Why WARDOGS Needs Kit Presets (And How to Cope Now)

Common advice around WARDOGS early access goes like this: Kit presets aren’t needed. Just buy the same loadout again. It’s quick enough. You can even rebuy your previous kit with one click. Sounds reasonable. But this advice misses something fundamental about how the game actually plays – and it’s costing you time, money, and momentum every single match.

Summary

What Everyone Says About WARDOGS Kits

The argument is straightforward. You die. You respawn at base. You open the vendor menu and start clicking. If you’re staying in the same role – assault, recon, support – you can hit the “previous kit” button and your last purchase appears again. Done in ten seconds. No need for a preset system.

Players who make this case aren’t wrong about the button existing. WARDOGS does let you rebuy the exact loadout you last used. For a one-role player who never switches, this works. But here’s the catch: that same button is useless the moment you change roles, try a different weapon, or want to experiment with a new bag configuration.

Where “Just Rebuy Previous Kit” Breaks Down

WARDOGS has six distinct classes – assault, recon, support, driver, pilot, medic. Each requires a completely different gear setup. An assault kit needs a primary weapon, spare mags, armor, a rig, grenades, bandages. A recon kit swaps the rifle for a sniper or DMR, adds a spotting device, and drops armor weight. A support kit demands a hammer, building materials, and often an anti-tank weapon.

The “previous kit” button only remembers one loadout. If you played assault last life and want to switch to medic because your squad needs one, you get nothing. You start from scratch. That means navigating the vendor menu – buying a bag, then a gun, then mags, then ammo, then armor, then helmet, then medical supplies. Each purchase requires multiple clicks. The menu resets after every buy. You have to find your items again in the list.

The video guide “7 Things WARDOGS Needs to Fix in Early Access” describes this exact frustration: “You got to go buy your bag, you got armor, you’ve got your rigs, you’ve got your helmet, then you’ve got your gun, and then you’ve got the mods that you want to put on the gun itself… it can just take a while.”

This isn’t a minor inconvenience. In WARDOGS, every minute spent in the base menu is a minute not in the field. That minute might cost you a supply run, a hot zone rotation, or a critical spawn wave. Players who dismiss presets haven’t spent a match switching roles twice.

The 5-Hour Wall

There’s a reason so many new players give up on kit building early. The interface itself is unintuitive. You select a gun, then a magazine, then ammo – but it’s not clear whether the magazine comes loaded or not. You click purchase, and the game then tells you you need a bag because you have nowhere to put the items. So you back out, find a bag, buy it, then go back to the gun section and start over.

The same guide notes: “The first 5 hours of gameplay did confuse me a bit because the game asks you to pick an assault rifle and then it asks you to pick a magazine and then the ammo to go in that magazine and then once you click that it’s like, ‘oh well now you need a bag because you can’t put it anywhere.'”

For a veteran, this is a one-time learning curve. For a new player who dies frequently, it’s a repeated punishment. Every death forces them to go through the same confusing sequence. Kit presets would eliminate that friction entirely.

The Hidden Cost of Manual Rebuying

Even for experienced players, manual kit building has a real economic cost. WARDOGS uses an in-game currency system – you earn cash by playing, and you spend it on gear. When you die, you lose everything you carried. You have to repurchase it.

Here’s where the math hurts: If you spend 90 seconds building a kit every third life, that’s lost time you could have used to earn more money or complete an objective. Over a two-hour session, those minutes add up. And if you’re trying to build a high-cost loadout – say, a support kit with a large hammer (now 75,000 to unlock, plus the hammer cost itself) – you’re already burning cash. Wasting time on top of that compounds the frustration.

Some players argue that building a kit manually forces you to think about your loadout. That’s true. But you already did the thinking the first time. The second, third, and tenth time, you’re just repeating a sequence you already know. Presets wouldn’t remove strategic choice – they would remove redundancy.

What a Workaround Looks Like (For Now)

The honest answer is that WARDOGS does not have a proper kit preset system as of early access. The developers have acknowledged feedback, but no timeline exists for adding it. So players who want to save time have to get creative.

First, memorize your most-used loadout and buy items in a fixed order. Start with the bag first – this eliminates the “you need a bag” popup. Then buy your rig, then your armor and helmet, then the weapon and its attachments, then ammo, then medical and grenades. This sequence minimizes menu backtracking.

Second, stick to one role per session when possible. If you know you’ll be piloting all night, you only need to build that kit once. The “previous kit” button then covers every respawn.

Third, use the firing range to plan ahead. WARDOGS includes a test range where you can assemble any loadout without spending cash. Go there, build your perfect kit, screenshot it, and replicate it in live matches. This doesn’t speed up the buying itself, but it removes the guesswork.

Fourth, ask squadmates to drop items for you if you need to switch roles mid-session. A teammate can carry your old gear or bring you a spare rig. This is unreliable but can save a trip to vendor.

None of these are good solutions. They’re survival tactics. The real fix is a preset system, and the community has been loud about it.

Why This Matters Beyond Convenience

Kit presets aren’t just about saving clicks. They affect how players approach the game itself. Right now, the barrier to switching roles is artificially high. If you’re a driver who wants to try recon for a life, you face a multi-minute rebuild that likely costs you a full respawn cycle. So you don’t switch. You stay in your lane. This makes teams less flexible and gameplay more static.

WARDOGS is built on coordination – logistics drivers, helicopter pilots, recon spotters, assault pushes. When the game penalizes role switching, it pushes players into silos. A good preset system would let a player adapt to the battlefield’s needs in seconds, not minutes.

The developers at Bulkhead have been transparent about early access priorities. Content updates are slow. Bug fixes and balancing come first. Kit presets may not arrive for months. But that doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist right now.

The Other Side of the Coin

Of course, there’s a valid counterpoint: manual kit building does make every purchase feel weighty. When you have to click through a dozen menus to assemble your gun, you remember the cost. It might make you play more carefully because losing that loadout hurts more. Some players genuinely prefer this deliberate pace.

But that argument only applies when you’re building a kit for the first time. By the twentieth time you’ve built the same AK-103 with a PSO-1 scope, suppressor, and GP-25 grenade launcher, the weight is gone. It’s just busywork.

The game also prevents you from dropping items while in the vendor menu – you have to exit, drop, re-enter. That’s not a design choice; it’s a missing quality-of-life feature that presets would bypass entirely.

What a Preset System Could Look Like

Imagine opening the vendor and seeing three save slots. You load “Recon Sniper” and the game auto-purchases everything – bag, rig, sniper, mags, ammo, armor, bandages, spotting device. Total time: one click. The cash is deducted. You’re back in the field within seconds.

That’s not a pipe dream. It’s standard in games like Escape from Tarkov, which also has a complex gear system. Tarkov’s presets are so essential that players consider them mandatory. WARDOGS is in the same genre but missing this basic tool.

The developers have said they want the game to be a sandbox where players learn by doing. That’s fine. But learning doesn’t require repeating the same 30 clicks every life. Presets would let you learn the gear once, then save it.

The Bottom Line for Now

If you’re a WARDOGS player who sticks to one class and never experiments, the “just rebuy” advice is fine. You’ll survive without presets. But if you ever want to switch roles, try a new weapon, or just save two minutes per death, you need a better system. And since it doesn’t exist yet, you have to build your own – through memorization, role discipline, and ruthless efficiency.

The developers have shown they listen. They adjusted progression curves, rebalanced vehicle costs, and fixed crash bugs. Kit presets are a matter of when, not if. Until then, accept that the common advice is good for one player in one niche – but it’s not good for the game.

META_DESCRIPTION: Common advice says to just rebuy your kit in WARDOGS. But this ignores real problems. Here’s why presets matter and how to cope for now.

DECIDED: type=explainer | style=analytical | tone=neutral