Cyber Knights: Flashpoint

Cyber Knights: Flashpoint

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Dr. Spendlove's Chrome Difficulty Single-Classed Character Guides
By Dr. Spendlove
This is going to be a list of character classes that are a powerful team together in the meta of early 2024 for Cyberknights: Flashpoint that works on Chrome difficulty. My personal emphasis is on speed. Of speed, combat, and stealth, my group chooses speed first. I'm also making the unusual but simplifying choice of only including a single class per character. This will allow you to extend any of these builds with later game cross-class choices as you wish. But the team should also stand on its own without doing that fancy stuff.
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Hacker Build: Hard Knock Hacker
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This guy lacks stealth in the matrix. Once he's there the answer to most problems is just killing all ICs either individually or using Null OP as an AoE. He's extremely fast to spike CPUs, and is jacked up with a Neural Toner to speed him up even more.
Soldier Build: Blitzkrieg
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This soldier rushes to the front with an AoE buff for speed and then holds positions if she gets in a bad spot with Entrench, the one point wonder. Later, she'll grab serious damage mitigation for herself. Works best with medium range weapons list UARs or E-Rifles.

Grab a display link for +crit and Neural Accelerator for even more speed.

Soldier Build: Plan B Covering Fire
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This guy uses longer range ARs. He focuses on atypical responsibilities for a Soldier. He shuts down sudden threats from mistakes (common when going too fast) with his full auto covering fire. He also helps vulnerable teammates escape overwatch with his powered up marked sights. Finally, it'd be just wasteful to not have at least one point in Coordinated Charge.

Now, why the Iron Grip? When you've boosted your team's MP/AP via other members (or the one point in Coordinated Charge he has for himself) you can move into a great position, and then fully auto attack applying your covering fire. You'll sometimes have enough AP left to burst fire one of the foes that you would prefer removing rather than debuffing afterward. But the recoil penalties will be severe. So the ordering is: Move to ideal spot, use Iron Grip to both boost your damage as well as remove the recoil from movement as well as reduce the penalty you'll incur from your next action, fully auto covering fire. After that, because we've reduced recoil generated, you can still have a decent burst fire (standard) attack.

I've got him only hooked up with a display link thus far. This is my backup soldier that often accompanies stealth teams. He really only needs to get involved when things go awry and someone needs saving.

Scourge Build: Positional Tank
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The Scourge has so many very distinct playstyles available to it. This might not be one of the most visually appealing options but boy is it fun. We've got enough power unlocked from combat drugs with a longer duration that are easier to use and you've got 4 of them... you basically don't need cover against most foes. And when you don't have to play defensively, you can get sight lines on foes that you'd almost never get otherwise.


Here the weaponry matters. We're taking a heavy shredding shotgun for going wild and a silent pistol for backup use before then. The combat drugs you can take your pick with but things that increase your speed and decrease damage taken are key. For cyberware you'll notice just some basic bone grafts as they're cheap, fast to install, and provide no downside.



At later levels, we're going to acquire a long range brain-worm which is our anti-overwatch talent as well as something to do while out of range other than pistol use. We're also grabbing a broad AoE stun attack. This is to allow us to survive extremely aggressive moves where we're horribly surrounded, without cover, and with only 2 AP left.

The gear we're aiming for is four combat drugs as we don't need a stunner when we've got brain worm. Also, level 3 light armor for extreme protection without taking a nasty 10% hit to movement speed.

Vanguard Build: Mr. Glass
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They called me, Mr. Glass.

This is what I had imagined was one of the most vanilla builds for vanguard until I was told that playing statistics indicate that glasswalker is rarely used. What a mistake! Glasswalker leaves your team in complete control at the most critical moments in your heist. Things escalate? That's ok, because you've got four supercharged turns in a row to handle it as you please. Glasswalker should always be maxed out unless you're taking two Vanguards on the same mission regularly.

We've also got Blend which I imagine everyone who tries it, loves. It's a great move for ending your vanguard in a bad spot but just blending away regardless as a save. Again, because this group is about speed, you'll find yourself in dangerous spots occasionally. If you don't have an escape card like Blend, stun mines, a soldier peppering all foes with Covering Fire, Entrench or Callous, you're going to die permanently on Chrome.

Cyberknight Build: The Immortal
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(I like loading this guy with with an AR and an SMG sometimes, but here with any positioning I want, I'll take a sword and an SMG instead.)

Now at level 25 (The current max level.)

Alright, a single classed Cyberknight seems odd, I hear you. But... check this out. Tactical Surge gets maximized early. It powers everything. Every turn it is available except OCCASIONALLY turn 1, you want to fire it. So many guards will die on those turns.

Interference spike as a one point wonder is used for anti-overwatch duty to save people trying to gut you on the way out.

Then we take Centering almost fully upgraded to provide an emergency defense. In practice I tend to not need the final range upgrade on it. This stacks so well with Entrench that you can really rescue someone in a really bad spot with the two together.

We pass through Quantum Assault as a means to an end. There are no drones in today's version. Once they're in the game, we'll probably be grateful for this one point. But until then, we're just using it to reach Ult-Pump. Ult-pump gives us crazy defenses but also absurd crit chance and AP. It's like a one person Tactical Surge that stacks with Tactical Surge.

Losing your knight on chrome is game over, so we've loaded up on survival talents. When you have many options to save you from death when caught in a bad spot, it allows you to move fast, and it allows you to take otherwise untenable positions and use them to massacre your foes.

In later levels we grab Rewind as it is a talent with a ton of utility. But more than that, it gets us access to two incredible passive nodes. The first gives +1 Initiative as well as +1 Reaction. The second gives 2% of the coveted Built-in armor along with a point of Will. Then we grab our upper-right passive node finally for +20 HP which is a lot for a node, and +1 Strength to boot. (Higher HP means it takes more damage to reach the injured status from an individual attack!)

Give these a try!


Solo Hacker - Hard Knock
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If you want to optimize a Hacker exclusively for hacking, such as in solo hacking missions, this is an improved version of the Hard Knock Hacker at the same level. This guy ignores Packet Loss, and drops the cooldown reduction on Overclock and Hardshell. The idea being that you only have 3 turns to perform your hacks, so these cooldown reductions aren't helpful.

In their place we get a powered up Rampage. While there is a Rampage cooldown reduction, it's in the service of moving toward a second cooldown reduction which will matter for 3 turn hacks, and, more importantly, will get us closer to the multi-turn duration of Rampage node.
17 Comments
Denshihaya 22 May, 2024 @ 7:45pm 
Thanks, Doc. I tried it and couldn't figure out the meta, but I was definitely using programs that were too high level and eating up my IO speed. Going that slow I couldn't see the advantage. I think I'll try again and see how it goes.
Dr. Spendlove  [author] 22 May, 2024 @ 12:03pm 
At High levels, I'm finding I handle the first two nodes specially: First node I stealth through with sleaze, Deception, Disarm, and in some cases, ignore. Second node I use the Delay talent and scan for what's nearby. If it's not an incinerator, I move there, nuke it to death and end my turn there. If it is, nuke the node I'm already in -- which is sad because we've already delayed things.

After that first turn I'm destroying everything and ignoring the QSec.
Dr. Spendlove  [author] 22 May, 2024 @ 12:03pm 
Denshihaya, I've found the hacking meta to be loading up Scan 1, Deception 1, and Nuke 1.

Deception is to be used exclusively against things that hit your already fragile connection strength. Nuke 1 is the answer to everything except for sole ICs that you can safely ignore as you pass by them (rare).

Scan 1 is preferred over Scan 2-3 due to its smaller space in RAM, allowing you to load up more Nuke 1s in a single turn.

When you're wrapped up with most the nodes and want to hit a paydata cluster, loading up Disarm 1-2 is a good choice to avoid being given nasty surprises you don't want to address but don't necessarily need to nuke.
Dr. Spendlove  [author] 22 May, 2024 @ 11:58am 
Updated to level 23 Scourge.
Denshihaya 20 May, 2024 @ 11:59am 
I play on a lower difficulty so what might be termed "conventional" hacking is more viable, but I'm interested in trying the fast and hard hacking style embodied by these builds.

What is the playstyle? Only attack programs unless spiking a node where a scan program is needed? Disabling IC on access nodes and destroying everywhere else? Something in between?

Does Attack I do enough damage to be usable? What is the ratio of Nukes to Attacks?
Dr. Spendlove  [author] 17 May, 2024 @ 7:10am 
Updated with level 25 Cyberknight.
Dr. Spendlove  [author] 9 May, 2024 @ 2:13pm 
Updated with a few more nodes on the Cyber Knight: The Immortal.
Dr. Spendlove  [author] 3 May, 2024 @ 7:34am 
Added a variant of the Hard Knock Hacker for solo hacking challenges.
Trese Brothers  [developer] 2 May, 2024 @ 10:48am 
Featured this awesome Guide in our video on importing builds from guides and using auto-train as you level up - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2wAxuQnMo
Dr. Spendlove  [author] 2 May, 2024 @ 6:27am 
Regarding not abandoning the standard starting talents, I really have been so used to those initial points being where they start that it's actually hard for me to run without them. I need a hacker that can disable a little security. I need lure on my vanguard to set up an early kill, or get someone out of my path before I'm ready to go really fast. I could see a more thematically optimized version of these builds without a couple default starting points, but I'd personally miss them and probably get myself killed early on.