Weapon choice is the decision that most affects a hunter's cost, and it is the one new players most reliably get wrong. The instinct is to buy the best weapon affordable. The correct approach is to buy the weapon that suits your current profession level and the creature you intend to kill.
The stats and what they mean
Damage is how hard a single shot hits. On its own it tells you almost nothing.
DPS, damage per second, combines damage with rate of fire. This tells you how fast the weapon kills, which matters for time spent and for surviving creatures that hit back. It says nothing about cost.
DPP, damage per PEC, is how much damage you get for each unit of cost. This is the economic efficiency of the weapon: two weapons with the same DPS can have very different DPP, and the one with higher DPP does the same work for less money.
Efficiency is a separate stat carried by weapons, shown as a percentage. Players treat a higher figure as better for the same spend, and it is largely independent of DPS, so a fast weapon is not automatically a highly efficient one. The weapons wiki records the figure for every weapon.
What efficiency does mechanically is a loot system question, and this guide will not answer it from player inference. Until an official statement is cited here, read it as a comparison stat between weapons rather than as a known quantity of value returned.
Ammunition burn is how much ammunition a shot consumes. It is part of DPP, but worth watching separately because it is the part of your cost you can shop around on.
Range matters for which creatures you can engage safely, and melee weapons trade range away entirely in exchange for their own economics.
How to read them together
The short version:
- DPS is a speed stat. It decides whether you can kill the creature before it kills you, and how many kills an hour you manage.
- DPP and efficiency are cost stats. They decide what those kills cost you.
You need enough DPS to handle your target creature safely, and after that you want the best DPP and efficiency you can get. Buying more DPS than the creature requires is buying a higher spend rate.
The weapons wiki lists damage, DPS, DPP, efficiency, range, decay and TT value for every weapon, which is what makes this comparison possible without doing the arithmetic yourself.
Profession level is the gate
A weapon has a profession level associated with it. Below that level you do not get the weapon's full performance, but you do pay its full running cost.
This is why the expensive weapon bought early is a genuine mistake rather than merely an impatient one. You are paying more per shot to do less damage than the weapon is capable of. The player next to you with a cheaper weapon used at the right level is spending less and killing more.
Upgrade when the level says you can, not when the wallet says you can. See Professions and profession levels.
Amplifiers
An amplifier attaches to a weapon and increases its damage, at the cost of extra decay and extra ammunition.
Amps are not free damage. They shift the whole cost and output profile of the weapon, and whether that shift is favourable depends on the amp, the weapon and what you are shooting. An amp that makes a weapon viable against a bigger creature can be worth it; an amp bolted on to a setup that was already working can make it worse.
The rule of thumb: change one thing at a time and record the result, because the difference between a good pairing and a bad one is not visible from the tooltip.
Melee, ranged and the rest
Weapon families progress separate professions, so switching family means starting a new progression rather than continuing an existing one. This is a real cost and worth deciding early rather than drifting between them.
Beyond that, the families differ in range, in how they handle creatures that close distance, and in their cost profile. There is no universally best family, and the choice is reasonably made on what you enjoy.
A practical procedure
- Decide what creature you want to hunt. See How hunting works.
- Work out what DPS you need to kill it comfortably at your current standing.
- Among weapons at or below your profession level that meet that DPS, take the best DPP and efficiency.
- Check the markup on the weapon and on its ammunition, because both are part of what you pay.
- Record what it actually costs you per kill, and compare with what you were using before.
Step 5 is the one people skip, and it is the one that turns all of this from theory into a number.