If you’re looking to better control your weapons on Modern Warfare, then look to attachments that have the following: Recoil Control or Recoil Stabilization. There are 7 Standard attachments, which are in the Table Below. For clarification, Recoil Control will minimize the vertical kick or spray pattern on your weapon, and the Recoil Stabilization will minimize some of the Horizontal recoil or spread.
See the Following chart for the attachments that in general minimize Recoil. Some other barrels or specific muzzle attachments can also impact the weapon’s recoil, be sure to check the properties of the attachment.
When focusing on Recoil Control, it is best to first understand a weapon’s recoil pattern before selecting an attachment. You can do this by selecting a weapon, going into a private game, and just shooting a wall in full auto to see how the gun recoils. Usually it is best to pair an attachment with Recoil Control with an attachment that has Recoil Stabilization, but that isn’t always the case and depends on the weapon.
Here is a Weapon guide for the Assault Rifles which provides all the recoil patterns for the AR’s and compares them.
A good pairing to try is to put the Compensator together with the Commando Foregrip. Here is a screenshot done by Xclusive Ace which shows the effect this combination can have on the Recoil Pattern. (Example is the AUG SMG).
Here is a further analysis where I took the above image and broke it down some more to show the massive impact this attachment combination has on the AUG.
The numbers by the boxes don’t have any significance except to calculate the spread percentages. You can see that for the AUG, this resulted in an overall spread reduction of 45% in the Horizontal Direction and 62% in the vertical direction. A massive improvement!
Note that not all weapons will see such a massive reduction in both Horizontal and Vertical Recoil as with the AUG. Here is an example XclusiveAce provides of the M4 where you can see there is not as drastic an impact. As such, feel free to do your own testing as well.
I did the same analysis as above for the M4, here are the results.
You can see that for the M4, There is an overall reduction, but the weapon has such a great recoil control pattern to begin with that for the first 8 Bullets or so, you really get little benefit from the Recoil Combination, so it’s probably best to stick to other attachments which will increase your ADS time or movement speed on the M4.
XClusive Ace, a YouTuber who has done some testing on this subject has put together a great video which highlights patterns and discusses the Recoil effects of the attachments listed above. This is where I got the screenshots from above.
Hopefully this information should get you on the right path when you are looking at attachments for recoil control.