Best PPSh-41 loadout in the Modern Warfare 4 beta

The short version

Four trackers publish a PPSh-41 build for the Modern Warfare 4 beta and no two of them match. The only attachment that appears in all four is the 53 Round Mag. Three of the four run a Hanbit RDR-Tiger barrel; two run the Hanbit RDW7-F stock. Everything else — muzzle, underbarrel, laser, ammunition, optic — is a coin flip between published lists.

That is worth knowing before you copy a build off the first page you land on, because the disagreement is not cosmetic. One build spends its slots on recoil control, another on ammunition type, a third on an Apex Attachment.

The gun also got hit twice in one week. Infinity Ward cut its headshot multiplier on 23 August and then trimmed its damage ranges on 24 August (Dexerto, MW4.GG). Any build published before those updates was tuned for a different gun.

One timing note: the open beta ended on 1 September, and Modern Warfare 4 does not launch until 23 October. This is a beta build for a beta gun — a starting point to carry into launch, not a settled answer.

The four published builds

Slot	wzranked	codmunity	wzstats	bestloadout
Muzzle	L980-S Comp	—	FTAC Silent Recon	FTAC Silent Recon
Barrel	Hanbit RDR-Tiger 50 (Heavy)	Hanbit Chimmuk-INTR	Hanbit RDR-Tiger 50-XL	Hanbit RDR-Tiger (Heavy)
Underbarrel	FSS Fireline Grip	—	—	FSS Tac90 Grip
Stock	Hanbit RDW7-F	Hanbit Janggun-H9	—	Hanbit RDW7-F
Magazine	53 Round Mag	53 Round Mag	53 Round Mag	53 Round Mag
Optic	—	ZLR Type C	—	—
Laser	—	XRK Clutch-LS	Schlager Visiv-5	—
Ammunition	—	—	7.62 Tokarev Frangible	—
Apex	—	PPSh-41 Ember	—	—

Sources: wzranked, codmunity, wzstats and bestloadout, all checked 1 September. Dot Esports publishes the same five attachments as wzranked.

What they actually agree on

• 53 Round Mag, unanimously. Four out of four, plus Dot Esports. If you take one thing off this page, take that. A gun with a fire rate this high runs a magazine dry faster than you expect, and every tracker spends a slot fixing it.
• A Hanbit barrel. Three of the four run an RDR-Tiger; codmunity goes to the Chimmuk-INTR instead. Same decision to spend the slot, different pick.
• A Hanbit RDW7-F stock in the two builds that run a stock at all — wzranked and bestloadout agree exactly here.
• Nobody runs a full five slots the same way. wzstats is the outlier that spends slots on a laser and an ammunition type; codmunity is the outlier that spends one on the PPSh-41 Ember, the gun’s Apex Attachment. Apex Attachments are a new MW4 system that bolt an extra capability onto a weapon rather than tuning its stats (Dot Esports).

The split between L980-S Comp and FTAC Silent Recon in the muzzle slot is the clearest philosophical difference: two builds want the recoil control, two want the suppression. On a gun designed for point-blank rooms, that is a genuine judgement call rather than one side being wrong.

The two nerfs, and why they matter more than the build

The PPSh-41 was on both of the beta’s back-to-back time-to-kill passes. On 23 August its headshot multiplier went 1.4x → 1.25x. On 24 August it lost range at every band:

What changed	Before	After
Max-damage range	0–10.9m	0–10.4m
First medium band	18 damage, 11–18.5m	17 damage, 10.5–16.3m
Minimum damage begins	after 34.2m	after 31.2m
Neck / upper torso multiplier	1.1x	1.0x

A half-metre off the top band sounds trivial and is not: the PPSh’s whole case is that it wins the first half-second inside a room. Trimming the window, dropping the medium band by a point of damage and flattening the upper-torso bonus all push in the same direction — you have to be closer, and you have to hit more of the burst. The full picture across all six nerfed weapons is in our MW4 beta TTK nerfs breakdown.

Treat those numbers as a checkpoint, not a final state. Infinity Ward said explicitly that more weapon and attachment changes would arrive with the open beta on 28 August, and we have no verified post-28-August damage table for this gun. If the numbers moved again, they moved after the ones above.

Is it actually good?

The trackers disagree here too. Dexerto’s wiki rates it A-Tier and carries the in-game description — “a legendary submachine gun with over 80 years of combat service” that “overwhelms enemies at close range with its best-in-class rate of fire and generous ammo capacity”. codmunity rates it a Contender at roughly a 2.1% pick rate in its own multiplayer sample.

Both can be true. A gun can be strong in the right hands and still be picked rarely, particularly when it competes with the ISO Nightshade for the same slot and has just had its effective range trimmed twice in a week.

Before you grind it

The PPSh-41 unlocks at Player Rank 11 and carries 54 weapon levels (Dexerto). Attachments unlock as you level the gun, so none of the builds above is available in your first hour with it — build toward the 53 Round Mag first, since it is the one every list agrees on.

And the honest caveat: beta progress resets. Weapon levels, unlocks and Player Rank all wiped when the beta closed on 1 September, and launch balancing lands with the full game on 23 October. None of this is Warzone data either — Warzone tunes weapons separately, so an SMG that clears six-minute multiplayer lobbies is not automatically a Warzone pick.

For the other half of the beta meta, see our best M4 loadout in the Modern Warfare 4 beta — a gun the trackers cannot agree on either — and the rest of our Call of Duty guides.

Sources we check

There is no first-party Activision loadout page, so the anchors here are the trackers that publish their own data: Dexerto’s MW4 wiki for the unlock level, tier rating, weapon level count and in-game description; wzranked, codmunity, wzstats and bestloadout for the builds, printed side by side rather than merged; Dot Esports for a corroborating build and for the Apex Attachment system. Damage figures come from the 23 and 24 August beta updates as reproduced independently by Dexerto and MW4.GG. We have deliberately left out two figures circulating in search results — a fire-rate and base-magazine number that contradicts the 53 Round Mag being an attachment at all, and an unsourced open-beta max-damage change — because neither traces to a source we can stand behind. When a consensus build emerges, or when October balancing resets it, this page gets rewritten.

FAQ

What is the best PPSh-41 loadout in the MW4 beta?

There is no agreed answer. The 53 Round Mag is the one attachment all four published builds run, three of the four add a Hanbit RDR-Tiger barrel, and two run the Hanbit RDW7-F stock. Beyond that the lists split on muzzle, underbarrel, laser and ammunition.

What level does the PPSh-41 unlock at?

Player Rank 11, with 54 weapon levels to grind for its attachments.

Was the PPSh-41 nerfed?

Twice. 23 August: headshot multiplier 1.4x → 1.25x. 24 August: max-damage range 0–10.9m → 0–10.4m, first medium band 18 damage at 11–18.5m → 17 damage at 10.5–16.3m, minimum damage from 34.2m → 31.2m, neck and upper torso 1.1x → 1.0x.

Is the PPSh-41 worth using?

Depends who you ask — A-Tier on Dexerto’s wiki, a Contender at ~2.1% pick rate on codmunity. It is a pure close-range gun whose close-range window has been trimmed twice in a week.