So I am playing with the Hardcore 22 V2 mod which makes enemies a lot more deadly but removes the egregious spongyness of very hard mode in exchange.

This gun just has it all, quick fire shotgun blasts for cqb, long range still fairly quick lovetaps to the head for when a ton of enemies are rushing you at once and of course a charged mode to punch through walls, just beautiful with stalker optics (I also banned myself from using the middle click highlight because its OP as hell)

So after a lot of playing Koumei this is a series of tricks, some obvious and some hopefully not, that you can use to get the most out of her kit. I'm going to try and format this thing into sections but I was never the best at typography so hopefully the end result is coherant.

The goal of this guide is not to build around specific decrees but instead to allow her to directly benefit from as many decrees as possible and thus reducing the rng element.

--Koumei herself--
So there's a few things you can do on Koumei herself to make life easier, most of these are pretty well known but I'm including them for the sake of having a comprehensive guide.

• Sickening Pulse: Probably the most well known Helminth for Koumei, its popular because it works, synergizing with her 4 to allow for nuking all the way up to level cap, this buff to her 4 also makes several decree challenges much easier.
• Parkour mods: I know a lot of people hate the idea of wasting an exilus on this but it really does make her gameplay that much smoother, something in the lightning dash family of mods is ideal and once you start the extra bullet jump distance is hard to give up.
• Armor: This is more than just defense for Koumei, in long runs it can also translate directly into power strength, and with arcane battery a mod like umbral fiber can sub in for (primed)flow too. A full Umbral Koumei hits a permament 600% power strength once her decrees are stacked.
• Equilibrium: Another useful but niche option, Koumei has decrees that both create and benefit from health orbs and this mod synergizes well with them.

--Decree challenges--
Some decree challenges can be a pain but with the minnimal investment of sickening pulse (and maybe that parkour mod) most of that pain goes away.

• Kill X enemies afflicted with element: Basically free, if its not one your weapon just prime with your 4 or kill with your 4 + sickening pulse, or with whatever weapon your passive is on right now.
• Kill while airborne, sliding or wall latched. Cast your 4 when on the ground, then do the appropriate manuver and hit sickening pulse, works everywhere from base level to endurance. Alternatively shotguns can do this a little slower but are less finicky, especially with sliding.
• Headshot kills: This is actually the only challenge I routinely skip, you can make it easier with skill or specific weapons but weapons that work best with Koumei tend not to be the greatest for headshotting and one of your own decrees can actually steal your own headshots by turning them into toxin procs.

--Equipment--
Koumei is in many ways a weapons platform frame, however unlike frames like Rhino, Mirage or Saryn the buffs she provides are less clear cut; in her hands some weapons hardly benefit at all while others can achieve heights far above what can be achieved with more conventional buffs.

• Hybrid: This is the most basic rule of gearing Koumei, decrees benefit both crits and status so a weapon that inflicts both is going to get the most consistent benefit.
• LMGs and Shotguns: A large number of her less popular and thus wasted decrees relate to magazine capacity, ammo efficiency and reloading. With many weapons these are useless, with the right weapons they can be excellent. Both weapon types tend to suffer from long or frequent reloads, delaying or skipping these alone is a nice buff. LMGs in particular have huge base magazines which can reach or exceed a thousand capacity with the right decrees, this can turn into truly bottomless magazine with reload on kill or even an additional 1000% electrical damage. Shotguns are similar, with magazine capacity, ammo efficiency and reload decrees allowing them to function as bullet hoses, its less dramatic than with LMGs but you haven't lived until you've tried bottomless magazine Felarx.
• Melees: Another way to put the initial summary of this section is that Koumei is a jank amplifier. dual ichor and okina incarnons are already strong but the daggers and clouds proccing decrees on their own is a whole new level of crazy. Projectile weapons go crazy with multiplicative CO and the inevitable melee rainbow status you aquire (even without priming). Heavy attack crit weapons make an entertaining alternative to hybrids with their own set of decrees that turn everything into a corrosive syam. Of course if you can get a fun hybrid heavy attack weapon then that's the dream and please mention it in the comments.

--Specific gear reccomendations--
Just some gear for Koumei that's effective and fun, and most importantly helps avoid wasted decrees.

• Trumna(prime): Its no torid incarnon (what is?) but as far as Koumei primaries go this has it all. At the start of the mission is a solid hybrid LMG with an alt-fire that can really come in clutch when you're having trouble with those airborne/latch/slide kill challenges. Stick around for a while and its an endless stream of bullets with all the fire-rate and damage you'll ever need.
  -Quellor: A side-grade to Trumna that trades damage for being a bit more consistent with headshots, and trades the grenade for the alt-fire that opticor wishes it was. Also has the highest base magazine capacity in the game if you really want to make the most out of the magazine size to electrical damage decree.
  -Scourge(prime): Largely a utility pick for the headshot challenge but also a decent weapon in its own right, most decrees just help this keep up with level scaling but if you get the ones that inflict toxin and electric AOEs on headshots then this thing is suddenly a rapid fire rocker launcher.
  -Shade(prime): At low levels this plus verglass or primer of your choice can help with damage CC or whatever you need. Into endurance (or right away if you want to build for it) you almost certainly have enough strength and efficiency from decrees that you can just sit around invisible and spam this + sickening pulse to nuke everything without even being shot at.

Continuing my recent playthrough of deliberately letting myself get distracted by every vaguely interesting piece of scenery here are 4 interesting spots around night city that never come up in scripted gigs.

Fairly easy to find, a random security gate near the Kiroshi Optics HQ leads to a surprisingly detailed little loading bay.

Beneath an unassuming overpass lies a whole little village of tyger claws. This area even includes a tyger claw dragon who's appears to be particularly tough, akin to the minibosses often found in criminal activity scanner hustles.

Just a hop, skip and jump from Dantes Den (literally) how many of us have ever looked down to realise there's a whole housing block sealed in by a wire mesh, based on a light in a bottom floor window it appears to still be inhabited to. (The media outer chest piece can be found on the balcony to the right of the image)

Just down the hill from the monestary we can find a whole abandoned housing development, as well as a gas pipeline running underneath the highway. Alas the alluring skywalk of mystery has an invisible wall that prevents the player from following it past the black electronic billboards.

So equipping a glowing clan emblem in either front/back sigil slot will cause the ephemera to be completely overridden by the sigils colour, mostly annoying but could also be interesting if its what you want.

On this playthrough I've decided to just wander around Watson a bit before the heist and keep finding streets I've never seen before, even on previous playthroughs where I walked everywhere. This particular street is practically subteranian and its a shame most of the content takes place at surface level or in the main streets when there are great environments like this hidden around the place where most players will never see them.

So for a lot of people Patch 2.13 has been a great performance boost; though I personally have a 40 series GPU and intend to keep using DLSS since it looks better (FSR 3.1 when CDPR?) FSR does actually gain me significantly more frames at the cost of some visuals.

However some of you (like me) will have initially had a significant FPS drop compared to pre-patch, along with weirdly low GPU utilization and loss of access to frame gen for 40 series cards. The fix is simple, go into windows graphics settings and enable hardware accelerated GPU scheduling. For me at least that solved all the above issues and I hope it can for some other people too.

Small update:
I was just trying some things to get latency down and while I was in Nvidia control pannel decided to give:
"Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization"
A try. I can confirm that I saw almost no shimmering and it dropped my GPU/CPU useages from about 70% to 50%. I'm playing at 1080p with DLSS on balanced and settings maxed. My system is a 32GB of ddr4, an AMD 3700x cpu and an RTX4070 GPU for reference.

Thought I'd add it to this post because it seems to be a fairly substantial performance boost with no downside, at least on my setup.

Tiny update:
Changing multi-threaded optimization from 'auto' to 'on' in the nvidia control pannel or your GPUs equivelent appears to result in a small but noticable boost to performance on some setups. This is due to windows often having auto default to off, though you should do this on a cyberpunk specific profile as it can break older applications.

So with his new fashion (love that lopsided scarf) and more importantly his newish augments he's really become a frame that I love a lot more than I thought I would. After looking at some youtuber builds the option seemed to be distinctly nuke or ghost but honestly he works great doing both (even with some mods missing)

Overall he ended up being a frame I can play however I want.

• Tanky enough to just melee or shoot when I want too.
• Nukey enough to handle base steel path even without subsuming roar
• Able to transition to shadow form pretty much whenever I want since the nuke instantly charges death well.
• Able to nuke well in shadow form too.

Its also just awesome to be able to have swarms of killer ghosts to summon on a whim in both normal and shadow form.

I'm sure we all remember when Topaz shards were utterly overpowered only to be nerfed so hard as to be all but abandoned outside secondary crit chance. Since then DE have said they follow the same rules Calibans lethal progeny ability, this howerver is incorrect and Topaz shards appear to be even more limited. They in fact seem to obey the following 2 rules.

• Overshields cannot be generated.
• Shields cannot be generated during ANY kind of recharge delay.

The second point is important because any recharge delay includes the brief one every time you'r hit, even if you still have shields and haven't shield gated. The result is that Topaz shards cannot generate any shields while under fire.

This in my opinion is likely an oversight as it renders them utterly useless since their only potential utility is when you're not in combat yet still able to kill enemies with a blast, a situation not only incredibly rare but also one where shields regenerate on their own anyway.

So before I start here's my build for reference:

Review
So overall I think Jade is a cool concept, having a 'biblically accurate' angel warframe is a nice change from another speedster frame or whatever cali...something is meant to be. I know some people find the whole, well if you played the quest you know; thing a bit uncomfortable but in retrospect its a pretty masterful move by DE because a biblically accurate angel should be unsettling. Onto the review:

• Lights Judgement:
  This is a pretty great ability, it effectively acts like blood altar but without requiring an enemy and with extra synergy with other parts of her kit. It does suffer a bit from the same issue as Trinitys 'well of life' in that despite being an objectively good ability its a bit overshadowed by the rest of her kit.

• Symphony of Mercy:
  This is basically a 3rd aura, and honestly outright unbalanced compared to other support frames but it is fun. I like to use the strength buff before casting my 4 for the free boost and then maintain damage to buff my own glory weapon, occasionally switching to the shield buff to quickly recharge if I'm taking a lot of damage. Its worth noting that this scales with affinity range so it can benefit from PoE consumables and the Vazarin focus school. I also suspect the % shield regen could make for an interesting tanking method when combined with primed redirection but I haven't tried that yet.

• Ophanim Eyes:
  Another strong one and Jades subsume the defense strip is not only good but also stacks addatively with corrosive projection allowing you to speed up armor strip by about a second. The ability also has slow but most enemies die before it can make a difference (The abilities own damage is not worth mentioning). On Jade only this can also revive allies but it really doesn't come up much.

• Glory on High:
  Mandatory if you want to look like an awesome angel instead of a pile of wet towels this ability is also fortunately pretty damn strong. The drain isn't crazy and the weapon is also strong in its own right, 30-50% damage reduction is also icing on the cake; combined with aerodynamic and aviator you can hit abnout 75% damage reduction in this state.

Glory:
Once again here's my build for reference:

Easily one of the stronger exalted weapons right now being somewhere beteen dex pixia and peace makers in terms of raw damage output while being easier to use than both. It can handily take down level 200 steel path grineer without any armor strip, and with range and sufficient enemy density it can maintain her 2 forever all by itself, particularly in steel path. It can also synergize with her 1 for a massive room nuke but honestly thats overkill.

If you want more single target damage simply swap fulmination for pistol elementalist to roughly double its damage output.

Conclusion
Overall Jade is a really strong frame who's fun to use with a kit where every ability has its place and feels worth using... yet its feels vaguely dissapointing. Despite being good it doesn't really feel like Jades kit. Particularly with her 2 and 4 it feels more like DE took all the things they should have done to rework, Hildryn, Equinox and Titania and combined them all together to make a new frame instead.

Overall I'm happy with jade but I think I would have been happier if Hildryn had a 4 that felt this good, if Equinox wasn't saddled with awkward limitations and uncapped energy drains, and if Titania (while still strong) just had a little more usability and synergy in her kit.

E.g. I like the Cinta because its super pretty and has an interesting firing mechanic even if its not the strongest.