WARDOGS Meta: Weapon Tier List
The best weapon in the Season 2 WARDOGS meta is the M14, a $7,400 marksman rifle that kills through a Level 2 vest in 3 body shots (171 ms). The best assault rifle is the TCX-SPR at $3,200, and the best free weapon is the A-91.
Best weapon in every class
All weaponsTCX-SPR
- Damage
- 34
- Rate
- 800rpm
- Velocity
- 700m/s
- Range
- 400m
- Weight
- 3.5kg
The tier list and weapon stats, on your phone · Plus a heads-up whenever a new patch drops.
Get it onGoogle PlayApp StoreThis WARDOGS tier list ranks all 37 weapons in the game on how fast they kill a player wearing a Level 2 vest, from the assault rifles and SMGs to the sniper rifles, shotguns and launchers. Open a tier to see why each weapon sits where it does. The ranking updates whenever a patch changes the numbers.
The fastest kills through a Level 2 vest across close, medium and long range. If your budget reaches one of these, it is the pick.
M14Marksman rifle3 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 700 RPM: 171 ms. Fastest marksman rifle on the list.
SVDMarksman rifle3 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 480 RPM: 250 ms. Nothing cheaper ranks higher.
BMR-308Marksman rifle3 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 450 RPM: 267 ms. The SVD ranks higher for $1,450 less.
SUPER-45SMG6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 1,200 RPM: 250 ms. Fastest SMG on the list. Falls off past 50 m.
- TCX-SPRAssault rifle
5 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 800 RPM: 300 ms. Nothing cheaper ranks higher.
FALAssault rifle4 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 650 RPM: 277 ms. Fastest assault rifle on the list.
A step behind the top tier on the clock, often for a lot less money. Most winning loadouts are built around one of these.
EVO-3 ULTRALMG4 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 700 RPM: 257 ms. Fastest LMG on the list.
M4Assault rifle6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 800 RPM: 375 ms. Nothing cheaper ranks higher.
T-21Assault rifle6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 750 RPM: 400 ms. Nothing cheaper ranks higher.
SKSMarksman rifle4 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 420 RPM: 429 ms. The T-21 ranks higher for $1,200 less.
PKMLMG4 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 600 RPM: 300 ms. The T-21 ranks higher for $2,900 less.
A-91Assault rifle6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 700 RPM: 429 ms. Free, and nothing paid below it ranks higher.
BUSHMASTER M17SAssault rifle6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 700 RPM: 429 ms. Identical on paper to the A-91, at the same price.
KH-2002Assault rifle6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 700 RPM: 429 ms. Identical on paper to the A-91, at the same price.
AMR 50Sniper rifle · Tiered on shots2 body shots through a Level 2 vest, 1 with no armour. Reaches 2,000 m. Its armour-piercing effect is not decoded, so the vest count is a worst case.
They do the job, but something above them does it faster. Worth carrying when the price or the role suits you.
GALIL$2,000
M249 SAW$3,200
AMP-9$1,375
AK74$800
MP5$1,800
PP-19 VITYAZ$1,200
GGX 18$1,000
MK22$6,400
MOSIN NAGANT$4,500
SV98$5,200
COMPOUND BOW$1,350
M500$1,200
- GALILAssault rifle
6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 650 RPM: 462 ms. The A-91 ranks higher for $2,000 less.
- M249 SAWLMG
6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 850 RPM: 353 ms. The A-91 ranks higher for $3,200 less.
- AMP-9SMG
8 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 900 RPM: 467 ms. The A-91 ranks higher for $1,375 less. Falls off past 100 m.
- AK74Assault rifle
7 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 650 RPM: 554 ms. The A-91 ranks higher for $800 less.
- MP5SMG
8 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 800 RPM: 525 ms. The A-91 ranks higher for $1,800 less.
- PP-19 VITYAZSMG
8 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 800 RPM: 525 ms. The A-91 ranks higher for $1,200 less.
- GGX 18Sidearm
8 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 1,200 RPM: 350 ms. Fastest sidearm on the list. Falls off past 50 m.
- MK22Sniper rifle · Tiered on shots
3 body shots through a Level 2 vest, 2 with no armour. Reaches 1,000 m.
- MOSIN NAGANTSniper rifle · Tiered on shots
3 body shots through a Level 2 vest, 2 with no armour. Reaches 500 m.
- SV98Sniper rifle · Tiered on shots
3 body shots through a Level 2 vest, 2 with no armour. Reaches 1,000 m.
- COMPOUND BOWBow · Our call
Silent, cheap and slow. Arrows drop hard past 60 m, so it rewards patience and punishes a missed first shot.
- M500Shotgun · Our call
A pump action that ends a fight at the door, and nothing past 70 m. The cheapest way to own a building.
Good at one thing — a room, a vehicle, a backup slot — and outclassed elsewhere. Buy them for that job, not as a main weapon.
PP-19 BIZONSMG8 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 700 RPM: 600 ms. The A-91 ranks higher for $1,000 less.
DEAGLESidearm3 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 267 RPM: 449 ms. 99 ms behind the GGX 18. Falls off past 100 m.
GGX 17Sidearm8 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 600 RPM: 700 ms. 350 ms behind the GGX 18. Falls off past 50 m.
M1911Sidearm6 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 430 RPM: 698 ms. 348 ms behind the GGX 18. Falls off past 50 m.
MAAWSLauncher · Our callThe answer to armour, and only to armour. Carry it when your squad has nothing else that stops a vehicle.
MGL-40Launcher · Our callA drum of grenades for clearing a position from cover. At $7,500 it costs three-quarters of a starting balance.
MP43Shotgun · Our callBoth barrels inside a second for $400, then a reload with nobody covering you. A one-room gamble.
RPG-7Launcher · Our callLight vehicles and dug-in squads are the job. Against a single rifleman you have spent $1,800 on a miss.
Something cheaper or faster beats them at everything they do.
JUDGESidearm4 body shots through a Level 2 vest at 200 RPM: 900 ms. 550 ms behind the GGX 18. Falls off past 50 m.
SCOUT RIFLE TDSniper rifle · Tiered on shots5 body shots through a Level 2 vest, 3 with no armour. Reaches 300 m.
26 weapons are ranked on time to kill through a Level 2 vest, re-run at close, medium and long range. The 5 bolt-action rifles are tiered on how many shots they need instead, and the 6 weapons the model cannot score — the shotguns, the bow and the launchers — are our own call, marked on each one.
Price is not part of the ranking, and in WARDOGS it should be: your cash carries over between matches, so a cheaper weapon that is nearly as good is often the right buy. How the ranking works and what each rank costs are below.
The leg meta: why players shoot legs
Armour only reduces hits on the body parts it covers, and every vest and helmet lists those parts in the game files. Vests protect the chest and stomach, the Super Heavy vest adds the pelvis and upper arms, and helmets protect the head (and the neck, from the Heavy helmet up). Nothing protects the legs, so a leg hit lands at full damage whatever the target is wearing. That is the whole idea behind the leg meta: against expensive armour, aim low.
- Light Armor30% off hits to chest and stomach
- Medium Armor40% off hits to chest and stomach
- Heavy Armor50% off hits to chest and stomach
- Super Heavy Armor60% off hits to chest, stomach, pelvis and upper arms
- Light Helmet30% off hits to head
- Medium Helmet40% off hits to head
- Heavy Helmet50% off hits to head and neck
- Super Heavy Helmet60% off hits to head and neck
Whether a leg shot actually beats a chest shot depends on one number: how much damage a leg hit does compared with a chest hit. Two independent readings of the game files give leg figures roughly twice apart, so we do not publish one. What we can say exactly is where the line sits for each vest:
| Target wears | Chest hits lose | Legs win if a leg hit does more than |
|---|---|---|
| Level 1 (Light Armor) | 30% | 70% of a chest hit |
| Level 2 (Medium Armor) | 40% | 60% of a chest hit |
| Level 3 (Heavy Armor) | 50% | 50% of a chest hit |
| Level 4 (Super Heavy Armor) | 60% | 40% of a chest hit |
The heavier the vest, the stronger the case for the legs: against Super Heavy armour a leg hit only has to do 40% of a chest hit to be the better shot. The tiers above are ranked on chest hits, so a cheap, fast-firing rifle aimed at the legs can outperform its tier against heavy armour. We will add the leg figure to the TTK rankings once our own decode settles it.
How the tiers are calculated
Dmg and RPM are recorded figures, not estimates. Rate of fire is per weapon and base damage is per calibre, both decoded out of the game's own files. Shots is how many torso hits a 100-health target takes, first with no armour and then through a Level 2 vest, which takes 40% off every hit to the chest. TTK is (shotsToKill - 1) x 60 / rpm on the vest count, printed in milliseconds — the first shot lands at zero, so a two-shot kill costs one firing interval.
Why a Level 2 vest. It is the armour most players can afford to wear every life, so it is the fight a weapon actually has to win. A tier list against bare skin flatters the light, fast-firing guns that a vest stops cold. The TTK rankings run every weapon against all four vests if you expect something heavier.
That 100 is a hypothetical. No player health value has been published or observed, so every TTK figure is really a ratio wearing the units of a millisecond. It compares weapons honestly and it will not match a stopwatch.
Close, Med and Long are modelled — that is what the rule marks. A weapon does not land every shot at 200 m, so each band re-runs the same arithmetic at an assumed hit rate: (shotsToKill / hitRate - 1) x 60 / rpm. The hit rates are per archetype, listed below, and they are ours. The tier letter is the mean of the three bands, each scaled so the best weapon in it scores 100: S from 50, A from 38, B from 25, C from 15, D below that.
Bolt actions are tiered on shots, not time. At under 50 rounds a minute a follow-up shot is more than a second away, so on time alone every sniper rifle ranks below the pistols. A bolt action is bought for the shot it does not have to repeat: two shots or fewer through a Level 2 vest is A, three is B, more is D.
6 weapons are our call. The shotguns' pellet count is not in the game files, and the bow and launchers do not kill by bullet damage, so the model has nothing to rank them on. Their tiers are our judgement from the vendor stats, and every one is marked as such.
Price is joined from the catalogue and the model ignores it. On this site cost is the axis that actually decides a loadout. The M14 tops the list and costs $7,400, against a starting balance of $10,000. The cost-efficiency ranking puts the two together, below.
The hit rates the ranking assumes
Close, medium and long are relative rather than metric - the study does not yet decode the range falloff curves that would let us attach distances to them. Replacing these with measured play-test figures is the single biggest improvement available to this page.
| Role | Close | Medium | Long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assault rifle | 75% | 45% | 22% |
| Battle rifle | 62% | 42% | 24% |
| SMG | 82% | 34% | 12% |
| LMG | 65% | 32% | 14% |
| DMR | 58% | 52% | 38% |
| Pistol | 72% | 28% | 10% |
| Machine pistol | 62% | 18% | 5% |
| Sniper rifle | 45% | 60% | 52% |
| Shotgun | 78% | 18% | 3% |
What the ranking does not know
Each of these would move rows, and several would move them a long way. None of them is in the model yet.
- ·Helmets, and armour durability
- ·Hit locations beyond the torso
- ·Penetration and ammunition types
- ·Range falloff, drag and bullet travel
- ·Recoil, spread and handling
- ·Attachments and build parts
- ·Magazine capacity and reload
- ·Aim-down-sight and burst timing
- ·Real player pick rate
- ·Cost, which is the axis this site ranks on
Why cost is the whole game
Call of Duty tier lists work because everyone has access to everything. If a rifle is the strongest option, you equip it, and so does everyone else. The only question is which item wins.
WARDOGS does not work like that. You open your account with $10,000 and buy your kit — weapon, equipment, vehicle — out of that balance. Spend it all on the best rifle and you have no armour, no utility, and no way to reach the Control Zone. Spend it on a helicopter and you are carrying a sidearm when you land.
And the balance does not refill when you die. Cash persists from match to match, so a loss is a real loss. That is the part that turns a shopping list into an economy: every purchase is a bet on surviving long enough to earn it back.
So "best weapon" is close to meaningless here. The real question is best weapon per dollar, and beneath that, what does the whole build cost. A rifle that is 90% as good for half the price is not the second-best choice — it is usually the correct one, because the money it frees buys the rest of your kit and survives a bad streak.
Which is the caveat that hangs over the table above. It ranks on time to kill, and time to kill has no opinion about a price tag — so read it as one axis of two. The second axis is next, and it changes the answer.
What a rank actually costs
Take the ranking above and put the price beside it, and one question answers itself: could you have paid less and done better? A weapon is on the frontier when the answer is no — when nothing cheaper in the table outranks it. That is the whole rule. It is not a score with weights to argue about, and you can check every row of it against the table above without taking our word for anything.
6 of the 21 weapons survive it. The rest are beaten on both axes at once — outranked by something that also costs less, which on this site is the definition of the wrong purchase.
| Weapon | Price | Budget | TTK rank | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $0 | 0% | 12 | Nothing cheaper ranks higher | |
| $0 | 0% | 13 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $0 less | |
| $0 | 0% | 14 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $0 less | |
| $800 | 8% | 19 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $800 less | |
| $1,000 | 10% | 28 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $1,000 less | |
| $1,200 | 12% | 9 | Nothing cheaper ranks higher | |
| $1,200 | 12% | 21 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $1,200 less | |
| $1,375 | 14% | 18 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $1,375 less | |
| $1,800 | 18% | 20 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $1,800 less | |
| $2,000 | 20% | 16 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $2,000 less | |
| $2,400 | 24% | 10 | T-21 ranks higher and costs $1,200 less | |
| $2,800 | 28% | 8 | Nothing cheaper ranks higher | |
| $3,200 | 32% | 5 | Nothing cheaper ranks higher | |
| $3,200 | 32% | 17 | A-91 ranks higher and costs $3,200 less | |
| $4,100 | 41% | 11 | T-21 ranks higher and costs $2,900 less | |
| $4,800 | 48% | 2 | Nothing cheaper ranks higher | |
| $5,600 | 56% | 4 | SVD ranks higher and costs $800 less | |
| $6,000 | 60% | 6 | TCX-SPR ranks higher and costs $2,800 less | |
| $6,250 | 63% | 3 | SVD ranks higher and costs $1,450 less | |
| $7,250 | 73% | 7 | TCX-SPR ranks higher and costs $4,050 less | |
| $7,400 | 74% | 1 | Nothing cheaper ranks higher |
The line that does the most work is the free one. The A-91 is the faction recruit rifle, it costs nothing, and on this model it outranks 9 weapons you would pay up to $3,200 for. With one caveat the table cannot hold: its tile says “Unable to equip attachments”, and attachments are on the model's own list of things it does not know about. A paid rifle you can build on is not competing with a free one on rank alone. That is the shape of the gap: the arithmetic defends the free rifle, and the arithmetic is not finished.
What this ranking leaves out
16 weapons on the tier list are held back from the table above, and not because they did badly. In each case comparing their rank against a price would produce a confident wrong answer rather than a missing one.
- Sniper rifles · AMR 50, MK22, MOSIN NAGANT, SV98, SCOUT RIFLE TD
- Tiered on shots rather than time, so their rank is not on the same scale as the rifles around them. A bolt action is bought for the shot it does not have to repeat.
- Sidearms · GGX 18, DEAGLE, GGX 17, M1911, JUDGE
- A sidearm is the second slot, carried alongside a primary rather than instead of one. It is not competing for this budget the way the rest of the table is.
- Our call · COMPOUND BOW, M500, MAAWS, MGL-40, MP43, RPG-7
- No damage figure for the model to work from, so no rank for the rule to compare. Their tiers are a judgement, not a measurement.
The three spends
Every life is one of these decisions. Builds on this site are organised by what they cost, not just what they contain.
The fourth spend sits outside the bands entirely: a vehicle is bought from its own vendor and priced against the same wallet, which is why a squad that buys transport is a squad fighting the Control Zone on a thinner kit.
Budget
Up to $4,000
What you can field after a bad life.
Standard
Up to $7,500
The everyday spend.
Full budget
Up to $10,000
Everything a fresh spawn can afford.
Go deeper
Weapons
Every weapon with its cost, tier and the patch the numbers came from. Populating after the alpha.
Open →Best loadouts
Complete builds organised by what they cost against your cash balance.
Open →How the economy works
Where the cash comes from, why teamplay pays better than kills, and what that does to the meta.
Open →How these rankings work
Most tier lists are one person's opinion presented as a verdict. Ours shows the arithmetic next to the letter, marks where the recorded figures end and our model begins, and stamps every figure with the patch it was observed in — currently Season 2 — because a weapon stat is never true outright, only true as of a patch.
When a patch moves a number, the stamp changes and the old value is replaced rather than quietly overwritten. That is the difference between a meta site you can check against and one you have to trust. Every build and what it shifted is logged on the patch notes page.
Read next
Catalogue
Every weapon we have recorded
The Closed Alpha roster, tab by tab.
Builds
Complete loadouts by what they cost
Whole kits priced against the $10,000 you get once per account.
Release date
When does WARDOGS come out?
10 September 2026 in Steam Early Access, PC only, $39.99 — and what is still undated.
Kolchia
The map and the Control Zone
256 km², with a 2 × 2 km zone that moves every match.