ARC Raiders Weapon Tier List: The Best Guns to Run in Every Raid (October 2026)
ARC Raiders Weapon Tier List: The Best Guns to Run in Every Raid (October 2026)
ARC Raiders throws you into the Rust Belt against both rival Raiders and the machine forces of the ARC, and the gun you’re carrying when a fight breaks out usually decides who walks away with the loot. Embark Studios’ extraction shooter has a deep weapon pool spread across pistols, shotguns, rifles, and launchers, each tied to a different ammo type and crafting tier. Here’s how the current weapon pool shakes out, from the guns worth rushing a workshop upgrade for down to the sidegrades you can skip.
S-Tier: Build Around These First
Five weapons separate themselves from the rest of the pool right now. Bettina, an epic assault rifle that runs on heavy ammo, trades a slow fire rate for some of the highest damage per shot in its class, and it’s one of only three heavy-ammo weapons in the game, which makes it a default pick for fighting ARC machines directly. It needs a level 3 gunsmith workshop to craft. Anvil, by contrast, is a cheap uncommon pistol that also runs heavy ammo; it’s inexpensive to produce, effective against every enemy type in the game, and only needs a level 1 workshop, making it the easiest heavy-ammo option to get running early.
Renegade, a rare lever-action rifle on medium ammo, rewards precise play with high per-shot damage, strong stability, solid armor penetration, and long effective range. It’s craftable at a level 3 workshop for 2x Advanced Mechanical Components, 3x Medium Gun Parts, and 5x Oil. For close-range fights, Vulcano is the current king, an epic shotgun that’s lighter than you’d expect for the category and devastating inside a room’s length, built at a level 3 workshop from 1x Magnetic Accelerator, 3x Heavy Gun Parts, and 1x Exodus Modules. Hullcracker, an epic launcher-ammo cannon sharing those same crafting materials, is nearly the opposite tool: weak against human opponents but one of the hardest-hitting options against ARCs.
A-Tier Through C-Tier: Reliable, But Outclassed
A-tier: Tempest, Bobcat, Osprey, Ferro, and Venator are all capable guns that simply don’t hit the damage ceiling or utility of the S-tier five, but are worth running while you farm materials for an upgrade. B-tier: Arpeggio, Rattler, Equalizer, and Jupiter. C-tier: Hairpin, Il Toro, Torrente, Burletta, Kettle, and Stitcher. Upgrading a weapon’s level improves its damage, but rarity is fixed, so a maxed-out C-tier gun still won’t catch up to an upgraded S-tier pick. Treat anything outside the top two tiers as a placeholder until you can craft something better, not a long-term loadout anchor.
Tips for New Raiders
Prioritize unlocking your level 3 gunsmith workshop as early as your raid earnings allow; four of the five S-tier weapons are locked behind it, and the jump in damage output is worth the material grind. Keep at least one heavy-ammo weapon in rotation specifically for ARC encounters, since Bettina and Anvil both punch well above their weight class against machines. And don’t sleep on extraction discipline: the best gun in the game does nothing for you if you don’t make it to the extraction point with it.
Gear Up Before Your Next Raid
Looking for another extraction shooter to run alongside ARC Raiders? The Forever Winter PC leans into a similarly bleak, high-stakes PvE sandbox and is in stock now. A Steam Wallet Code (Global) covers whatever you need to spend on cosmetics or future DLC, and the full PC category at Dragon4Deals has more to browse.
