing with zero warning.

• The Interceptor overkill weapon, when leveled fully, is a great bypass for particularly unfair objectives in stealth (like biometric scanners). Just note it won't undo search mode!

• At present, stealth skills let you hack a guard's pager, effectively blinding them for a lengthy period. Note that once they recover they will still respond to sounds they hear while stunned, and some illegal actions (usually marked with "Observed") will nonsensically bypass the stun.

Heist-specific notes

• Road Rage, despite being the second mission in story progression, is an infamous killbox and has much worse, harder combat balance due to layout and enemy balance issues. Plan accordingly.

• Road Rage can be made much easier by finding and using a construction gate utility box- this bypasses several other obstacles blocking the truck.

• Run Under the Surphaze on a low difficulty first - you can complete many objectives in any order, and the scripted order you are told is the slowest and hardest way to approach the mission! If stealthing, go top down: all QR code locks on the upper level of the gallery can be bypassed via the roof.

• A zipline is effectively essential to stealth Under the Surphaze. Use it at the position running from a fire escape to near the bag secure point. Be aware that loot or players on the zipline will alert guards if they are watching from the gallery windows.

• In Dirty Ice, a safe in the basement contains some documents you will be prompted to photograph. Getting these documents fast enough will silently stop the manager from leaving, and will give you a way to move her somewhere sort of safe to deal with the biometric scanner.

• In Rock the Cradle, getting a VIP pass will let all players navigate all private areas safely- even on Overkill, where you're otherwise not allowed into the club at all.

• In Gold & Sharke, guards will enter search mode if they see the open vault door.

• Touch the Sky is considered nearly impossible to stealth the intended way, mostly due to the biometric lock requirement. If you must do this, use an interceptor...or just brute-force the vault code. It only takes ~15 minutes of guessing!

• Turbid Station is another infamous mission; NPCs and guards will wander through basically any area you open up, so nothing is really safe. You can kill the biometric scanner NPC to get an alternate, easier objective.

• In stealth, Boys in Blue requires that the player spend an extended period distracting and navigating around the evidence lockup guard. If you can do so safely, it may actually be faster to kill this guard and leave the camera guy alive.

• Fear & Greed is a nightmare to stealth. This is because it was not really designed to be played unmasked. If you get the favor to start the mission on the floor unmasked, the mission becomes bearable (and, in fact, very easy). If attempting stealth masked, at the start, the correct elevator will have a discarded sign on the floor near it. For the rest, well, good luck.