Gaming

I’ve never used sandy,

You absolutely should. Reflexes+blades is the usual option, flanked by body and cold blood. Even without the legendary heatsinks you can spend more time inside bullet time than outside, at low levels that's going to result in a lot of "run in, slash stuff, run to cover before sandy runs out to recharge it" but then there's also camouflage and your slashing is going to become ever more effective and body is going to make you a bullet sponge so at some point it just ceases to matter whether people have a chance hitting you once in a while.

Gun builds are problematic because bullet time slows down shooting frequency (it doesn't do that with melee) but I've seen people do comrade hammer's builds. If you want maximum damage output for crowd control at decent range there's monowire which uses the same skill tree as katanas. The katana is to avoid excessive collateral damage as well as for style, and then of course knife headshots.