Counter-Strike Weapons Guide

How CS2 itself groups weapons

The game's loadout screen uses seven headings: Starting Pistol, Other Pistols, Mid-Tier, Rifles, Heavy, Grenades and Equipment. The one worth noticing is Mid-Tier. In Valve's item definitions every SMG, every shotgun and both machine guns are assigned to the same block of slots — the block the client labels Mid-Tier — even though the in-match buy menu splits SMGs and Heavy into separate tabs.

That is not a quirk of file layout. It reflects how the weapons are used: SMGs and shotguns are both "you have some money but not enough for a rifle" weapons, and they share the elevated kill rewards that make that gamble pay.

You can rearrange which weapons sit in those slots yourself, which is what our loadout builder is for.

Pistols

Everyone starts every half with a pistol and no money, so the pistol round is the one round where these guns are the main event. After that they are a fallback — the thing you fight with on a save, or the thing you swap to when a rifle runs dry mid-duel.

Read that armour penetration column carefully — it is the reason the pistol tier is not a joke. A Five-SeveN at $500 keeps over 90% of its damage through kevlar, so a saving player with one is a genuine threat to a fully-bought rifler. The Desert Eagle is the extreme case: enormous damage, near-total armour penetration, and a first shot so demanding that most players lose more rounds to it than they win.

The two CT starting pistols are the same weapon with different magazines and one suppressor between them — we cover that choice in detail in how to equip the USP-S.

Mid-tier: SMGs, shotguns and machine guns

This is the anti-eco class, and the reason is the kill reward. A rifle kill pays the standard $300. Most SMG kills pay $600, and Nova, Sawed-Off and MAG-7 kills pay $900. Two or three kills with a $1,050 MAC-10 against a saving enemy team can bankroll your next two rounds.

The UMP-45 is the outlier worth knowing: 35 damage and 65% armour penetration make it the SMG that stays honest against armoured opponents, and at $1,200 it is the standard CT force-buy. The P90 is the other outlier, in the wrong direction — it costs more than twice a MAC-10 and pays only the normal $300 a kill, so it is a weapon you buy to win a round, not to fund one.

Shotguns — Nova at $1,050, Sawed-Off at $1,100, MAG-7 at $1,300 and XM1014 at $2,000 — are position weapons. They are devastating inside a doorway and useless past it, so they suit a CT anchoring a tight site far more than anyone who has to take space.

The machine guns sit here too and almost never make sense: the Negev at $1,700 drops you to 150 units per second, and the M249 costs $5,200 for a $300 kill reward.

Rifles

Rifles are what a full buy exists to afford. They are the only class that combines lethal damage, useful range and a spray pattern you can actually learn — which is why time spent on recoil patterns converts more directly into rounds won than time spent on anything else.

The AK-47 is the class benchmark because 36 damage with a 4× headshot multiplier kills through a helmet in one shot; no CT rifle does. The M4A1-S trades the M4A4's magazine depth and fire rate for higher per-bullet damage and a suppressor, and — the detail most players miss — a reduced headshot multiplier of 3.475 rather than 4.

The Galil and FAMAS are force-buy rifles: roughly a third cheaper than the full-price options, close enough in damage to win a round you were not supposed to win. The scoped SG 553 and AUG are the specialists, bought when a specific long angle is the whole round.

If you want the head-to-head rather than a table, the weapon comparison tool and the compare hub put any two side by side, and the damage calculator resolves the shots-to-kill question at a specific range and armour state.

Snipers

The AWP is the only weapon in Counter-Strike that reliably kills with one body shot through armour, and that single fact reshapes a map: defenders hold angles they otherwise could not, attackers spend utility they otherwise would not. It is also the only rifle whose kill reward is cut — $100 instead of $300 — so an AWPer who trades badly drains the team, not just themselves.

The SSG 08 at $1,700 is the underrated one. It keeps you at 230 units per second, which is faster than any rifle, and it is cheap enough to buy on a half-buy round where the enemy expects nothing dangerous.

Grenades and gear

Utility is the part of the buy that new players cut first and good players cut last. It is also the cheapest thing on the list.

• Decoy — $50. Situational, mostly a fake-noise tool.
• Flashbang — $200. The highest-value grenade in the game per dollar, and the one most often thrown badly.
• Smoke — $300. Blocks an angle for a fixed window; the backbone of every execute.
• HE grenade — $300. Chip damage that turns a trade into a kill.
• Molotov — $400 (T) / Incendiary — $600 (CT). Denies ground rather than dealing damage.
• Kevlar — $650, kevlar and helmet — $1,000. Armour before anything optional. A helmet is what stops a Glock or a P250 headshot.
• Defuse kit — $400 (CT). Cheap enough that not buying it is usually a mistake.
• Zeus x27 — $200. A single-use, very short range taser.

Lineups for the grenades that actually matter are in our nade lineup library.

When to buy what

1. Full buy. Rifle, kevlar and helmet, and enough utility to take or hold your position. If a rifle plus armour leaves you with no grenades, you are one player short of an execute, not one rifle up.
2. Force buy. Galil or FAMAS, or an SMG with armour, when losing this round costs you the next one anyway. The point is to break the enemy's rhythm, and every gun you take off a body is a free full buy next round.
3. Eco. Buy nothing, or armour only. The purpose of an eco is to guarantee a genuine full buy on the following round — five half-armed players is the worst outcome of all.
4. Anti-eco. When the enemy is saving, an SMG at $600 a kill is worth more than a rifle at $300. Do not over-peek to farm it: a dropped AK is the fastest way to un-eco the other team.

The thresholds behind those calls — loss bonuses, when to break, what a save is worth — are in the CS2 economy guide, and the advanced mechanics guide covers the shooting side: counter-strafing, spray control and the movement inaccuracy that decides whether any of these numbers matter.

Where these numbers come from

Damage, armour penetration, fire rate, magazine size, movement speed and penetration power on this page are read out of CS2's own weapon data files. Prices for guns come from our weapons dataset; prices for armour and the defuse kit come from Valve's item definitions.

Where our hand-curated dataset and the extracted game files disagree on a value, the extracted files win and this page follows them. That mostly affects a few armour-penetration figures and the range modifiers, which are the values third-party databases most often carry from an older patch.