Earth Defense Force 6: Best Ranger Weapons (2024)

The Ranger, at a glance, might seem like the 'basic soldier' of the Earth Defense Force games, especially compared to the Wing Diver who can fly, the Fencer who's a walking WMD/Tank, and the Air Raider who can call in all sorts of vehicles, but it's really not that simple. In Earth Defense Force 6 especially, they've nerfed the Air Diver a tad and given some of their tools to Ranger, who was already quite powerful.

So, Ranger now has some pretty powerful vehicles they can call in on top of their already absurd lineup of standard weaponry. Honestly, the Ranger can be played in all sorts of different ways, and almost all of these ways are pretty viable even on Hardest and Inferno Difficulty. With all that in mind, let's take a deep dive look at the Ranger's vast array of weapons in Earth Defense Force 6 and pick out some of our (and the community's) overall favorites.

9 M9 Thermite Bullet Grenades (Backpack)

Great Area of Effect Damage for Hordes

First up is one of the Ranger's backpack weapons, and that doesn't mean just grenades. The Ranger's backpack category has access to grenades, landmines, automated bombs, targeting systems, and more. However, for this first pick, it is a grenade, the M9 Thermite Grenades to be exact. There are weaker variants of this grenade that players can obtain very early on with Ranger, but the M9 Thermite Grenades are one of the strongest versions of them.

Now as far as their function is concerned, the Thermite Grenades work for both single-target damage and area-of-effect damage. Essentially, the Ranger throws the grenade, and whatever it hits, it sticks to, whether that's a bench, the ground, or a giant ant. Then, the grenade immediately starts spewing fire for quite a long time, and this fire does some pretty great damage to anything it touches as well as causing weaker enemies to constantly get staggered out of their attacks.

8 Goliath ZD

Relatively Fast Reload Missile Launcher WIth Speed, Damage, & Massive Explosions

There are an absolute ton of different ways to fire rockets as a Ranger, in fact, there are so many options that it's broken up into two categories, Rocket Launchers and Missile Launchers. Rocket Launchers, in general, tend to be a sort of 'point and shoot' weapon while Missile Launchers tend to be more of the 'lock-on and fire' weapons.

The Goliath, for example, is a very basic Rocket Launcher that fires a very powerful rocket at a very fast speed as soon as the player pulls the trigger. What separates this weapon from other similar weapons is both the speed of the projectile and the explosion radius. The Goliath has a pretty gigantic explosion radius, making it a great choice to clear groups of enemies, and it flies incredibly fast, making it hard for enemies to even think about dodging it.

7 CA90 (Backpack)

Needs Proper Planning, But Can One-Shot Bosses & Full-Clear Hordes

Next up is the CA90, which is just essentially gigantic bricks of C4 that the Ranger can throw anywhere and blow up by holding the Backpack input afterward. So, for the most part, players tend to use these to line an area they know the enemies are going to pass through or a giant boss-type enemy is going to pass through, and then absolutely demolish them right when they're on top of the CA90 bricks.

The damage these things do is devastating, and the explosive area of effect is also absurd, but in exchange, players need to be very conscious of where they place them. This thing can blow up unaware teammates extremely easily, and kiting enemies in specific directions in Earth Defense Force 6 isn't the easiest thing in the world to do. Still, if done properly, the CA90 can output some of the highest damage numbers in the game.

6 MR111 Fang (Sniper)

Elite & Boss Killer Sniper

Moving on to another fantastic single-target ranged option, the MR111 Fang Sniper Rifle. players can get variations of the Fang at a lot lower levels, especially if they're farming for it, but the MR111 variant is the strongest. This thing is the very definition of what a Sniper Rifle should be, one shot, one kill, at long range.

It needs to be reloaded after every shot, but honestly, that doesn't matter very much at all because the reload speed is pretty generous and the enemy the player was shooting at is already most likely dead from the first shot. This is the perfect secondary to have at the ready whenever a player if fighting a swarm of bugs and then an elite pops out such as a Queen Ant or something similar.

5 A72 Binary Bullet Gas Grenade (Backpack)

Easy Access to Large Area Denial & Constant Damage

Both the Ranger and the Air Raider have access to some pretty powerful gas-type weaponry, with the Ranger's A72 Binary Bullet Gas Grenade being the better of the two. Now at first, one might look at a Gas Grenade and think something like "Why kill the bugs slowly with gas when you could just use a rocket to kill them immediately?", and that's a decent question. The most obvious reason is that a Gas Grenade allows a player to deal damage in one direction while also being able to fire in another.

But, additionally, most of the weaker enemies in Earth Defense Force 6 will have 'recoil animations' after getting hit, and this gas can continually trigger those since it deals constant damage, essentially stun-locking anything caught in it until they die. Just be careful using this in an online multiplayer lobby, or at least make sure the other people in the lobby know that the purple gas is bad.

4 Leopard Guided Rocket Launcher Model 0

A Rocket That's Hard to Miss With

As far as accurate weapons for the Ranger go, there are plenty, but sometimes a player doesn't want a bullet that's easy to hit with, they want a rocket that's easy to hit with, and that's where the Leopard branch of Guided Rocket Launchers comes in. These things are not only powerful, but they follow the player's laser sight after being shot (provided the laser sight makes contact with something in its range) which can be incredibly helpful against some enemies.

Or, say that there's an enemy the player is hunting down who runs away behind a building tucked into a grouping of buildings. Instead of blowing these buildings up one by one to reveal the enemy, they can instead use this and literally curve the rocket to hit the exact building they need to reveal (and then take out) this hypothetical enemy. Again, there are so many weapons in EDF6 for each class that it's hard to pick out even 10 of them that exceed all the others, but in our opinion, the utility and damage of this rocket launcher make it an easy pick to put on here.

3 ZEXR-Gun Turret (Backpack)

Allies That'll Cover Your Back & Won't Accidentally Blow You Up

All of the Gun Turret Backpack weapons for the Ranger are fantastic, though some are a bit riskier to use in multiplayer than others. Friendly Fire can be pretty difficult to deal with in this game, especially on the higher difficulties, but for the most part, players don't really struggle with hitting each other using their standard ammo, instead, explosions and large AoE effects like fire is usually what ends up accidentally causing team kills (especially low-Armor teammates). So, the ZEXR-Gun Turrets, which fire powerful bullets, isn't going to hurt allies nearly as much as the flamethrower variant Turrets will.

It can be a bit rough giving up a grenade slot for Gun Turrets, given that the cooldown for the Turrets is typically a lot longer than any grenade, but the sheer amount of offense offered when placing all of these turrets down at once is worth the long cooldown, and they can even be thrown on any moving vehicle to make any allied vehicle even more deadly.

2 EXA Blazer (Assault Rifle)

Less of an Assault Rifle, More of a Beam Rifle

It's a little tough to call the Blazer branch of Assault Rifles, well, Assault Rifles as they're more like Beam Rifles than anything else. Instead of firing standard ammunition, this thing unleashes a solid purple beam that is devastatingly strong. This is one of the Assault Rifle branches that players won't start obtaining until the high 50s in terms of level, but once they do get one it's hard to switch off of it, even if the mission level is a lot higher than it.

The EXA Blazer is just so powerful, has such long range to it, has pretty good ammo efficiency, and because it's dealing constant damage while it hits this is another scenario where it can get enemies stuck in their recoiling animation.

1 UMFF Grenade Launcher

Reliable (and Deadly) Area of Effect Damage

The UMFF Grenade Launcher is a high-level variant of the UM series of Grenade Launchers, and it's a total powerhouse. Even the earlier iterations of this weapon are incredibly deadly, incredibly reliable, and incredibly easy to knock yourself out with.

At least with Missile Launchers, the Ranger can just fire it and it'll fly straight in any direction, Grenade Launchers are sort of 'lobbed' out and as such they don't have the same range, and are easier to mistakenly misunderstand the range of, but also a bit better for clearing out groups of enemies that have gotten too close. As long as the player is careful with this thing, the UMFF Grenade Launcher is a fantastic AoE damage weapon, and it's also great to have equipped just for taking out buildings or terrain in the way as well.

Earth Defense Force 6

Systems

Franchise

Earth Defense Force

Platform(s)

PC , PS4 , PS5

Released

July 25, 2024

Developer(s)

Sandlot

Publisher(s)

D3Publisher