Payday 2 / Tropes M to Z

PAYDAY 2 provides examples of the following tropes:

Tropes A-L | Tropes M-R

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M-R

• Macro Zone: The Lab Rat heist for Halloween 2015 takes the meth lab from the Rats heist and shrinks the players and cops to tiny sizes as they fight on top of the table that the meth is usually cooked on. A giant sized Cloaker and a giant spider may sometimes appear as well.
• Machete Mayhem: The Utility Machete, a weapon added by the Gage Shotgun DLC, the aptly named "Machete", added in the Point Break Heists DLC, and the El Verdugo, added for free when Sangrez was added to the game. They all deal some of the most damage out of any of the melee weapons when charged.
• MacGuffin: Many of the non-monetary things you steal in the game qualify, Vlads' safes in Aftershock, the Tiara in Ukranian Job, the briefcases in Boiling Point and Brooklyn 10-10, the list goes on.
• Made of Iron: The combination of the top-tier skills Iron Man and Bulletproof (Enforcer and Technician trees respectively) and the best armor in the game can give a player the ability to take dozens of hits before their armour breaks.^note To Give an idea of how strong a tech-forcer is. Taking these two skills into account, and using the armorer perk deck (A skill deck made for maxing out armor health) A player can have 315 armor, with a recharge time for 1.5 seconds! (instead of 3) At this point you are a walking tank! And if you lose all your armor. All you need to do is sit behind cover for a second and a half, and you're at full again! This can even be expanded even FURTHER by adding Underdog Aced ((Enforcer) Take 15% less damage when there is 3+ enemies near you) and Nerves of Steel ((Tech) Take 50% less damage when using something... Like Reviving a teammate. In a crowd of cops)
  • The cops are continually frustrated by the Payday Gang's absurd resistance to gunfire.
  Cop: "Center mass! Center mass, for fuck's sake!"
  Cop: "Double tap! Triple tap! JUST KEEP TAPPING!"
  • The AI players also count, should you choose to have them enabled, as they can have anywhere from 2000 to 2500 HP - half that of a Bulldozer!
• The Man Is Keeping Us Down: Chains says the trope name to an extent in the web series, claiming the banks and corporations are designed to keep people in debt for life and that they (the PAYDAY gang) are out to steal what's rightfully theirs. In the second episode, Dallas tells the civilians in the bank during the robbery that First World Bank has been robbing them all blind. How much of this they actually believe is debatable, however, as they have zero altruistic motives.
  • This is Bodhi's characterisation in a nutshell.
• Marathon Level:
  • The Train Heist. Not only is it pretty lengthy in itself (players must open several train cars, resorting to drilling when abilities and keycards run out, and then use thermal lances to open a few vaults), but before Update #57 rolled around and turned it into a separate contract, unlocking it required grinding the Armored Transport missions for military blueprints, which could take upwards of ten minutes each time.
  • The Bomb (Forest) Heist is just pure hell. It includes 8 possible locations for the vault, which has to be opened from the side that is on the top, which is even more annoying, because the lack of cover means that most of the cops all around the hillsides will spot you and start firing, forcing you to stay away from whatever needs to be done, such as to fix the drilling sequence, until the heat dies down. The vault itself uses the water trick to open, so that's drilling and pumping water and blowing it up. And THEN there's the escape sequence, which requires you to carry loads and loads of bags to the escape area, which can be located on the other side of the map!
  • Cooking a full seven bags of meth on Rats can take about half an hour for one day of the three-day heist. If the RNG Gods are unkind this can result in a five-day marathon due to the potential for both Day 1 and Day 2 to have escapes.
  • White Xmas and Cookoff, both of whom have literally infinite loot, so unless you've agreed upon a set amount with your buddies, expect to be there for a looooong time, either chasing down loot or cooking meth (and, in the latter, pray the lab doesn't explode as it could end the mission in failure if you didn't hit the 3-bag increment).
  • Crime Sprees are a series of randomly selected heists that progressively get harder through with a variety of modifiers.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: None of the police units are female, not even the beat cops or security guards. Averted in the Hoxton Breakout update, which adds (non-tactical) female FBI agents and a female prison guard to keep it in line with the accompanying short film. Also averted in the Biker Heist, as the Overkill MC have female memebers that you need to take out in order to progress.
• Mighty Glacier: Enforcers (or anyone else using Enforcer skills in general) tend to fall into the trope if they don't invest in extra speed from the Ghost tree. A fully pimped out Enforcer wearing the ICTV armor will be slow as molasses, but can take gunfire like nothing else can, while dealing out a ton of hurt to enemies. Bulldozers also move (somewhat) slowly while having lots of health and firepower - though they can still climb up the wall of a house, and sprint!
• Militaries Are Useless:
  • Although in GO Bank, Bain mentions that the National Guard is pursuing the Payday gang, none of them were even existing in locations that were already struck by said criminal gang. Not to mention for certain heists that may span more than an hour to complete. Not even a functioning tank sent in after the criminal situation already bankrupted Washington DC.
  • Murkywater is the biggest merc company out there, down to having at least two high-tech facilities and the backing of an Ancient Conspiracy, down to taking over the White House. The Payday Gang still blows through 'em like a chainsaw and paper.
• Mind Screwdriver: The Hardcore Henry Packs Trailer is just as confusing to the audience as it is to the PAYDAY gang, which deals with psychic powers, reincarnation, many unexplained events out of the blue. However, the trailer makes significantly more sense if you watch the movie.
• Missing Secret: Originally, the players were supposed to unlock only one item at a time, spreading the original weapons over all 100 levels, as seen in very early beta footage. At one point, Overkill merged several unlocks together, meaning players unlocked all content at around level 40. ^note Such footage showed, for example, the Locomotive 12G shotgun getting unlocked at level 95, while in the final game, it becomes available at level 13.
  • Semi-averted later in that at those levels you unlock weapons that also need the corresponding DLC pack to be unlocked, hence unlocking nothing.
• Money Mauling: You can whack people on the head with a stack of Benjamins. It's weaker than using your fists (you need to use it twice to even break thin glass), but the sheer ludicrousness of the situation causes trained special ops to fall down in surprise. The money stack can be swung fairly quickly and has a good amount of knockback, making the process of subduing law enforcement to be taken as hostages easier. What makes the weapon even sillier is you have to unlock it at a certain level instead of just taking your own money.
• Mook–Face Turn: The Joker skill allows you to convert a guard or cop to fight for your side. Related skills allow you to convert two at a time, give your minions extra health and firepower, or enhance your own abilities (e.g. running speed and health regeneration).
  • The stronger the enemy, the more health he'll start with.
  • Some (unarmored) cops carry Bronco .44 pistols. A converted one will be a bit of a Glass Cannon, but while he lasts, his shots will be very effective.^note  He also may be difficult to dominate. Chances are you'll one-shot kill him, and he probably won't dominate until he's taken damage, so your best bet is to melee him first. In the meantime, you're running straight at a guy who is shooting at you with a hand cannon...
  • They will behave very much like team AI, but are not controllable and will not pick you up if you go down. (They also get stuck easily. If the fight has moved on, they'll just idle there. You'll still get any boosts, but lose the extra fighting power.)
  • You can't dominate or convert specials ^note (dammit) or thugs.
• Mook Medic: There is the Medic unit, which spawn rather frequently among waves of basic enemies on Overkill difficulty and above. While not especially powerful attackers, and sporting a slightly higher-than-average health pool, they fully heal any enemy that is killed near it, including other special units, from the more basic Shield to the almighty Bulldozer and its HP in the several thousands.
  • Later on they combined the Bulldozer and Medic units into a single super unit for the hardest difficulty. They can potentially spawn in pairs, and can heal each other...
• More Criminals Than Targets: Inverted. The amount of law enforcement thrown at you seems to exceed the city's population.
• More Dakka:
  • Gage Weapon Pack 02 DLC introduces LMGs to the game, including the return of the Brenner from Payday: The Heist. To balance to ammo capacity and rate of fire, they have 20% movement speed reduction while held, and you can't aim down their sights like you can with most weapons - you can still aim a little better, but a laser sight is practically mandatory.
  • The Overkill DLC pack adds a minigun which works much the same way as the LMGs, except you move even slower with it equipped.
  • The aced version of the Mastermind's Equilibrium skill outright doubles the fire rate of pistols. Attach it to a machine pistol or dual pistols and the fire rate is higher than the aforementioned LMGs.
• Money for Nothing: Since money works as experience and actual cash to spend, this occurs every PAYDAY. After level caps reduce money for XP^note (most likely to prevent low-level people hiding on OVERKILL missions to skip several levels) an ~80% cut then goes "to an offshore laundering account" — meaning a multi-million heist result could leave you with as little as a few hundred thousand to actually spend. Once you obtained most of your skills and preferred guns, however, money becomes useless unless you're interested in using the respec system.
  • Which costs of your offshore account money and ALL of your spending money. Have fun grinding for a pair of sunglasses! (And permanent bonuses to allow lower requirements for rank four skills)
  • Mask materials, patterns, and colors follow this the same way. While the masks themselves can be sold from the inventory, materials, patterns, and colors cannot. Even worse is the fact that patterns MUST be selected with Colors in order to be finalized and discarded.
• Multiple Endings: The White House heist, chronologically the last heist, has two possible endings. The standard ending, done by completing the mission objectives normally, where Bain dies, and the secret Golden Ending, which you must fulfill by completing a series of steps within the game itself, which lets you find a secret area that contains a cure for Bain's virus.
• Mundane Utility: The gang steals the Diamond from the McKendrick Museum of Ancient Arts. Do they sell it? No. They give it to Sokol to be turned into the world's biggest drill bit.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Any heist remake from the first game has a remix of the music associated with that heist. For example, the Heat Street remake has "Double Cross 2017", and the No Mercy remake has "Code Silver 2018". The sole exception is the Diamond Heist remake, as the music associated with the original heist was already remixed in 2014 in The Diamond Heist; and so instead another track was chosen, the fan-favorite "I Will Give You My All"; a song associated with the games' advertising.
  • The Diamond Heist is one big nod to the heist with the same name in PAYDAY: The Heist; both heists have you messing with circuit board wiring to disable the lasers where the main prize is located and if the heist goes loud, you'll have to hack the security systems to proceed. While the glass cutter in the first game was used only to extract the rare red diamond, the tool returns in the sequel to be used to steal optional loot without setting off the alarms. Another nod to the first game comes in the form of a puzzle you need to solve to obtain the diamond by carefully stepping on the correct tiles while stepping on the wrong one releases gas into the room, which is a reference to the secret vault in the First World Bank with a similar puzzle.
  • The original game's sole DLC was the "Wolf Pack", the major additions of which were a Grenade Launcher (the GL40) and two heists (Counterfeit and Undercover). Eventually, among all the other DLC PAYDAY 2 has received, it got its own version of the "Wolf Pack" - the major additions with it being a different Grenade Launcher (the China Puff 40mm, since the GL40 came with a much earlier DLC) and ports of the same two heists as the original. For added bonus, anyone who owned the DLC for the original game got the second game's version for free.
• Naïve Newcomer: In a way, Commissioner Garrett. He's a legendary police commissioner, famous for taking down entire mafias and genuinely is the impressive strategist that the SWAT team desperately needs, but he's oblivious to the scale of corruption in his own partners and is only mildly suspicious of PMC's like Murkywater (he suspects them of transporting illegal contraband since they won't even say there was a theft, but definitely has no clue about the stolen nuclear warheads).
• Nerf:
  • Enemy AI used to come in huge swarms and were extremely aggressive until the community complained about it, causing the developers to scale down the aggression to more reasonable levels. Though at a certain point this change was reversed and enemies once again swarm you, especially on Death Sentence difficulty where every enemy can kill you in 2 hits or less.
  • Mask mods were obtained too frequently over other payday bonuses, so the drop rate for mask mods were scaled down and a money bonus card was added to keep things interesting.
  • The Cable Guy skill used to allow the user to have 10 cable ties but it was reduced down to 5 ties after the developers saw players were easily tying up every hostage in the level to do stealth with little trouble; this was eventually pushed up to six ties with the skill, alongside the ability to rarely replenish ties from ammo boxes, enough to have up to nine hostages tied down with the skill.
  • The Mastermind's Dominator skill used to allow the player to intimidate multiple cops at once, making some stealth portions of a heist extremely easy. Now the team can only scare one cop at a time. Dominating cops or guards in stealth also used to not set off their pagers like killing them would; now it does.
  • All the shotguns in patch 11 got nerfed to the point where they can no longer hit an enemy at a long distance for full/high damage. The Mosconi shotgun used to be the only weapon with a maxed out damage rating until it was hit with the nerf. This is quite annoying with some automatic shotguns, which are about as strong as one of the higher end assault rifles.
  • Death Wish (Patch 24) brought along some painful nerfs to stealthers in the form of limiting body bags (2 per player) and disabling the Joker ability (which, among other things, frees up the single "Dominated Guard" slot the team has) while in stealth. While the latter could be expected given the odd situations it causes (such as a jokered guard calling in a busted camera, breaking your stealth attempt), the former was completely out of left field. These changes, understandably, did not go over well with the fanbase.
  • The Spring Break event brought some beneficial changes to the Train Heist. The explosive ammo bags no longer explode from hard impacts and the achievement related to them have been reduced from 40 bags to 20.
  • The tactic of camping has been hit with the nerf bat several times through the use of more spawn points for enemies in the DLC/free maps, increased the duration of flashbangs, and Captain Winters who makes the assault wave not end while buffing the defense of all enemies and uses several shield units while camping in one spot of the map to make you come to him.
  • Special SWAT units were given a 15% health reduction temporarily due to a Game-Breaking Bug in patch 94 that was linked to marking special enemies and the developers disabled enemy marking as a temporary fix.
  • Because of the addition of the Medic, the Cloaker's spawnrate got significantly decreased and no longer spawns in "Hard" difficulty. He still spawns in "Very Hard" and higher difficulties, though.
  • The Airbow that comes with the Ethan and Hila Character Pack DLC. It was a weapon with high damage, and highly concealable so it's viable with dodge and crit build. A few days later its concealment rate was decreased to 5 from 28.
• Necessary Drawback: Class balancing enforces this. On a scale of Fragile Speedster to Mighty Glacier, the order is: Ghost — Mastermind & Fugitive — Technician — Enforcer.
  • Light machine guns: high ammo capacity, high rate of fire, and is great to use to clear out crowds in small areas, especially with headshots. Has a LONG reload time and can't actually aim down their sights (and, as such, can't fit sight attachments to boost their stability) so that the weapon isn't completely overpowered. Bipods go some way to address their accuracy at long range, but require a player to brace themselves against the floor or a convenient chest-high wall and gives them a limited firing arc while set up.
  • Sniper rifles: high power (even the weakest ones equal the damage of the strongest assault rifles and shotguns; the Thanatos is at the point where only explosives deal higher damage), can pierce multiple enemies, and can hit enemies from behind certain walls or through armor, including Shields. Has a low ammo pool, lengthy reload times, and has a very slow rate of fire.
  • Dual pistols: double the firepower and double the ammo capacity. Requires you to collect double the ammo to stay full, accuracy is bad (since they can't be aimed properly either), and stability is horrendous, which makes it difficult to keep a steady aim when rapid firing. Dual wielding pistols is a primary weapon instead of a secondary.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Gunfight: With the correct build, this can be gloriously inverted.
• New Game Plus: The Infamy system. Once you hit level 100, you can choose to reset your character level back to 0 while also losing all your spending cash and $200,000,000 from your offshore account (for the first five times). All of your level-locked guns and armor are relocked due to level restriction (though able to be used without having to be bought again once you get back to their required level) and you'll also lose all of your class skills. Becoming infamous earns you a card to show off to other players displaying your infamy and you'll earn infamy points to spend in a special infamy tree. The infamy tree permanently increases your experience earned and can decrease the number of points required to advance to the next tier in a tree, and some fun mask options. You also get a power guitar chord when you join a game. You can earn up to 100 levels of infamy.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The events leading up to Bain suffering from a virus the Kataru injected into him was caused by the crew's heist on the No Mercy hospital from the first game (this was due to the contact they worked with, who wanted the item, and would later on in the sequel become the crew's main antagonist). While it is never shown, a fictional news report states that a "mysterious fire" caused the whole building to collapse. Said fire was caused by a missile attack by Murkywater fighter jet against the hospital.
• Ninja: Repeatedly referenced. There is the Shinobi Ghost Skill, and then the Shadow Raid heist. All the achievements read together sound like a Badass Creed. There is also the Gage Ninja Pack DLC, which adds throwable shuriken and the option of an Okinawan-style sai and a kunai for melee. Some heisters, like Bodhi, also refer to Cloakers as "ninja cops" and similar.
• No Fair Cheating: Effectively what makes Death Wish^note and now Mayhem and Death Sentence difficulty so hard; not only is the AI advantage maxed out, but even cutting corners isn't allowed. Try to charge to the Ukrainian Job safes and detonate them for the tiara? The safes can only be drilled. Want to blow up the Rats meth lab and skip the tedious, difficult part? The whole map sets on fire to incap everyone and the escape van doesn't trigger, forcing a restart.
• Nostalgia Filter: Parodied In-Universe by a Monthly Safe House job.
  "Nostalgic people prefer to only think about what was good back in the day, easily forgetting the bad days. Like when you're robbing a bank with shoddy weapons and poor armor."
• Nostalgia Level: In the same manner as Left 4 Dead 2, the developers have gradually ported the original game's heists over to the second game. One interesting difference from its inspiration is that, for the most part, these remade heists are explicitly the second time the gang hits the location in question, which the characters will sometimes comment on.
  • First World Bank, as of the 2015 CrimeFest, makes a return from the previous game and it plays exactly like before while having some minor changes and randomizations to make it feel a little different. Unlike in the original version, it's possible to finish the heist in stealth, with the addition of an insider who directs you on how to sneak through if you keep things quiet.
  • Slaughterhouse was added a few days later as well, featuring similar upgrades as First World Bank. Unlike First World Bank, this heist still can't be done in stealth.
  • In February 2016, the game got its own version of the first game's Wolf Pack DLC - including ports of the same Counterfeit and Undercover heists the original added, again featuring a few upgrades and changes, most noticably the ability to actually print counterfeit money at the end of the former. As a bonus, owners of the first game's Wolf Pack got this version for free.
  • The Hoxton's Housewarming Party event added a remade Panic Room heist on the last day.
  • The Search for Kento event added another two remade heists, with Heat Street coming on day 2 and Green Bridge on day 10, both with minor changes, both to gameplay as well as to their story to fit in with the event in question (such as the Chinese prisoner from Green Bridge being replaced with a Yakuza member named Kazuo).
  • Crimefest 2018 added the No Mercy heist, with small changes in the lore to fit the current storyline. Unlike the other Classic heists, this one is stated to be a flashback.
• Noob Cave: Jewelry Store and Four Stores (Normal difficulty) are very straightforward with minimal randomization elements and simple objectives.
  • Four Stores is easy enough after Infamy on Overkill with decent weapons (presumably you built some before you went Infamous... right?), help from the AI, and a bit of care. ^note And patience, because you might have to drill several safes.
  • Jewelry Store is simple enough that even on Death Wish, you can solo it as a level 0 heister (which makes it great for jumping right back into the action after going infamous). The same goes for Ukrainian Job, which uses the same map.
  • Four Stores can also be solo-stealthed at level 0 on any difficulty, but requires a big safe in the coffee shop (drilling any other big safe will attract guards), so may take several restarts. ^note At Overkill or below, you can bring an ECM and pop the ATM in the store. With a bit of luck you can do it without being detected, then hide in the back.
• No One Gets Left Behind: If a Point of No Return occurs during a day (or escape), all human players have to be in the escape zone or in custody for the day to successfully complete. If even a single player is 5 inches away when the timer expires, the entire day is failed. While this behavior has been in Payday 2 since launch, it was exceedingly rare that this situation would come up, as the only non-escape heists that have this are the stealth-only heists, GO Bank (free DLC), the technically-an-escape Train Heist (paid DLC, bonus contract for the longest time). Of these, the stealth-only heists are the most likely heists where this can happen, due to it being possible to trigger the point of no return before the mission objectives had been completed, since it's triggered by setting off the alarm and breaking stealth.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Falling from a great height will either severely damage your health or instantly incapacitate you, depending on the distance. Before the effects were made part of the default game, the Cat Burglar skill reduced fall damage and acing it damaged armor instead. However, in the "Birth of Sky" heist, if you're stupid enough to jump out of the airplane without your parachute, you'll splatter yourself across the pavement and get taken into custody instantly.
• Not the Intended Use: The Taser-type melee weapons are mainly used to incapacitate non-Bulldozer targets to easily kill them while they're stunned. This also has the side effect of discharging their entire magazine, which in addition to measly 20 points of damage it does, this creates the absolutely perfect criteria for holding up enemies you want to take hostage and convert, especially the Bronco wielding beat cops who typically appear as part of the first response.
• No-Sell: The point of the Stoic perk deck; a significant chunk of damage you take is converted into Damage Over Time, and the deck's gimmick allows you to not only dump the currently-ticking Do T, but heal back 50% of it. A Stoic build can get bitchslapped by a Skulldozer or eat a Sniper round to the face and not only laugh it off, but come back stronger.
• No Swastikas: In the trailer for the diamond heist that shows the history of its owners, the part in Nazi Germany has flags that just have featureless circles instead.
• No Sympathy: It can feel like this when using aced Inspire to revive companions at a distance; they've been shot up and are probably screaming for help, while you holler "Pain is just mental!" and "Get back in the fight!" at them instead of seeing to their wounds.
  • Chains, Houston, Hoxton and Wolf all just shout "Get the fuck up!" instead of the previous lines, which are said by Dallas.
  • Even the Medic Bulldozers get in on trash-talking their fellow officers when they pick them back up, as they too have Inspired Aced.
• Obvious Rule Patch: The developers saw players were constantly playing levels like Nightclub, Four Stores, and Ukrainian Job because they were extremely easy to complete in a matter of minutes (or even seconds!), which led to people farming the levels for experience points, cash, and random loot with little effort. The developers then patched the game to include escape sequences in the most farmed levels if the players finish them loud instead of quiet in order to discourage them from farming the same level over and over. Additional patches also changed the layout of the Nightclub heist so the safe with the money is in a random location in order to discourage farming.
  • The Death Wish update enhanced this further by introducing EXP reduction if you play the same level over and over while giving you an EXP boost on heists you haven't played in a while. The same update also introduced an anti-level grinding feature for the Death Wish version of Rats on day 1; trying to blow up the lab so you can skip cooking the meth? The lab still explodes, but the explosion and fire covers the entire level. Even if you try get around this, the escape van is programmed to never show up unless you cooked 3 bags of meth.
  • Newer stealth maps are being made resistant to the controversial tactic of ECM rushing. The Bomb Dockyard is impossible to rush since the Moretta takes so long to change berths. You can rush Car Shop, but breaking anything glass will set off the alarm and it's almost impossible to avoid someone (you or a guard) shooting a window during a rush since the whole front of the shop and half the second-floor interior are windows. Additionally, in Hoxton's Revenge your EC Ms mess up the timelock on the panic room and it stops counting down when an ECM is active.
  • Update #75 changed the exp system from a set amount of exp per heist to a variable range, where you start out with a base set of exp and gain additional ones based on objectives being completed and loot secured. This was due to players sitting in Crime Net trying to "snipe" heists to get massive amounts of exp without doing any work, as well as people doing just the bare minimum of objectives and leaving the majority of the money behind since they usually take a long time. The most notable of these changes is Shadow Raid; prior to the patch you would receive almost 1 million in exp upon completion. Now even with many infamy points you would only receive about 300k on the highest difficulty unless you looted every piece of loot and the armor.
  • Jewelry Store can still be solo-ECM-rushed in under 30 seconds on Normal, and under 18 seconds with a coordinated team. You don't get much money or XP^note which is probably why they never patched it, but it's the fastest way to farm post-heist card flips.
• Occidental Otaku: It's implied Sydney is one - she's implied to really want to learn how to be a katana master from Jiro (and calls him sempai), and occasionally fakes a sweet-toothed anime voice when picking up pagers.
• Off-the-Shelf FX: The tracer detector in episode 1 of the web series is an Olympus LS-100 field recorder.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: The Dentist in The Dentist trailer knows exactly who Dallas is, and he uses that information to strong arm him into doing jobs for him, and also promises to break Hoxton out of jail, just to sweeten the deal.
• Oh, Crap!: Dallas's reaction to the Dentist knowing his true identity has him dart his eyes back and forth before trying to get up from the chair to escape, only to be restrained by the Dentist and the nurse.
  • In-game, the gang sometimes give one of these when calling out Special Units - usually when spotting a Bulldozer. Wolf is downright terrified of Cloakers, while Clover is terrified of EVERY special unit.
  • Bulldozers sometimes respond with this rather than a Badass Boast when their armoured visor is shattered. Thanks to this allowing attacks on their vulnerable head, they are often Killed Mid-Sentence - not that this stops their corpse from delivering the rest of their line from the floor. Particularly funny if they're still ranting about how they're going to kill you.
  • Quite a bit of Enemy Chatter consists of this, especially when they realize who they're fighting. They also have responses for certain player actions, such as deploying medical and ammunition bags, and especially killing enemies with the OVE9000 Saw.
  SWAT Officer: We aren't prepared for this, that's the Payday Gang!
  FBI Officer: He just killed somebody, with a saw!
  • And before an escape sequence, your getaway driver will likely scream one of these right before he crashes into something and dies.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Cloakers return from the previous game, retaining their ability to instantly down you regardless of your health or the type of armor you have on. There's even an appropriately named achievement (HOLY SHI-) for getting taken down by one for the first time.
  • Snipers get to almost demonic levels on Deathwish due to the damage ramp up; against a fully specced out Tech-Enforcer in ICTV armor, he can kill you in about 3-4 shots. Anyone else (even a normal Enforcer in ICTV armor) can and will be downed the moment a sniper hits you, regardless of your health and your armor.
  • The rocket launcher is powerful enough to kill anyone with a direct hit, even the most durable enemies like the Commissar and the Skulldozer. This also applies to you if you're not careful with your aim and just happen to be wearing light armor.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Again, civilians are fragile as ever as they were in the previous game. Even the weakest gun in the game can kill innocents with a single shot. Accidentally hit one when you meant to shout for them to get down? Yeah, that'll penalize you too. Patch 27 made the civilians a little more resilient to melee strikes, meaning one slap will force them to get down on the ground without killing them. Hitting them a second time will still kill them and shooting them still kills them instantly.
• One-Steve Limit: Played straight, mostly, for the player characters.
  • You may play any player character, unless somebody else is playing it in your game.
    • Whomever joins a lobby first with a character gets priority (it should be obvious that the host automatically gets his or her first choice).
    • An update allow you to select a series of four characters in descending order of preference. When you join a lobby, the game will run through your list until it finds a character not already being used. If you select characters for all four, you're guaranteed to play as one of them, even if it ends up being your fourth choice because all three other players who joined first managed to take all your other preferred characters.
  • Between Payday: The Heist and Payday 2, Hoxton was put in prison and his place taken by Dallas's brother, who picked up the Hoxton name and mask. However, the studio held an event and added a Hoxton Breakout map where they added old Hoxton back into the game and changed the names around, old Hoxton taking his name back and new Hoxton being renamed to "Houston". During the breakout, old Hoxton makes a point to tell new Hoxton to change his name to Houston, because he's "got a fucking problem".
    • Inverted and Played for Laughs: Not only can you play old Hoxton in Hoxton Breakout while the NPC Hoxton is present, but there's a special side job called "Spacetime Paradox" that rewards you for doing just that.
• Only in It for the Money: Election Day is implied to be this - Bain openly insults McKendrick, the candidate the crew is helping, and makes a point to mention to the crew that it's 'just politics' if he has to falsely implicate Mayor Nancy during Plan B. But The Elephant is offering a lot of money to get McKendrick elected, and even offers to make sure Hoxton gets transferred to a lower-security prison if they succeed...
• Pacifist Run: Entirely possible with many heists having stealth as an alternate method instead of running in guns blazing, but it takes a lot of coordination and the right tools and skills at times.
  • The Shadow Raid heist offers an achievement for securing six loot items without killing anyone.
  • The We Are Professionals achievement semi-requires you to do this on GO Bank. While you're allowed to kill the guards (who would otherwise make the level impossible to do), you're not allowed to kill any civilians. Unlike other maps, GO Bank infinitely spawns civilians until the end, so you will certainly run out of cable ties even if everyone has the skill aced.
• Palette Swap: The Bulldozer that uses the automatic shotgun wears a black suit of armor compared to the green colored pump-action counterpart. Then there's the Skulldozer introduced in the Death Wish Update, that wears the black suit of armor but with a distinctive skull painted on the faceplate, which carries a light machine gun.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Played straight or averted depending on what the player has equipped. If the player uses highly concealable weapons and wears a two piece suit or light armor, guards and cameras won't bat an eye unless the player gets way too close to a guard or a restricted area. Players wearing heavy armor and bringing big guns will be noticed a lot more quickly due to sticking out like a sore thumb.
  • Played straight with the bouncer in the Nightclub job before the detection mechanic was altered in a patch. You were able to walk up to him decked out in a full suit of body armor, carry highly visible weapons, and he would still think you're a classy gentleman, letting you inside. A patch changed the bouncer's detection towards the players so only lightly armed players will get by him without incident. ^note It is still possible to walk by him in heavy armor and large guns, though, since he's programmed to start on his spiel as soon as you get close - even if you immediately run back around the corner so he stops detecting you - and then step aside after a few seconds, allowing you to slip by. Civilians also play this entirely straight until you have your weapon drawn.
  • Played straight again with the Glasses "Masks", especially John Wick. These "masks" consist of a pair of glasses... and nothing else. However you still gotta "mask up" to actually start shooting people. Taken to the extreme with items like The Chef hat or Almir's Beard, as they don't even cover your characters eyes and make them more distinctive if anything, especially if you're wearing the beard as Clover, Sydney, Bonnie, Hila or Joy. Not to mention a number of ordinary hats and caps, the tiara, a bandanna, and the like, none of which conceal any facial features.
• Parking Garage
  • One of the possible Escape segments begins in one.
  • The second half of both the Hoxton Breakout trailer and Day 1 of the Hoxton Breakout heist take place in a parking garage. The truck holding Hoxton is forced to make a detour through a parking garage, tailed by SWAT, when its forward progress is halted by security bollards. A firefight ensues as the crew (Dallas and Wolf in the trailer, all members in the heist proper) searches for a security room, to lower the bollards and continue the escape.
• Perpetual Beta: On release, the game was riddled with bugs that required a few hasty patches. This is an ongoing problem, however, as while the game keeps getting content, and has improved over several updates, they still come with a Game-Breaking Bug or two every now and then.
  • Also applies to playstyles, as updates have been known to Nerf entire loadouts. Of course, due to the frequent updates mentioned above, a single update can even leave you nerfed by overpowering another, making you obsolete by comparison.
• Pistol Whip: You can still whack enemies with the butt of your gun in the second game, but cops will also pistol whip you if you get too close to them, causing you to be forced into crouch mode. Certain Fugitive and Enforcer skills can reduce the damage you take from enemy melee attacks, increase the damage you deal with such attacks and make it easier to knock enemies down with such attacks.
• Play Every Day: The Spring Break update in March 2015 added Side Jobs, which gives you daily and weekly tasks to complete for bonus cash, weapon mods, and masks.
• Point of No Continues: Before they were removed, Pro heists had a higher payout, but were harder than the standard difficulty, could play out slightly different, and couldn't be restarted after failure. Failing any day of the mission booted you back to the lobby (meaning restarting repeatedly to force certain director conditions required a full restart), and failing a mission that spans multiple days required a full start over if you fail.
• Police Are Useless: The Captain Winters trailer shows that because of the Payday Gang's high-profile successful crimes and constant survival against the impossibly high amount of cops thrown at them, the people of DC have barely any trust for the police, and the crime rate has increased among the entire population of the city.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • In Rats Day 1, Bain can frequently say the wrong ingredient; easily caught if two players hear something different. Comparing notes and waiting for repeats are the best ways of checking.
  • Bain will repeatedly encourage heisters on Ukrainian Job to check the display cases and remind them that the tiara doesn't have to be in the safes in the back. It's always in the back, and it's always in a safe.
• Power Copying: The Copycat Perk Deck's namesake is its final Perk, Mimicry, allowing you to copy a Perk from another deck.
• Power Creep, Power Seep: The Copycat Perk Deck allows you to use a Perk from another deck for its final Perk. The Armorer Perk is Type I Armor, which increases your armor by 10%. Then Sociopath's Perk is Tension, adding 10% armor as well alongside restoring 30 armor on killing an enemy.
• The Power of Friendship: The Mastermind's Inspire skill has the user yell various versions of the encouraging "GO GO GO!" at another player to give them a temporary speed boost. Acing the skills also lets the player revive a downed friend by yelling at them with some words of encouragement (or swears).
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Most of the crew have some sort of line while masking up. There's also a sort of indirect version with Bain's random words of encouragement at the beginning of Police Assaults.
  Bain: Don't die!
• Pretty Little Headshots: Shooting enemies in the head will paint the wall behind them with blood, but that's about it. Even done humorously with armored mooks, as any helmets or hats will fly off vertically and there's still no wound.
  • Averted if using the Platypus sniper rifle as Bodhi; getting headshots on tasers will blow their heads clean off.
  • Again averted if the popular HoxHud mod is used, which allows for any high-caliber weapon to take enemies' heads off.
• Private Military Contractors: GenSec, with their various wares that places used to secure their goods, such as safes, indestructible cameras and the like. There are also Murkywaters' Mercenaries, returning from the first games' "Slaughterhouse" Heist, and Akans' Russian Mercenaries situated in "Boiling Point". Both are PMC's not affiliated with other law enforcement.
• Product Placement:
  • The entire Alesso Heist DLC is a vehicle for the Swedish music producer of the same name. The group infiltrates a concert Alesso is holding to steal from vaults that are coincidentally in the arena (full of real cash as a sign of the safe manufacturer's confidence in their design), and Bain doesn't hesitate to mention how big a deal Alesso is at the start of the heist.
  • John Wick, Point Break, Hotline Miami, Goat Simulator, Hardcore Henry, Scarface (1983) and Reservoir Dogs have tie-ins to the game. Usually, whenever each tie-in is released, there's a trailer to go with it, as well as serving as the games' start-up intro.
  • Clover mentions The Walking Dead several times. She was added around the same time Overkill announced they were developing a shooter based on said series.
  • A cheeky one - Rust, played by Ron Perlman, makes sure to mention Hellboy several times whenever he answers a pager.
  • DLC added in late 2017 adds Youtube personalities Ethan and Hila of h3h3productions as a pair of heisters.
• "Psycho" Strings: These play while you have a Psycho Knife melee attack fully charged.
• Pun: One of the enemies may occasionally quip that the players "sure ain't clowning around."
• Punch-Packing Pistol:
  • The Judge gun is a revolver that fires shotgun shells, like the real life Taurus Judge. The gun's damage output is absurdly high and it has great concealment, which makes the Judge a perfect weapon to use for stealth as a backup plan if stealth fails. The Judge can also be fitted with a suppressor for stealth runs, a laser sight to aid in hip firing, and scopes for better iron sight aiming. Not only that, but because the Judge is a revolver, all the shells are reloaded at the same time rather than the one shell a time that most shotguns go by, and it benefits from the Enforcer's shotgun buffs. The only downsides to the gun are: extremely poor accuracy; low ammo count (25 shells total with Fully Loaded only giving another six); and, unlike most other community weapons, it costs almost a million (especially the Akimbo variant) to purchase.
  • One of the weapon rebalances that came about during the 2015 Crimefest, and which wasn't fixed until that Christmas, turned every pistol into some variety of this. Even the smallest, weakest pistols, with suppressors and the like that lowered their total damage, still dealt as much per-bullet as an assault rifle; slightly bigger ones were so damaging that below Overkill difficulty you almost didn't need a primary weapon. Even after they were nerfed, there are still some non-Judge standouts; the page image for this trope, in fact, shows off the "Baby Deagle" pistol (a Jericho 941) dealing three times the damage per-bullet as an AK-74.
  • The 5/7 AP pistol (FN Five-seven FDE) not only has a fairly high damage stats, but it will also pierce armor; it's also easily useable in a stealth build. The drawbacks? Hilariously poor accuracy, an excruciatingly low ammo pool and pickup rate (for every ammobox you pick up, you retrieve a quarter of a bullet!), and a fairly long reload time. This, coupled with a high rate of fire makes it very easy to chew through your entire ammo reserve.
• Put on a Bus:
  • Hoxton, albeit briefly. He got pinched between the events of the first game and the start of this one. He wasn't happy to hear that his old crew had replaced him, and so, after a few contracts later from the Dentist later, The Dentist helped the Payday gang to break him out. He's still rather bitter about it, though, and really has it out for Houston, the former person who took his name, never failing to berate the poor bastard.
  • Ditto Hector... at least for a while; he's had no new heists since the game was released, and ultimately turned out to be the rat who got Hoxton arrested, so they Dropped a Bridge on Him.
• Quirky Bard: A player investing into Sentry Guns was once considered this. A single unmodified sentry doesn't do much good, but when upgraded sufficiently, they can really help in missions on the go such as Day 1 of Firestarter. Sadly it takes a LOT of points to do so, which people would prefer to invest in C4 instead. They got a new lease on life with the advent of a new Technician skill (named, appropriately enough, "Jack of All Trades") that allows for carrying C4 and sentries, even if this still costs a lot of points and causes a lot of false flags for cheating.
  • With the skill tree revamp, sentries got even better; the highest-tier skill allows you to deploy four sentries at once while still carrying a second deployable^note  or six at once; there are two types of sentries, and you can choose one type for primary and the other for secondary deployable and no longer be falsely accused of cheating.
  • Even better, if you purchase the "More to Deploy" Gage Bonus on a crime spree, you can carry six turrets and a second deployable; if you invest your points properly, you can carry two fully loaded bags of ammo to help keep the turrets fed. ^note Or theoretically you could carry nine turrets, but your buddies had better bring a boatload of ammo or they're all going to run dry pretty quickly.
• Random Drops: A card game (the eponymous Payday) occurs after a successful heist. Want a weapon mod? A new mask? Mask materials? You have to get lucky and hope the game gives you something you need! Fortunately there is a formula: the Payday won't drop a weapon mod if you already have two of that item in storage (not equipped).
• Random Event:
  • Not as prevalent as the first game, but random events do exist, such as specific doors appearing/not appearing and loot locations. There's also a random chance that one or two players in the beginning of an escape sequence will automatically start the level incapacitated due to the van crashing.
  • Taken to ridiculous levels with GO Bank, where stealth runs live and die on random events. These events can include an armored car with additional guards outside, additional guards with pagers spawning to check on the building, police officers that will do the same but cause an alert if they die, to someone demanding a bag of money or he'll call the police. On the plus side, another random event is that the vault starts out open.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Major kingpin-type enemies appear as assassination targets in several of the missions (examples include the Commissar, the Rat/ Hector, the Biker Leader, Chavez, and Ernesto Sosa). They have very high boss-level health, with the Biker Leader and Ernesto Sosa being especially tough, and on higher difficulties can take as much damage as a Bulldozer. However, unlike the Bulldozer they lack Contractual Boss Immunity and can be taken out very quickly with a number of different exploits.
• Rare Random Drop: Rare items are dubbed as "infamous" items. Several masks rarely drop, including extra copies of the default masks (which allows you to use them on any character) and textureless versions of the default masks so you can customize them any way you want. Many mask materials, patterns, and colors are also rare drops. Spending infamy points will also boost your rare item drop chance.
• Real-Place Background: Several, mostly in D.C.
  • The bridge where Rats Day 3 takes place is based on the Fredrick Douglas Memorial Bridge. The stadium seen in the distance on the far side is meant to represent Nationals Park.
  • There really is a bank at 1500 Penn, where the Benevolent is in-game. The exterior is identical to its real-life counterpart (aside from the name), and both the Treasury Building and the White House are present where they appear in-game.
  • The FBI Headquarters in Hoxton Breakout is based on the J. Edgar Hoover building; the FBI files explicitly identifies it by name in-universe. Though the layout of the interior is likely fictional, the plaza outside the entrance is real.
  • The McKendrick Museum is based on the Freer Gallery of Art, located in the National Mall next to the Smithsonian Institute (here named the "Andersonian Institute").
  • Election Day Plan C's building is based on the lobby of the Field Building in Chicago, IL.
• Real Time: It's pretty much been established that the events of the games and their follow up DLC are happening in real time. For example, the game launched in 2013 and the Art Gallery heist, which was released in 2014, takes place one year later. Hoxton burns down the original safehouse, explicitly granted to the gang in 2013, in 2016. About the only thing that isn't progressing with real-world time is the characters' listed ages.
• Refuge in Audacity: Before the introduction of HE shotgun shells and sniper rifles, the most effective way of killing a Bulldozer was to charge in point blank and unload a high rate of fire weapon directly into his faceplate, which would break it and score numerous headshots. This is still a viable strategy, particularly for those players who prefer submachine guns over sniper rifles and shotguns. Light machine guns with decent accuracy and a bipod can work as well, if you can handle staying in one place and letting the Dozer unload back at you.
  • Also, during stealth, detection of players is based solely on whether or not a direct line can be drawn from a guard or civilian's head hitbox to the player's. In certain maps with thick walls, a player can crouch in the corner and look directly down — the character's head will clip through the wall, and the player will go undetected as a guard passes behind him inches away (unless the guard actually bumps into the player). Most easily done on Shadow Raid, in the warehouse stairwell.
• Renaissance Man: Encouraged. Since it's impossible to ace every ability of even one class, the overlap of abilities (e.g. Mastermind can carry more zipties, which is useful to a Ghost) means players are better off mixing and matching some skills. There are also plenty of high-level synergies, such as the Techforcer combo for massive amounts of armour. There is a Steam achievement called "I'm a Healer-Tank-Damage-Dealer" earned after spending 10 skill points in each skill tree.
• Reset Milestones: The infamy system has you reset your level in exchange for a small perk. Infamy level 1 lowers skill point requirements by 10% and doubles infamous item drop rate. Every Infamy level up to 25 increases experience. Every odd Infamy level up to 25 and every level above that unlocks a piece of clothing or join stinger, and even a weapon color or charm!
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The Judge, a revolver that fires shotgun shells, somehow deals more damage than full sized shotguns despite using smaller shells. The Bronco also does more base damage than most of the other pistols. The Matever and Peacemaker revolvers are also pocket snipers in a pinch, though both suffer from strong recoil and long reload times, respectively.
• Running Gag: Many of the optional safes and deposit boxes would have nothing but a partially eaten cheese toast sandwich. The toast came back in a massive pile in one of the large safes during the Halloween event and the toast was quietly removed from the game. Big Bank brought the toast back for the safe in the manager's office and one of the news feeds in the level shows sales of Cheese Toast Inc. had a rise in stocks. After the addition of the new safehouse with Hoxton's Housewarming Party, one of the trophies you can get for the safehouse is a partially-eaten cheese toast sandwich, unlocked for finding the partially-eaten cheese toast sandwich in the manager's safe in Big Bank - the name of which, "It's Not Even Fresh..." alluding to the ridiculousness.
  • To say nothing of the rare giant "Almir's Toast" in the Xmas Heist. It's one of the heaviest items able to be carried (on par with the fusion engines from Big Oil), and its value is on par with a turret part from the Train Heist, something like ten times as much as any of the coke bags you spend most of your time .
• Russian Reversal: The Commissar pulls a vulgar one on you once you start trashing his motel.
  The Commissar: You think I'm asshole, eh? Well in Russia, asshole fuck YOU!

S-Z

• Safecracking: The Ghost can unlock an upgrade to do this, though any interruptions force a full restart and there are more creative means of opening locks, such as C4. It's still a worthwhile investment, though, since without interruptions cracking the safe by hand will invariably be faster than waiting for even a fully-upgraded drill (drills tend to have a minimum of two minutes for safes, with the Ghost's skill you can crack it yourself in about 40 seconds), and there are some safes that can only be opened by picking the lock.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: What's the sense of making a game about bank heists without one of these? We get two. The Mosconi 12G is the classic "double-barrel hunting shotgun" option, and you can modify it by sawing down the barrel and removing the stock - unfortunately the gun becomes hilariously inaccurate and impossible to control even with the meagre two shots, but to it's credit, it has one of the lowest concealment ratings of any weapon. However it can't be silenced, and the returning Locomotive 12G (your "modern" choice) can be silenced, has more shots, and takes up a secondary slot as opposed to the Mosconi's primary. The Mosconi is very rarely used outside of some niche concealment Dodge builds that want something with punch.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Invoked as some of the achievements require this. A trio of cheevo's from 2015's CrimeFest comes to mind; "I Never Asked for This" (Don't jump a single time in a heist), "Jump! Jump! Jump!" (Jump constantly within 4 seconds of each previous jump) and "Bunnyhopping" (Jump 100 times within 30 seconds, which requires you to abuse doorway arches and Wall Bonking), all of which were made to celebrate the fact that the game was given new jumping animations.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: The man with the glasses in The Diamond trailer, who's there when Marie Antoinette gets beheaded, when Hitler shoots himself, and when Dallas is about to take the diamond.
• Scavenger Hunt: Patch 26 introduces several packages that spawn in random locations across various heists that you can pick up. You'll get a small experience bonus for collecting them, and if you own the Gage Courier Pack DLC, collecting enough of any specific kind will also grant you free weapon mods.
• Screaming Woman: Female civilians use the exact same screams as they did in PAYDAY: The Heist and a few more, despite the male civilians having a brand new set of panic sounds.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Wolf, infamous for whooping and shouting, shrieks "IT'S A MOTHERFUCKIN' BULLDOZER!" when spotting one. Similarly loud for just about every other special enforcer, too.
  • Clover is always shrill when she points out any special enemy.
  • Your getaway driver, in the 12 Days of Payday.
• Scripted Event: The meth cooks in day 1 of Rats are scripted to die as soon as you reach the second floor no matter how you approach the level.
• Secret Room:
  • The climax of the Framing Frame job tasks players with stealthily locating and infiltrating a hidden vault room (that's always hidden behind a bookshelf) that's filled with the spoils of an illicit arms deal in the condo of an American senator and planting cocaine to frame him (and optionally stealing the gold within). Though if they are detected, they're forced to leave the gold behind and simply leak the arms deal to the press to keep their benefactor happy, missing out on most of the job's potential profit.
  • In addition to keeping the OVERDRILL secret vault intact in the remake of First World Bank, unlocking the game's Golden Ending requires finding a secret passage that leads to another hidden vault in the White House heist, which is hidden behind a painting only that can only be moved after fulfilling a number of convoluted hidden requirements in other parts of the game, and successfully opening it (requiring, among other things, translating ancient Sumerian).
• Self-Deprecation:
  • After Steam gave games the ability to be tagged with custom genres, Overkill took the piss at themselves by tagging the game as a "Bag Throwing Simulator," which is a nod to the community that always complained how the game makes you do nothing but throw bags around.
  • The announcement video introducing Aldsworth (Hoxton's butler, voiced by John Cleese), ends with him saying "Selling drills on the black market is not the best idea you've ever had, was it?", referencing the controversy that erupted when Overkill sold virtual "drills" via microtransactions.
  • Several of the achievements added in the Hoxton's Housewarming Party update include jabs at the game itself, such as "Bag Throwing Simulator",^note Complete Diamond Store on Death Sentence difficulty with One Down modifier activated and "What a Flat!"^note Complete Framing Frame on Mayhem or above, named for one of the lines that Bain often repeats while stealthing the heist.
• Sequel Hook: The game ends with the death of Bain and the entire gang getting pardoned. However, the Kataru, the missing president and the Dentist plot threads are still unresolved.
  • Resolved in "The End 2" where The Dentist is revealed to be behind the Kataru and also the final "boss", the US president is missing but Bain took his corporeal body, and the entire gang retire happily... oh, as for John Wick, the entire game turns out to be a Stealth Prequel to the first John Wick film.
• Serial Escalation: The Payday gang starts as a crew of four people who take on small heists like trashing malls and robbing jewelry stores. As time goes on they recruit more members and eventually take on bigger jobs like robbing a big casino across the US, taking out a secret lab in Russia, and stealing nukes.
  • The difficulties available have also ramped up as the game evolved; originally the highest difficulty was Overkill, then Death Wish was added with new enemies, massive buffs to existing enemies, and sometimes unique events for heists. And then One Down difficulty was added, with even tougher enemies than Death Wish and only giving players a single down; the second down sends them immediately into custody. This was later replaced with Death Sentence, with One Down being turned into a modifier.
• Shadow Archetype: The Commissar. While the PAYDAY gang isn't exactly noble, the Commissar is known for tying a bomb to his hostages, torturing said hostages, and is implied to create sex videos for either profit or for his own pleasure while he also produces and distributes coke. The PAYDAY crew only tie up civilians and prefer to not harm them while also avoiding the more nasty illegal activities like slavery and torture. They also help distribute drugs.
• Shaped Like Itself: Chains's comments veer into this when commenting on your equipment:
  Chains: "How can it be a drill if it ain't drillin'?!"
• Shock and Awe: During the third day of Firestarter, attempting to use the thermal drill on the vault door gets you electrocuted the same way a Taser unit would shock you. Cutting the power to the door is required to bypass the shock.
  • In addition, the game puts so many chain-link fences in your way that cutting through them tends to be an unconscious action for most players. However, if the game feels particularly capricious, the chain-link fence in the first day of the Big Oil mission can be electrified, shocking you and (due to the ensuing involuntary muscle spasms) discharging your weapon repeatedly. If it was un-suppressed, you just warned the enemy you were coming, and they will proceed to burn several important pieces of intelligence.
  • The Taser special unit, as the name suggests, shocks players with an electrical discharge. The shocked player is prevented from moving, has their view twitch and shake, and randomly fires their weapon (even working the action between shots on bolt and pump-action weapons, presumably for balance reasons) as they spasm uncontrollably. If the Taser is not killed, or at least staggered by sufficient damage, the unlucky player will be incapacitated after a few seconds of sustained shocking - not to mention the effects of any incoming fire from other law enforcers.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Some doors have locks can be shot out with any weapon in order to bypass picking the lock. However, metal or high security doors cannot have locks shot out, and you need to drill the lock, cut through it with a saw, or blow the door entirely with C4.
• Shooting Gallery: If you upgrade John Wick's area in the new safehouse to level 2, you unlock a shooting range with a pair of targets. Upgrade it to level 3, and you unlock the Killhouse, a multi-room time-trial shooting course with a mix of police and civilian targets. Shooting cops decreases your time, with an extra bonus for headshots, while shooting civilians increases your time.
• Shoot the Medic First:
  • A major update near the end of 2016 introduced the Medic special enemy. As his ability is healing nearby enemies and turning mooks (or even highly dangerous special enemies) into bullet sponges, he becomes a high-priority target when present.
  • Before him was Captain Winters, who is arguably a more fitting instance of this trope than the Medic - whereas the Medic's healing is limited to a single person at a time, is easy to counter (particularly on the lower difficulties the Medic spawns in, where you can just shoot the target in the head again), has a short but noticeable cooldown, and leaves the Medic vulnerable as he plays out an animation of healing someone, Winters gives passive buffs to the defense of everyone around him just by being there, and on top of that makes assault waves never-ending until he and his cadre of Shields are cut through and forced to retreat.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: In the Big Bank Heist trailer, a random bystander assists the crew by reviving Dallas when he's shot by the cops. Dallas rewards him by tossing him a wad of cash. However, when the bystander attempts to catch the money, he falls off the roof of the bank. Later material shows he managed to survive, though badly injured.
  • He apparently recovered and runs the official Payday merchandise store now. He even gets to sell his bobble heads! Upgrading Jimmy's section of the new Safehouse has him show up as the bartender, as well.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted once again as every shotgun can reliably paste enemy cops from several yards away with only one or two shots. Unfortunately, several post-release patches gave the shotguns an arbitrary cutoff past which they won't do any damage, thus playing this trope straight.
  • Averted again with the Gage Shotgun DLC, which not only allows the player to load several different types of shells, from buckshot to slugs to explosive shells, but also makes the the shotguns decently long-ranged again with standard loads. Anything beyond ten to fifteen feet will take reduced damage from buckshot, but will still hit. Effectively, the range was corrected, but the lethality range was kept the same.
  • Shotgun spread itself is played differently from other games; unlike other games, the shotguns in PAYDAY deal full damage if even a single pellet hits the target, and will cause a headshot in the same way. However, more than one pellet hitting the target will not increase the damage whatsoever, making it actually efficient to use the shotgun in the way it works in real life: to compensate for a lack of accuracy by throwing out several pellets in one general direction (also allowing for easy multi-kills with one shell, since every enemy that gets tagged by any pellets will take damage).
  • Due to the way shotguns work, this actually makes the Accuracy stat work in reverse; Accuracy in the game increases the likelihood of the shot landing where the ironsights align while aiming. With shotguns, however, this means the pellet spread is reduced, actually making it harder to hit something on target. Outside of messing around with slug rounds (which trade off the multiple pellets and some reserve ammo for armor-piercing capability), this completely invalidates a skill that increases shotgun accuracy, and means that people will actively mod their shotguns with lower accuracy to make them better at hitting stuff.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Shotguns are very popular among players for several reasons. They are unquestionably the king of CQB but can also offer a lot of versatility between different types of ammunition - buckshot for extra power, flechettes to allow the shotgun to pierce armour and achieve parity with rifles at medium ranges, slugs and dragon's breath rounds to punch through shields, etc. They rival sniper rifles as the most powerful non-BFG weapons in the game if a player puts points in the Shotgunner skill tree, but even without skill point investment they still pack a serious punch. And they have the most mechanical variety within any weapon class in the game - break-open, tubular or box magazine, pump-action or fully automatic, even one revolver.
  • The Locomotive is widely considered to be one of the best secondary weapon choices in the game. It has all the previously stated strengths of a shotgun, and it can also deal with Bulldozers very quickly due to its high stopping power and rather fast firing rate by shotgun standards. It is an excellent backup weapon for a sniper, machine-gunner or other heavy weapons specialist, and with the right mods it can achieve the same Concealment rating as a regular pistol at 26, so stealth players can get a lot of mileage out of it as well.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Shovel Strike: The K.L.A.S. Shovel, an entrenchment tool added by the Gage Shotgun Pack DLC, complete with an achievement for completing the Night Club heist using nothing but that shovel.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Gold is extremely heavy and can't be tossed very far due to its weight, which is exactly how real life gold acts. It stands out because when carrying other forms of loot such as jewelry or drugs, the crew can throw them a decent distance, sometimes jump and run. When carrying gold, you can't run or jump more than two inches and you walk slower. Likewise, you also get to carry engine parts at one point and you move even slower with them on your back than gold does while jumping is restricted to just an inch high.
  • The landscape of Washington D.C. isn't perfect, but it looks close enough to its real life counterpart. The Harvest and Trustee bank also looks very similar to what a typical small branch bank looks like in real life.
  • Crossed with The Coconut Effect, the developers know exactly how to attack with the K.L.A.S. shovel, but they also know how players would want to attack with it and used that instead. The description points this out.
  • In adding John Wick, they mention that he has a background in boxing. In the films, John uses the Center-Axis Relock style of close-quarters shooting, which utilizes a boxing stance.
  • Inflated magazine sizes throughout the game notwithstanding, the devs understand that the number of shells a tube-fed shotgun can hold is dependent on the length of that tube - as such, some shotguns with different barrel lengths that also change the length of the tube, like the M1014 and Raven, will increase or decrease their total mag capacity appropriate to which barrel length you have attached.
  • The reloading animation for the RPG-7 accurately includes the character cocking the hammer after inserting a new rocket, a detail that almost no other game to feature the RPG-7 shows.
• Signature Move: Every class has several signature abilities and playstyles as well as a favored weapon.
  • The Mastermind: Focuses on helping his teammates. Has both available healing deployables. Can use shouting to control civilians by making them stay down and refuse help from the police, and intimidate enemies into giving up and handcuffing themselves, allowing him to convert them to his side and fight for him. His best skills include shouting at teammates to revive them as well as increase their running speed, and slowly regenerating health from taking hostages. Prefers Sniper Rifles.
  • The Enforcer: Focuses on killing enemies. Is strong enough to use the saw and wear the heaviest armor. Bonuses include being incredibly durable, buffing their damage by getting kills, and greatly diminishing the saw's weaknesses. Prefers shotguns as well as the aforementioned saw.
  • The Technician: Focuses on completing objectives and using equipment. Secures the area with tripmines and sentry guns while opening doors and safes quickly using shaped charges and improved drills. Can use two deployables at once. Prefers high-capacity weapons to suppress enemies, and gains the ability to do more damage on body shots.
  • The Ghost: Is the stealth-oriented tree. Can use the ECM jammer and deploy more body bags. Can disable cameras temporarily, lockpick doors faster and lockpick safes. Has an area-of-effect stun via the ECM, and the power to sprint faster and in all directions.
    • Has loud skills that focus on luck mechanics in exchange for extremely high damage and mobility. Using stripped down weapons and wearing little or no armor when going loud allows performing critical hits and dodging bullets. Has no specific preference for weapons but prefers them to be suppressed and easy to conceal.
  • The Fugitive: Is extremely aggressive. Gains bonuses after being revived and can engage in melee combat more effectively when at low health. Given the lack of durability-increasing skills and any upgraded deployable, is frequently combined with another tree (usually Ghost). Prefers pistols, both single and dual-wielded.
• Silliness Switch: The mutators change up the rules of the game in many ways and several of them are downright hilarious, such as the tractor beam mutator which lets you carry the bodies of any enemy you killed with a shotgun by an invisible tractor beam with ragdoll physics, similar to the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. The mothership version sends any enemy killed with shotguns to rocket off into the sky.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Hoxton versus Houston, due to the latter taking the former's mask and (previously) code name.
• Small Girl, Big Gun:
  • The female prison guards and FBI agents throughout the Hoxton Breakout heist are a bit on the short side, but they also wield the Bronco .44.
  • While not exactly small, Clover wielding the Minigun is this. Especially if you add on the long barrel attachment and have her wear the 2 piece suit.
• Smug Snake: Nearly all the special SWAT units will taunt the player in some way and act like they will dominate the players; you can almost taste their smug overconfidence. Examples: the Bulldozer may say things like "There's no Payday for you!", the Taser may give off an Evil Laugh as he shocks you, and the Cloaker will break the fourth wall and taunt the player directly by telling them to cry on the forums like the little bitch they are.
  • The Commissar in Hotline Miami is this in day 2. When you catch up to him, he loses his shit.
• Sniper Pistol: With the right mods, the Desert Eagle can be outfitted as one. Even dual Deagles can be modified, with the right skills behind it, to be perfectly accurate. The Broomstick pistol even more so, being able to be modded with a precision barrel increasing damage to be on par with assault rifles in the game modded with a DMR kit, and fitted with a sniper scope.
• Socialization Bonus: There is level grinding which you must do in order to unlock new skills and equipment. Completing heists with friends gives you a "Crew Alive Bonus'', which gives you extra money and experience points for having friends alive at the end of the heist. If you want to ease the pain of level grinding, bring a buddy or two.
• Spell My Name With An S: It's Bain, not Bane. And Cloakers are not spelled as Cloackers (although this could be a Stealth Insult by calling them cloacas).
• Starts Stealthily, Ends Loudly: Technically possible in any of the stealth-capable heists, but is definitely applied in both Car Shop and Panic Room.
• Status Buff: Buffs can cover yourself or the team once they are unlocked, such as having more stamina for running, faster armor regeneration, or having unlimited bullets for a few seconds after deploying an ammo bag.
• Stealth Pun:
  • Throwing money away from a bridge or a shipyard gives you a thought what an "off-shore" account would be. Do you know there is also an achievement for this?
  • Joy, a character who was introduced as a timed exclusive for the Nintendo Switch port, was shown wearing a light up LED mask in her debut trailer with the colors red and blue on either side of the mask, mimicking the most common color combo of joycon controllers.
• Stealth-Based Mission: Expanded upon compared to the first game. Several heists are totally possible to complete without the alarm being raised, allowing you to complete your objectives without the threat of cops. The Ghost class is all about stealthing heists as well. However, some heists cannot be stealthed at all.
  • Taken a step further with the stealth-only heists (Shadow Raid, Car Shop, Murky Station, The Yacht Heist and Breakin' Feds). You can't have the alarm raised at all, otherwise you'll have just a very short amount of time to secure the rest of the loot, finish any objectives left and hightail it out of there before you're left behind.
  • Any mission that can be Stealthed generally comes with a bonus in exp and cash. This combined with the fact that going loud on such missions is very hard (having to resort of Plan B, the Payday crew will have to accomplish additional objectives on Loud versions of these heists, which takes up time and means they have to face more assault waves) encourages people to do these almost exclusively stealthed.
  • "The Elephant" Contractor is explicitly stated to favor this type of mission, as given his position and the nature of the jobs, it's understandable that he doesn't want anyone to know. He also provides a substantial cash bonus to every successfully stealthed mission, usually in the form of several stacks of gold that would otherwise be inaccessible to the crew should they go loud (this is on top of the usual stealth bonus).
• Stealth Prequel: The "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue reveals that John Wick, after retiring from PAYDAY Gang, married and adopted a dog. Everyone who watched the first minutes of the first John Wick will know how this leads to...
• Stealthy Mook: Cloakers are not technically invisible but they have a knack for hiding in places inaccessible by the players in order to ambush them for an instant Non-Lethal K.O..
• Stock Scream: In the web series, episode 2, the Wilhelm scream can be heard when Dallas and Wolf dispatch a random cop.
• Stockholm Syndrome: An ability for the Mastermind allows you to turn civilians and hostiles to your side.
• Stone Wall: You can convert any cop you take hostage to fight for you if you have the Joker skill. While your new cop buddy won't be killing too many of his former friends on his own, with the additoinal skill Partners In Crime, he gains a whopping 45% damage resistance. With the Aced version, he gains an additional 54% damage resistance, totalling 99%. With this in mind, he can tank pretty much anything the game throws at him, making him an excelent bullet sponge. He's also immune to the shocks form a Taser and the instant down kicks of a Cloaker.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Used the wrong ingredient to cook meth? The lab explodes. The truck took too much damage while you were moving the coke out? Explodes. Throwing cache of guns into a fire to destroy them? Big explosion. Failed to defuse the C4 on a bus? You know what happens.
  • Previews of the game during its alpha stage showcased cars exploding when shot at enough times. Sadly, the feature was removed.
  • The Train Heist has explosive shells you can steal for money but, for a while, if the shells were tossed too far, the shock of the impact made the shells explode. This example had been abused repeatedly by hackers, who figured out how to spawn said bags at a high velocity on a ballistic arc. Meaning the bags of artillery shells are actually being used as artillery.
  • The Gage Shotgun Pack DLC added 12-Gauge HE rounds as an option for all shotguns, which exchanges a little over half your ammunition capacity for higher-damage shells which deal area damage and stun all enemies in the blast radius.
    • With the right mods and skills, it is now possible to have what is effectively a 430RPM semi-automatic grenade launcher fed from a 27-round drum as a secondary weapon.
  • The Overkill DLC pack adds an actual rocket-propelled grenade launcher, which can kill anyone, even a Bulldozer, in a single shot with a fairly large blast radius.
  • The mutator feature has one option that lets you make any enemy explode when you kill them. There's also a "Nuclear Bulldozer" option where if you kill a Bulldozer, not only does he explode, but every enemy on the map explodes too.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: The secret ending still has the gang retiring and Bain dies, but the gang retires happily, is reunited with the good contractors including The Butcher and Vlad, also Bain is revealed to be reincarnated as the president.
• Suspicious Missed Messages:
  • Killing/subduing a guard results in someone calling their pager to check up on them. If the pager isn't answered in time, the police will be called.
  • The GO Bank and Big Bank heists have phones that need to be answered after the time locks are triggered in stealth^note Only once for Big Bank to persuade their security providers that everything's fine, but repeatedly in GO Bank due to needing to deal with the bank's customers as well as the management, with Bain impersonating a member of the staff to try to avoid arousing suspicion. Missing a call results in the police being called.
• Take That!:
  • PAYDAY 2 has an achievement that pokes fun at Call of Duty: Ghosts and the infamous fish A.I. meme.
  • The addition of Titan safes; they can only be opened with a drill and cannot be blown up with C4. Underneath the "TITAN" logo is a small message reading "Suck It", which is a jab at players who farmed heists for loot drops and other things by using C4 to quickly complete objectives.
  • The trailer for the Xmas Heist content, done in the style of a live newsfeed, shows a message at the bottom saying "Video game company releases free content, internet outraged," which is a jab at the less than kind fans that believed the (then) upcoming Christmas heist level was going to either be paid DLC or just plain suck because it was a copy and paste of a map from Valve's Counter-Strike Global Offensive (Valve worked on the map with Overkill as a collaborative project, similar to the No Mercy crossover heist for the previous game).
  • The Cloaker has several lines he says that break the fourth wall by insulting the people who kept complaining about the lack of safe house customization, assuming that the Cloaker itself would be DLC, or even that the developers did exactly as asked and added the Cloaker at all. The developers also knew people would complain about the Cloaker being "overpowered", so the Cloaker has a line telling those people to bitch on the forums. ^note And that's exactly what people did.
  • In Bain's Guide^note (included in the pre-ordered Steam version of the Criminal Career Edition), there are a few jabs at the frequent fan complaints. For example, the ammo bag section has the word "clip" crossed out and replaced with "magazine", which is circled in red and noted "Never forget!" — mocking about the vast amounts of nagging Overkill suffered for accidentally confusing the terms.
  • In the description of the Graham mask, which talks about rabbits, it slips in a not so subtle jab.
  When fleeing, they hop in a zig-zag pattern, much like many Counter-Strike players do.
  • A very subtle jab at the players, and possibly themselves, in Hoxton Breakout. A common complaint about any given heist DLC is that it's too short, and said DLC typically costs $7. Cue Bain's comment when you take the parking ticket back after getting through the parking garage:
  Bain: Seven bucks?! We were hardly here!

  • Further mocked with the Alesso heist. See 'Continuity Nod' above.
  Bain: Good work gang, got your seven bucks back. Remember, stretch goals are good.^note A large upset in the community was a stretch goal system that was fueled by purchasing copies of the game or DLC. The community was not pleased with paying loads of money just to guarantee Overkill would make DLC on the list, and then have to pay more money to purchase the actual DLC items.
  • You get an achievement called Van Gogh to Hell if during the heist in a modern art gallery, you throw a painting in the toilets.
• Take Your Time: Certain objectives do not activate until you have done specific actions. For example, the Swat isn't called in the Panic Room remake until Chavez is killed. This allows you time to bag any loot that's sprawled about the place, such as the piles of Cocaine, and the ever-elusive giant toothbrush.
• Take Up My Sword: Hoxton was arrested after the first game, and his successor took the mask and the codename. However, fan outcry eventually lead to the creation of the Hoxton Breakout heist and his replacement being given a new codename, Houston.
• The Teaser: The Shadow Raid update came with a new intro video, titled "The Dentist", which teased future update heists: "The Big Bank" on June 17th, to be followed with "Hoxton Breakout" on October 27th, "The Diamond" on December 16th, and "Golden Grin Casino" on June 25th.
• Temporary Online Content:
  • The four baby masks were only added to your stash by completion of secret achievements during the Safehouse Nightmare "job" in the PC version. If you sold any of the baby masks, you would never get that mask again because it is only added by the achievement being completed for the first time on your Steam account and have a drop rate of 0. Notably, this was the first instance of "unique masks" to ever appear in Payday 2 - even the Loot Bag DLC Skull masks will drop in Paydays - but a patch during the second Safehouse Nightmare fixed that and made the masks returnable.
  • The Humble Bundle team offered two Starcraft-themed masks in one of their packs, but like all of their bundles it was for a limited time only.
  • During Halloween 2014, a second bundle with two other masks was also available for one week.
  • Played straight with the "Completely Overkill" DLC masks. If you didn't buy the pack before March 12th 2015, too bad, no cool masks for you! Not to mention the secret cosmetic item scheduled for future release only obtainable by those who purchased said mask pack.
  • The Alpha Mauler was the first weapon to be this. It was only available if you registered on the Alienware Arena website and claimed a key during the first release of the Alienware Alpha and the Payday 2 deal with it. While you didn't have to buy an Alpha to claim a key, it still rubbed quite a lot of the community the wrong way, mostly because it was something that actually mildly affected gameplay as opposed to a cosmetic mask.
• Tempting Fate: The Alesso Heist takes place in a large arena that is owned by GenSec and they brag that their vaults are perfectly impenetrable. Bain wants to prove the security company wrong by having his crew steal money from the company while Alesso's concert is used as a cover. They succeed.
  • On one of the interview tapes scattered around the house in Hoxton Revenge, the FBI are interrogating Hector about a contract they want him to submit to Crimenet in an attempt to surround the Payday Gang. That contract being Watchdogs. The FBI Handler simply remarks "What are they gonna do? Fight their way out?", which is exactly what happens at the start of said heist.
• There's No Kill like Overkill:
  • Using a Rocket Launcher, mini-guns or Grenade Launchers on anything that's not a Bulldozer, which crosses over into Disproportionate Retribution. Nothing like robbing a convenience store with excessive firepower, huh?
  • The Thanatos Sniper Rifle deals an eye-wateringly high 3650 damage, as it fires .50 cal rounds!, far more than almost any special unit can handle, even on Death Sentence. This means you can one-shot every special unit sans Bulldozers (which require you to break off the glass part of the face-plate, so requires 2 shots maximum). The drawback is that the gun doesn't have many rounds (it only has 20 bullets, 10 in a clip), and even with skills to boost the clip, it's an odd case of a weapon simply being too OP to be useful as the comparatively weaker sniper rifles have more ammo in reserve and can work in dodge builds.
• Those Two Guys: On Jewelry Store and Mallcrashers, you may notice a pair of off-duty police officers buying food. Many a stealth run has been foiled by these two.
• Timed Mission: Escape sequences involve your replacement driver or chopper pilot only sticking around for a limited time and will ditch anyone who is not in the safe zone once the time limit is up. The GO Bank heist, should stealth fail, has an escape sequence similar to those used in the first game where you had to go through an escape route and reach the safe zone before the time limit expires.
• Time for Plan B: Bain, as always, has back up plans in case plan A fails. In levels with stealth, if you go loud, your objective(s) may either change or adapt to the situation. The trope is more apparent in day 1 of Watchdogs where Bain summons Bile to airlift you out of dodge if your escape driver is killed by the police.
  • And should Plan B fail in day 1, or the players mess up Plan A by tagging the wrong truck during Election Day, Bain comes up with a Plan C, which is to distract the cops by doing a bank heist while "accidentally" destroying the ballot machines. Though the only way to get to Plan C is to do day 1 horribly and Bain will chastise you for it. ^note He's more forgiving of you if you go loud on Day 1 and get away with only half the database, than if you stealthed Day 1, but tagged the wrong truck
  • Averted with the stealth-only heists. You are required to stealth them. If you're detected, you have a short amount of time to complete the heist and get to the escape or you lose, which can be Unwinnable by Design and/or Unintentionally Unwinnable if you got spotted early, or simply Screw This, Time To Get Out Of Here if the alarm was raised as everyone's already heading back to the van.
  • Also averted in Hoxton Breakout, where the only option is to drive through the streets while being shot at by police from every angle. Bain even lampshades it. The same goes for Day 2 of the heist likely due to it being an improvisation on Hoxton's part.
  • Most Loud-Only Heists have only Plan "B" as, obviously, you can't stealth them. In addition, some of The Dentist's Stealthable heists have a Plan B for Plan B, usually different escape plans that cost Favours; the more it costs the easier it is (with usually the most easy one costing almost all of the available favours for the given heist).
• Title Drop: A knowingly cheesy and homophonic one. The trailer for the Dentist's pack of missions has it end on "You see... I need my payday (long, obvious beat)... too."
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Rare masks, mask patterns, and mask materials with absurd drop rates (one mask has a one in a million chance of showing up). Since you cannot remove materials or colors applied to a mask, you better make damn sure that the colors and patterns you want on a certain mask are the ones you want to stay. As such, a lot of players simply don't use their rare materials and patterns.
  • The Thanatos .50 cal sniper rifle does a blistering 3650 damage per shot, and can kill anything with only one bullet (save for bulldozers that force two shots to remove the first two faceplates). However it's main selling point is also it's greatest weakness; it's too powerful to be of any use in anything other than sniper-dependant maps with sniper-specific builds, further compounded by having terrible ammo pickup rate, and being outdone by other, weaker, sniper rifles, that work in more builds.
  • The rocket launchers are intentionally overpowered, and were balanced around reliable bulldozer removal; indeed it's the only weapon type in the game to kill a bulldozer in one shot. But as with the Thanatos, rocket launchers can only get ammo from an ammo bag, and said ammo is limited in supply, not to mention you can down team mates easily if you miss your shots. And while they have more utility than the Thanatos (as they're secondary weapons like the grenade launchers, not a primary), this too is limited, and you're better off taking other weapons.
• Took a Level in Badass: The entire police force has received a significant upgrade since the last game. Not only the cops and SWAT units are more durable, they are also smarter by flanking you, pulling back and taking cover when needed, and bashing you with the butt of their guns if you try to take them on very closely. Cops are also smart enough to steal your loot bags if you leave them unattended. The Gage Weapons Pack #2 update also gave cops the ability to use knives against you.
  • Cloakers have been vastly upgraded from the original game. Their original straight kick has been upgraded to a Bruce Lee-like flying kick with an incredible range of at least 15 feet, and instead of charging players like other police units they now camp behind furniture or around corners in order to ambush players with their instant-down attack. They are also scripted to spawn right on top of you via air vents or sewer holes the moment you pass near. They also have a lot more health, having about 6 times as much health as the standard SWAT mooks, though they take significant damage from headshots.
  • Street cops can now use the Bronco .44 (a freaking hand cannon!)
  • The crew shows shades of the trope; while they still rob the usual stuff like banks and stores for cash and jewels, they also raid an FBI branch office to steal intel and they also and steal fusion engine parts that could lead the way to renewable energy. Of course, the crew still get paid quite handsomely for their efforts. The Big Bank also gives you the chance to rob a bank that hasn't been successfully robbed for over 200 years.
  • Some of the weapons from the previous game also get quite a hefty boost in the sequel; the Locomotive shotgun was considered a Joke Weapon in the first game due to its short range and not so great power, but the same gun in the sequel now has a lot of power and decent range.
  • The entire SWAT force got a badass upgrade in the Death Wish update. The new SWAT teams can hit harder, move faster, and have better accuracy than their tan FBI counterparts. The Bulldozer also got a major upgrade by not only having his faceplate painted with a skull on it, but also carries a light machine gun, the same heavy and fast firing weapons that players can use.
  • Vlad, of all people, took a level in Badass in Meltdown when he asks you to steal live (but mercifully not armed) nuclear warheads. The crew itself also took a level in the mission as Bain initially deemed an all-out assault on the Murkywater compound to be too dangerous, but now has you assaulting the facility in broad daylight.
  • A minor one for Chavez, who was a mission critical NPC from the first game in the Panic Room heist. In the first game, Chavez is treated as a civilian and can be tied up. In the remake of the heist, Chavez is not only wearing body armor, but he also dual wields pistols and will fight back. He can also withstand plenty of headshots despite not wearing a helmet.
  • The Hoxton's Housewarming Party added Mayhem and One Down (later reworked to Death Sentence) difficulties, the cops have gotten even more badass. However, the real badassery starts when people play Death Sentence and go up against ZEAL Team, a group of elite forces that make absolute mincemeat out of players. Even normal security guards on that difficulty can take a lot more punishment, but they're better than facing ZEAL Team.
• Train Job: Originally a Bonus Level, but as of Update #57, it is a separate heist called "Armoured Transport: Train", where you have to secure a turret and its ammo from an idle train.
  • Taken further in the "The Bomb: Forest" heist. This time, they derail the train by blowing up a bridge and raid the wreckage for a thermobaric bomb.
  • Day 2 of the Biker Heist, which sees the heisters landing on a train in-motion, fighting to the front of the train through both hostile bikers and police, retrieving a specific piece of loot from the front of the train, then fighting again to the back of the train to deposit the loot.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Every heist, though moreso for stealth missions. Since spawns can make-or-break missions, and even render some stealth games unwinnable without alert in certain circumstances, expect to restart an entire day based on a single factor being in the wrong spot.
  • Also the reason that Pro Jobs were initially added. Players got a higher cash prize, but cannot restart as failure kicked players back to the lobby. With no restarts available, the Trial-And-Error aspect becomes even more of a chore, requiring players to keep re-buying a map to guarantee another attempt. Pro jobs were eventually removed entirely with the Hoxton's Housewarming Party update.
• True Companions: The crew. All the money and all the gold in the world doesn't convince Dallas to work with the Dentist. But as soon as the Dentist alludes to Hoxton's arrest and shows that he has Hoxton's transfer schedule on hand, Dallas doesn't bat an eyelid before accepting the nebulous deal. Also, one of Dallas's potential lines when succeeding at a heist is "Tightest crew ever!" Likewise, in the Hoxton Breakout trailer, Houston actually dives in front of Chains in order to shield him from gunfire (which ends up flooring Houston) - granted, he has a bulletproof vest and so can take the hits, but still, that's a level of loyalty that money can't buy.
• Undesirable Prize: Completing a heist allows you to earn a bonus item through a Random Drop system, ranging from weapon mods, masks, mask mods, extra cash, and extra experience points. Many players groan in disappointment when they get the cash card (which typically gives a sum under 100K$) after already having several million dollars in spending cash, yet another completely useless mask pattern or color when they already have all their masks customized how they want, or an attachment that's a copy of one they already have and don't use or is for a weapon they don't own or plan to use. Suffice to say, whatever you don't want from the card drop is probably what you're going to get. The Offshore Payday option added around late 2016 has assisted in this, as the player can decide what they want and then "safe" any or all of the cards so that it will definitely have what they want, though at the cost of a good chunk of money from the otherwise-unusable (except for going Infamous the first five times) offshore account.
  • Safes made this even worse from when they were first added up until Update 100. Instead of getting anything useful, you could end up with a safe that holds a random weapon skin... and requiring you to spend nearly $3 in real life just to open it. Technically, you could also get a drill instead of having to buy one, but they were naturally far more rare than safes - and there's also the possibility that the drill would be for a safe type you don't have. Even with the safes able to be opened for free now, there's still always the possibility that the skin you get is for a weapon you don't own and/or have any plans to use... or is even for something from a DLC you don't own. Though this is mitigated by the Steam Marketplace, where you can sell the skin if you don't have the weapon for it/ you don't like it/ have gotten for the 5th time.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Car Shop in more ways than one. Similar to Shadow Raid, it is a stealth-only heist. Unlike Shadow Raid, you start in casing mode instead of wearing your mask already, and with the exception of a handful of guards there are no enemies and a few civilians, whereas Shadow Raid at least had the highly trained Murkywater mercenaries. And finally, instead of bagging the loot, you get into a car and drive away with them.
  • The Hotline Miami heist takes this even further. On the first day, you kill all of the Commissar's henchmen in a motel, set their cars on fire, and blow up their gas station just to get the Commissar's attention. The second day has you confronting the Commissar himself within his penthouse and when you get there, you need to use a thermal drill to pop open the vault he sealed himself into while defending yourself from swarms of cops, snipers, and the Commissar's gunship! If that wasn't enough, the mission effectively forces you to rush through the gauntlet to stop him from flushing extra loot down the drain, the Commissar himself has nearly the same amount of health as a Bulldozer, and he also wields a light machine gun to boot. The entire heist is done just to get the crew one step closer to breaking out Hoxton.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: A minor example, but replacing the red dot on scopes and sights with a hand Flipping the Bird is exactly as Cool, but Inefficient as it would be in real life.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • Mission-critical notes, such as Day 2 on the Big Oil heist, the recipes in Hotline Miami and the whiteboard in Car Shop used to be too blurry to read on lower texture settings. Update #105.2 fixed this.
  • Averted in Day 2 of the Watchdogs heist. Any of the bags that you throw into the water, either by mistake (from not realizing the boat that comes to get it has a limit on how much it can carry, for instance) or intent (just from the less-jerkish possibilities, there's an achievement for throwing a bag in the water here making fun of Call of Duty: Ghosts's "innovative" fish AI) will respawn at the truck where they were at the start. Of course, with waves of FBI likely between you and that truck at this point, it might be as close to unwinnable as possible without actually being unwinnable. Shadow Raid gets a better aversion, as any bags that end up in the water near the zipline you send them off on will just respawn right next to that zipline.
  • Hotline Miami has a section where you have to torch 4 cars with gas cans. However, more than 4 gas cans and cars spawn. Before a patch, if more than 4 cars were torched before the mission objective disappeared (which can happen if two players shoot two gas cans at the exact same moment) the mission logic glitched and the next objective never came.
  • Sometimes the RNG can result in oddly-specific setups, such as having the Vault directly in front of a camera on Day 3 of Framing Frame.
  • A rare bug can occur on Day 1 of Hoxton Breakout if a player other than the host grabs the parking ticket. When a player leaves/disconnects or goes into custody, key items like the parking ticket are supposed to transfer to the next viable player. If the player disconnects while going into custody, the two scripts conflict and only get as far as removing the parking ticket from that player's inventory, without transferring it to another player, which results in the entire day being unwinnable as the team no longer has the key item necessary to unlock the escape sequence.
• The Usual Adversaries: Gensec, whose security forces and various products (alarmed windows, safes, cameras, etc.) are practically everywhere the Payday gang can attempt to rob in D.C.. The Reservoir Dogs heist even has them over on the west coast in L.A.
• Variable Mix: There are a lot of different tracks that can play during a heist, with varying levels of intensity - this often leads to a Musical Spoiler, as the music will start to build up about ten or fifteen seconds before a police assault wave actually starts. Stealth Heists like Shadow Raid, Yacht Heist and Murky Station deserve special mentions as the music changes in response to the progression of the heist instead of the status of an assault wave. There are usually at least three different mixes: the starting mix (which is timid), a slightly more intense mix that starts up closer to your goal, and the "alert" mix/buildup. The Yacht heist has eleven stages to its soundtrack!
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can kill innocent civilians for no reason as they try to run away from you or call the police, or even tie them up, and then kill them. The hostage with a bomb tied to him in the Hotline Miami heist can be blown up with gunfire before or after saving him and killing him has no effect on the game at all. In some stealth runs, it's encouraged - shooting a civilian about to run and call the cops, or see the entire bank taken hostage, and taking the $3,000 or so penalty is a drop in the ocean, compared to the $6,000,000+ payout. Impatient players can also quickly wipe out an entire bank to find the manager and his keycard. It doesn't help that the game still considers a mission "Stealthed" as long as the alarm isn't raised, and the quickest and easiest way to do this is to drop an ECM and murder every living thing on the map.
  • As of the release of the BBQ Pack, one can incinerate civilians.
  • Combined with Disproportionate Retribution in the Counterfeit Heist, where you can murder Mitchel, Wilson and all of their friends and families just because you want to steal their money printer.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Having an itchy trigger finger around civilians not only instantly saps your spending cash as a penalty, but also causes you to have a higher chance of being forced to do an escape sequence after the heist. Thankfully, this is balanced out by making the Civilian AI much easier to handle: they stay on the ground longer after being yelled at, and can be Bound and Gagged with cable ties for a Non-Lethal K.O.. Killing civilians will also delay you from being released from police custody, increasing the amount of time for negotiations by 30 seconds for each dead civilian.
  • Played straight with a certain Crime Spree modifier that limits how many civilians may be killed before the alarm sounds.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted. The game has two, the Flamethrower MK.1 introduced in the Butcher's BBQ Pack, and the MA-17 Flamethrower (blatantly modelled on the Boring Company's "Not a Flamethrower"), introduced for free later on. While they both don't set enemies on fire immediately, they do damage over time, and it acts more like a short-ranged beam of destruction, in that whoever it hits will have all of their health sucked away in short order. Their ranges aren't too shabby either, being comparable to that of the Pyro's flamethrower. The only Special Unit that can stand up to the flames is the Bulldozer, and even then if they're hit by the flames, it'll immobilize them. The MA-17 also has higher base concealment while providing the same damage as the MK.1, as well as being a secondary weapon. The only downside to all this power is that it chews through ammo like nobody's business and takes an eternity to reload, and the MK.1 is incredibly impractical in dodge builds.
• Villain Ball: The Dentist holds Bain hostage with a handgun... within clear line-of-sight of four Payday Gang members in full heist equipment.
• Villain Protagonist: The Payday crew started off as ridiculously well-equipped thieves, but added heists have propelled them into international terrorists at best. If nothing else, the sheer number of police they've killed has easily qualified them all for the death penalty hundreds of times over.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • In some heists that have civilians in them, some players that plan to do the level in stealth will go the extra mile by killing civilians so that they don't alert the police, even if it means losing cash as a penalty.
  • Doing heists in stealth on the highest possible difficulty (Death Sentence) is a good way to ensure some gameplay consistency, as guard spawns are locked to Mayhem, so players can make a note of the general routines, titan camera spawns, AI Behaviour etc, as they'll never get any harder. There is also nothing stopping from you ticking the "One Down" modifier either, which lets you get the achievements for doing the heist with One-Down enabled and on the highest diffculty (despite the entire point of stealth is to avoid firefights).
  • The fastest way to secure the dance floor in Nightclub or the front lobby in Bank Heist involves grenades, since it immediately silences a very high percentage of the people who might end up calling the police or tripping an alarm.
  • A heister can carry full body armor, a minigun, a rocket launcher, four automated turrets, a large bag of ammunition, a broadsword, a bag of gold and an infinite number of safe-cracking drills(!) but can't carry more than six zipties? It boggles the mind.
  • Day 1 of Hotline Miami has you trashing the Russian Commissar's hotel assets. Those assets include a (presumably Russian-owned) full-on meth lab. You'd think you want to blow the lab, right? Hope you don't mind giving up a shot at $2.6 million on the second-easiest difficulty.
  • In Day 2 of Hotline Miami, the Commisar's gunship will start firing rockets at the penthouse, setting part of it on fire and (if its in the blast zone) stopping the thermal drill. You'd think the best thing to do is to turn on the sprinklers to put the fire out, right? Except the fire doesn't do much damage over time, so a reasonably tanky build can take the damage while repairing the drill; the fire doesn't spread, so putting it out isn't urgent; there are always paths around the fire, so you won't get trapped; the cops won't path into the fire, so they can't break the drill; and the gunship won't make another rocket attack while the fire from the previous attack is still burning. In short, what's the best thing to do when part of the area you're holding out in is set on fire? Ignore the fire completely.
  • Jacket answers the pager with an automated message... that states it's an automated message. The other heisters at least try to sound human.
  • Lampshaded with the "I Have No Idea What I'm Doing" achievement, unlocked for completing Shadow Raid, a stealth-only heist, while bringing a minigun and an RPG launcher. The idea is you take it and sit at the van tossing in bags for someone else with a more competent loadout. People have nevertheless found ways to get the achievement solo (by using the melee weapon to kill). A lesser example is with the "The Turtle Always Wins" achievement, for completing the Art Gallery heist in stealth in four minutes while wearing the heaviest armor in the game that basically makes stealth impossible, and the least painful manner of stealthing it in the allotted time involves abusing another loophole regarding what counts as breaking stealth (i.e. ECM rushing).
  • The way to get the most payout for the Framing Frame heist? Do it properly on stealth... until you get into the vault and bag all the gold and are home free, afterwards bag all the gold then come back in guns blazing so you get the extra pay from doing it on loud as well as the gold for doing it quietly.
  • Pre-2018 rebalance, taking "Specialized Killing" from the Ghost tree made any weapon with a silencer deal more damage than ones without a silencer, since the boost to damage by the skill invariably outpaced the hit it would have taken from the attachment.
  • Dodge builds. They work by having less armor in favor of bullets not hitting you so long as you're moving. Asides from Anarchist and Sicario builds (the former focuses on much more armor, the latter uses dodge with a smoke grenade), this completely violates any sense one player can have (as logically, more armor is better).
  • The Heat Street remake doesn't flood the first set of streets with large waves of cops like in the original, and instead has pre-positioned cops and SWATs waiting for you to pass by. One of the easiest ways of beating the first portion of the heist on Mayhem or below is to simply run as fast as possible to Matt's crashed van, ignoring the litany of cops shooting at you, as it's not worth the time dealing with them, and subsequently getting stuck in the first assault wave in the street with little cover. Armor builds make this difficult to do, but dodge/Anarchist builds should be fine.
• Violent Glaswegian: Bonnie. Considering that her signature melee weapon is a whiskey bottle, you could almost consider her a white, two-eyed, female version of The Demoman, moreso if you have a grenade launcher like the China Puff, since it's basically just the Loch-N-Load from Team Fortress 2 with an extra round in the mag.
• We Have Reserves: The police's general strategy for handling the Payday Gang seems to be along the lines of "steadily build up a huge wall of police carcasses until they can't run away." This trope really doesn't even come close to cutting it. Just to illustrate the point, a simple bank heist can easily result in the players killing 250+ police officers.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Without spoilers, The Reservoir Dogs Heist is pretty much this, down to the days being reversed to mimic Tarantino's storytelling style.
• Welcome to Corneria: Bain's messages throughout Day 3 of Framing Frame, while stealthing it.
  • Also his dialogue in Ukrainian Job when stealthed.
  • Bain's instruction while stealthing the Bank Heists. "Guys, the thermal drill, go get it!"
  • It is possible to get rid of these via the gameplay option for muting contractor voices.
• Wham Episode: The Reservoir Dogs Heist is the start of a massive Genre Shift for the story. From that point onward, things slowly go from "masked clowns performing robberies of epic proportions" to "battling an Ancient Conspiracy to recover a device of untold power and save the world."
• Wham Line: In Hoxton's Revenge:
  "The rat was Hector?!"
  • Or if the player searches the tapes:
    "I'm getting impatient Hector, look, I know you are connected to Bain, if you want this little arrangement of ours to continue, you better give me something on the clowns."
  • A minor example from the Safehouse Nightmare, which implies that Jacket isn't everything he appears to be:
    Tape Recorder: Your name is not Jacket.
  • The Reservoir Dogs heist drops a massive one from Locke, whom up until that point had been thought to have been a traitor for the gang:
    Locke: I know you got little incentive to trust me after Alaska, but sending you there was the only credible ruse we had time for, to get you out of DC. People Bain used to think could be trusted... were listening. And now he's gone.
  • On Hell's Island, at the very beginning:
    The Dentist: What's that I hear? Rats... in the sewers?
  • The true ending shows the 46th President granting Solomon the Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor for "eradicating" the Payday Gang. Then, at the end of his speech, he says something that might sound familiar...
    46th President: America, let's do this!
• Wham Shot: The Shacklethorne Auction heist contains multiple documents that hint towards the existence of the Nephilim, massive Humanoid Abominations that herald disaster and are supposedly descended from angels. It's creepy, but there's no indication of there being any truth to it. But then let's say you go out to the front of the mansion... and a flash of lightning lights up the sky, revealing the silhouette of something massive on the horizon◊.. something that looks an awful lot like the depictions of the Nephilim.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: If you wait in the boxes at the beginning of the second day of Hotline Miami, one of the mobsters may mention that he's worried about his daughter skipping school.
• What the Hell, Player?: Bain and Locke will yell at you for killing civilians and will warn you that getting out of custody will be harder while the cops will become more aggressive in response.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: If the Golden Ending is obtained, a new video called "Rumors and Stories" is unlocked that describes what happened to the members of the Payday gang after the White House heist.
• White Mask of Doom: It is entirely possible to make a mask that is pure white simply by using the base 'white plastic' material with no pattern and no color. The "Clean" variants of the Crews' own masks start out this way. Though none are quite as featureless as the trope's page image. The closest one could get would be by using the Alienware or Gage Blade masks and using as much white as possible.
• Whole Episode Flashback: The No Mercy heist is a retelling of the events that occurred from the same heist in the first game with Chains in the present musing over how he had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the start and should have said no to the job. The virus the crew stole from the first game was injected into Bain while he was held prisoner and now he's on death's doorstep.
• Why Am I Ticking?: Day 2 of the Hotline Miami heist can have a hostage strapped to a chair with a bomb attached to his body. While you don't have to go out of your way to save him, doing so will net you a few bags of money that would have been blown to bits if the bomb went off.
• Wild Mass Guessing: In-Universe, during the Hoxton's Revenge heist, if one examines the evidence board, one can discover the FBI seems to be completely and utterly convinced that Vlad is an ordinary baker, and is possibly being used as a front by Bain without his knowledge, and his time in prison was only because Bain framed him.
• Witch Hunt:
  • Depressingly common for high ranking infamy players online. Due to the rampant cheating from people who used said cheats to boost their levels to the max, legitimate players that have reached the maximum infamy level are often kicked out of many games because people assume that maximum infamy is a cheater's calling card. Doubly so for max-infamy players who have their Steam profiles set to private, since many people assume private profiles means that person has something to hide, and acting Properly Paranoid because of it. The same happens in reverse, where people will kick low level players because they believe they might screw them over due to lack of available weapons and character skills. Justified on high-difficulties such as Death Sentence, but complete nonsense on Overkill or below where someone who has played FPS games before can survive and thrive.
  • Taken up to eleven with the "Dodge VS Armor" debate, where on loud heists you can get kicked for wearing too much armor, too little armor, or the wrong kind of armor.^note The Dodge Build abuses the Dodge mechanic by avoiding damage altogether, but requires the player to equip themselves very lightly, resulting in someone who can't contribute much unless they have a very specific build. If they're also unlucky or unskilled, they will go down within the first 2 minutes of the heist going loud. Armor builds suffer from something similar in that it takes fully upgrading two specific skill trees to be survivable in heavy armor, and even then you're slowed to a snail's crawl the moment you have anything on your back, dragging everyone down to cover your ass as you crawl along a map. And god help you if you want to come in with anything in between; on lower levels it's forgivable but on Overkill or Death Wish, you better pick one or the other or else everyone will instantly brand you as dead weight, before unceremoniously giving you the boot.
  • There are several exploits within the game that seasoned veterans like and will exploit, as in some cases they're the only way you can survive on Death Wish. Grab a keycard on Hox Breakout when everyone else was trying to dupe it? Kick. Turn on the sprinklers on Hotline Miami Day 2 after someone just braved the fire to fix the drill? Kick. Take the Thermite before people could dupe it? Kick. Of course, there are people that will do the exact opposite and will kick anyone that even dares to suggest to go for any of these exploits on purpose.
  • It gets worse when you play Rats or Cook Off on Death Wish or Death Sentence as hosts start designating who cooks the meth. If you aren't one and even happen to pick up an ingredient...
  • The addition of microtransactions with weapon skins exacerbated the problem even further by people who will kick anyone on sight if they are using paid skin mods. This was due to the community's overwhelming negative response to the microtransaction system and believing that punishing the players who support it would send the devs a message. It even continued after the mandatory microtransactions were removed!
• You Don't Look Like You: An audio version, since we never see Bain's face (up until Hell's Island). A lot of the earlier heists (Ukrainian Job being the most obvious due to inordinate amounts of chatter) have Bain sound more like he does in PAYDAY: The Heist, quite unlike his present radio filter.
  • On a lesser note, Hoxton and his live-action counterpart. Hoxton is played by Josh Lenn, while his Voice is Pete Gold.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Some of the weapons have folding/telescoping stocks, but you have to actually pay money to fold/extend some of them.
• Zerg Rush: Cops don't rush in as much as they used to in the first game, preferring to strategically flank you instead. On Mayhem, Death Wish and higher however, the cops play the trope straight at all times, since they have the health and firepower to back it up.
  • Played straight on Firestarter Day 1 if you get the far right hangar. Cops will never stop swarming over the fence until the assault wave is over or you've moved all the bags away from the hangar.

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