WARDOGS Weapon Tier List (Season 1): Verified TTK & Conflict Arbitration

How This Tier List Is Built

Most tier lists rank everything and verify nothing. This one is the opposite, because in a per-life economy a wrong number costs you money: the tiers below cover only the eleven weapons benchmarked on our TTK and damage chart — every STK count, time-to-kill and price stamped on the Season 1 build. Guns we have not verified appear in a separate unranked table, labeled Community-reported, with the sources named. Nothing is invented to fill an S-tier slot.

Two labels are used throughout:

• Confirmed — measured or price-checked by this site on a live build, with the version stamped. The full method is on the TTK chart and the arsenal counts come from the developer’s own launch breakdown, documented on our weapons list.
• Community-reported — multiple independent sources agree, but we have not reproduced it in-game. Reported, linked, not endorsed.

Tiers are assigned from three verified inputs: shots-to-kill bands across armor levels, ideal time-to-kill against Level 3 composite plates (the armor community consensus says you should assume — see our best loadout guide), and verified price. Performance and value are scored separately, because a $2,600 gun that wins the fights you actually take beats a $6,500 one you play scared with.

The Verified Tier Table (Season 1)

STK = shots to kill against that armor tier; TTK = ideal time-to-kill against Level 3 composite plates (180 effective HP). Prices in the Price column are site-verified; dashes mean we have not price-checked that gun yet.

Read the STK columns as the unarmored column plus one: every gun’s unarmored and Level 1 bands are on the TTK chart. The tier calls, in brief:

• FAL 50.00 — S. The only verified gun that holds a 2-shot kill into Level 1 armor, at the highest cyclic rate of the full-power rifles, with the fastest practical Level 3 kill we measured. It is also the premium pick of every community list we checked — the one ranking claim that survived arbitration. The catch is economic: at $6,500 it is a squad purchase, not a solo one.
• M14 EBR — A. The statistical footnote most lists miss: at 700 RPM its ideal Level 3 TTK of 171 ms is the fastest number in our whole matrix. It loses the S to the FAL because it needs 3 shots where the FAL needs 2 against Level 1 — the advantage only exists on paper against heavy plates.
• G3A3 — A. Same kill bands as the FAL (2/3/3), just 100 ms slower. A sidegrade, not a downgrade; price unverified.
• AK-74M — A, and the value king. Raw bands say A: 3-shot unarmored, 4-shot into Level 2, slowest Level 3 TTK in the table. Price says otherwise: at the verified $3,800 it is the cheapest rifle we have confirmed, with the low recoil that keeps new players alive to the tick-20 refund. Solo queue: this is the gun.
• SCAR-L and M4A1 — A. The 5.56 middle class. SCAR-L edges the M4A1 against Level 3 (5 shots, 400 ms); both are safe, unspectacular picks whose prices we have not verified yet.
• Vector .45 — A, role-locked. The fastest verified kill in the game unarmored: 144 ms point-blank. Against Level 3 plates it needs 7 shots — a bunker-clearing tool, not a front-line rifle.
• G36K — B. Matches the M4A1’s bands almost exactly but loses the unarmored column to the AK-74M at a verified lower price. Not a bad gun; a dominated one.
• MP7A1 and P90 TR — B. High cyclic rates that stop mattering the moment ceramic plates show up: 7 shots against Level 3. P90 TR also opens with the worst unarmored band we measured (5 shots).
• MP5A3 — B, and the second value pick. Worst Level 3 numbers in the table (8 shots, 525 ms) — and still the right answer at $2,600 for FOB doorways and unarmored early fights: 140 ms kills and laser-accurate hipfire. Buy it as a second weapon, per our best loadout guide.

Deliberately Unranked: Community-Reported Guns

These guns appear in competitor tier lists, several in S-tier. We have not benchmarked any of them, so they get no tier here — that is the whole point of the two-label system.

Data Conflict Arbitration

This is the section no competitor tier list runs: a three-way comparison of the launch-window ranking pages against each other and against our verified numbers, with the disagreement explained rather than averaged away. Sources, each fetched September 27, 2026:

• wardogshub.gg tier list — published August 5, 2026 (pre-launch beta), data re-stamped “Season 1 · 10 Sept”, page updated September 20. Ranks 20 weapons, lists 5 more as unranked for missing damage/RPM data.
• skycoach.gg best weapons — last updated September 11, and self-labeled “beta-based” in its own header. Ranks six tiers from S to Specialist.
• MetaForge’s weapon tier list — the site blocks crawlers (we observed the same Cloudflare wall during our September crawl), so the evidence is its search-result title: “All 34 Weapons Ranked”.

The 92 ms FAL, explained by its own numbers

Wardogshub gives the FAL a 92 ms TTK; skycoach says it kills in “2 body shots”. Our verified matrix says 184 ms against Level 3 armor. All three can be true, and the arithmetic shows which assumptions each side made:

• 92 ms at the FAL’s 650 RPM is exactly one firing interval — a 2-shot-kill benchmark. Our matrix agrees the FAL 2-shots unarmored and Level 1 targets.
• The same pattern holds down wardogshub’s S-tier: the SVD’s 125 ms at 480 RPM and the BMR-308’s 133 ms at ~450 RPM are each one firing interval — 2-shot kills against unarmored 100 HP targets.
• Against Level 2 and Level 3 plates, our verified model (35–50% damage absorption) pushes the FAL to 3 shots and 184 ms.

Verdict: not an error — an unstated armor assumption. Every TTK in wardogshub’s S-tier is an unarmored ideal. Against the Level 3 plates the community consensus tells you to expect, the verified number is 184 ms. Rank order survives; the printed TTKs do not.

AK-74 at $1,600 vs AK-74M at $3,800

Both wardogshub and skycoach list the AK-74 at $1,600. Our price for the AK-74M is $3,800, verified on the Season 1 build and stamped on the TTK chart. Three facts frame the conflict without resolving it by taste:

1. Both competitor prices trace to beta-era data — skycoach says so itself (“beta-based”), and wardogshub’s page was born five weeks before launch.
2. Season 1 raised vendor prices — the official changelog is dated September 9, one day before Early Access, and this exact pattern already explained the FAL’s $5,500-vs-$6,500 split we documented on the weapons list.
3. “AK-74” and “AK-74M” may be two different guns in a 37-weapon arsenal — variant naming is exactly where pre-launch and launch builds drifted.

Verdict: our build-stamped $3,800 stands until we re-verify a vendor screen showing otherwise. Wardogshub’s September 20 update still printing $1,600 is either a different variant or a price table that did not fully refresh — flagged, not guessed.

T-21: consensus without verification

Wardogshub puts the T-21 in A-tier; skycoach puts it in S. Same gun, same reported price ($600, 28 damage, 750 RPM), different tiers — a clean demonstration that tier order is opinion; the stats underneath are the checkable part. The stats converge across four independent sources (KeenGamer, Overgear, Playhub, skycoach — the first three documented on our best loadout guide), which is why the T-21 leads the unranked table above. When we verify it in-game, it moves — with a stamp.

Nobody covers the confirmed 37

The developer’s own launch breakdown confirms 37 weapons at Early Access (documented on our weapons list). Against that: MetaForge’s title claims 34 ranked, skycoach lists about 35 names across its six tiers (its own note: “35 known weapons in beta; 37 confirmed for the September 10 Early Access launch”), and wardogshub covers 25 (20 ranked + 5 punted for missing data). Two consequences:

• No competitor’s table is complete, and the guns they omit are not fringe picks — M14 EBR, SCAR-L, G36K, G3A3, Vector, MP7 and P90 are all absent from both competitor lists we fetched, yet seven of the eleven rows in our verified matrix.
• The honest alternative is not a longer list. It is a shorter list where every row is stamped — which is what this page is.

Name drift in the budget SMG band

Our verified $2,600 SMG is the MP5A3 (26 dmg, 800 RPM). Wardogshub lists a $2,600 SMG called SUPER-45; skycoach lists Super-45 at $2,600 with 30 dmg at 1,200 RPM. Same price band, different name, different stats — and neither lists our Vector .45 at all, while wardogshub’s separate “MP5” sits at $1,500. Our best loadout guide already documents the pattern: community guides written against pre-launch builds use pre-launch names. Verdict: unresolved, flagged, not equated. We keep the name and stats we verified and re-check the vendor menu next price pass.

Arbitration summary

What Would Move a Tier

• An in-game price check. The moment we verify T-21, SVD or SCAR-L pricing on a vendor screen, those rows get real value scores — the value column is capped at three guns only because prices are the slowest thing to verify.
• A patch that touches the economy. Bulkhead has said each season brings a new item order; the next one re-opens every price row at once. The dated change log is on our Season 1 patch notes.
• A verified armor model change. The whole FAL arbitration above hangs on 35–50% plate absorption. If a patch rebalances plates, the STK bands and the tiers move with them.

The Tier List by Budget

Tiers answer “what kills fastest”; the per-life economy answers “what you can afford to lose”. Combined, on verified prices:

1. Under $4,000 — AK-74M ($3,800). The value king: 3-shot unarmored, 4-shot into Level 2, and cheap enough to lose twice and still extract-positive. Pair it with the armor-first rule and one $300 IED — the anti-vehicle pocket pick proven on our anti-tank guide.
2. Under $7,000 — AK-74M + MP5A3 ($6,400). The verified core of our best loadout guide: rifle for the mid fight, MP5A3 for the doorway, headroom left for plates.
3. Squad banked — add the FAL ($6,500). The S-tier buy, and the one ranking claim every source agrees on. Its 184 ms Level 3 kill needs teammates to cash it in — solo, the AK-74M still wins on value.

And before spending anything on frames, remember the cheapest performance upgrade is a stable frame rate — our best settings guide covers it.

Tiers, STK counts and the three verified prices come from our TTK benchmarks on the Season 1 build; competitor positions are quoted from wardogshub.gg, skycoach.gg and MetaForge’s search listing as fetched on September 27, 2026, with every disagreement explained above rather than averaged. Re-verified whenever a patch touches the economy.