Social Enhancer
This line of augmentation is expensive for what it provides. It gives you a HUD for conversations that monitors the target individual, their heart rate, and personality. This makes debates much easier. However, paying a couple points of Praxis for a line that doesn’t help often is rough in the early or mid-game. In addition, our guide tells you the ideal conversation paths during debates, so only buy this if you want to see how cool it looks.
Dialectic Enhancer
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Effects: Assist with conversations to aid in extracting information |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Hacking Capture
You start with this essential augmentation, and it allows you to break into electronic systems. Hacking is a huge part of the game, but it isn’t required beyond Level 1. Lethal players who don’t care about causing chaos are free to ignore hacking entirely, but stealth players and completionists should pursue this heavily. Hacking gets you XP, additional story information, and makes multiple encounters easier to avoid or defeat!
Hacking Capture Level 2
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Effects: Breaches level 2 electronic systems |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Hacking Capture Level 3
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Effects: Breaches level 3 electronic systems |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: This is a good place to stop for players who don’t rely on pure stealth. |
Hacking Capture Level 4
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Effects: Breaches level 4 electronic systems |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Hacking Capture Level 5
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Effects: Breaches level 5 electronic systems |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: Go all the way up if you’re pursuing Ghost and Smooth Operator bonuses. |
Camera Domination
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Effects: Lets you disable or commandeer cameras |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: Essential for stealthy play. When you get into a security computer, you gain the ability to turn off all associated cameras attached to that device. |
Turret Domination
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Effects: Lets you disable or commandeer turrets |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: This extends your domination to turrets. These can often be avoided if you know the layout of a level well. In addition, you won’t want to commandeer a turret because their kills will still count as your kills, thus negating a non-lethal run. |
Robot Domination
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Effects: Lets you disable or commandeer Robots |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: Robots are less common and suffer from the same lethality issue as turrets. This is non-essential for stealth and non-lethal players, and is only moderately useful for others because they’re able to combat Robots through many other means. |
Hacking Fortify
These augmentations let Jensen extend his time inside a terminal after being detected. Fortified nodes take much longer to trace, ensuring that the computer doesn’t have enough time to log him out and trigger an alarm. Though useful for hackers, this line isn’t nearly as powerful or important as both Hacking Capture and Hacking Stealth. Take this group last.
Because you can be detected when you Fortify a node, it’s best to wait and Fortify everything right after the AI starts its trace. That way, you can get as far as possible through pure stealth, and still benefit from slowing the computer if things start to go wrong.
Hacking Fortify 1.1
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Effects: Slows traces against the fortified node |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Hacking Fortify 1.2
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Effects: Further slows traces against the fortified node |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Hacking Fortify 1.3
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Effects: Severely slows traces against the fortified node |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Hacking Stealth
Hacking Stealth is a huge benefit when infiltrating more complex systems. The higher level each node is, the higher a chance that you are going to be discovered when taking control of it. Stealth brings that chance down considerably, so you can defeat better and better security systems without failing and causing an alarm.
There is still an element of luck to hacking. Even with high Stealth, you can fail on your first node and end up getting logged out soon after (with an alarm being raised). That’s why even the best hackers should carry extra software, to ensure that they have some padding when things go wonky.
Code-Level Rootkit Ver. 1.0
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Effects: Reduces chance of detection during node capture by 15% |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Regenerative Rootkit Ver. 2.0
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Effects: Reduces chance of detection during node capture by 30% |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: None |
Polymorphic Rootkit Ver. 3.0
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Effects: Reduces chance of detection during node capture by 45% |
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Energy Consumption: None |
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Notes: Minor hackers or those who reload when they fail at hacking can stop before hitting this tier of Hacking Stealth. Players that don’t reload and really care about exploration should take this all the way up. We suggest getting this by mid-game, at latest, if you’re going to get it at all! |