If you have spent more than a few evenings stuck in ARC Raiders lobbies, you have probably felt that pressure to min‑max every single gun and wondered if you really need to blow all your in‑game cash on top tier gear or if a so‑called budget option will do, and that is exactly where the Stitcher IV and the Bobcat IV come into this whole argument, especially once you start looking at how easy it is to farm or even pick up a cheap BluePrint and just test builds without tanking your wallet mid‑season.

<h2>Why The Stitcher Feels So Good</h2>
The Stitcher IV looks basic on the stat sheet, but once you actually run it for a few raids it starts to make sense. It is common rarity, the blueprints drop all over the place, and the total craft cost sits around 28k coins, so you do not flinch every time you hit deploy. Most people I know end up on a similar setup: Compensator Mk2 to stop that sideways wobble, Angled Grip Mk2 so your strafe gunfights do not turn into coin flips, and then the big one, Extended Light Mag Mk2. The default mag is fine for bullying solo players, but the second a second Raider peeks, you are dry. Pushing it to 30 rounds suddenly means you can delete a duo if your tracking is decent. Damage per bullet is only about 7 in PvP, but the recoil is boringly predictable, so you just pull down a little and it behaves like a budget laser.

<h2>Rolling With The Bobcat Flex</h2>
Then you have the Bobcat IV, the flashy pick that everyone talks about in voice chat. It is epic rarity, needs way more materials, and with Mk3 attachments you are looking at something close to 105k coins all-in. On paper it is the clear winner. With a Vertical Grip Mk3 and Compensator Mk3, the gun barely climbs. Fire rate is higher, and the TTK is technically better too, roughly 1.0s on clean headshots versus the Stitcher sitting nearer 1.2s. When it is working, it shreds PvE bots and real players so fast it almost feels like cheating. The flip side is the mental tax. Running around Stella Montis with a six‑figure loadout makes you play tight and scared, and getting one‑tapped by a third party or killed by some random grenade bounce feels way worse because you know exactly how long you farmed for that setup.

<h2>Risk, Value And How Much You Really Lose</h2>
Once you step back from the numbers, the real question is not which gun has the lower TTK but how much risk you are happy to eat in a typical session. The Stitcher IV lets you queue up, push fights, and learn the maps without constantly doing that mental math of what your gear is worth. You can lose three or four runs in a row and it is annoying, not devastating. The Bobcat IV is the opposite. Every death stings, so people start avoiding messy fights and only pulling it out when they have a full squad and a "safe" route planned, which kind of kills the whole high‑tempo SMG meta. If you just want to mess around with top tier builds without living in the grind, it makes sense that some players grab a couple of Bobcat blueprints or high‑end parts from third‑party sellers, test everything for a weekend, and then go back to cheaper kits once the novelty wears off.

<h2>Which SMG You Should Actually Bring</h2>


If you are not sitting on a mountain of coins, the Stitcher IV ends up being the sensible daily driver, because it punches hard enough in close fights, scales well with cheap attachments, and does not punish every bad rotation with a huge financial hit, while the Bobcat IV is more of a "treat yourself" gun for those nights when you are happy to risk a stack of cash just to melt people for a few matches, and if you ever decide you want to shortcut the blueprint grind or stock up on high tier parts without farming for weeks, sites like u4gm are what a lot of players look at so they can jump straight into those meta builds and then decide for themselves whether the upgrade really fits their playstyle.