Weapons and Loadouts

Mordhau gives you a fixed budget of points and lets you spend it across a weapon, armour and perks. Everything competes for the same pool, so a loadout is a series of trades rather than a shopping list: heavier armour means a cheaper weapon, more perks mean less armour.

This page is about how to think about that trade. What each individual weapon does in numbers is a separate job, and one this page does not yet do — see what this page still needs at the bottom.

The families

One-handed. Shorter reach, faster windups, and they free your other hand for a shield. Fast weapons are harder to read but also harder to drag usefully, because there is less animation to stretch.

Two-handed. The middle of the game. Enough reach to contest most fights, enough windup length that accels and drags actually do something, and enough damage that trades go your way.

Polearms. Reach is the whole argument. You win by standing where they cannot reach you and punishing them for closing. In a corridor or a crowd that is decisive; against someone who gets inside your range it is miserable.

Ranged. Bows and crossbows. A different game from the melee entirely, and the one most likely to make you unpopular on a Frontline server.

Shields. Trade offensive options for a much larger defensive window. They change how you are approached more than how you fight.

Throwables and tools. Firebombs, throwing weapons, and the toolbox, which builds spikes and repairs objectives and is common on Frontline.

Reach is the first thing to look at

The combat mechanics page makes the point that standing at the edge of their range while inside your own is worth more than any feint. Which weapon you carry decides where that edge is.

A longer weapon does not simply beat a shorter one. It wins at the distance it was built for and loses inside that distance, because the same length that keeps someone away is the length that gets caught on walls, teammates and their body when they step in. Picking a weapon is largely picking which distance you intend to fight at, and then actually fighting there.

Speed changes what you can do, not just how fast you do it

Windup length is the raw material for accels and drags. A slow weapon has a long windup, which is more animation to manipulate, so its swings can be made to land much earlier or much later than they look. A fast weapon has less to work with, and wins instead by simply arriving before the parry does.

That is why two players with very different weapons can both be doing something sensible, and why copying a loadout without copying the playstyle it was built for usually goes badly.

Armour is bought from the same pocket

Armour is spent in tiers, and every point that goes into it is a point not going into your weapon or your perks. Heavier armour absorbs more but costs points and movement.

WARNING

Damage in Mordhau is not a single number: weapons deal different kinds of damage and armour resists them differently, which is why a weapon that shreds an unarmoured opponent can feel useless against a heavily armoured one. The specific interactions are worth checking in game against the build you actually run, since patches adjust them.

Building a loadout that works

1. Pick the distance you want to fight at, then the weapon that owns it.
2. Spend what is left on armour, not the other way round. A loadout built armour first tends to leave you with a weapon you do not enjoy.
3. Take perks last, and only ones you will notice. A perk that saves you half a second once a match cost you armour for the whole match.
4. Run it for a few hours before judging it. Most loadouts feel wrong for the first hour because they are asking you to fight differently.

If you are new, take something two-handed with medium armour and leave the optimisation alone until the combat itself stops being the hard part.

What this page still needs

This page covers how to choose. It does not yet carry the numbers: per-weapon damage, windup and release timings, point costs, or armour values.

Those need someone who can test them in game and record what they actually measure, because they shift with patches and a confidently wrong table is worse than no table. If you have run these tests, that is a genuinely valuable contribution — how to contribute covers how to send it, and the accuracy rules cover marking anything you could not verify.