WARDOGS Season 2: new weapons, rain, Lonestar bonuses and a big damage nerf

WARDOGS Early Access Season 2 goes live on October 15, and it is far from a small seasonal refresh. You get four new weapons, four new vehicles, three new buildables, a rain weather preset, a complete damage rework, rebuilt suppression, much faster role progression and a long list of price changes. If you still haven’t jumped in, the shooter has its own WARDOGS store page on Steam.

Maintenance before the season starts

There is a scheduled maintenance window on October 15 between 08:00 and 09:30 UTC. The developers estimate roughly 90 minutes of downtime before the new season goes live.

Four new weapons

• TCX-SPR [7.62x39mm] – assault rifle
• PP-19 Bizon [9x19mm] – SMG
• Evo-3 Ultra [.308 Win] – LMG
• M14 [.308 Win] – marksman rifle

Alongside them comes a new set of attachments: extra optics, muzzle devices, magazines and bipods.

Molotov, Range Finder and helmets

• Molotov – a thrown incendiary that splashes fire on impact and burns anyone caught in it. You can throw it overarm or underarm, it deals impact damage and the flames burn over time while you stand in them. Molotovs also burn destructible foliage and are affected by rain.
• Infrared Range Finder – now runs on batteries. One battery lasts around 80 seconds of active use and drains faster if you keep toggling it on and off. The device already had a turbulent history, which we covered in the article about IR Rangefinders.
• Helmets – the Level 4 Helmet now has muffled audio, muffled proximity chat, a restricted field of view and fogs over when you sprint. Level 3 and Level 4 helmets gain increased suppression resistance so they protect you in more ways than just damage reduction.

Four new vehicles

• Wolf-110 – a fast, light wheeled transport.
• Wolf-110 [M2 Browning] – the same car with a ring-mounted M2 Browning.
• T-72B3 – a main battle tank. Slower than the L2A6, but cheaper and slightly more fuel-efficient.
• Flakpanzer Gepard – an anti-air vehicle.

If you are lost in the growing garage, we have a separate overview of vehicles in WARDOGS.

Three new buildables

• MG Nest – a manned M2 Browning emplacement (large hammer).
• Large Shelter – a big metal shelter for covering key assets or keeping the rain off (medium hammer and above).
• Wooden Step – a step. Made of wood (small hammer and above).

New rain weather preset

Rain is not just a visual filter. Surfaces, vehicles and characters get visibly wet, and the sound changes depending on what the rain falls on and where you stand – under cover, indoors, inside a vehicle or out in the open. Destroy a roof and the rain starts visually coming through it.

• Thunder rolls in during heavier rain and every player on the server hears the same strike at the same moment from the same direction. It is loud enough to mask footsteps, so use it strategically.
• Spotting range is affected by rain.
• Molotov fire is reduced by rain.

Season 2 Gold Market camos

Eight new weapon and vehicle skins join the Gold Market across four camo families:

• Black & Gold – Little Bird (Season 2 exclusive Gold Market camo)
• Chocolate Chip – Evo-3 Ultra, M14, TCX-SPR
• Two-Tone Desert – Galil, Mosin, Havoc
• Digital Wood – M500

The Black & Gold AK camo has been removed from the Gold Market.

Wager Vendor arrives later in the season

The Wager Vendor is not available at Season 2 launch and will open later in the season. It lets you bet your own cash on your own performance – you set the stakes yourself and either win big or lose it all. A live wager tracker sits above the minimap showing your stake and progress. The vendor is not a permanent addition and is meant to come and go throughout a season.

Team switching and team killing

To stop late switching from deciding matches, once a team is more than 10 points ahead:

• You cannot switch teams again for 15 minutes after joining one.
• If you switch teams or join a match in progress, your map stays obscured until you reach the control zone for the first time.
• You cannot use the spawn vehicle until you reach the control zone for the first time.

The goal is friction for team-switch abusers while still letting you join your friends’ team when you need to.

Team-Kill Punish & Forgive

• When a teammate kills you, you are asked to Forgive or Punish.
• Punish results accumulate against a teamkiller, leading to kicks and escalating bans for repeat offenders.
• Forgive removes a potential mark against the player who killed you.

If you respawn and leave the safe zone without voting, it counts as an automatic forgive.

UI and server quality of life

• Squad Intent UI – squad leaders can set a team-visible squad intent from a pre-defined list, which everyone sees in the squad list before joining. Squad invites and other timed prompts now queue. More on playing together is in our guide to squads and voice chat.
• Rebuy Last Loadout – the old placeholder UI is gone. Clicking the button now fills the equipment vendor UI with your last loadout, which you can edit before buying.
• Server seeding – players who join and populate empty servers earn rewards and a vendor discount once the match begins. Pre-match entertainment is now available too: guns lying around with targets, football and a hidden radio in each spawn.

Region-based ping limits

• Official Servers enforce different maximum ping limits depending on their region. The initial values are fairly lenient while the team tunes them.
• Players who consistently exceed the limit over a sustained period get automatically kicked, so short spikes don’t punish you.
• Server-side lag spikes are excluded from ping measurements.
• Kicked players cannot rejoin the same server until the next map transition.
• The server browser gets maximum ping tags and filters, and community server admins can configure their own limits for cross-regional play.

Faction balance experiment: Lonestar needs you

One team had a notoriously lower win rate than the other two. The developers acknowledge valid complaints about Lonestar’s uniform visibility and certain spawn positions, but say sentiment around the blue team is the biggest reason players avoid it. Season 2 therefore runs a social experiment:

• Lonestar cash & XP win bonus, Season 2 only.
• Lonestar teamplay action cash & XP multipliers, Season 2 only.
• All faction spawns have moved on Bakurani – all three team spawns were rebuilt with purpose-built routes to the zone for a more balanced match.
• New vendor discount for the losing team: 20% off if they are at least 40 points behind second place. This applies to all teams, not just Lonestar.
• Community server hosts caught exploiting the faction bonus will be punished.

Combat balance: the big damage rework

High-calibre rounds like.308 and 7.62x54mmR were designed for sniper rifles, where slow fire rates and small magazines balance out the damage. In assault rifles, DMRs and LMGs they were delivering near-sniper damage at a much faster rate, which made every other option feel like a handicap. The update doesn’t make them bad, it just pulls them closer to the rest of their archetype – the FAL still has the highest damage per shot among assault rifles, only now closer to the TCX-SPR and M4.

Calibre base damage reductions

These affect every weapon using the round, infantry and vehicle weapons alike:

• .308 Winchester −25%
• 7.62x54mmR −20%
• 7.62x39mm −19%
• .50 Cal −16%

Weapon categories

• DMRs – hit-location damage adjusted for the new base values. Headshots and upper-body hits are slightly weaker, so DMRs sit between assault rifles and snipers.
• Assault rifles & LMGs – torso damage is now more even across upper, middle and lower hits, so body shots are predictable. Assault rifle body shots do slightly less damage and LMG body damage now matches assault rifles – LMGs win through sustained fire and magazine size.
• Sniper rifles – hit-location damage increased to counter the base reduction and keep the sniper fantasy intact.
• Scout Rifle – headshots one-shot targets with no helmet, a Level 1 helmet takes two headshots.
• 12 Gauge Slugs – damage against armor now scales with armor tier instead of one flat reduction.

Armor

• Level 3 armor and helmets: damage reduction 55% → 50%.
• Level 4 armor and helmets: damage reduction 65% → 60%.

Vehicle weapons and turrets

The calibre cuts also apply to vehicle weapons firing those rounds, such as the Little Bird AH-6M Minigun, Z20 Lakota Minigun and Humvee Minigun. Heavy and Artillery top machine turrets no longer use the helicopter cannon’s hit-location values and instead use the same numbers as assault rifles and LMGs. If you are on the receiving end, our guide on destroying tanks and helicopters is still worth a read.

Suppression, bow and parachutes

Suppression was inconsistent and often unnoticeable, so it has been rebuilt around shared falloff curves per weapon.

• Near-miss suppression from small and medium calibres is considerably stronger.
• Rate of fire is now accounted for, so SMGs and pistols don’t suppress disproportionately.
• Suppression screen shake has been reduced so the effect reads clearly without fighting you for control.
• Level 3 helmets reduce suppression by 68%, Level 4 helmets by 80%.

Compound Bow: shorter arrow drop-off, slightly more effective against lower-tier armor than in Season 1, and damage against armor now scales with armor tier.

Parachutes: they take longer to fully open and won’t open at all below roughly 10 m. Pulling at the last second is a real risk – if you’re falling fast and open below about 50 m, you take fall damage. The Basic Parachute costs $100 → $500, the Sport Parachute $1,000 → $700. Make sure you trust the pilot before boarding, or just drive to the control zone.

Medical Bag: durability 100 → 150.

Recoil and weapon tweaks

• MP5 – more horizontal recoil pattern, it was too easy to use.
• Super-45 – stronger damage fall-off beyond 50 m, firmly a close-quarters weapon.
• DMRs – a new recoil pass across the whole category.
• MGL-40 – muzzle velocity −25%, stronger fall-off on the 40mm outer radius, plus heavy inaccuracy, sway, slower ADS and a reload penalty while sitting on the Little Bird bench.
• Mosin – gets the new PU 91/30 (3.5x) Scope and loses access to other optics until planned customisation features arrive.

Building balance

A full pass on build costs, speed and durability aims to make structures a considered investment rather than something you spam. The Talon, Mortar and Drill Rig got their resources and ammo rebalanced to be slower to build and more expensive to keep active. Our guide to building and the FOB covers the basics of hammers and supplies.

Build supply costs

• Wood Base 15
• Bremmer wall 15 → 32
• Door 22 → 80, Gate 85 → 200
• Large Shelter → 250
• Air raid shelter, bunker, crow’s nest 100 → 200
• L81 Mortar 150 → 600, Stingray 150 → 650
• MG Nest → 650, Talon 9K-SAM 1,000 → 650
• Vanguard CIWS 1,500 → 1,200
• Hot Zone Magnet 2,250 → 2,750

Build speed and Drill Rig

• Medium hammer contributes less per swing, critical spots give a smaller bonus, large hammer is unchanged.
• Drill Rig: minimum fuel to activate 1,500 → 2,000, duration per fuel 0.05 → 0.03 (max uptime 375s → 300s), max fuel 7,500 → 10,000, and a substantially longer post-spawn cooldown so a destroyed rig can’t be replaced immediately.

Buildable weapons

• Talon – reload 2s → 5s, restock from munition supplies 50 → 200.
• Mortar – restock 75 → 150 and a new firing animation where the player drops the shell into the tube, lowering the fire rate. Everything about indirect fire is in our artillery guide.

Misc building changes

• Barbed wire and sandbags can be placed on top of Bremmer walls.
• Barbed Wire no longer gives cash or XP on kills.
• Foundations fit properly against slopes, stairs and walls.
• Unfinished buildables collapse as soon as they lose a support instead of floating.
• Tank traps only go on a defined set of surfaces.
• Doors and gates can no longer be breached with a hammer, the Halligan bar now breaches both.
• CIWS cannon damage against structures is properly tuned – it shreds light cover and struggles against heavy fortifications.

Vehicle updates

• Inventories of purchased vehicles are private to the driver and their squad by default, with a setting to open them to everyone once the vehicle is fully unlocked. Free team-spawned vehicles stay open to all.
• Tracked vehicles feel weightier – less floaty in the air, less bouncy on landing.
• Humvee handling reworked: less stiff over terrain, slower to build to top speed, better at climbing.
• Dune Buggy brakes are less effective, giving more skid and drift.
• Explosives and placeables can no longer be used from enclosed vehicle seats.

Bug fixes include the Humvee gunner facing the wrong way after entering, gunner fire desync, helicopter cockpit glass now taking damage from shots fired outward, tanks launching themselves off their own turret collision, vehicles sinking into the ground after high-speed rams, wheeled vehicles getting stuck after a backward roll, gamepad spinning after closing the tac map, inconsistent controller ADS, crouching and seat swapping in mounted turrets, smoke screens and flares not showing for late joiners, and exiting a vehicle pushing you through the ground. The Vanguard CIWS now takes 2.25x longer to kill the Spawn Vehicle.

Controller improvements

• New Aim Assist strength slider in Settings > Controller > Advanced (default 1, 0 turns it off), aim assist now works on Target Dummies in the Firing Range, plus general improvements.
• Reworked horizontal and vertical sensitivity and aim acceleration values, with acceleration kicking in sooner.
• Look direction returns faster after closing radial wheels, list scrolling is faster, and hold times for ‘Purchase Loadout’ and ‘Apply Changes’ are shorter.
• A long list of bind changes: Cycle Minimap Zoom and Reject Tip on View (Press), Deploy Crate on D-Pad Up (Hold), Open Inventory moved to Menu, Toggle Weight to View, Remove From Loadout to Y (Hold), Bribe to X, squad invites to View/Menu, scoreboard sorting to LT/RT, Drop to Y (Hold), and LB/RB now switch primary tabs while LT/RT switch secondary tabs.
• Fixed grenade cooking with X and releasing LT not cancelling a bandage self-heal.

Progression: level 20 in less than half the time

Levels 10 to 20 were a slow grind and many players stalled before unlocking the gear that defines each role. Reaching level 20 now takes less than half the playtime of Season 1.

• Level 10: 35,000 → 25,000 XP (29% quicker)
• Level 15: 110,000 → 54,750 (50% quicker)
• Level 20: 250,000 → 111,500 (55% quicker)
• Level 25: 365,000 → 206,600 (43% quicker)
• Level 30: 500,000 → 318,200 (36% quicker)
• Level 35: 750,000 → 525,000 (30% quicker)
• Level 40: 975,000 → 712,500 (27% quicker)
• Level 45: 1,225,000 → 920,850 (25% quicker)
• Level 50: 1,500,000 → 1,150,000 (23% quicker)

Most attachments also moved to earlier levels or different tracks. The highlights per track:

• WARDOG – adds the Compact P-1 Red Dot (LVL 21), the music tape “Blue (Da Ba Dee) – Eiffel 65” for Lonestar only (LVL 29) and the Gold Market (LVL 35). Supply pallets now have to be unlocked, the Judge drops from LVL 18 to LVL 1, and Level 3 Helmet & Armor move from LVL 60 to LVL 70.
• Assault – becomes the base-attacking role. C4 moves here (LVL 4), the Molotov Cocktail arrives at LVL 13, the TCX-SPR takes the M4’s place at LVL 20 and the M4 moves to LVL 28. The AK74 is unlocked by default.
• Medic – the Medical Bag drops from LVL 24 to LVL 14 and costs less, the MP5 falls to LVL 4, the PP-19 Bizon is unlocked by default and the Defibrillator moves up to LVL 22.
• Recon – gets the M14 (LVL 25) with its scope, bipod, magazines and muzzle devices, plus the PU 91/30 Scope at LVL 10. The Compound Bow and Claymore cost more to unlock.
• Support – gets the Evo-3 Ultra (LVL 30) with bipod and suppressor, the PKM drops from LVL 30 to LVL 15 and the M249 moves from 15 to 20.
• Pilot – the Little Bird AH-6M [Miniguns] moves from LVL 4 to LVL 8 and from $50k to $125k, the Havoc now costs $650k. More on flying in our helicopter guide.
• Driver – the Wolf-110 lands at LVL 8, the armed version at LVL 16, the T-72B3 at LVL 20 and the Flakpanzer Gepard at LVL 25. The SPH-2 moves from WARDOG LVL 90 all the way down to Driver LVL 31 and gets cheaper to unlock.

Cash and XP rewards

• Assault archetype kills pay $1,500 → $2,000.
• FOB hacking also rewards teammates in the FOB radius ($1,000 / 250 XP), the hacker still gets $2,500 / 250 XP.
• New door breached reward with the Halligan Bar ($100 once per door, uses raised 5 → 7) and a $75 reward for closing a friendly FOB door.
• Destroying a FOB pays a bonus of up to +$7,500 / +250 XP based on the supplies it held.
• Destroying buildables and using IED/C4 now gives assault XP instead of support, artillery gives driver XP, and repair XP goes into the driver or pilot track depending on the vehicle.
• Capturing a hostile drill tower $750 → $1,500.

Logistics: base rewards are lower, but new delivery streaks reward consecutive runs – crates +$100 / +50 XP each up to 10, pallets +$250 / +100 XP up to 10, players +$25 / +5 XP up to 25 and return trips +$50 / +25 XP up to 10.

Vehicle kills: every variant now has its own reward and armed variants give 1.5x the XP of the default. A plain Humvee is worth $600 while the Minigun version pays $5,000, the Little Bird AH-6R [Rockets] pays $9,400, the T-72B3 $8,000 and the Flakpanzer Gepard $7,000. Attack vehicle rewards also grow the more kills that vehicle has racked up.

Spotting rewards are roughly 30% lower than in Season 1 because it was the lowest-risk, highest-paying way to earn, and they now scale with the value of what you spot. A spotted target destroyed by an enemy faction pays 25% instead of 50%.

Exploit fixes

• Spotting rewards scale with build progress, so you can’t farm unfinished buildables.
• Destroying a buildable pays based on how built it is.
• Selling from a supply crate has diminishing returns per buyer – after enough sales you simply break even.
• Selling to an enemy player no longer gives cash or XP, and destroying an empty enemy crate pays half.
• FOB Supplied Assist is split between assisting players. Earlier rounds of this cleanup are described in the article about update 0.1.2.

Vendor prices

New weapons land at $1,000 for the PP-19 Bizon, $3,200 for the TCX-SPR, $7,250 for the Evo-3 Ultra and $7,400 for the M14. The Molotov Cocktail costs $340, the Wolf-110 $2,200, its M2 Browning version $7,800, the Flakpanzer Gepard $14,000 and the T-72B3 $16,000.

Notable increases: Super-45 $2,600 → $5,600, AMR 50 $8,800 → $14,800, Range Finder $400 → $1,450, Infrared Range Finder $1,200 → $3,200, Level 4 Helmet $3,000 → $4,500, L2A6 $14,000 → $22,000, Havoc $18,000 → $28,000 and Humvee [Minigun] $4,500 → $10,000.

Notable decreases: AK74 $1,600 → $800, FAL $6,500 → $6,000, PKM $4,500 → $4,100, all backpacks (Ruck $2,400 → $1,600, Arsenal $5,000 → $4,000), Halligan Bar $1,100 → $885 and Medical Bag $2,000 → $1,800. Most muzzles, grips and foregrips dropped by up to a third.

Misc

• WARDOGS Steam Trading Cards and Point Shop items are coming during Season 2, pending Valve’s approval.
• 30mm cannon ammo now takes a 2×2 inventory slot instead of 1×1, backpack stacks capped at 50, vehicle storage unchanged at 200.
• Assistance request ping timer increased 20s → 60s.
• Many QoL improvements, bug fixes, performance, stability and security work.

Where to go next

For a wider picture of the game, browse our collection of WARDOGS guides, or keep an eye on WARDOGS news for hotfixes that follow the season launch.

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