All Scout Rifles in The First Descendant, ranked

Modified Sep 19, 2024 23:58 IST

The First Descendant Scout Rifles ranked — The First Descendant has a handful of Scout Rifles (Image via Nexon)

Scout Rifles occupy a very slim niche in The First Descendant. These feature scopes and high effective range (but also higher magazine capacity than the average sniper) with a quasi-auto trigger mechanic to go with it. The best ones will be one-shot wonders against mobs if kitted out properly, while the worst ones are just spice-of-life guns for variety.

Given that there are seven of these with similar sheet DPS, it can be hard to decide which is the best. In this guide, we'll try to rank all seven Scout Rifles currently in the game.

The First Descendant Scout Rifles ranked from worst to best

7) Nightmare Hound

Nightmare Hound can be obtained early in the game (Image via Nexon)

Accessible earlier than all other Scout Rifles in The First Descendant, the Nightmare Hound lives up to the mantra of a low-rarity weapon. This is the only standard (blue) weapon of this type, and its lower DPS ceiling reflects that. Unless you manage to get some miracle god-roll, this is little more than Mastery fodder from the weapon proficiency.

6) The Age of Innovation

Age of Innovation isn't a great option (Image via Nexon)

The Age of Innovation is a straight-up downgrade from Hero's Scar: near-identical rate of fire and base damage with lower crit chance. Naturally, there's very little reason you should invest in this. Level it up for the Mastery and then chuck it.

5) Silly Weeper

Silly Weeper is a silly sniper (Image via Nexon)

Silly Weeper is the middle point between Scout Rifle and Snipers in The First Descendant. It's got the highest base damage out of all Scouts by a huge margin, but its recoil and snail-paced fire rate keep it from being super effective. To truly leverage a good crit build, you would need Gley for circumnavigating the magazine size, but at that point, you're better off using a Sniper rifle anyway.

Also Read: The First Descendant tier list: Best characters to play

4) Hero's Scar

Hero's Scar has good base damage and crit (Image via Nexon)

Hero's Scar is very similar to The Age of Innovation. As mentioned earlier, this one is the better version to fill this middle-of-the-road niche. Its downside is imperceptible at first glance—you run really slow with this weapon equipped, much like Tamer. Thankfully, with some practice, you can easily get into the habit of swapping to another weapon when running.

3) Sonic Co-op

Sonic Co-op can deal a lot of damage (Image via Nexon)

Sonic Co-op is easily the best Scout Rifle without going into The First Descendant's Ultimate weapon-crafting echelon. It offers the highest fire rate within this weapon class, a high critical chance, and a solid mag size to dump those crits. Without relying on unique effect gimmicks, this is the best DPS (Damage Per Second) you can get out of Scout Rifles.

2) Blue Beetle

Blue Beetle is the Scout Rifle to go with for fashion (Image via Nexon)

Blue Beetle is one of The First Descendant's meta Ultimate weapons. It is primarily used as a stat stick for its unique effects—Skill Crit Hit Rate buff upon casting Fusion abilities and an on-demand debuff removal for characters with "Singular" skills. Even outside these unique effects, it has good stats. Blue Beetle has the highest critical damage among Scout Rifles in The First Descendant at the time of writing.

1) Wave of Light

Wave of Light is a meta weapon for endgame (Image via Nexon)

Wave of Light's Unique Effect pushes it to the top tier of Scout Rifles. The raw stats are just middling (other than the high Weak Point damage) on this gun, but once you reload, it has guaranteed critical hits for one second as the Solar Halo effect. Not only this, a secondary series of effects kick in after Solar Halo to indirectly grant a 10% Firearm ATK buff for six seconds.

Note that this list is partially based on the author's subjective bias, as some of these weapons are neck-to-neck in terms of raw DPS. In these cases, it's better to go with whichever scout rifle feels the best to use.

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Edited by Siddharth Satish