Season 2 patch notes: everything that changes on 15 October

Season 02 went live at 10:00 UTC after an extended window

Maintenance began at 08:00:02 UTC on 15 October. At 09:39:08 UTC, BULKHEAD said the window was being extended and existing servers would restart across regions, without a revised ETA or cause. At 10:00:10 UTC, WARDOGS Updates said Season 02 was live and services were back online; @WARDOGS repeated the recovery at 10:01:51 UTC. Those posts record a recovery moment, not continuous health. The notes give no patch number.

Four guns, four vehicles, a Molotov and rain

• Molotov Cocktail ($340, Assault level 13): splashes fire on impact, deals impact damage and burn damage to anyone standing in the flames, burns destructible foliage, and is weakened by rain. Thrown overarm or underarm.
• Infrared Range Finder: back, and now runs on batteries — around 80 seconds of active use per battery, draining faster if toggled on and off quickly. Vendor price $1,200 → $3,200.
• Rain is a new weather preset: wet surfaces and vehicles, rain that sounds different under cover, indoors or in a vehicle, rain through destroyed roofs, reduced spotting range, and thunder every player hears at the same moment — loud enough to mask footsteps. WARDOGS Updates says it is selected at random on map change and should appear across all regions within 24 hours of 10:22 UTC on 15 October; that does not guarantee it in any particular match.

Team-switch limits, a team-kill vote and ping kicks

• Team switching: once a team leads by more than 10 points, you cannot switch again for 15 minutes, and a switcher or late joiner has an obscured map and no spawn-vehicle access until first reaching the control zone.
• Team kills: the victim chooses Forgive or Punish; Punish results accumulate into kicks and escalating bans. Respawning and leaving the safe zone without voting forgives.
• Squad Intent: squad leaders pick a team-visible intent from a fixed list; invites and timed prompts now queue.
• Rebuy Last Loadout fills the vendor with your last loadout to edit before buying.
• Seeding: players who fill empty servers earn rewards and a vendor discount once the match begins; pre-match targets, a football and a hidden radio in each spawn.
• Region-based ping limits on official servers, starting lenient: sustained high ping gets you kicked until the next map; the browser gains max-ping tags and filters; community admins set their own limits.
• Bakurani: all three team spawns moved and rebuilt with purpose-built routes to the zone.
• Losing-team discount: 20% off the vendor for any team at least 40 points behind second place.

Faction balance experiment

The 14 October notes called this a social experiment: Lonestar received a cash and XP win bonus and multipliers on teamplay actions. At 20:58 UTC on 15 October, BULKHEAD said it was removing those modifiers after the test pulled progression-focused players onto blue. Its video disclosed the removed values as 5% cash and 2.5% XP. The separate 20% trailing-team vendor discount remains in the notes and was not named for removal.

High-calibre rounds lose 16–25% base damage

BULKHEAD says .308 and 7.62x54mmR were doing close to sniper damage in faster-firing assault rifles, DMRs and LMGs. The cut applies to every weapon using these rounds, vehicle weapons included. Sniper rifles get more hit-location damage to compensate; the FAL keeps the highest per-shot damage among assault rifles.

Armour and helmets

• Level 3 armour and helmets: damage reduction 55% → 50%.
• Level 4 armour and helmets: damage reduction 65% → 60%. The Level 4 helmet now muffles audio and proximity chat, restricts the field of view and fogs while sprinting.
• Suppression resistance: Level 3 helmets reduce suppression by 68%, Level 4 helmets by 80%.
• Scout Rifle headshots now kill a target with no helmet in one shot; a Level 1 helmet takes two.
• 12-gauge slugs and the Compound Bow now lose damage against armour by tier, instead of one flat reduction.

Weapons

• Assault-rifle body shots do slightly less damage, and torso damage is more even; LMG body damage now matches assault rifles.
• DMRs: hit-location damage adjusted to sit between assault rifles and snipers, plus a new recoil pass.
• Sniper rifles get more hit-location damage to offset the calibre cut.
• MP5: a more horizontal recoil pattern. Super-45: damage falls off harder beyond 50 m.
• MGL-40: muzzle velocity −25%, stronger fall-off at the 40 mm outer radius, more sway and inaccuracy, slower ADS, and a reload penalty on the Little Bird bench.
• Mosin: new PU 91/30 (3.5x) scope, and no other optics.
• Compound Bow: flatter arrow drop, slightly better against low-tier armour.
• Parachutes open more slowly, not at all below about 10 m, and opening below roughly 50 m at speed means fall damage.
• Medical Bag durability 100 → 150.
• Heavy and Artillery top turrets now use assault-rifle hit-location values against infantry; the calibre cuts also apply to vehicle miniguns.

Suppression is rebuilt around shared fall-off curves: near misses from small and medium calibres suppress much harder, fire rate is taken into account, and screen shake is reduced.

Structures cost more supply and build more slowly

• Drill Rig: minimum fuel to start 1,500 → 2,000; duration per fuel 0.05 → 0.03 (max uptime 375 s → 300 s); max fuel 7,500 → 10,000; a much longer post-spawn cooldown.
• Talon: reload 2 s → 5 s; restock from munitions 50 → 200.
• Mortar: restock from munitions 75 → 150, and a new firing animation that drops the shell in as it fires, slowing the rate of fire.
• Medium hammer contributes less per swing; critical spots give a smaller bonus; the large hammer is unchanged.
• Barbed wire and sandbags can sit on Bremmer walls; barbed-wire kills no longer pay cash or XP.
• Doors and gates can no longer be breached with a hammer; the Halligan bar breaches both.
• Unfinished buildables collapse when they lose support; tank traps only place on defined surfaces.
• CIWS cannon now shreds light cover and struggles against heavy fortifications.

Level 20 in less than half the Season 1 playtime

Role-track XP requirements fall at every published level, most between 15 and 25. These are the totals the Season 02 notes print; their Season 1 figures for levels 25 and up are higher than the ones the Season 1 changelog published (365,000 against 325,000 at level 25), and this page quotes each announcement as written.

• WARDOG: Three supply pallets that used to be free now unlock on this track, and the Judge and GGX 17 swap places.
• Assault: Now the base-attacking role: C4 and the new Molotov move here, the AK74 is free and the TCX-SPR takes the M4’s level-20 slot.
• Medic: The Medical Bag arrives at level 14 instead of 24, the PP-19 Bizon is free and the MP5 drops to level 4 — the biggest reshuffle of any track.
• Recon: Recon gets the M14 and its attachments, the BMR-308 drops to level 20 and most scopes swap levels.
• Support: Support gets the Evo-3 Ultra; the PKM moves down to level 15 and the M249 up to 20.
• Pilot: The minigun Little Bird unlocked too early for its strength, so it now comes later and costs more.
• Driver: Armed vehicles before the L2A6: the armed Wolf-110 at 16, T-72B3 at 20, Gepard at 25, and the SPH-2 down from WARDOG 90 to Driver 31.

Logistics streaks, assault bonuses and repriced kills

• Assault-archetype kill bonus $1,500 → $2,000.
• FOB hacking also pays teammates in the radius $1,000 / 250 XP; the hacker keeps $2,500 / 250 XP. Destroying a FOB pays up to +$7,500 / +250 XP depending on supplies held (max at 25,000).
• New rewards: door breached with the Halligan bar $100 once per door (bar uses 5 → 7); friendly FOB door closed $75.
• Capturing a hostile drill tower $750 → $1,500, XP 250 → 300.
• Role XP moves: destroying buildables, IED and C4 pay Assault XP; artillery pays Driver XP; repairs pay Driver or Pilot XP by vehicle.
• Logistics base rewards fall (player delivered $150 → $100; pallet deployed $2,500 → $1,250; small crate $500 → $250, large $1,000 → $500), offset by new delivery streaks: +$100 / 50 XP per crate, +$250 / 100 XP per pallet, +$25 / 5 XP per player and +$50 / 25 XP per return trip, each capped. BULKHEAD corrected the first two figures after publication: the original post used base-design values without the Control Zone multiplier; these are the actual Control Zone returns.
• Destroyed buildables now pay their build supply cost in cash with XP at about 25% of that; destroyed crates and pallets are repriced.
• Spotting pays about 30% less than Season 1, scales with the target’s value, and pays 25% (was 50%) when an enemy faction destroys it.
• Exploit fixes: supply-crate sales have diminishing returns per buyer, selling to an enemy pays nothing, and FOB Supplied Assist is split between assisting players.

Every new price, increase and cut

These are per-purchase vendor prices. Track unlock costs are separate and sit in the progression section.

BULKHEAD says most muzzles, grips and foregrips dropped by up to a third and lists only the biggest cuts, which are the last eight rows above.

Gold Market and the Wager Vendor

The Black & Gold AK camo leaves the Gold Market. The Wager Vendor — bet your own cash on your own performance, with a live tracker above the minimap — is not available at launch; BULKHEAD says it opens later in Season 02 and is meant to come and go.

Private inventories, heavier tanks and a Humvee rework

• Purchased-vehicle inventories are private to the driver and their squad by default; free team-spawn vehicles stay open to everyone.
• Tracked vehicles feel heavier in the air and on landing; the Humvee is reworked to climb better and build speed more slowly; Dune Buggy brakes are weaker.
• Explosives and placeables can no longer be used from enclosed seats.
• Helicopter cockpit glass now takes damage from outgoing fire too; the CIWS takes 2.25× longer to kill the Spawn Vehicle.
• Fixes for Humvee gunner facing, gunner fire desync, tanks launching off their own turret, vehicles sinking when ramming, late-joiners missing smoke and flares, and exit placement.

An aim-assist slider and new binds

• An Aim Assist strength slider in Settings > Controller > Advanced (default 1; 0 turns it off); aim assist now works on firing-range dummies.
• BULKHEAD also lists general aim-assist improvements, without publishing numeric tuning values.
• Retuned sensitivity and aim acceleration; faster list scrolling and shorter hold times for Purchase Loadout and Apply Changes.
• Rebinds include Open Inventory to Menu, Toggle Weight to View, Remove From Loadout to Y (hold), Bribe to X, Drop to Y (hold), and LB/RB / LT/RT for primary and secondary tabs.
• Fixes: grenades can be cooked with X; releasing LT cancels a bandage self-heal.

• 30 mm cannon ammo takes a 2×2 inventory slot and caps at 50 per backpack stack; vehicle storage stays at 200.
• Assistance-request ping timer 20 s → 60 s.
• Steam Trading Cards and Point Shop items are to be added within Season 2, pending Valve’s approval.

Keep the patch date attached

BULKHEAD published these notes at 14:59 UTC on 14 October 2026. The build went live after extended maintenance at 10:00 UTC on 15 October; anything not named here keeps its earlier value and grade on this site.

Source: WARDOGS | Season 02 Patch Notes ↗