Best Netrunner Perks in Cyberpunk 2077 2.5

Taking down a room full of enemies without firing a shot is part of the appeal of playing a Netrunner in Cyberpunk 2077. Quickhacks let you turn enemy cyberware against them, spread damage between targets, and control a fight from a distance.

Choosing the right perks helps you get more from these tools, increasing your damage and keeping you supplied with the resources needed to continue hacking.

This guide covers six of the best Netrunner perks for Update 2.5, explaining what each one does and how they work together to support your build.

For help choosing which attacks to pair with these perks, explore our best quickhacks in Cyberpunk 2077.

Overclock becomes available at 15 Intelligence and changes how you manage your quickhack resources.

Normally, uploading a quickhack consumes RAM. When you cannot afford another upload, you need to recover enough RAM before continuing. While Overclock is active, you can cover missing RAM with health, allowing you to keep uploading quickhacks beyond your available RAM.

This is particularly useful when facing several enemies or needing an expensive hack at a crucial moment. You can apply effects across a group without immediately stopping when your RAM runs low.

For example, Overheat can burn a target while Contagion helps spread damage between enemies. Overclock gives you more room to use these tools during its active window.

The trade-off is your remaining health. Repeatedly uploading expensive quickhacks can leave you vulnerable to incoming attacks, so keep track of your health bar and use cover while managing your uploads.

Sublimation becomes available at 15 Intelligence and supports the health expenditure created by Overclock.

While Overclock is active, RAM recovery effects also regenerate health. This gives your recovery tools an additional benefit during the period when you are spending health to continue hacking.

The interaction is especially useful in longer encounters. As you upload quickhacks across several targets, RAM recovery can help replenish some of the health used to pay for those attacks.

Sublimation therefore makes RAM recovery more valuable within an Overclock setup. You are supporting both your ability to keep hacking and your ability to survive.

Continue watching your health, particularly when enemies are attacking you directly. The additional recovery helps sustain your offence, but expensive uploads and incoming damage can still leave you exposed.

Race Against Mind increases quickhack damage as your health decreases while Overclock is active.

This works naturally with Overclock because uploading quickhacks can already require you to spend health. As your health drops, Race Against Mind can make subsequent quickhacks more damaging.

That gives the health you spend an additional offensive benefit. You are gaining access to more uploads while also improving the damage potential of the quickhacks you use at lower health.

However, you still need enough health to survive enemy attacks. Trying to remain critically injured for extra damage can quickly end an otherwise successful encounter.

Use the bonus alongside reliable recovery and careful positioning. Sublimation helps support that balance by providing health regeneration through your RAM recovery effects during Overclock.

Hack Queue allows you to queue multiple quickhacks against a single target, giving you more control over the order in which their effects are applied.

This creates opportunities to combine a supporting effect with a damaging quickhack. Instead of selecting each upload separately after the previous one finishes, you can prepare a sequence that suits the enemy you are fighting.

Queues are particularly useful against tougher enemies that can survive an individual quickhack. Consider what each part of the sequence contributes, whether that is disrupting the target, enabling a damage bonus, or delivering the main attack.

The order matters. If your damage relies on the enemy already being affected by another quickhack, establish that effect before the damaging upload takes effect.

Hack Queue also connects with other perks in this guide. Embedded Exploit rewards attacks against enemies affected by qualifying hacks, while Blood Daemon can restore health when an enemy is neutralized with quickhacks still queued.

Blood Daemon provides another way to recover health while Overclock is active.

When you neutralize an enemy during Overclock, the perk restores health based on the quickhacks still remaining in that enemy’s queue. This can help recover some of the health spent uploading your attacks.

The remaining queue is the important part of the interaction. Quickhacks that have already finished uploading are no longer waiting in it, so simply defeating an enemy does not guarantee the same recovery every time.

Blood Daemon is especially useful in encounters involving several enemies, where neutralizing one target can help you maintain enough health to continue fighting the others.

Combined with Sublimation, it gives you two complementary recovery mechanics: healing from RAM recovery and healing from quickhacks left queued when a target is neutralized.

Embedded Exploit rewards you for setting up an enemy before dealing quickhack damage.

Its damage bonus applies against enemies affected by Control quickhacks, Covert quickhacks, or the Distract Enemies quickhack. The relevant condition is the effect on the target, so this perk can help against more than robotic enemies.

Apply a qualifying effect before committing to your damaging quickhacks. This gives the supporting hack a second purpose: alongside its normal effect, it helps enable the damage bonus from Embedded Exploit.

The perk works well with Hack Queue because you can organise your follow-up uploads around the target’s current effects. Make sure the qualifying effect is still active when you need the bonus.

Against bosses and other durable enemies, this setup can help you get more damage from your available resources. Check which quickhacks the target can receive and choose your sequence accordingly.