Choosing The Right Firearm For Ready Or Not
Ready Or Not Unleashing The Best Gun For Maximum Damage
The M4A1 with the Huxley Raptor barrel and extended mag is the most consistent default carry gun. It holds up under sustained fire, cycles fast enough to track moving targets, and the ammo economy works across mid to long range engagements inside buildings. It is not the most damaging single hit, but it lands the most hits before you need to reload. The 12-gauge pump with slugs is where people lose money. You see the damage number and think it solves everything. It does not. The reload takes six seconds when you are already stuck behind a door and someone is pushing through with an AR. Miss one slug, and you are down to your secondary while three suspects are running at you. I learned this the hard way on a hostage rescue call when the suspect broke cover behind the kitchen island. I was holding the shotgun at hip level, fired once, missed, tried to rack the pump and forgot my operator grip timing. Two rounds to the chest before I got the second shot off. The hostage took a bullet to the leg because of my reload animation. If you are running the shotgun, do not put it on your primary slot. Keep it as secondary, main loadout stays the carbine. Use the shotgun for breaching doors and close hallway clears where you are already at point blank. One slug through drywall stops almost anything. Through concrete block? Less effective than you might assume. The ballistics in this game treat walls differently depending on material type. Drywall and light wood stop slugs. Concrete and reinforced doors absorb them partially.
The MP7 with the long barrel build is another solid option, especially if your playstyle involves clearing tight rooms quickly. It hits hard at close range, has a high fire rate, and the default magazine holds twenty rounds which lasts longer than you would expect. The downside is ammo scarcity. Reserve ammo for the MP7 is harder to find in standard loadouts. If you commit to it, stock extra mags in your kit bag or plan around it. I ran a full shift with just the MP7 last week. Finished the night with two mags left and one reload in the middle of a active threat scenario. That is too close for comfort. Damage calculations in Ready or Not are not as simple as picking the highest number on a stat screen. Headshots multiply damage, but the multiplier changes based on which part of the head gets hit. Forehead gets slightly more than the temple. Body armor absorbs a portion of incoming damage before the health pool takes it. That is why shooting a heavily armored suspect in the upper chest with a 5.56 round still drops them in three to four shots instead of two. The armor value is doing what it is supposed to. For actual maximum damage output, the M249 light machine gun mod exists but it is practically unusable in most interior engagements. The recoil pattern pushes the barrel around so much that tracking a single target becomes guesswork. The only time it works is if you are defending a static position during a siege call and suspects are funneling down a corridor. Even then, the weapon overheats after about four seconds of continuous fire. I tried using it on a warrant service inside a warehouse with three corridors. Overheated on the first corridor clear. Had to swap to my sidearm for the rest of the shift.
The real answer to maximizing damage is not the gun itself. It is trigger discipline and positioning. A properly aimed rifle round to the center mass will drop a suspect faster than spraying a shotgun around a corner. You do not need the highest DPS rating on paper. You need clean first shots. Every round that misses is a round you do not have when the next person steps into view. If you are starting out and want one gun to build around, go with the M4A1. Attach the red dot, the compensator, and the extended mag. Do not bother with the laser sight unless you are running CQB builds specifically. It adds recoil sway in this game's engine. The compensator helps with vertical kick only. You will notice the difference after your third or fourth engagement. I keep a spare Glock 19 on my secondary slot always. Not because I expect to need it, but because when you run out of primary ammo during a high intensity call, the difference between a clean takedown and a failed arrest is having something in your hands. The Glock does not deal maximum damage by any measure. But it is available. Always available.
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