ARC Raiders Enemies Guide: Every ARC and Weak Points

TL;DR

ARCs are color-coded, and the color tells you exactly where to shoot. White and light-colored surfaces take full damage. Grey armored plates take reduced damage. Yellow marks the true weak point, where shots deal increased damage and stagger the machine, and on bosses that same role goes to the glowing red core. Learn that one rule and every fight gets readable: aim for the yellow, never waste rounds on the grey. Light recon drones die to anything. Heavies and bosses need armor-punching ammo (Heavy or Energy) plus a item:hornet Driver to lock them down. Below is the full roster by class with the precise spot to hit on each one.

The one rule that fixes every ARC fight

Most of the frustration new Raiders feel against ARCs comes from dumping a magazine into grey plating and watching the health bar barely move. The fix is to read the machine before you shoot it. White and light-colored surfaces are unarmored and take full damage. Grey is armor, and it eats most of what you throw at it. Yellow is the soft spot the designers built in, and hits there deal increased damage while staggering the unit so it cannot fight back for a beat.

A few patterns hold across the whole roster. On flying ARCs, the thrusters and rotors are the answer. On ground ARCs, look for exposed cores, leg joints, and the rear, since the front is almost always the most armored face. Yellow weak points tend to sit on rear sections, joint connections, exposed cores, and rotating components. Once you train your eye for those, you stop fighting the armor and start fighting the machine.

The other universal tool worth carrying is the Hornet Driver. It stuns most heavy ARCs, including the item:bastion, item:rocketeer, and item:surveyor, freezing them long enough to circle around to the weak side. For a solo Raider standing in front of a four-legged minigun platform, that stun window is the whole plan.

Recon and ambush ARCs

These are the cheapest kills in the game and the most dangerous if you ignore them, because their job is to call in everything else.

• Tick: whole body. Any shot kills it, and a single melee swing does the job.
• Pop: whole body, fragile. Same treatment as a item:tick.
• Snitch: thrusters and propeller plates. It does not attack. It detects you and broadcasts your position to every ARC nearby, so drop it on sight before the broadcast finishes.
• Spotter: general structure. A recon unit that alerts others. Kill it before it relays.
• ARC Probe: non-combat. It signals nearby ARCs for help. Silence it fast.
• ARC Assessor: a probe variant added in Flashpoint. It gives no XP, so deal with it only if it is about to call reinforcements.

The lesson with this class is positional, not mechanical. A item:tick is harmless. A Tick that finishes its broadcast turns a quiet looting run into a three-front fight.

Flying small ARCs

• Wasp: the thrusters, any of the four propellers. Knock out two rotors and it crashes.
• Hornet: the rear thrusters. The front rotors are armored, so either bring Heavy ammo or maneuver to hit the two exposed propellers at the back.
• Firefly: the thrusters and the yellow fuel cell sitting between the body and the flamethrower. That canister is the fast kill.

Flying explosive ARCs

• Fireball: the white core inside. It opens up to attack, and that is your window to hit the exposed interior.
• Comet: the inner mechanism, exposed when it starts rolling. Sustained fire into the side plating cracks it open.

Stationary ARCs

• Turret: the body behind the barrel. Bait its shot from cover, then push while it resets.
• Sentinel: the yellow canister on its arm. It telegraphs with a visible targeting laser before it fires, so flank during that wind-up and put rounds into the canister.

Heavy ground ARCs

This is where loadout starts to matter. Light ammo barely scratches the front plate on any of these. Bring Heavy or Energy, and bring a Hornet Driver.

• Leaper: the leg joints and the central eye. It has two attacks, a long leap that hits hard on landing and a short-range shockwave that strips your shield and stuns you. Dodge perpendicular to the leap, not backward. Fire is a strong counter here, so a Fireball Burner or item:blaze-grenades shorten the fight considerably, and explosive damage from a item:hullcracker tears through the leg joints.
• Bastion: the yellow leg joints first (the front pair, visible from the side), then the yellow canister at the back. It is a four-legged minigun platform with a near-impenetrable front plate, and it usually arrives with item:wasps or item:hornets escorting it. Stun it with a Hornet Driver, then loop around for the rear.
• Bombardier: same profile as the Bastion, yellow leg joints into the rear canister. It tends to deploy item:spotter drones first, so clear those before you commit to the leg work.
• Shredder: the thrusters. Destroy them to destabilize it.
• Surveyor: the laser exposure point and the internal beacon module. The catch is that it flees at full speed the moment it is alerted, which makes it nearly impossible to kill without a Hornet Driver to pin it in place.

Heavy aerial ARCs

• Rocketeer: all four thrusters and the scanner area above the eye. It fires rocket salvos on a timer, and a direct hit erases your shield and most of your health. You need hard cover, since wood and thin metal will not stop a rocket. One change worth knowing from Flashpoint 1.22.0: Rocketeers now take less collision damage and survive being rammed while stunned, so the old trick of stunning one and driving a vehicle into it no longer works. Shoot the thrusters the honest way.
• Vaporizer: the rotors on the sides and the belly, plus the scanner. A Flashpoint addition that rewards the same flying-ARC instinct of going for the rotors.

Boss ARCs

Both bosses follow the same rhythm: break the armor plates, then attack the red glowing core, with the yellow leg joints as secondary stagger points after the plates are gone. Bring a squad of three and bring patience.

Queen. She spawns only during the Harvester map condition and drops the highest loot tier in the game. She fights with laser beams, EMP blasts, ground slams, and mortars, and she will call in item:rocketeers to pressure you while you work the core. Her head opens up while she charges the laser, which is the cleanest window to punish, and the leg joints become live targets once the armor is off. The item:hullcracker is still the best plate-stripper for this fight despite its nerfs. For the full encounter walkthrough, see our Queen boss guide.

Matriarch. Same weak-point pattern, plates into the red core in the head, with the leg joints as secondaries. The difference is her armament: she fires homing missiles that track you around cover rather than the Queen's lasers and mortars. That changes how you build for her. Constant movement is mandatory, which often makes a item:light-shield the smarter pick over a item:heavy-shield one, because the Heavy shield's movement penalty turns lethal when you cannot afford to stand still. She shares the Queen's loot tier. Our Matriarch boss guide breaks down the missile timings phase by phase.

Building around what you will face

The roster runs more than twenty distinct ARC types, and most of them die to good positioning and the right spot on the body. The two things that change a loadout are the heavies and the bosses. For general ARC work, the Anvil strips armor faster than anything else and is the safest all-around pick. For boss plates and Leaper legs, the Hullcracker and its explosive damage stay at the top. Carry Heavy or Energy ammo whenever you expect heavies on the map, keep a Hornet Driver for the stun, and save your cheap weapon and melee for the recon swarm.

For a complete boss-killing kit built around the Hullcracker, the Boss Hunter build guide lays out the full loadout, and you can compare armor-stripping picks in our weapon tier list.

Build: 4921ec567869

The cleanest way to pressure-test a kit before you drop in is to counter-profile it against the ARCs you expect, matching ammo type and stun tools to the heavies on a given map. That is exactly the kind of trade-off our Loadout Optimizer is built to surface.