u4gm ARC Raiders guide how to rank every weapon for PvP and PvE
If you have been judging weapons in ARC Raiders just by the in-game bars or some dodgy fan spreadsheet, you are probably selling yourself short, and the same goes for how you chase an ARC Raiders BluePrint when you do not need top-tier rarity to keep up with serious players. Once you start looking at frame-by-frame time-to-kill, counting bullets to break shields and actually timing full clears in raids, a lot of the “meta” falls apart pretty fast. Some cheap guns end up doing scary work in real fights, while a few “cool” picks that people hype on forums turn out to be dead weight once you are under pressure.
Budget SMGs And Sidearms
Take the Stitcher. On the stat page it looks like a throwaway starter gun, and most people ditch it as soon as they can. In matches though, it has real teeth at close range. It needs roughly 19 rounds to pop a medium shield, and with a mag upgrade you can usually drop a raider in one clean burst if you stay on target. For PvP, that puts it solidly in A tier, even if it basically does nothing to ARC armour. On the flip side, there is the Hairpin. Folks love to talk about it for “stealth runs” or roleplay, but once you feel how slow it kills and how that manual slide keeps wrecking your movement rhythm, it just turns into drag on your kit. Plenty of players keep trying to make it work; it really does not.
Rifles That Punch Up
Rifle fans have a couple of stand-out options if they are watching their budget. The Rattler is the big one. It ends up playing like a cheap assault rifle, and it only needs about 15 bullets to put a raider down if you are not whiffing shots. It comes pretty close to the rare Tempest in raw performance, with the big downside being that slow reload that keeps catching you in bad spots. The Tempest itself feels like the game’s classic “M16” style rifle – steady, flexible and happy at almost any range. The real surprise pick, though, is the Renegade. Imagine a Pharaoh-style rifle that hits hard but does not force you into that annoying re-cock every shot. It lets you stay on target and trade shots rapidly, which is why, in most straight duels, a Renegade will usually bully a standard Pharaoh user.
Overtuned Long-Range Options
Then there is the Ventor, which looks and feels like a balance mistake waiting for a patch. It is light, handles more like a DMR than a heavy gun, and still reaches out like a sniper while killing at speeds closer to an LMG. You can carry it without feeling weighed down and still win mid-range fights way too fast. For close-range bulldozing, the Volcano is the extreme pick. It has a time-to-kill under a second, but only if you are basically in someone’s face, under 10 metres or so. Inside tight buildings where sight lines are short, the El Toro shotgun also comes into its own. It punishes anyone who peeks the same corner twice and is brutal when people panic and try to backpedal out of a room.
PvP Vs PvE Thinking
One thing that keeps tripping people up is using the same logic for both modes. The Hullcracker is the clearest example: in PvP it feels like a joke, clumsy and too slow to matter in a real duel, so most players write it off and never look back. The moment you bring it into ARC-heavy content though, it turns into a core tool, shredding Bastions, drones and other mechanical targets while saving you loads of ammo on your main gun. If you are grinding raids or farming specific drops, you almost want to plan your build around it. When you are hunting blueprints, coins or just trying to afford weapons like Anvil or Renegade, it helps to ignore the pretty stat bars and focus on how each gun actually behaves in real fights, and that includes how and where you decide to buy BluePrint to fill out your arsenal.Improve your tactical advantage with premium Blueprints available at u4gm.com, designed for faster progression and better builds.
