WARDOGS Weapon Tier List: All 34 Weapons Ranked by Value (Season 1)

The tier list at a glance

• S — the efficient frontier: T-21 ($600), SKS ($2,400), Super-45 ($2,600), PKM ($4,500). Nothing buys the same capability for less.
• A — you pay for the edge: M4, FAL, SVD, Galil, AK74, M249 SAW, Mosin Nagant, AMP-9, Deagle, MK22, BMR-308, GGX 18. Genuinely better, and every one charges thousands for it.
• B — workable, with a hard ceiling: A-91, KH-2002, Bushmaster M17S, MP5, PP-19 Vityaz, SV98, M500, MP43, Judge, Compound Bow.
• C — skip: Scout Rifle TD, M1911, GGX 17.
• D — tools, not tiers: 9K333 Verba, MAAWS, RPG-7, MGL-40, AMR 50. Ranked apart because comparing a launcher to a rifle is meaningless.

Why the price tag is a weapon stat

There are no fixed classes and no permanent loadout in WARDOGS. Before every life you open the buy menu and spend from your balance — gun, ammunition, armour, medical kit, grenades, tools, vehicles. Die, and the kit is gone. Cash persists between matches, so a bad night follows you into the next one.

You earn it back through teamwork rather than fragging: holding the Control Zone, reviving, driving squadmates, spotting targets, and kills, with the Hot Zone paying roughly double. That is the game telling you where it wants you to be.

Which is why the FAL at $6,500 is stronger than the T-21 at $600 and worse for most players. Two deaths without a payout and you cannot afford armour; without armour the cheap rifle across the street kills you first. Keep the gun under a third of your balance and spend the rest on armour, ammunition and medicine — those decide whether you survive the first contact at all.

Two more rules shape every pick. Bullets travel and drop, so range decides the gun: under 50 m handling and rate of fire win, at 50–150 m recoil control wins, past 150 m muzzle velocity and leading the target win. And below Wardog level 9 the vendor charges half price on everything, permanently gone once you pass it — that window is for experimenting, not for hoarding one trophy rifle.

How a kill actually works

Damage starts at the cartridge, not the weapon: 5.56×45 lands 28, 5.45×39 lands 26, 7.62×39 lands 42, 7.62×54R lands 55, .308 lands 60. That number is then multiplied by the weapon’s class and by which of the body’s twelve zones you hit — which is why the same 7.62×54R round puts 109 into a chest from a Mosin and 79 from an SVD.

Health is 100, so shots-to-kill is that damage divided into 100, and the kill time follows from the rate of fire:

TTK = (hits − 1) × 60,000 / RPM

Two chest hits at 650 RPM is 92 ms. Four at 800 RPM is 225 ms. Every figure in the table below comes from those two lines.

Armour breaks the arithmetic in two places, and both are worth more than any weapon upgrade:

• Armour only covers what it covers. A vest or helmet cuts damage roughly 30% at the lightest tier and 65% at the heaviest, and it is a durability pool that wears out as you shoot it. Legs, forearms and hands stay soft at every tier — a cheap high-RPM rifle aimed at a thigh does full damage to a fully-geared player.
• Ammunition matters more than the gun. Against the heaviest tier, FMJ keeps about a third of its damage, AP keeps about two thirds, and HP keeps under one percent. Bringing hollow-point to a late-match fight is a bigger mistake than bringing the wrong rifle.

Every weapon, with the numbers

Weapon	Tier	Price	Damage	RPM	Chest hits	TTK	Full-damage range	Unlock
Bushmaster M17S	B	free	28	700	4	257 ms	300 m	—
A-91	B	free	28	700	4	257 ms	300 m	—
KH-2002	B	free	28	700	4	257 ms	300 m	—
T-21	S	$600	28	750	4	240 ms	550 m	—
AK74	A	$1,600	26	650	4	277 ms	500 m	Assault 3
Galil	A	$2,200	28	650	4	277 ms	400 m	Assault 10
M4	A	$2,800	28	800	4	225 ms	500 m	Assault 20
FAL	A	$6,500	60	650	2	92 ms	800 m	Assault 35
AMP-9	A	$900	22	900	5	267 ms	100 m	—
PP-19 Vityaz	B	$1,200	22	800	5	300 ms	200 m	Medic 4
MP5	B	$1,500	22	800	5	300 ms	200 m	Medic 15
Super-45	S	$2,600	30	1200	4	150 ms	50 m	Medic 35
MP43	B	$400	25/pellet	900	—	—	70 m	—
M500	B	$1,200	25/pellet	120	—	—	70 m	Support 10
M249 SAW	A	$3,200	28	850	4	212 ms	700 m	Support 15
PKM	S	$4,500	55	600	2	100 ms	1,000 m	Support 30
SKS	S	$2,400	42	420	2	143 ms	400 m	Recon 5
SVD	A	$4,800	55	480	2	125 ms	800 m	Recon 12
BMR-308	A	$6,000	60	450	2	133 ms	500 m	Recon 30
Scout Rifle TD	C	$1,100	28	46	2	1,304 ms	300 m	—
Mosin Nagant	A	$4,500	55	46	1	one shot	500 m	Recon 10
SV98	B	$5,200	55	46	1	one shot	1,000 m	Recon 19
MK22	A	$6,400	60	46	1	one shot	1,000 m	Recon 25
AMR 50	D	$8,800	107	42	1	one shot	2,000 m	Recon 35
Compound Bow	B	$800	77	90	2	667 ms	—	Recon 17
GGX 17	C	$200	22	600	5	400 ms	50 m	Wardog 1
Judge	B	$250	45	200	3	600 ms	50 m	Wardog 18
M1911	C	$300	30	430	4	419 ms	50 m	Wardog 40
GGX 18	A	$800	22	1200	5	200 ms	50 m	Wardog 70
Deagle	A	$900	63	267	2	225 ms	100 m	Wardog 85
9K333 Verba	D	$800	—	—	—	—	anti-air	Support 16
RPG-7	D	$2,000	110	100	—	—	300 m	Support 5
MAAWS	D	$2,600	—	100	—	—	—	Support 20
MGL-40	D	$6,000	—	75	—	—	—	Support 35

Chest hits and TTK are calculated against an unarmoured target at 100 HP, using each weapon’s own published damage and rate of fire. Prices are per loadout, paid again on every respawn, and halved below Wardog level 9.

The outliers, in both directions

Underpriced

T-21 — $600. Four chest hits at 750 RPM is 240 ms, fifteen milliseconds behind an M4 that costs 4.7× as much. It also holds full damage to 550 m against the M4’s 500 m, at the same 910 m/s muzzle velocity. The cheapest rifle in the vendor out-ranges the popular one.

SKS — $2,400. 54.6 to the torso is a two-hit kill, exactly like the SVD: 143 ms against 125 ms, for half the price, 1.45 kg less to carry and seven Recon levels earlier. The SVD’s real premium is range, 800 m against 400 m. Inside that, the SKS is the better buy — the “budget DMR” label undersells it badly.

Deagle — $900. 63 damage means a two-hit kill from a sidearm, with rifle-grade accuracy (0.84) and full damage to 100 m. At 225 ms it kills as fast as an M4 and weighs 2 kg. Quietly the best secondary in the game.

GGX 18 — $800. 1,200 RPM on a 0.63 kg pistol kills in 200 ms inside 50 m — faster than every assault rifle except the FAL. A backup that wins the rooms your primary was not built for.

Overpriced

M4, SVD and BMR-308. Each buys a sliver: $2,200 over a T-21 for 15 ms and 50 m less range; $2,400 over an SKS for 18 ms; $3,600 over an SKS for 10 ms. Good guns, bad purchases until your bank stops noticing the loss.

FAL — $6,500. The 92 ms kill is real and it is the fastest in the game. It also means one death empties two thirds of a full bank, and you cannot buy Level 4 armour with what is left. It wins duels and loses matches.

Scout Rifle TD — $1,100. A sniper rifle chambered in 5.56: 28 damage, 46 RPM, 300 m. Two hits to kill with 1.3 seconds between them. There is no engagement in this game where it is the right answer — the $250 Judge hits harder per shot.

Worth testing yourself

MP43 slugs — $400. 25 per pellet of buckshot at 900 RPM, and one published TTK chart puts its slugs through Level 4 armour in 0.20 s, which would make it the best dollar-per-kill in the vendor by a wide margin. Accuracy 3.08 and 70 m of range are the catch, and it is a single source. Try it on the range before you trust it.

What to buy, by role

Assault. Start on the T-21 at $600 with a GGX 17 behind it — $800 of guns, under a tenth of your opening bank, and everything left goes into armour, magazines and grenades, which is what actually wins a building. Upgrade path as the bank grows: AK74, then M4, then FAL when losing $6,500 stops mattering.

Medic. The Super-45 is the best submachine gun in the game and the right answer to close quarters — but a medic carries medicine. If the gun ate the budget and the carry weight, you are just a worse assault. The MP5 at $1,500 and the AMP-9 at $900 are the honest downgrades.

Support. The PKM works from a position, not on a flank run: two-hit kills, a 100-round belt, 7.5 kg, and full damage to 1,000 m. Its job is that the enemy squad cannot lift their heads. The M249 at $3,200 trades that two-hit kill for 850 RPM and the worst accuracy in this list.

Recon. The SKS until the map gives you real distance, then the SVD. Semi-autos beat bolt actions in most fights because the follow-up shot does not wait on a bolt cycle. If you want the one-shot kill, the Mosin is the value version inside 500 m and the MK22 is the instrument beyond it. The AMR 50 is for vehicles, not people.

Attachments: what actually moves the needle

1. Optic first. Magnification matched to your engagement range is the one part that changes how a gun feels everywhere. No muzzle device fixes bringing a red dot to a 300 m lane.
2. Vertical grip second. Recoil here is predominantly vertical, so a vertical foregrip earns its slot on almost any automatic. The 45° angled grip trades a little vertical kick for better horizontal control and tighter spread.
3. Recoil and sway are different stats. Parts that reduce sway do nothing for the climb you fight during a burst. Of the 207 attachments in the game, only about 85 move a number printed on the weapon page.
4. Ammunition beats a fourth muzzle brake. AP penetrates, HP hurts unarmoured targets, slugs give shotguns reach. Late in a match, when everyone is armoured, ammo choice decides more fights than any bolt-on.
5. Weight is the hidden cost. Every part comes out of the load you can carry, and recoil parts pay off least on marksman rifles, where one placed shot does the same work for free.

A note on where this list comes from

All 34 vendor weapons were checked individually against their own stat pages — base damage, rate of fire, muzzle velocity, range, accuracy, weight, price and unlock — rather than inferred from a class average. That pass is what moved the three free rifles out of the top tier (they cannot equip attachments at all, magazines only, no optics, and they stop at 300 m), and what moved the Galil, MK22, Deagle and Judge up.

Where this list disagrees with others: published tier lists put the SVD anywhere from S to C and treat the SKS as a stand-in, but both kill in two chest hits, so the order here is reversed. One tracker also prices the SVD at $3,750 rather than $4,800, and lists the Deagle’s unlock at Wardog 85 rather than 90 — the table uses the majority figure in both cases.

And do not compare absolute TTK figures across sources: published charts put the FAL anywhere from 92 ms to 340 ms because each assumes a different armour tier, ammunition and hit zone. The numbers here are all one model — unarmoured chest, 100 HP.

WARDOGS is in Steam Early Access (launched 10 September 2026, developed by BULKHEAD and published by Team17), and prices, damage, recoil and unlock requirements move with every patch. Treat this as a snapshot of the Season 1 opening meta, and test a gun on the range before you put half your bank into it.