Wardogs makes you buy your kit again every time you respawn, using money earned during the match and carried over from previous ones. What a gun costs matters as much as what it does, because dying means paying for everything you were carrying. This guide lines up the most used assault rifles against the prices players have logged, since BULKHEAD publishes no stat sheets of its own. The question worth answering is when spending more actually buys you something.
At a glance
Every player starts on $10,000 and rebuys their loadout each life, according to the official store page.
Community logs put the T-21 at $600 and the FAL at $6,500, for similar results in ordinary firefights.
Season 02 arrives on 15 October 2026, a date the studio announced on Steam.
Price is the real balance lever in Wardogs
The official Wardogs store page lays the system out plainly: each player starts with $10,000, buys a custom loadout every life, and cash persists between matches. Team play pays, whether you are reviving a squadmate, ferrying friendlies to the zone or holding the objective yourself. Matches run up to 100 players across three teams fighting over randomised 2x2km control zones, so there is rarely a shortage of ways to earn.
That loop changes how you read a weapon in Wardogs. A $6,500 rifle lost twice in a row costs you more than the match is likely to pay back. The sum you are doing covers damage numbers and, just as much, what you can afford to lose without having to stop and rebuild your bank.
Patch notes point the same way. The Season 1 changelog, published on 9 September and covered by Shacknews, mixes server fixes, progression tweaks and hardware passes such as the one on the Z20 Lakota helicopter. Guns move by price as well, which lands in the same place as a damage nerf. Push a rifle up by a couple of thousand and half the server stops buying it, without a single stat being touched.
What the most played assault rifles cost
The prices below come from community guides, XGamingServer and AllThings.how among them, which log in-game costs weapon by weapon. The Wardogs team puts out no official table, so treat these as player-gathered figures worth checking again after every update.
The T-21 sits at $600 and holds its own against far pricier rifles in everyday exchanges. The AMP-9 lands around $900 and works as a fallback when your balance is thin. The AK74 runs to $1,600 at roughly 650 rounds per minute. The M4 asks $2,800, and the FAL climbs to $6,500. Those five cover most of what you meet in a control zone, from the player who has just lost their bank to the one on a winning streak.
The $2,200 gap between the T-21 and the M4 pays for full armour and ammunition across several lives. Sticking with the T-21 mainly buys you the freedom to redeploy without thinking after every death, which counts for more across a Wardogs match than a handful of damage points. The M4 earns its keep once your balance supports it and you are holding the zone properly, the FAL once you are confident you will not throw a life away in the first minute.
Where the community rankings land
The weapon tier list Dexerto published on 16 September puts the FAL and the M4 at the top of the assault rifles, with the PKM leading the machine guns, the BMR-308 and SVD among the marksman rifles, and the MP5 for close quarters. The T-21, Galil, M249 SAW, M500, AMR 50 and Super-45 follow just behind.
Other sites hand the top spot to the T-21, precisely because they fold its price into the reasoning. Dexerto ranks on raw performance, the value-led guides rank on what a loadout costs to replace, and both readings are defensible. That disagreement says everything about how Wardogs works: judge a gun on its stat line or on its replacement cost and you get two different podiums. We took the beginner’s angle on this in our guide to five weapons worth knowing early on.
One technical detail is worth knowing before you spend. Between the beta and release, M4 shot deviation went from 7 to 10 degrees according to figures picked up by the specialist press, and vertical recoil on the Mini Angled and Shift foregrips was adjusted. A gun that felt excellent in the beta can behave differently today, which is why a dated tier list beats an undated one every time.
What Season 02 on 15 October could shift
BULKHEAD announced Season 02 for 15 October 2026 on the Wardogs Steam page, with no detail on its contents so far. A season usually brings its own batch of weapon tweaks, and that is the point at which today’s rankings lose part of their value. The studio has also reported 3 million sales a little over two weeks into early access, along with a Golden Joystick nomination for best early access game.
Those sales figures come from the studio itself, as does the peak of 400,000 concurrent players logged in mid-September. For a game in early access, the practical takeaway is that balance will keep moving. The team had already warned it would run short of content at this pace, which we covered in our piece on BULKHEAD’s warning. Wardogs is still very much a work in progress, and weapon pricing is among the levers the studio pulls most often.
To keep track of what is coming next, check the release calendar.