In this Cyberpunk 2077 Build Guide I’ll be showing you my T-1000 Terminator Build which is a Build that uses the Gorilla Arms Cyberware to pummel enemies to death, while at the same time having enough survive ability to withstand a shitload of gunfire. If you’ve been looking for a good Gorilla Arms Melee Build, then you this Guide is for you.

Cyberpunk 2077 Builds: T-1000 Terminator (Gorilla Arms) Character Guide Weapons Perks

The T-1000 Terminator Build is aptly named not only for the huge amount of Cyberware that you use, but also because you move quickly, hit hard and cannot be killed easily. With this Build you will chase down enemies with prejudice, often killing them in one punch.

The way this Build works is that we take advantage of the Legendary Short Circuit Quickhack to add a huge amount of Shock Damage to our melee attacks, which allows us to spend a good amount of other Perk Points and Mods on survive ability. When you don’t need to worry about your damage, then it is easier to stay alive.

T-1000 Terminator Attributes

The Attributes needed for this Build are Intelligence, Body and Cool. Intelligence is needed in order to obtain the Legendary Short Circuit Quickhack, as well as use some really good Cyberware that increases Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage.

Body is needed to gain Perks related to using the Gorilla Arms in the Street Brawler tree, as well as those in Athletics that will help keep you alive. Additionally, each point in Body gives you more Health, Stamina and Melee Damage. You’ll need lost of Body for some really good Cyberware too.

Cool gives you an excellent buff in Cold Blood that not only increases damage, but also defenses (including up to 100% more Armor). It also provides Resistances and Crit Damage, which are also really good.

Your Attributes should look something like this:

• Intelligence: 20
• Body: 20
• Cool: 20

Your goal will be to max Intelligence straight away, and then start pumping Body in order to gain Perks there and access to better Cyberware. Once that’s done start maxing out Cool in order to get a better and better buff from Cold Blood.

T-1000 Terminator Perks

In this section we’ll take a look at what Perks you should acquire in order to get the best performance from this Build. Intelligence is our top priority, and since it contains Quickhacking, we’ll begin there. It’s important to note that in many cases higher level Perks are better than lower level ones, so if you haven’t maxed a lower level Perk out when you unlock a higher level Perk, you might want to come back to it later on.

Quickhacking Perks

Bloodware – This extremely simple Perk just increases the damage of your Quickhacks. You want them to kill enemies ideally, so you’ll max this one out as well to help make this happen.

Hacker Overlord – This Perk provides you all Epic schematics for every Quickhack in the game instantly. You’ll need the Rare versions to make them, but these are not hard to acquire.

Critical Error – This Perk allows your Quickhacks to deal Critical Damage, which will be a huge boost to Short Circuit damage. Make sure to focus on Crit Chance and Crit Damage in order to make the best use of this Perk.

Bartmoss’ Legacy – This Perk provides you the Legendary schematics for all Quickhacks in the game. You need the Epic versions to craft these, but you’ll have them from Hacker Overlord. Note that you do not need any Crafting Perks in order to make these!

Athletics Perks & Annihilation Perks

Regeneration – This Perk heals you over time while in combat. It doesn’t do a lot of healing, but you can increase it with future Perks making it much more useful. Get it early since it has no requirements.

Invincible – This Perk increases your Health making you harder to kill, and you will be taking some gunfire so you need to stay alive through it. Max this one out straight away. You cannot have enough Health with this Build.

Epimorphosis – This Perk allows you to heal to full every time you leave combat. This saves a lot of healing items, and means you’ll always engage your enemies at full Health, which is great. Max this one out.

Steel and Chrome – This Perk further increases Melee Damage, which isn’t really needed for this Build since the bulk comes from Short Circuit, but this one doesn’t hurt to have.

Cardio Cure – This Perk further increases your Health regeneration in combat while moving. You’ll be constantly moving so this works well here, and you want to stack Health regeneration.

Dog of War – This Perk further increases your Health regeneration while in combat, stacking with other bonuses. The more you don’t have to stop and heal, the faster you can wipe out enemies.

Marathoner – This Perk makes it so that Sprinting no longer drains Stamina. You will be non-stop Sprinting while in combat so this works beautifully for this Build. This will really help your Stamina management.

Wolverine – This Perk speeds up the time needed for your Health regeneration to begin in combat, which makes your Health regeneration more effective in general. You should get a ton of Health regeneration with this Build.

Street Brawler Perks

Flurry – This Perk increases your damage with successive hits with your Gorilla Arms. You don’t really need this because your damage will come from Short  Circuit, but it’s still nice to have.

Rush – This Perk will heal you when you strike an enemy for a percentage of your Max Health. This is one of the reasons you want as high of Max Health as you can get, so this heals you more.

Efficient Blows – This Perk reduces the Stamina cost of attacking with the Gorilla Arms. This is very useful when fighting in melee because you need to be able to spam attacks as quickly as you can without worrying about Stamina.

Frenzy – This Perk increases your damage with Blunt Weapons by 100% for 10 seconds after defeating an enemy. This allows you to chain kill enemies more quickly.

Guerrilla – This Perk increases your Critical Damage by up to 100% for the first 10 seconds of combat, which will also apply to Short Circuit! Between this and Merciless you’ll absolutely crush enemies.

Cold Blood & Stealth Perks

Cold Blood – This Perk gives you a buff that lasts 10 seconds when you kill an enemy. It starts out as only a Movement Speed increase, but as you progress you’ll unlock other benefits as well. Take this one immediately in order to begin gaining experience in this Perk tree since at level 2 you gain a permanent Crit Chance boost.

Critical Condition – This Perk increases the duration of your Cold Blood buff. You want this to be as long as you can, so this is a must have Perk for this Build. Max it out as soon as you can.

Rapid Bloodflow – This Perk increases your Health regeneration in and out of combat for each stack of Cold Blood you have. The more healing you can get the better, so you’ll take this one.

Defensive Clotting – Another Perk that will help keep you alive, but this one increases your Armor with each stack of Cold Blood. The more defense you have, the better.

Coldest Blood – This Perk increases the max number of stacks you can have by 1, up to 4 from the 3 if you maxed out Cold Blood itself. Every stack you can gain just makes you stronger, so take this one.

Cold and Calculating – This Perk gives you a chance of gaining a Cold Blood stack when you Critically Hit. You do lot’s of Critical Hits with this Build so that synergizes nicely.

From The Shadows – This Stealth Perk is amazing because it ups your Crit Chance by 50% for the first several seconds of combat. This should allow you to kill several enemies before they even knew what hit them.

Coolagulant – This Perk makes you lose only one stack of Cold Blood at a time, further increasing the duration you maintain its buffs. This one can make your buffs last much much longer, so take it.

Unbreakable – This Perk does the same thing that Coldest Blood does, and will increase your max stacks from 4 to 5 if you maxed Cold Blood and took Coldest Blood. The more stacks you can have at once the stronger you get.

Cheat Death – This Perk reduces incoming damage by half if your Health falls below 50% for several seconds, and has a 1 minute cooldown. This is amazing, because this will happen often and it will keep you alive when it does.

Merciless – This Perk increases not only your Crit Chance, but also your Crit Damage as long as you have Cold Blood activated. This can be a staggering amount of damage, so you’ll definitely want this one.

T-1000 Terminator Equipment

In this section we’ll take a look at what equipment is needed to play the T-1000 Terminator Build. We’ll begin with Weapons first since they will determine how you play this Build.

Weapons

I’ll cover the Gorilla Arms here, even though it’s technically Cyberware, since it’s what you’ll be using for your “weapon”. The Gorilla Arms add increased damage to your fist attacks, and allow you to do things like force open doors etc. You’ll want these if your going to play an “unarmed” Build, since this is the most effective way to do it.

The Gorilla Arms charge up as you perform attacks with them, and you can unleash a devastating attack by doing a Strong Attack after you’ve charged them up. You won’t really need to do this with this Build because of Short Circuit, but you can early on until you gain the Quickhack.

You can modify the Gorilla Arms to do different types of damage, though it is not necessary for this Build. However, there are a couple of Mods you will want for this Build and those are RIN3U Battery and Sensory Amplifier. The RIN3U Battery fully restores Stamina when you defeat an enemy, and Sensory Amplifier has various effects but you want the one that increases your Max Health. Black-Market Battery is also not a bad choice, but you won’t need to Charge Attack with this Build, so you won’t see much use from it.

Armor

Armor-wise, you want to look for bonuses to Crit Chance or Crit Damage ideally. You should aim to have one of each, since having more than that seems to not increase these stats. Having more Armor is of course better, and you will be hit often, and the best way to get more Armor is by using Armor with Mod Slots and slotting Armadillo Mods into them. You can craft these once you have the schematic, and the Armor value from them increases with your Character Level, so make sure to craft more often.

Cyberware

Cyberware is very important to this Build, and I’ll explain here just what you want. First up is your Cyberdeck, and you’ll want the Netwatch Netdrive Mk.5 for this Build. Not only does it allow you to upload a Quickhack to 3 targets at once, but it increases your damage with Quickhacks by 30%. Get this one as soon as you can.

You’ll want both the Limbic System Enhancement and Visual Cortex Support which increase Critical Hit Chance, and Critical Hit Damage. They are some of the best Cyberware in the game, and at Legendary you’ll gain an extra 25% Critical Hit Chance, and 45% Critical Hit Damage.

Biomonitor is also fantastic because it automatically heals you when your Health drops below a certain point, allowing you to keep on fighting without having to stop to heal. This also requires Body to use, but you will have enough to use it eventually, and you can upgrade as you go.

The Synaptic Signal Optimizer is another great Cyberware for this Build as it increases your Health by a huge amount, and you gain Health back when punching based on your Max Health. Make sure to get this one when you can.

The last Cyberware you’ll absolutely want for this Build is Subdermal Armor, since you need all the Armor you can get. More Armor equals less damage taken, so stack it sky high.

Quickhacks

The only Quickhack you need for this Build is Short Circuit and you can purchase a Rare version from the Netrunner in Pacifica. Once you have this you can upgrade it to Epic once you have the Hacker Overlord Perk, and once it’s Epic you can upgrade it again to Legendary once you have the Bartmoss’s Legacy perk.

Final Tips

One of the really fun things to do with this Build is to begin combat by crashing your vehicle right into the middle of enemies, since you can Crit with your car, and that will proc Short Circuit, often one-shotting most enemies. Since you have extremely high survive ability, so can get out and survive, even if surrounded. It’s a ton of fun. Just be careful because you can kill citizens with a love tap.

Punching robots will often kill you because they explode, so instead of trying to melee them just use Short Circuit from range to take them out. It will save you a quick death and it’s really easy to do, even mid combat.

You shouldn’t need to heal often with the way this Build is setup, but you will need to from time to time, so don’t think that you’re completely invincible. This is especially true early on, since you won’t have all the parts of this Build.

Lastly, you can get a Legendary version of the Gorilla Arms if you complete the main story, or you have to purchase it from a Ripperdoc for around 100k Credits. You should be able to get this about the time you hit 20 in Intelligence, so you’re Build will come together all at once.

---

Stay tuned for more of Cyberpunk 2077 Build Guides, and be sure to drop by the Cyberpunk 2077 wiki for all your Night City needs. Or you can drop by our Twitch Channel and say hi as we stream the game over the next couple of weeks! And make sure to check out our Early Impressions and Character Creation!