I’ve made a new game and have skipped the Watson lockdown and trying to max level before I do any missions. I’m at level 12 but it’s taking forever.
I’ve searched YouTube and there are a ton of XP guides where they show you good areas to farm XP, but for them to be reliable you have to already be about level 20-30 otherwise it takes forever to down enemies because you can’t access most weapons or you do so little it’s just tedious. I already have 27 street cred and have the arm launcher but it really isn’t enough, it’s better to use a sniper but it takes 3-4 headshots for each person.
Just adding to this:
You can use any non-lethal attack that render enemies unconscious for exp and street cred, and then finish them off lethally with a weapon (or even your fists if you want to conserve ammo) for extra exp & street cred - basically getting double exp from each kill. The arm launcher with the tranquiliser rounds mod is great for this, as are quick hacks such as System Reset, Overheat & Short Circuit.
On a side note - Netrunner is ridiculously broken once you get access to legendary quickhacks (perk to craft them unlocks at 19 Int, doesn't require any Tech level), especially Ping which lets you apply quickhacks to any enemies it picks up on the scan, regardless of whether you have line of sight or not, even if they are on different floors. Combine this with the deck that lets ultimate type quickhacks spread once and System Reset & Suicide basically insta-kill 2 enemies per use. The deck also reduces the quickhack cooldowns by 45%, and with the right perks in the quickhack tree, you can have these skills available around every 10 secs or so - then it just becomes an issue of having enough ram capacity and regen to keep using them.