Best Payday 3 Tank Build: Weapons, Skills, Equipment

Bulldoze your way through the opposition to set up the perfect heist for your team!

The best tank build loadout forms the frontline of an assault in Payday 3 that can take heavy damage and can return the favor exponentially as well.

Having a tank player on your heist team is essential in Payday 3. Now you can simply pick out all of the tank skills to make yourself beefy, but that is not how it works.

To be an efficient and aggressive tank, you are going to need the best tank skills that complement each other. That is how you are going to create a good tank build in Payday 3.

Payday 3 tank build weapons

Primary Weapon Slot: Car-4
Secondary Weapon Slot: Signature.40
Overkill Weapon Slot: Marcom Mamba MGL

For the best tank build loadout in Payday 3, assault rifles should be your focus for the primary weapon slot. The VF-7S is a deadly gun but it takes a lot of grind to unlock at level 77, so it’s recommended to start with CAR-4 since it unlocks at level 1 and then work your way up.

Pistols are a good choice to have as your secondary weapon, the Signature .40 is an all-around weapon available to you at the start of the game and it serves its purpose well.

The carnage doesn’t stop here; Overkill Weapons take it one step further. This slot includes the Marcom Mamba MGL, a grenade launcher capable of firing 6 grenades before you have to reload.

Best Payday 3 tank build skills

Ammo Specialist: Ammo Specialist, Plate Up
Tank: Tank (Aced), Extra Plates, Last Man Standing
Enforcer: Enforcer

Our main goal here is to target the skills that grant us Grit and Edge quickly. For a functioning tank loadout, we will be focusing on 6 of the best tank skills in Payday 3.

Ammo Specialist will buff your reserve ammo by 20% and the ammo bags you deploy will have 2 additional charges. This skill is vital for our best tank build in Payday 3; the more bullets you have, the more enemies you can mow down from the frontline.

Plate Up comes under the Ammo Specialist skill tree. This skill works really when paired with Grit. Players can replenish their ammo from dead bodies or traded hostages; they can also replenish armor chunks upon picking up ammo drops. The ammo drop incentive is only available if players have Grit.

The Tank skill works well in both basic and aced versions. In the basic version, your armor chunks regenerate 20% quicker. The aced version grants players Grit or recharges it when the armor chunk breaks. This is a great way to gain Grit and use it with the Plate Up skill for a health advantage.

As the name suggests, the Extra Plates skill increases your armor bag by 2 charges. This takes the total to 6 charges in your armor bag which can be used to fix broken armor chunks.

Last Man Standing is a really powerful skill as it allows players to stay alive from damage that would normally kill them and become invincible to all damage for 10 seconds.

The cost is that it consumes all of your available Grit and you can’t recharge it unless you heal using a Medical Bag/ First Aid Kit or are downed.

Suffice it to say, Last Man Standing forms the base for our best tank build in Payday 3. It pairs well with the other best tank skills to make you bulldoze your enemies like nothing.

Lastly, Enforcer skill allows you to gain Grit and Edge easily. In its basic version, if you kill 2 enemies within 4 seconds that are in a 5-metre radius around you, you gain Grit.

In the aced version, if you kill an enemy within a 5-metre radius, you will get Edge provided you have Grit.

Payday 3 tank build equipment

Deployable: Ammo bag
Armor Lining: Medium Ballistic Lining
Throwable: Flashbang Grenade
Tool: Infrasonic Mine

Last but not least, let’s discuss our equipment. Equipment forms a vital part of your tank arsenal and if used tactfully, can help you get out of tricky situations. The list along with the best recommendations are as follows:

For the Deployable, go with the ammo bag. One can never have too much ammo and those extra bullets might save your life in combat.

Choose the Medium Ballistic Lining as your armor lining. It is made of flexible ceramic lattices which offer a good balance in speed and protection when compared to light and heavy ballistic lining armors.

Choose the Flashbang Grenade as your throwable. As the name suggests, it stuns and freezes your enemies for a short duration, allowing you to take swarths of them out easily.

Out of the 4 available tools, you can choose any depending on your playstyle. However, after fiddling through most of them you will find that the infrasonic mine is best suited for our best Tank build in Payday 3; the rest of the tools fall under the surveillance/ stealth category.

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Ali is a passionate RPG gamer. He believes that western RPGs still have a lot to learn from JRPGs. He is editor-in-chief at SegmentNext.com but that doesn't stop him from writing about his favorite video ...