Hi everybody, what is your gameplay style in Deus Ex GOTY and what augmentations do you recommand? Which one is the best between Microfibral Muscle and Combat Augmentation? How about between Aqualungs and Environmental Resistance? I personally like to stealth behind the enemies and knock them with the baton or from far away using the mini crossbow, so what are to your opinion the most appropriate augmentations for this kind of gameplay? Thanks for your suggestions

I like stealth play too, so I usually choose the following:

Microfibral Muscle – allows you to access some alternative pathways and ducts
Run Silent – for obvious reasons
Cloak – human opponents are more frequent and mobile than robots and cameras
Ballistic Protection – again, more bullets than energy weapons
Regeneration – useful in any situation, whereas the energy shield is only useful in certain contexts
Environmental Resistance – only because Aqualung is useless; in most of the submerged areas you can survive on your own if you invest only a skill point or two in swimming; for those few other situations there's the rebreather
Power Recirculator – to better save energy when you have the Cloak and Run Silent activated
Spy Drone – for reconnaisance, but I didn't use it very much
Vision Enhancement – aids stealth play

It basically boils down to player choice; there really aren't any useless augmentations, with one or two exceptions.

It's been a long time since I played without a gameplay mod, but here are my suggestions from what I remember. And let me preface this by saying, there is no wrong way to build your JC Denton. Any build is viable, some will just have more trouble than others.

When you start the game, upgrade Lockpicking, Electronics, and Computers. The first two will get you 25% off a lock or electronic device with a lockpick or multitool respectively, and the latter will allow you to hack computers and security terminals, which basically eliminates the need to find passwords ever. You may want to upgrade Computers to Advanced later in the game, to give you more time to read e-mails, but otherwise that's all you need for those three.

Once you've done that, you MIGHT want to upgrade Pistols to Advanced; the jump in power is very noticeable.

After that, I'd suggest plowing toward Master level in Rifles as soon as you can; once you reach that, the Sniper Rifle has enough power to destroy cameras and turrets, and can also take down MJ12 Commandos (which are big brutes with wrist-mounted cannons and rockets) in one headshot.

From there, it's basically personal preference.

As for augmentations...

Subdermal: Ballistic Protection and Cloak. This gives you the widest range of usefulness; almost all enemies use ballistic weapons, and the majority of enemies you can't sneak around are human.

Cranial: Aggressive Defense System. Explosives are a huge danger to you, and them detonating early is a huge plus. Also, I personally don't like Spy Drone; it drains way too much power for what it does.

Arms: Microfibral Muscle. Being able to lift heavy objects is a lot more useful than doing melee damage, especially with the awesome melee weapon you'll get as part of the storyline.

Legs: Speed Enhancement.. Run Silent just doesn't do that much, and you can crouch with Speed Enhancement on to move quickly and silently.

Eyes: Vision Enhancement. This is personal preference. I'll admit it's really cool to see detailed information on enemies, but I prefer being able to see through walls (at Tech 3 and 4.)

Torso: Aqualung, Regeneration, Power Recirculator. Aqualung is more useful than Environmental Resistance because there's a LOT more situations where you can swim and there's no rebreather than there are situations where you need to cross an environmental hazard and there's no HazMat suit.

Regeneration is mostly personal preference to me, and the alternative aug in that cannister (Energy Shield) is good too, but I'd rather be able to heal than take less damage from energy. Aggressive Defense System can detonate explosives and (I think) plasma bolts, and enemies with flamethrowers are very uncommon.

Power Recirculator is again personal preference; I'd rather save my biocells. The alternative, Synthetic Heart, burns 100 energy per minute (which is a full charge) in exchange for boosting the performance of your other augs (but not beyond their max level) which in my mind is not worth it.

Weapons: I always take one heavy weapon, usually the GEP Gun, for dealing with enemy mechs.

Two pistol-grip weapons are a good idea; I would suggest the Stealth Pistol and the Mini-Crossbow. The Stealth Pistol is silent, although it requires a double-tap to the head to down most enemies, and one tranquilizer dart will eventually down any human enemy, no matter where you hit them.

I also take a Sniper Rifle, the melee weapon you get as part of the story, an Assault Rifle, and either an Assault Shotgun or a Sawed-off Shotgun. As I mentioned, the Sniper Rifle can destroy cameras and turrets (and some doors) at Master Rifles. That melee weapon is extremely powerful, to the point that you can destroy bots with it if you're patient. The Assault Rifle is a good mid-range weapon and has an underhand grenade launcher, and the Assault Shotgun is excellent at close range. The Sawed-off Shotgun actually does more damage per shot, but has a much slower rate of fire. Both are capable of taking down bots with 12-Gauge Sabot rounds.

Whatever you've got left over in your inventory is personal preference. Grenades, miscellaneous items, and so on.

I haven't played Deus Ex for a while, but I clearly remember having used a rebreather only once in the entire playthrough, and that was in the flooded metro station in Hong Kong. Even the underwater base was quite dry. In flooded areas that are strictly quest-related there are plenty of air pockets to help the players who haven't opted for Aqualung and who don't have a rebreather handy, otherwise they'd have a very difficult time.

As for mechs, I always carry a couple of EMP or Scramble grenades, and one is usually enough to take care of any mech situation, and they take MUCH less inventory space than a GEP gun. Or I just sneak past mechs; there are few of them in the game that are a real threat anyway.

Thanks for your replies guys, I will give it a try with Microfibral Muscle and Aqualungs. As for the skills, which ones do you think are necessary and which are not? I personally started the game with Lockpicking, Electronics, and Computer. Is that a good choice? What do you think should be updated? What is worthless to invest points into? Thx guys.

Apparently you should avoid swimming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j8jMn2Kcgs

Lockpicking, Electronics and Computer are all solid, just don't forget to also get a weapon skill. All other skills except Swimming are at least marginally useful, although I'd avoid the Medical one - it's just not useful enough, especially if you get the regeneration augment.

This ass-umes I'm playing the vanilla game--no mods and I'm not using cheats...

At first I do the following in skills...

Trained in swimming as I DON'T use the Atualung aug (Environmental Resistance is MUCH more useful) and there aren't very many places in game where swimming is needed--but when I need the skill it's there, at least if I'm fast.

Trained in Demolition Weapons to avoid getting fragged/fried/gassed when plucking useful munitions from walls.

Advanced at Pistol Weapons because I like using the Mini Crossbow for nonlethal attacks and whatever weapon skill decision I make throughout the rest of the game I KNOW I've got a solid backup with Stealth Pistol'Mini Crossbow/others--PLUS pistol ammo is fairly widely available in all maps, even the later ones.

If I were going for complete stealth and not my usual mix for augmentations I'd pick...

Spy Drone which is good for EMP attacks that bring down bots (at higher upgrade levels)
Microbial Muscle because I find it helpful in ANY 'character build.'
Radar Transparancy which is helpful with cameras
Cloak for obvious reasons
Run Silent because I'd want to be all stealthy and things. :-)
Power Recirculator because this augmentation reduces the power loss from the others
Regeneration to save inventory space
Environmental Resistance because for me it's always been more useful than Aqualung
Vision Enhancement again because it's just too useful.

As an aside does ANYONE use the Targeting augmentation? From everything I've read it seems like Ion Storm should have rethought this one out of ALL the augmentations they made for this game.

The targeting augmentation is actually rather good. Combined with good weapon skill, it makes your accuracy extremely high. It's actually possible to get 100% accuracy with even the sawed-off shotgun with the targeting aug and Master rifle skill.

Also: It works by altering your effective skill level with all weapons. This means that it not only works on hand-to-hand weapons too, but also increases your damage, lowers recoil, helps allow you to run with heavy weapons, etc. It's pretty weird like that.


The Vision aug always bothered me. The first level of it basically just washes everything out with green. Technically speaking, all it does is put a green filter over everything, so green components of on-screen colors are enhanced while red and blue gets totally filtered out. Blood looks totally black, for instance. It does increase the effective brightness of most things, but it's done post-rendering so if something was really dark beforehand then it's still going to have barely any recognizable detail afterward. It's rather unfortunate. Luckily, the other levels of the augmentation do more, and are more useful.