WARDOGS Season 3 patch notes: the key changes and what they mean for the meta

Bulkhead has published the full Season 3 patch notes, the day before the season goes live. Season 3 starts on Thursday 12 November after maintenance from 13:00 to 15:00 UTC (the same in UK time), with roughly two hours of downtime. It’s a wipe with slower levelling, a new city map, a new Limited Mode and a broad balance pass. Here’s what changes and what it means for the weapons and vehicles you’ll be buying. Every figure below comes from the official notes; the full text is on our Season 03 patch notes page.

The key changes at a glance

• New map: Sabatulo, the first city map, built around close-quarters and vertical fighting.
• New Limited Mode: no HP or AP ammo, no Level 3 or 4 armour, no attack vehicles, no CIWS, Stingray, MG Nest or Drill Rig, and no anti-tank mines.
• Slower progression: more XP needed per level, closer to Season 1 pacing, over a season of roughly three months.
• Multi-track unlocks: armour, backpacks, tactical vests and parachutes can be unlocked on every role track.
• The Infrared Range Finder is gone from the vendor until it’s redesigned.
• Assault rifles, LMGs and DMRs hit harder; vehicle miniguns do more damage to infantry.
• Tanks unlock much later, and four vehicles get cheaper, including the Havoc and the AH-6M.
• The Wager Vendor has been removed.

Sabatulo and Limited Mode

Sabatulo is all tight streets, tall buildings and destructible cover, with a central hospital, a swimming pool, a power station and a river embankment as the main landmarks. Expect fights room to room and from the rooftops. The notes don’t give a size or a mode list.

Limited Mode restricts the vendor to roughly what players normally have early to mid season. It’s aimed at people who want fairer fights and at anyone joining later in the season. Progression and cash earned there carry over to the other modes, and the server browser now has a filter for Limited servers.

Progression and the wipe

• XP per level goes up, and overall levelling is slowed towards Season 1 speeds.
• Shared kit now sits on every role track, so you no longer need to dip into several roles to reach it. Each role gets its signature item a little earlier: Assault gets armour first, Medic the tactical vest, Support backpacks and Recon AP ammo.
• Ammo types move later on the WARDOG track and are spread across the role tracks that use them.
• Lower-level players get a catch-up XP bonus and a bigger vendor discount, both growing week by week and tracked per role.
• The losing faction’s discount is now based on how far it trails first place, not the faction just above it.

Unlock moves listed in the notes:

Bulkhead expects a small number of players who min-max progression to reach strong kit within the first weekend, and suggests early counters, teamwork, new-player servers and Limited servers if you’d rather avoid them.

Weapons and equipment

• Assault rifles: torso damage goes back to Season 1 values: upper torso +13%, middle and lower torso +3% compared with Season 2.
• LMGs: torso damage now matches assault rifles, with the same increases. For both, armour still cuts damage by the same percentage as before.
• TCX-SPR: less climb in full auto and less sideways drift, and it no longer uses standing recoil when prone.
• DMRs (SVD, BMR-308, M14, SKS): all four now kill an unarmoured player in 2 body shots (was 3) and a player without a helmet in 1 headshot (was 2). The SVD, BMR-308 and M14 need 1 to 2 fewer body shots at every armour level and kill through a Level 3 helmet in 2 headshots (was 3). The SKS needs 1 fewer body shot against Level 2 and Level 4 armour. Neck damage is up but still takes 2 shots; arms and legs are unchanged.
• Compound Bow: arrows travel 50% faster, so you lead moving targets less.
• Molotov: sets you on fire, damaging you and making you drop what you’re holding. Unlock cost halves from $25k to $12.5k, but it does less to armoured vehicles and heavy armour.
• Infrared Range Finder: removed. Bulkhead says it turned up in almost every match and the Season 2 battery requirement didn’t rein it in.
• Parachutes: the Basic Parachute ($500 → $1,250) is now an emergency chute for bailing out of helicopters: slower to open, can’t be pulled within about 20 m of the ground, and effective above about 100 m. The Sport Parachute ($700 → $2,250) turns, glides and dives faster, and is effective above about 60 m. Helicopter passengers now see their height above the ground, and there’s a new reward for parachuting into an enemy FOB.
• Halligan Bar: can force open enemy supply crates, dropping a random item.
• Weights corrected: AMP-9 20-round magazine 1 kg → 0.3 kg, IED 1.5 kg → 2.7 kg, IED trigger 1.5 kg → 0.2 kg.

Vehicles

• Price cuts: Wolf-110 [M2 Browning] $7,800 → $6,800, Kodiak [M249] $6,750 → $6,250, AH-6M [Miniguns] $12,000 → $10,480, Havoc $28,000 → $26,000.
• Vehicle miniguns vs infantry: head +50%, neck +78%, upper torso +64%, mid torso +55%, lower torso +50%, pelvis, arms and legs +56%. That puts them between Season 1 and Season 2.
• AH-6R [Rockets]: now fires its own 70 mm rockets instead of the Havoc’s 122 mm. Damage is unchanged, but the rockets wobble in flight, so it’s slightly worse against infantry and the same against vehicles and FOBs.
• Little Bird cockpits (MH-6, AH-6R, AH-6M): pilots and co-pilots are better protected from bullets, between Season 1 and Season 2 levels.
• Vanguard CIWS: 20x102mm rounds now damage each vehicle section once per round. The Havoc and Z20 Lakota take roughly what they did in Season 2; the Little Birds take slightly less. Its maximum aim angle drops from 65° to 60°, so the blind spot overhead is bigger.
• Tanks (T-72B3, L2A6): more resistant to grenades, which could previously knock out an engine with a single hit. A grenade launcher bug is also fixed: tracks now take 3 hits (was 1) and the engine 5–6 (was 3). Bullets can no longer kill the T-72B3 driver from outside.
• Wheeled vehicles roll downhill off the throttle and reverse faster: Bobcat 16 → ~25 km/h, Kodiak 33 → ~57, Humvee 35 → ~57, Dune Buggy 43 → ~50, Ural 15 → 27 and Wolf-110 27 → ~40. The Ural and Humvee get slightly better traction, and the Ural can no longer roll backwards faster than it drives forwards.
• Destruction: vehicles other than the Bobcat flatten box hedges, and tanks and artillery can knock down stone walls.
• Supply drops: crates can’t be deployed in safe zones, and safe drop heights fall: crates ~60 m → ~35 m, armoured crates ~80 m → ~35 m, pallets ~90 m → ~40 m. Speed counts too; around 80 km/h at those heights is still safe.

Cash and XP

• Destroying enemy emplacements pays double: L81 Mortar, Talon 9K-SAM, MG Nest and Stingray $650 → $1,300, Vanguard CIWS $1,200 → $2,400.
• Air vehicle kill streak rewards are back, and destroying a vehicle with your own vehicle within 1,000 m of a control zone now pays the full control zone reward.
• Spotted target kills pay less. Cash: AH-6M and AH-6R $1,000 → $850, Z20 Lakota [Miniguns] $1,400 → $1,200, L2A6 $3,300 → $3,000, T-72B3 $2,400 → $2,000, Hot Zone Magnet $1,650 → $1,500. XP: player 150 → 125, FOB 250 → 200, Hot Zone Magnet 225 → 200, spawn vehicles 500 → 400.
• Low-value crates pay less, scaled to what’s in them, and pallets dropped outside a friendly FOB pay less. Fuelling a FOB that starts a drill now earns a kickback.
• Community servers pay a small cash bonus.

What this means for the meta

These are readings of the notes before anyone has played the build, so treat them as starting points and check them in game.

Rifles and LMGs are the safe infantry pick again. The torso buff makes chest hits count for more at every range for both classes, and the TCX-SPR gets easier to control on top. LMGs now trade torso damage evenly with rifles and keep their bigger magazines, which suits holding a street or a stairwell on Sabatulo.

DMRs are back as a real choice. Two body shots on an unarmoured player is a big swing early in a wipe, when most people won’t have armour yet. In Limited Mode, where Level 3 and 4 armour is off the table, the lower shot counts against lighter armour keep them useful all season, and the SKS (Recon level 5 in Season 2) is the cheap way in.

Expect more Little Birds early, and bring a Verba. The AH-6M is $1,520 cheaper per life, its miniguns hit infantry much harder and the cockpit survives more hits. The counter arrives sooner too: the Verba now unlocks at Support level 8, well before the Large Hammer.

The ground war stays light for longer. Tanks now start at Driver level 35, so armed light vehicles will do the heavy lifting for much of the early season. The cheapest armed options are the Kodiak [M249] at $6,250 (Driver level 6 in Season 2) and the Wolf-110 [M2 Browning] at $6,800. When tanks do arrive, grenades won’t stop them, so carry a launcher.

Long-range spotting gets harder. With the IR Range Finder gone, ranging targets at distance is down to scopes and your squad’s calls again.

Mind the drop heights. Pilots used to dropping crates from high up will lose them at the new limits, and the Basic Parachute is no longer a cheap way off a tower.

What the notes don’t tell us yet

• New unlock costs for the items that moved (Verba, AMR 50, tanks and the rest). Our pages will show the new levels, with costs added once they’re confirmed in game.
• New destroy rewards for the vehicles whose prices changed.
• Whether the Flakpanzer Gepard and SPH-2 moved along with the tanks.
• Unlock levels and prices not mentioned in the notes are carried over from Season 2 on our weapon and vehicle pages until we can check them in the new build.

Also in Season 3

• Anti-cheat: using NVIDIA Inspector or other third-party tools to remove smoke or grass, change geometry, LOD bias or textures is now bannable. The game will warn you and refuse to start if those settings are detected, and getting around that is bannable. The hidden “potato” shadow setting is reset on boot if it’s been edited outside the game, and spoofing specs to get it is bannable.
• Ping limit on official servers rises to 250 in every region.
• Price rise: the Early Access price goes up by $5 at the end of Season 3 on 28 January. Existing owners pay nothing extra.
• Movember DLC: the Tactical 'Stache cosmetic grows as you play in November, plus a permanent scoreboard badge. All profits go to Movember.
• Twitch Drops are on for Season 3, with rewards ranging from bandages to a Littlebird, a Wolf-110 and Level 2 armour.
• Gold Market camos: Defibrillator Black & Gold (limited time), MAAWS Two-Tone Desert, Compound Bow Digital Wood, M1911 and FAL Chocolate Chip. The Black & Gold Littlebird camo stays for the first two weeks.
• Controller: hold A to jump straight to the driver’s seat (handbrake and pilot fire move to B), hold X to reload by discarding the magazine, and world interactions are now a single press.
• DDoS attacks on Asian servers: Bulkhead says the attack route has been found and infrastructure fixes are targeted for launch.

Our weapon and vehicle pages are being updated with every change the notes confirm.