Four loadouts,
built from the round backwards

One honesty note before the tables. There is no verified attachment stat table for this patch, so nothing on this site claims a muzzle or a stock changes a number. What follows pairs weapons with rounds and armour, using the published weapon stats — calibre, effective range, rate of fire, firing power, and the best round each gun can chamber. If a kit says “here is the gun and here is the round”, that is exactly what it means and no more.

The build order

1. Decide the armour class you expect to fight. On a normal raid that is class 4; on a geared lobby, class 5.
2. Choose a round one class above it. Same class kills inside range, one class above kills outside it, two classes above is money set on fire.
3. Check the round’s range behaviour against your map. A round that stops penetrating at 62 percent of a 32-metre range is a 20-metre round, whatever its class.
4. Only then pick the gun. Rate of fire and ergonomics decide how many chances you get to land that round; they do not decide whether it works.
5. Spend the remainder on armour you can afford to lose. Class 5 for solo grinding, class 6 only when the squad is committed to a fight.

Archetype one: the budget rifle that still kills class 4

The workhorse. The target is a class 4 rig and a class 4 helmet, which is what most of a lobby wears, and the answer is a 5.45 or 7.62x39 rifle with a one-class-up round. This is the archetype to run when you are rebuilding after a loss and cannot afford to be precious about the gun.

Two things to notice in that table. First, the 5.45 BP round reaches class 4 penetration with the highest DPS index in the group and an effective range that covers most Farm sight lines — which is why the AK platform keeps being recommended as the default rather than as a compromise. Second, a higher DPS index is not a licence to spray: it is a measure of how fast the gun can deliver, and delivering at 30 metres outside the round’s penetration window delivers nothing.

Armour for this archetype is class 4, deliberately. You are going to lose this kit, and a class 4 rig that costs a fraction of a class 6 one lets you take the fight you would otherwise avoid.

Archetype two: the long-range answer

Valley and the outer lanes of Armory reward a kit that still works at 80 metres, and that is a calibre question before it is a scope question. The 7.62x54 and 7.62x51 families hold penetration far past the small-bore rounds’ cutoffs, and the marksman platforms add the firing-power bonus on top.

The trade is explicit. A marksman rifle has a low rate of fire and a small magazine, so a missed first shot is a lost engagement — the archetype demands that you take the shot you can make rather than the shot you can take. It also rewards the high firing-power band: a bolt gun adding nine damage to its round is doing more per shot than any automatic in the game, and that is what turns a two-tap into a one-tap at the head.

Pair this with a helmet upgrade before a rig upgrade. In a long-range fight the head is the only part of you that is reliably exposed, and class 5 helmets survived the season 5 changes better than class 4 did.

Archetype three: the indoor kit

TV Station and the inside of the Armory are the two places where the fight happens under 15 metres, and there the round’s range behaviour stops mattering while its blunt damage and rate of fire start. This is the archetype that justifies the SMG.

The mechanism is blunt damage. An SMG firing a round that cannot penetrate a class 5 plate still banks two to four damage per hit, and at 800-plus RPM that is 40 points of unavoidable damage inside a second — after which the plate is damaged enough that the penetration roll starts going your way. This is why the archetype works against armour it has no business beating, and why it collapses the moment the fight opens past 20 metres.

Take the .45 Vector or the M1911 seriously here: class 4 .45 penetrates class 4 helmets at any range, which is an outlier no other pistol-calibre round offers. In a building, that is the whole kit in one sentence.

Archetype four: the committed squad kit

The expensive one, and the only one where class 6 armour is the right answer. In a team fight the value of a plate is not that it saves you, it is that it buys your squad two more seconds to trade. A class 6 rig costing close to a million is buying consistency across a long engagement, not immunity — top-tier rifle ammunition still kills it in three rounds, and one to the head.

Read the material column as a repair stat, not a damage stat. Aluminium, ceramic, polyethylene and hardened steel change how well a plate comes back after a repair between raids; they do not change how much flesh damage gets through on a hit. Coverage is the column that actually matters for a squad kit: a rig covering shoulders and abdomen absorbs hits that a chest-only plate lets through, which is what makes the full-body class 6 rigs expensive rather than merely heavy.

The speed penalty is the hidden cost. A 15-kilogram rig at minus 18 percent movement is not a kit you take into a building where you need to reposition after every burst. This archetype belongs on a map with sight lines and a squad that holds them together, not on TV Station stairs.

What to actually buy, in order

For a player who is building an account rather than a single raid, the spending order that produces the most raids per hour is:

1. Ammunition, always first. One class above the armour you expect. This is the cheapest multiplier in the game and the only one that changes the outcome of a fight directly.
2. One workhorse rifle. A 5.45 or 7.62x39 automatic covers Farm and the inside of Armory, and its round is cheap enough that you can afford to carry two magazines of it.
3. A class 4 rig and a class 5 helmet. The rig is disposable; the helmet is the piece that survives a mistake.
4. A container before a second gun. Capacity converts a good raid into money. A second rifle converts money into a second rifle.
5. Class 6 last, and only for squad play. It is a team-fight purchase, and it should be funded by the raids the cheaper kits already paid for.