Stealth in Payday 2 is somewhat of a hit or miss for the players. If you are more of a miss kind of gamer or just starting out, this guide should help you get the basics and avoid some of the mistakes (or maybe you still will make them, but learning from mistakes is what everyone does.) that everyone makes.

First of. Welcome to Payday 2! A little bit of advice before you go on to join any lobbies, get to know the difficulty of the game. It goes: NORMAL > HARD > VERY HARD > OVERKILL > DEATHWISH

Starting out you want to begin with normal (shocking I know) but starting out a game you want to start easy to get to know the basics. The best heist to start with is the Jewelry Store Heist. Easy, fast and good to begin with. (try not to go above NORMAL unless you've got friends who already play.)

Before ANYTHING check the key bindings and assign keys to your preffered one. I recomend leaving the action key to F. Easy access and easy to hold down. But its to your preferences. So if you like to assign the action key to Alt+Shift+M+J then do it, but do so at your own and your teams risk. After all, this is a 4 player heisting game.

At first you could visit the SAFEHOUSE. Its not a heist and there Bain (Mission contractor and heist coordinator) will guide you thru the basic objectives to get you into the heists.

Go to the main menu and co to crime.net to choose or wait for the jewelry store heist NORMAL to appear. Choose the heist and you will be in a lobby. Here you can manage inventory, skills and perk decks. Inventory is important because you will manage something called detection risk. The detection risk is tied to the concealment of your armor and weapons. THE HIGHER THE CONCEALMENT OF A WEAPON THE LOWER YOUR DETECTION WILL BE YOU WANT IT TO BE AS LOW AS POSSIBLE. If you are gonna stealth you should use the suit. SUIT UP! Armor is never necesary for stealthing unless you plan to go loud, then again youre on a stealth guide so yea...




Lets begin.


You begin some stealth heists without your mask and some with. In this case you begin without the mask. Walk around and take a look around the store. In normal the heist will have from 1-2 guards that you WILL have to take out. First off (it may seem kinda stupid but apparantly many dont think that stealth heists need silenced weapons pls PLS) DONT SHOOT WITHOUT A SILENCER! (FROM THE WIKI) Suppressor (a.k.a. silencer) barrel extensions and suppressed barrels reduce or eliminate the chance that NPCs will detect shots fired. Normally, the detection radius for a suppressed weapon is 0 meters (undetectable), though some weapon shots can be detected up to 1 meter away.At the beginning you will obviously begin without one so you will have to resort to a knife or melee weapon. Of course if you shoot WITHOUT a silencer the noise will alert everyone and their grandmother. So no shooting without a silencer. (exceptions are the bow and crossbow)

You will take out guards (make sure he is alone and hidden from the view of any civs (civilians) as you knife him. Try not to bertstare the guard as you case the joint. They see you as well since they arent blind. As soon as the guards body hits the ground the pager will activate. YOU MUST ANSWER IT! take this as a rule of thumb. If you kill him/her you dispose of him/her correctly. That means answering any pagers and moving the body to a better location so that its not easily seen by others.

Use your head. Try to not do something quickly and risky if you can do it safely and slowly. Patience is the thieves greatest weapon. Use the cover of your surroundings to your advantage. If there's a player that is higher level than you listen and learn from him and his movements.

One more thing before moving on. Stealthing in itself involves being quick and slow at the same time. Use cover and for the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS SACRED AND BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD CROUCH IF YOURE STEALTHING! pls do otherwise you will be spotted so quick that you may end up like this.

AS mentioned before. For stealth you will use:

• Two Piece Suit
  
• SILENCED AMCAR Rifle
  
  
• SILENCED Gruber Kurs Pistol
  
  
• Aussie Roo Slicer
  
• Payday 2 Throwing cards
  
  These weapon are your starting weapons. You WILL have them (for the throwable cards you may need to join the Payday 2 Steam group ( http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/games/218620/ ) but if not don't worry.
  
  As you progress thru some levels you will get skill points that you can use to better your skills or unlock equipment (like the ECM Jammer) That you will need to stealth.
  
  

Now we will get to Skills and Perk Decks. In the lobby or main menu go to the skills tab. And you are introduced to many diferent things that if your new you will probably not understand the firsts econd you see it. The important bits will be this. There are

• Mastermind
  
• Enforcer
  
• Technician
  
• Ghost
  
• Fugitive

For stealth you will focus on the Ghost Tree but just starting out you will need just a couple of skills to make stealthing the first heists easy.

Fugitive Tree

• SHINOBI Branch (ACED*)

*Aced means you will buy both of the tiers of the skill, its basic and aced.


As for any of the other skills, well you can choose what you want. I would recomend getting the drill skills, cable ties and maybe the dominator skill.

Simply try and use the cover of the heists to your advantage. Look for places that are good to hide yourself in and have a good clear escape route.