For a late entry in the battle royale genre, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt has a pretty good variety of weapons. In addition to the standard selection of firearms found in most other competitive shooters, Bloodhunt lets players wield archaic World War I guns, explosive crossbows, and vicious melee weapons.
This guide will provide an overview of every weapon in Bloodhunt with its strengths, weaknesses, and less obvious quirks. Note that all ranged weapons reduce players’ movement speed while aiming down sights. This is curiously also true while players are airborne, which allows for some pretty cinematic firefights from time to time.
Pistol and Dual Pistols
The starting Pistol in Bloodhunt is completely useless, and the game knows it — as soon as you equip a second ranged weapon, it will automatically replace the Pistol, even if you don’t specifically swap them. You won’t find any other versions of it in the loot pool, so if you see one on the ground, you should be aware another player may still be in the area.
The Dual Pistols are a straight upgrade, each one hitting harder than the starter Pistol. They are powerful up close, but almost equally as useless as the Starter at medium and long-range. With higher rarities, the Dual Pistols get bigger magazines, faster reload speed, and slightly longer damage range.
Assault Rifle, Tommy Gun, Silenced SMG
These three weapons function exactly like their counterparts in any other shooter game. The SMG and Tommy Gun are strong in close range, with the Tommy Gun having excellent sustained damage output with its large magazine. The Silenced SMG is only somewhat “silenced,” and players can still pick up its sound from about a block away.
All three weapons are fully automatic, and at a higher rarity they come with higher ammo capacity, faster reloads, and slightly longer damage ranges. The Assault Rifle is much better than the other two at medium and long-range without really performing any worse in close quarters, and is currently the forerunner for strongest weapon in Bloodhunt.
Revolver, Sniper Rifle, Marksman Rifle
The three slow-firing, heavy-hitting, accuracy-rewarding guns in Bloodhunt function very similarly. Each of these three weapons boasts a long damage range and high damage per shot. All three of them deal additional headshot damage compared to other weapons. All of them get better reload speed and damage range with higher rarities, and the Revolver and Sniper Rifle also get improved recoil recovery.
Burst Rifle
The Burst Rifle is a mid-to-long range semi-auto gun with decent damage output and great accuracy. It can switch between single-shot and burst fire mode. This weapon is favored by the forces of the Entity, who will often use it against players quite effectively.
LMG, Minigun, and Toggleable Machine Gun
These three heavy weapons are similar in that they use the same ammo and are all fully automatic, but they each come with their own quirks. The LMG gains improved accuracy the longer it fires, and it performs best at close range. The Minigun fires faster the longer you hold the trigger down, and it has a massive 300 round drum magazine that cannot be manually reloaded.
The Toggleable Machine Gun is the odd one out, and one of the more unique and flexible weapons in Bloodhunt in general. It has two fire modes which players can switch between freely. The long-range mode has a slower fire rate, but it’s much more accurate; this is indicated by the crosshairs getting smaller when switching to it. The close range mode has double the fire rate and works similarly to the LMG. The weapon deals high damage per shot in either fire mode.
Heavy Crossbow and Dual Crossbows
The Crossbow weapons in Bloodhunt are not what you would expect: they have generally low upfront damage, no damage dropoff over range, and they are decidedly not silent. The Heavy Crossbow fires a single large bolt that detonates into a persistent cloud of toxic gas on impact, blocking off a sizable area with each shot. At higher rarities, it gets faster reload speed.
The Dual Crossbows fire smaller bolts, resulting in smaller explosions that do not leave gas behind. At higher rarities, they get faster reload speed and can fire more bolts before needing to reload. Both weapons’ projectiles fly in a heavy arc, so landing hits with them over long-range is basically impossible.
Pump Shotgun and Double Barrel Shotgun
The two shotguns in Bloodhunt deal high burst damage as long as your target is right in front of you. Neither is great at mid-range, though the Pump Shotgun is generally better in those situations. At higher rarities, the Pump Shotgun gets a bigger magazine and faster reloads, making it more dependable. Conversely, at higher rarities, the Double Barrel gets a tighter pellet spread and slightly longer damage range, but it’s still decidedly a close-quarters weapon.
Melee weapons
In addition to two ranged weapons, Bloodhunt players can carry a single melee weapon: either a Spiked Baseball Bat, a Fire Axe, a Katana, or the Scourge Blades. All melee weapons come in fixed rarities and have unique attack chains, and while the Bat and the Axe are more or less the same, the Katana and the Scourge Blades grant their users unique abilities. The Katana can deflect bullets back at the shooter, and the Scourge Blades allow players to quickly dash forward while slashing. Both abilities go on a short cooldown after use.
While melee weapons are silent and don’t require ammo, they are explicitly a last resort option, since they cannot compete with most of the guns in Bloodhunt in terms of raw damage output or flexibility. They also don’t seem to have any vertical detection, even when the player is aiming up. This makes them very unreliable in rooftop fights. That said, Archetypes like the Vandal and the Siren can make good use of melee weapons, especially if they feed on enough NPCs with the right blood type to level up their melee damage.
