WARDOGS Damage, Armor & Ammo Explained

Damage is caliber-based, not per-gun

Two weapons firing the same cartridge deal the same base damage. The T-21 does the same base damage as the M4 because both fire 5.56. What separates weapons in the same caliber is fire rate, recoil, magazine size and the multipliers tied to their category, which is why a sniper and a marksman rifle firing 7.62 hit the body differently even though the round is identical.

Where you hit changes everything

The body has eight damage zones, and each weapon category multiplies them differently. The table shows how hard each zone hits compared with the chest, with FMJ and no armour. Assault rifles and SMGs share one profile. Snipers concentrate their damage in the chest, so a stomach or limb hit falls off far faster than with a rifle, and the chest is the shot that keeps their one-hit kill.

In practice that means one rule: aim for the upper chest by default and the head when you can. Limbs take roughly half of chest damage and hands and feet about a quarter, so chasing limb shots is how a winning fight turns into a loss, unless armour changes the maths.

Which body parts armour protects

A vest is not full-body armour. At levels 1 to 3 it covers the chest and both stomach zones and nothing else, so the groin, arms and legs take full damage. Level 4 adds plates over the groin, upper arms and thighs. The forearms, shins, hands and feet are never armoured at any level. Against a level 2 vest the M4 needs 7 chest hits but only 4 to the groin, which is why aiming low wins fights against mid-tier armour. Helmets work the same way for the head alone.

Armour also breaks. Each helmet and vest absorbs a set number of hits, and every hit after that does full damage, so heavy armour slows a kill down but never makes a target immortal.

Armor is the number that decides fights

Armour tiers run from 1 to 4, and they matter more than weapon choice. Any level 1 vest stops a Mosin, SV98 or MK22 chest one-shot, and a level 1 helmet stops the starter Scout rifle killing you with one headshot. Level 2 costs about $200, so nearly everyone wears it, and it adds three chest hits to every 5.56 rifle. Level 3 is the big power spike, turning players into bullet sponges, and level 4 is tougher still while slowing movement.

Season 2 damage changes

Season 2 cuts base damage on the big calibres. The cut hits every weapon that fires the round, including vehicle weapons such as the Little Bird and Lakota miniguns and the Humvee minigun.

The last column assumes the hit-location multiplier is unchanged. For ARs and LMGs it is a floor, because their body shots also lost a little. Sniper rifles got higher hit-location damage to offset their cut, so they keep their one-shots and the net change is small. DMR headshots and upper-body hits are slightly weaker than before, which puts DMRs between assault rifles and snipers. Torso damage is now more even across the upper, middle and lower torso. The per-gun result is in the Season 2 tier list: the FAL, PKM, SVD, BMR-308 and SKS all need more chest hits than they did in Season 1.

Category rules that changed

The armor maths in Season 2

Hits to kill scale with 1 divided by the share of damage that gets through. Level 3 lets 50% through, so a target needs 1 / 0.50 = 2.0 times the unarmored hits. Level 4 lets 40% through: 1 / 0.40 = 2.5 times. Season 1 was 1 / 0.45 = 2.22 and 1 / 0.35 = 2.86. Level 4 over level 3 is therefore a 25% gap now (2.5 / 2.0), down from 29%. The level 4 set costs $9,500 against $4,500 for level 3, so the extra $5,000 buys 25% more hits to kill.

Stack that with a .308 body shot where the hit location did not change. Against level 4 it takes (1 / 0.40) / 0.75 = 3.33 unarmored-hit equivalents, up from 2.86 in Season 1, so about 17% more hits. Against level 3 it is 2.67 against 2.22, about 20% more.

The developers' advice for beating tier 4 is to stop shooting the plates. A full magazine of hollow points into a level 3 or 4 chest shows up as single-digit hits in the damage log. Hollow points into the legs, ideally from a fast-firing SMG, is the counter they recommend. The Season 2 numbers back it for the shins and forearms, which no vest covers; a level 4 vest plates the thighs, so aim below the knee. More answers are in the press conference recap.

FMJ vs HP vs AP: match the round to the target

You buy your ammo, so you can tune it. FMJ is even. Hollow point doubles damage to unarmoured flesh, so the M4 drops from 4 chest hits to 2, but a single level 1 vest pushes HP to 13 hits. Armour-piercing does about a fifth less to flesh and much more through heavy plates: against a level 4 vest the M4 needs 8 chest hits with AP instead of 10 with FMJ. Early in a wipe, standard ammo is fine because armour is thin. As the lobby levels up and level 3 and 4 armour becomes common, players who do not switch to armour-piercing start to feel like their gun went soft, without understanding why.