According to this guide and ign, gold is indeed the rarest color for weapons. The ranking is as follows:
The color scheme used in Apex Legends can be a powerful tool once you get familiar with it. The colors represent item rarity with gray being the least rare, then blue, then purple, and finally gold being the rarest.
Loot dropped by eliminated players will glow the color of the rarest
item that it's in the stash, making it easier for you to decide which
stash to loot first.
There aren’t different tiers/rarities of individual weapons i.e. there aren’t grey, blue, and purple prowlers, but there are tiers for wearables and attachments.
For attachments, the higher the tier/rarity, the better it is. Clips of higher rarity hold more ammo, stabilizers of higher rarity give more recoil control, stocks of higher rarity provide faster raise/lower times when swapping weapons, etc. The only subjectivity comes with scopes where it depends on preference as higher tier scopes have more zoom and gold scopes have the added benefit of highlighting enemies in red and showing enemies through smoke.
Gold weapons are the exact same as non-gold versions, except they come fully kitted with attachments that cannot be swapped out. There are also two gold weapons (Kraber and Mastiff) which can only be found in care packages and will always be gold.
Gold wearables are essentially equivalent to their purple counterparts, except they provide an additional passive perk.
- Gold helmet: faster recharge of abilities.
- Gold armor: full shield refresh on execution of an enemy.
- Gold backpack: faster usage of healing consumables.
- Gold knockdown shield: single use self-revive.
This answer is based on my own experience and might be completely off!
From my experience I can say, that scopes do not influence the trajectory, but only make it easier to aim.
For example, take a sniper scope. Some of them have dots with the numbers 2, 3, 4 under the cross. If you now shoot at an enemy in a distance of up to 100 meter, you can see that there is no bullet drop. If the enemy is up to 200 meter away, you would need to aim with the dot with the number 2 next to it to actually hit the enemy. This means that for each 100 meter distance, the bullet drops by the distance between each dot in the scope.
Onto the close range scopes. I prefer the HOKV x1 scope as it has this red dot in the middle and no cluster around it. On short distance the bullets hit "exactly" where the red dot is (there is still weapon spread and other stuff making it not so exactly). Yet over greater distance the bullet still drops and the spread kicks in harder.
So overall, are only a visual help for the players as its for great distances hard to even see the enemy without a scope. They don't influence the trajectory of the bullets in any way.
The trajectory itself can't be influenced by any weapon modification, only the behavior of the weapon itself (recoil reduction through stabilizers).
Best Answer
Today playing matches is the only way that you can practice "for real".
Lots of features and upgrades are already being included and more are scheduled to improve gameplay, performance and more as producer Drew McCoy wrote via EA's blog post.