Cyberpunk 2077 is not a linear game. Night City has many side gigs, choices, and lifestyles that it'd be impossible to funnel you down a singular path. The game is classified as a first-person shooter, but even that can be altered to become a first-person stabber. If you're wanting to take a knife or katana and dice your way through underworld mobs and corpo overlords, you're in the right place.

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Every single skill in the blades tree is fantastic. Seriously. There are no wrong answers, but, unfortunately, the game is reluctant to give out perk points, so you will likely not be able to select everything you want by the time the credits start rolling. If you only get a handful of skills to dabble in, these should be your top contenders.

10 Deathbolt

Restoring 20% of your health is absurd. Even on the highest difficulty settings, this essentially ensures that you can walk up to any mob, haphazardly slash them down, and, by the time the last body falls, you'll still be topped off on health.

The additional movement speed boost makes this even easier to achieve, allowing you to hack the frontlines down and then chase the snipers immediately afterward. No one can stand in your way.

9 Shifting Sands

The cooldown is unlisted in the tooltip, but even with the two-second limitation, you'll essentially never had to worry about stamina again.

You can dodge anytime, even if no attack is incoming, and the movement will still satisfy this skill. It's really helpful for establishing a rhythm in battle. Dodge toward an enemy, slice them down, then dodge again and repeat.

8 Float Like A Butterfly

This works in perfect tandem with the last skill, as it simply operates offensively instead of defensively. If you're dodging every couple of seconds, as you should, then you've essentially increased your damage without ever having to break your stride.

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It really sets the blades apart from the guns, since most of those trees settle for smaller incremental damage increases, whereas this is a much more significant upgrade.

7 Sting Like A Bee

Blades are already viciously fast, with most fully upgraded varieties doing five slashes per second. With this perk, you can bump that up to almost seven per second, and you definitely should.

Each slash has a chance to crit and apply status effects, so squeezing an extra boost in attack speed in will yield a damage result even greater than originally possible.

6 Offensive Defense

If you've invested your points correctly, you can reliably slice away your problems without ever having to enter a defensive stance for almost all of the game. There are times, though, that you'll fight a high-threat boss or cyberpsycho and won't have any minions around to restore health by killing.

In these situations, you'll want to remain in a defensive stance and get your attacks in at the perfect time. This skill makes it so a fifteen-minute boss fight might only take a few minutes, so it's worth the investment.

5 Roaring Waters

There is no shame in using mostly primary attacks from this weapon type, but you should always lead with a strong attack if it's possible. Snipers like to think they have the market cornered on one-hit kills, but this skill will put you right there with them on a majority of the targets in the game.

Charge into battle and use a heavy attack against bigger foes, enemies that are blocking, or anyone that looks at you the wrong way. No matter what it is, the extra boost to these attacks will make all the difference.

4 Blessed Blade

Crit chance on armour and mods doesn't seem to stack very well, so getting an increase to crit chance via the skill tree is a nice, clean way of getting an extra critical hit in.

With many attacks every few seconds, this perk makes it highly probable that at least one of those attacks will be a critical hit. Doing critical damage once every few seconds is not something even medium threat targets are going to endure for more than a couple of flurries.

3 Judge, Jury And Executioner

With the perks we've discussed so far, you should already be able to make it so you can one-hit kill your standard goons. But what about the rest? Put three points into this perk and bosses will fall no differently than the hordes of mobsters they employ.

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A strong attack doing double damage, even if it doesn't outright kill a cyberpsycho, will leave it so crippled that the rest of the fight will snowball heavily in your favor.

2 Fiery Blast

With this perk, you can incrementally increase the amount of damage you are dealing to enemies the more hurt they are. The lower their health is, the more damage you'll deal, which gives you a constant advantage throughout a combat encounter.

Threatening targets count on drawn-out fights, and this skill effectively flips the table on them, giving you the advantage as targets start taking more damage over prolonged engagements.

1 Bloodlust

If you're using a blade, you'll be applying lots of bleed effects. Even with a bad knife or katana, you'll average about one bleed effect per second. After getting that effect to go off, if you use this perk, you'll essentially have lifesteal.

In groups of stronger enemies that require multiple swings, this ensures that your offense is your best defense, absorbing back health in even the heaviest firestorm of bullets. As a secondary bonus, this also frees up cybernetic spaces dedicated to healing abilities so you can focus on doing what you do best: cutting down the goons of Night City.

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