Power first. Difficulty kept honest.

Default target

Purple Evo means 200 total health: 100 shield plus 100 flesh. The default hit sequence uses nine torso/arm hits followed by one leg hit, repeated until lethal. Arms use the torso multiplier in Apex, so this is labelled 90% torso/arms + 10% legs.

Mechanical TTK

The first damaging shot lands at time zero unless the weapon has an initial charge. TTK then counts the intervals between required shots. Burst gaps, HAVOC charge, Devotion ramp-up and selected-magazine reloads are included. Projectile travel time is not.

Distance and shotguns

Ordinary weapons do not receive a damage-over-distance curve. The Charge Rifle’s explicit distance scaling is a separate weapon mechanic, not conventional fall-off. Shotguns also keep their listed damage per connected pellet; their practical damage drops because an expanding blast pattern places fewer pellets on the target.

The shotgun range lab is deliberately labelled as a model. It projects the extracted fixed blast pattern onto a centred target silhouette and counts intersecting pellets. It excludes aim error, movement, random spread, headshots and choke.

Use difficulty

The 1–5 difficulty rating combines four measurable pressures: extracted recoil-path movement compared with the median weapon in the same class, the share of a base and blue magazine needed for one purple-shield knock, the time lost when a shot misses, and any initial charge or wind-up. Recoil emphasises horizontal spread, discounts smooth vertical climb and applies only a square-root cadence adjustment, so fire rate cannot dominate the result. Similar weapons stay near one another instead of being forced across the whole five-point scale. Difficulty is context beside the ranking, not a penalty inside it.

Expert-power ranking

The main score assumes the player can control the weapon. TTK is 65% of an AR score and 70% of an SMG score; LMGs give more room to sustained fire, while marksman weapons, shotguns and snipers give more weight to burst and headshot lethality. Handling and magazine capacity contribute, but recoil and attachment dependence do not subtract power.

For weapons with an initial charge, the lethality component is split evenly between trigger-pull TTK and firing TTK. A documented-utility adjustment, capped at 10 points, covers combat functions the stat file cannot express; the Hemlok’s silencer and Breach Charge are the current example. Popularity alone never earns this adjustment.

S tier begins at 77 power points. Class rank is shown separately, so the best weapon in a class remains easy to find without receiving an automatic S promotion. Current external tier lists are used as a disagreement check, not copied into the score.

Attachments and powered states

Floor-attachment dependence is calculated from one-clip margin and the measured improvement from base to blue magazine or fire-rate attachment. Major upgrades are separate: locked hop-ups can become the recommended expert setup after an availability adjustment, while temporary resource states such as a Thermite-revved Rampage or Shield-Cell-amped Sentinel remain separate comparison rows.

Source verification

Official EA patch notes take priority for changed values. When a note is incomplete, DropStats can corroborate it with version-matched game-file extraction, repeatable firing-range measurement and independent specialist sources. Matching articles alone are not treated as proof because they may all repeat the same original claim. Conflicts are flagged instead of silently averaged.