Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) Strategy Guide

01 · The 2019 Reboot in Context

Half the arguments you will read about this game are about decisions made in 2019. Knowing which ones is worth ten minutes.

Released 25 October 2019 Infinity Ward, published by Activision, on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. It is the sixteenth main entry in the series and a reboot of the Modern Warfare sub-series rather than a sequel to the 2007 game, so the callsigns are familiar but the events are not.
A brand new engine The 2019 title moved off the old IW engine lineage onto a rebuilt one, which is why doors, mounting, photogrammetric materials and the night-vision playlist exist here and in no earlier Call of Duty. It also explains the install footprint, which climbed past 200 GB on PC at its peak.
First crossplay Call of Duty PlayStation, Xbox and PC players share lobbies and share progression. Console players can switch crossplay off in the account options, which on most regions now means a much longer queue. If your matches take two minutes to find, check whether crossplay got turned off.
Paid map packs were dropped Every post-launch 6v6 map, Gunfight map and mode went to all players at no extra cost. That is why the map pool is unusually wide for a Call of Duty and why nobody is ever missing a map. The seasonal reward track and cosmetic bundles carried the monetisation instead.
Six content seasons, then stop Season One opened on 3 December 2019 and Season Six ran from late September 2020. Support wound down after Black Ops Cold War arrived in November 2020. There has been no meaningful weapon balance change since, which is why the 2020 build guides you find still work exactly as written.
PC launched off Steam The PC version shipped on Battle.net only and stayed exclusive to it for more than three years. The franchise went back to Steam with the 2022 sequel, and this title followed on 8 March 2023, so the PC population is now split across two clients feeding one player pool. Either way that population is concentrated in a handful of round-the-clock playlists rather than spread across the full rotation, which is why queueing for a specific map often fails and queueing for a 24/7 playlist never does.
Spec Ops Survival was split The wave-defence Survival mode was a one-year PlayStation timed exclusive, which annoyed a lot of people in 2019 and is now just a footnote. The four-player Operations missions were available everywhere from launch.
Warzone grew out of this game The original battle royale launched on 10 March 2020 sharing this game’s weapons, attachments and levelling, so grinding a gun in 6v6 levelled it there too. That original Warzone client has since been retired; the multiplayer covered on this page is the part that is still live.

02 · Kill Speed & the Handling Budget

You have 100 health, no armour and no second chances. Everything else follows from that.

Three to five hits, usually Health is a flat 100 with no shield layer. Most assault rifles need three chest hits close in and four or five once damage drops off; most submachine guns need four or five. Nobody survives a clean first burst, so whoever starts shooting first wins the majority of even fights.
Sprint-out time is the real stat Time to kill is short, so the stat that decides duels is how long it takes you to go from sprinting to firing. Tactical sprint roughly doubles that delay. If you round a corner in tactical sprint and someone is already aiming at it, you lose, and no sensitivity setting fixes that.
Aim-down-sight time is a currency Every attachment that adds range or recoil control takes aim speed away. A rifle at 250 ms aim time and a rifle at 400 ms are different weapons on the same map. Decide your aim time first, then spend what is left on everything else.
Damage range, not damage Weapons rarely differ much in base damage per hit; they differ in how far that damage carries before it drops a tier and costs you an extra bullet. Range attachments do not make you hit harder, they move the line at which three shots becomes four.
The server tick works against you Public 6v6 servers run at a low update rate, widely measured around 22 Hz, and Ground War lower still. That is why you die behind cover and why trades feel generous. Play as if the enemy sees you about 50 ms before you think they do, and stop peeking twice from the same spot.
Trade, do not duel Because kills are this fast, a teammate standing four metres behind you converts your death into two enemy deaths. Standing eighteen metres behind you converts it into nothing. The distance you hold from your teammate is a mechanic, not a courtesy.
Headshots matter less than you think Outside of marksman and sniper rifles the head multiplier rarely removes a whole bullet from the kill at close range. Aim upper chest and let recoil climb into the head rather than starting on the head and climbing off the body entirely.

03 · Gunsmith: Five Slots, Ten Categories

You may equip five attachments. There are ten categories. The whole system is the choice of which five, and every entry shows you its penalty bar before you commit.

Category	What it gives you	What it costs	Take it when
Muzzle	Sound suppression, damage range, recoil smoothing. The Monolithic Suppressor is the single most-equipped attachment in the game.	Aim-down-sight speed, and on some guns raw handling.	Almost always. Suppression plus range on one slot is the best exchange rate available.
Barrel	Effective range, bullet velocity, sometimes hip-fire accuracy on the short barrels.	The long barrels are brutal on aim speed and movement speed.	Long-lane maps and marksman builds. Skip it entirely on a close-quarters kit.
Laser	Aim stability and aim-down-sight speed. The Tac Laser is the best pure handling attachment in the game.	Your laser is visible to enemies while you are aiming, which broadcasts a held angle.	Aggressive, moving kits. Never on a build whose plan is to sit still and hold a lane.
Optic	A cleaner sight picture and a magnification step for longer lanes.	A small aim-speed cost, and magnified optics narrow what you see beside the target.	Only if the iron sights genuinely obscure the target. A 3x on a submachine gun is wasted weight.
Stock	Aim walking speed, aim stability, or on the removed and collapsible stocks, movement and aim speed.	The heavy stocks cost movement; the light ones cost aim idle stability.	Take a light or removed stock on rushing kits, a heavy one only on a mounted support build.
Underbarrel	Recoil control while aiming, or hip-fire and movement on the angled grips.	Aim-down-sight speed on the heavy foregrips.	On any weapon whose vertical climb is costing you the fourth and fifth bullet.
Rear Grip	Either aim speed or recoil steadiness, depending on which grip tape you pick.	Whichever of the two you did not pick, plus a little movement on some.	Use it as the tie-breaker slot once the other four are set. It is the cheapest way to buy back aim speed.
Ammunition	Magazine size. Sixty-round magazines on a rifle mean you can fight three people without reloading.	Reload time and, on the largest magazines, aim-down-sight speed.	Objective modes, Ground War and anything where you are outnumbered often. Optional in Gunfight, where a reload rarely happens.
Perk (weapon)	A weapon-only bonus: penetration, faster reloads, steadier aim while scoped, a full spare magazine on spawn.	Nothing but the slot itself, which is exactly why it loses to attachments that move numbers.	Only when your other four are locked and you are choosing between two marginal gains.
Trigger Action	Fire rate on the weapons that expose it, which shortens kill time directly.	Recoil, and a shorter effective range on most of them.	Close-quarters builds on small maps where you were never going to hit anything at 40 m anyway.

04 · A Shortlist Nobody Can Patch

Balance stopped moving in 2020. These picks are not a temporary meta; they are the permanent one. Level the gun to unlock its attachments, since the pre-built blueprints only equip attachments you have already earned.

M4A1 The rifle the game hands you early and never stops being correct. Low recoil, forgiving range, fast handling. Monolithic Suppressor, a small red dot, a foregrip, 60-round magazines and a grip tape is the build almost every experienced player converges on. If you are unsure what to run, run this.
Grau 5.56 Added in the second season alongside Rust, then nerfed for recoil and range once it took over the battle royale meta, which left it merely excellent. With the long Archangel barrel it has the flattest recoil of any rifle in the game and holds damage further than the M4. Take it when the map has real sightlines and you can afford the slower aim speed.
Kilo 141 The boring correct answer for players who miss shots. Slower kill time than the M4 at close range but the recoil pattern is nearly vertical and predictable, which makes it the best rifle for anyone still learning to control a burst past 30 m.
MP5 The default submachine gun. Fast aim, tight hip-fire, and with 45-round magazines it survives a two-versus-one. On small maps it beats every rifle inside 20 m. Build it with a suppressor, a light or removed stock and a merc foregrip and do not add a magnified optic.
MP7 Higher rate of fire than the MP5 with a lower damage per hit, which means it punishes misses harder and rewards a hip-fire rush more. It is the better pick specifically on Shipment and Shoot House, where you will be inside 10 m almost constantly.
RAM-7 A bullpup rifle with a submachine gun’s rate of fire. It is the strongest single choice for players who want a rifle that still wins doorway fights, at the cost of a magazine that empties quickly and a recoil pattern that needs attachments.
AUG and the 5.56 conversion Classed as a submachine gun but convertible to rifle ammunition, which turns it into a mid-range weapon that keeps submachine gun handling. A genuinely different feel from everything else on this list and worth the levelling time if you like hybrids.
Kar98k The quick-scope rifle. With the Singuard Custom barrel, a sport comb and a laser it aims fast enough to be used aggressively rather than from a fixed nest. It rewards pre-aiming a lane and flicking the last few degrees, not sweeping the map through a scope.
HDR and AX-50 The two real sniper rifles. The HDR hits harder at extreme distance with slower handling; the AX-50 aims faster and suits 6v6. On most 6v6 maps neither is the correct weapon, which is exactly why a competent sniper on Gun Runner or Rammaza is so annoying.
725 The double-barrel shotgun that launched absurdly strong, killing at ranges no shotgun should reach, and was nerfed repeatedly through late 2019. Post-nerf it is a two-shell weapon with a real reload penalty. Bring it only on maps where every fight is under 8 m.
A launcher in the secondary slot Carrying one rocket launcher in a lobby that is fielding helicopters and VTOL jets is worth more than the fifth attachment on your rifle. It is also the only honest answer to an enemy Juggernaut.

05 · Perks: Blue, Red, Yellow

Three slots, six options each, and the slots do not overlap. Picking three of the same kind of help is the most common loadout error in the game.

Blue slot Survival and sustain

Double Time: longer tactical sprint, faster crouch walk
E.O.D.: reduced explosive damage
Quick Fix: health regeneration starts the instant you get a kill
Cold-Blooded: invisible to thermal optics and automated targeting
Scavenger: ammunition from bodies
Kill Chain: streaks earned this life count toward the next streak

Take: Double Time on objective modes, E.O.D. in any lobby throwing claymores and grenades, Quick Fix if you push multiple enemies in a row.
Skip: Kill Chain unless you are genuinely reaching 8 and above regularly; otherwise it does nothing all match.

Cold-Blooded is the quiet pick in a night-vision playlist, where thermal optics are everywhere and the perk effectively removes you from half the enemy team’s sight picture.

Red slot Information and loadout

Ghost: hidden from aerial radar, radar drones and heartbeat sensors
High Alert: your vision pulses when an enemy off-screen is looking at you
Overkill: two primary weapons
Hardline: every killstreak costs one less kill
Restock: your lethal and tactical equipment recharge on a timer
Pointman: killstreaks become scorestreaks, so objective play earns them

Take: High Alert if you push a lot and keep getting shot in the back. Overkill if the map has both a 10 m room and a 50 m lane.
Skip: Ghost in a lobby that never calls a radar in. Check the killfeed for two minutes before you commit the slot to it.

This is the slot people waste. Ghost is reflexive for most players, but against a team with no aerial radar it is a blank. High Alert is the most underrated perk in the game for anyone whose deaths mostly arrive from behind.

Yellow slot Utility and counterplay

Battle Hardened: weaker enemy flashes, stuns, gas and electric effects
Amped: much faster weapon swap and launcher reload
Tune Up: your field upgrade charges faster
Spotter: see enemy equipment through walls and flip it to your team
Tracker: enemy footprints and death markers
Shrapnel: an extra piece of lethal equipment on spawn

Take: Battle Hardened in any objective mode, where stuns arrive on every capture. Amped if you run Overkill, since the swap is the whole point of carrying two primaries.
Skip: Tracker unless you are playing a hunting style; the footprints are a distraction if you are meant to be holding a position.

Spotter is the anti-camping perk. On a map full of claymores and proximity mines it turns every doorway you were going to die in into a doorway the defender dies in.

06 · Field Upgrades & the Dead Silence Argument

A field upgrade is a slow-charging ability, separate from perks and equipment. Making silent footsteps one of them instead of a perk is the most consequential design decision in the game.

Dead Silence is not a perk here In earlier Call of Duty titles silent movement was a perk you simply had. Here it is a field upgrade you charge, activate, and lose after fifteen seconds. Every gun, melee or throwing-knife kill you land while it is running refreshes that fifteen seconds, which means it rewards a successful push and abandons a failed one. Fifteen seconds is shorter than people plan for: that is about one rotation, not a whole life.
How to actually use it Do not pop it the moment it charges. Hold it until you have decided on a specific flank, activate it as you leave your own half, and convert it into at least one kill before the timer runs. Used correctly it is a two or three kill window; used reflexively it is nothing.
Trophy System Destroys the next incoming grenades and rockets near it. On a bomb site in Search and Destroy or on a Hardpoint it is worth more than any offensive upgrade, because the entire enemy plan for retaking that point is usually utility first.
Deployable Cover A portable ballistic shield you can mount on. It creates a head-glitch angle in the middle of an open lane where the defender was counting on there being none. Deeply underused, and genuinely strong on the larger maps.
Munitions Box Refills ammunition and equipment for you and your team. In objective modes this quietly doubles the amount of utility your side throws over a match, which is the resource that usually decides who holds a point.
Recon Drone A flying camera that marks enemies for your team. It is intelligence without risk, and in Search and Destroy it is the difference between guessing which site is stacked and knowing.
Tactical Insertion Sets your next respawn point. Powerful and dangerous in equal measure: placed well it keeps you on the good side of a rotation, placed badly it feeds an enemy who has found it a repeating kill.
Stopping Power Rounds A single magazine of higher-damage ammunition. It is the one upgrade that directly shortens your kill time, and it is at its best in Gunfight where a single round decides the match.
Equipment is not optional Alongside the field upgrade you carry one lethal and one tactical. A cooked grenade onto a Hardpoint, a stun through a door before you open it, a smoke across a lane you cannot win: these decide more rounds than weapon choice does, and most players finish matches having thrown almost none of them.

07 · Killstreaks & What They Are Worth

Streaks reset on death by default, so the honest question is not what is strongest but what you actually reach. Most players should be running a low set and calling it in.

Reachable 3 to 5 kills

Personal Radar at 3
UAV at 4
Counter UAV at 4
Cluster Strike, Cruise Missile, Precision Airstrike at 5
Care Package at 5

Run: UAV, Precision Airstrike, Cluster Strike. You will earn this set several times a match instead of once.
Worth: Four separate UAVs across a team is permanent map knowledge and swings more rounds than one late helicopter.

The Cruise Missile is the best value strike in the set because you steer it. Take the extra second to fly it into a doorway rather than dropping it on the first red dot you see.

Earned 7 to 10 kills

Wheelson, Sentry Gun, Infantry Assault Vehicle at 7
VTOL Jet, Emergency Airdrop, Juggernaut Recon at 8
Chopper Gunner and White Phosphorus at 10, Support Helo at 11

Run: VTOL Jet if you want a streak that defends a point for you while you keep playing.
Worth: Roughly one appearance every two or three matches for an average player. Budget accordingly.

White Phosphorus denies an entire area rather than killing outright, which makes it the best objective streak in this band. Drop it on the Hardpoint the enemy is about to rotate to, not on the one they already hold.

Rare 12 to 15 kills

Gunship at 12
Advanced UAV at 12
Juggernaut at 15

Run: Only if you already reach 10 without trying, and only with Hardline or Kill Chain supporting it.
Worth: Match-deciding when it lands, and zero on the eleven matches where it does not.

Advanced UAV is the quietly correct 12, because it shows the enemy team’s facing direction to everyone on your side for its whole duration. A Gunship kills six people; an Advanced UAV wins the next two minutes.

08 · The 6v6 Map Pool, Rated Honestly

This game shipped with a divisive map set and then spent a year adding remakes that fixed it. Here is what you are actually going to load into.

Shoot House Added on 8 November 2019, two weeks after launch, and immediately the community favourite. A symmetrical three-lane map with a shipping-container middle, rotations of about forty seconds, and spawns that behave. If you are learning the game, learn this map first: it teaches lanes without punishing you for existing.
Shipment The tiny square from 2007 with four container stacks, rebuilt here and given its own round-the-clock playlist. It is not a real map, it is an experience grinder and a grenade lottery. Use it to level weapons and unlock attachments, and accept that you will die to things you never saw.
Rust The circular oil-yard map with the central tower, returned in the second season. Whoever holds the tower controls the sightlines but has a single predictable way down. Play the ground level and punish the descent rather than queueing for the tower like everyone else.
Crash The 2007 classic, rebuilt and added in the first season. Three storeys around a downed helicopter, with the apartment building overlooking everything. The best map in the pool for learning vertical angles, because the power positions are obvious and therefore contested.
Vacant A tight indoor warehouse and office remake. Doors matter here more than on any other map in the pool: a slow-opened door is a free peek and a kicked door is an announcement. Bring a submachine gun and a stun.
Gun Runner A launch map built around a factory floor with long outdoor flanks. One of the few original 2019 maps the community actually liked, because the middle is contestable and the flanks punish overextension rather than rewarding it.
Piccadilly Widely and correctly voted the worst map in the game. A long open London street with two double-decker buses, terrible spawns and almost no safe rotation. If you must play it, ignore the street entirely and work the interiors on either side.
St. Petrograd A dense apartment block with a central courtyard and a great deal of vertical stacking. Excellent for players who like clearing rooms, miserable for players who like lanes. Sound is the dominant sense here: you will hear more enemies than you see.
Rammaza A launch map with real long sightlines through the middle and a covered flank on either side. This is one of the few maps where a marksman rifle or a sniper is genuinely the correct pick rather than an ego choice.
Arklov Peak A snow-covered compound with a large central building. The upper interiors are the power positions and they are all reachable from two directions, so holding one requires a teammate watching the second entrance. Solo-holding here is how you end up on a highlight reel, other people’s.
Azhir Cave Surface trenches over an underground cave system, which means every fight has a second entrance you have not checked. The tunnels are pitch dark in places, so the thermal and night-vision interaction matters here more than anywhere else in the rotation.
Aniyah Palace A Ground War-sized map that was put into the 6v6 rotation at launch, which went about as well as it sounds: five-minute walks between kills, snipers everywhere, no rotations. It was pulled from core 6v6 after the complaints. Worth knowing about as a lesson in what map scale does to a mode.

09 · Gunfight, Ground War & the Rest

Two of the modes in this game were genuinely new ideas. The rest are the standard set, with one or two useful wrinkles.

Gunfight Two versus two on purpose-built miniature maps, forty-second rounds, first to six round wins. Both teams are handed the same pre-set loadout, and it rotates every two rounds, which strips out every advantage except positioning and aim and gives you exactly one round of practice with a weapon before it decides something. If the forty seconds expire, an overtime flag spawns in the centre for ten seconds; if nobody captures it the round goes to whichever team has more total health left, so chip damage you took early is itself a scoreline.
How to actually win Gunfight Do not split. Take the same angle as your partner from two different heights, let the first contact trade, and win the second fight four-on-two in effective health. Most Gunfight rounds are lost in the first eight seconds by a player who sprinted somewhere alone.
Ground War Thirty-two against thirty-two on large maps with vehicles and lettered capture points. Progression counts the same as 6v6, so it is a comfortable place to level weapons. Squad spawning is the actual mechanic: spawning on a living squadmate at the contested point is worth more than any weapon in your loadout.
Cyber Attack One bomb, two objectives, no respawns, but downed teammates can be revived. That revive is the whole mode. A three-versus-one is winnable if the one is standing on a body, and a four-versus-four is losable if nobody goes back for the first death.
Search and Destroy No respawns at all, alternating attack and defence. Information beats aggression: the first thirty seconds should be spent listening and clearing, not entering. The post-plant is a separate skill from the entry, and most teams only practise one of them.
Hardpoint A rotating capture zone, added in the first season. Knowing the rotation order on each map is worth more than aim: being at the next point before it opens is a free thirty seconds of scoring. Learn the order for two maps rather than half-learning it for eight.
Domination and Kill Confirmed The reliable objective pair. In Domination, holding two flags and refusing the third is the correct play far more often than people accept, because three flags flips the enemy spawn on top of you. In Kill Confirmed, denying an enemy tag is worth the same as scoring one.
Realism The standard modes with the entire display removed: no radar, no hit markers, no kill feed, and a louder gun mix. It is the single best training playlist in the game because it forces you to track the map in your head rather than in the corner of the screen.
Night vision Darkened versions of maps where everyone wears goggles and weapon lasers are visible to the whole lobby. Your laser gives your position away every time you aim, so short controlled bursts and frequent repositioning matter here far more than usual.

10 · Doors, Mounting & Footsteps

Three mechanics this game introduced or exaggerated, and all three are still the reason most players die.

Doors have four interactions This was the first Call of Duty with functional doors. You can push one open slowly for a controlled peek, kick it open to burst through, shoot through it, or blow it off its hinges with an explosive. Most players only ever use the kick, which is the loudest and most telegraphed of the four.
Slow-open, then wait one second Easing a door open and standing still creates an ambiguity a defender has to resolve. Very often they resolve it by walking into the frame. The whole trick costs you one second and wins fights you were going to lose on reaction time.
Bullets go through doors If you hear someone mounting or reloading on the other side of a wooden door, shoot it. Penetration through light doors is real, and the ammunition perk that improves penetration turns this from a gamble into a plan.
Mounting halves your recoil Aiming into a surface mounts the weapon and cuts recoil dramatically, which makes a 50 m lane trivially winnable. The price is that you cannot strafe and your head is a fixed target at a known height. Mount to win one exchange, then unmount and move.
Mounting is also a tell A mounted player has committed to one direction and cannot reposition quickly. If a lane has been quiet and suddenly someone is landing every bullet on you from it, they are mounted; go around instead of trading into it.
Footsteps here are loud Movement audio in this game is unusually audible, which is the single biggest reason the metagame tilts toward holding angles. Walking is silent, crouch-walking is near silent, and both are slow. Sprinting the last ten metres to a contested room announces you to everyone in it.
Slide cancelling exists Sliding and then cancelling out of the slide resets tactical sprint, so a practised player moves across the map faster than the sprint timer should allow. It is worth learning for rotations, and it is worth not doing in the last fifteen metres before contact, where it just makes noise.
The compass, not the radar At launch the minimap deliberately did not show a red dot when an enemy fired without a suppressor; a compass along the top of the screen carried the gunfire direction instead. Later playlists put dots back in places, but reading the compass is still the habit that pays, because it works in every mode including the ones with no radar at all.

11 · Settings That Change Outcomes

Most menu tweaking is superstition. These nine are not.

Audio mix: Boost High The audio presets are not cosmetic. Boost High compresses the range so quiet sounds like footsteps and equipment come up toward the level of gunfire. On a game whose whole metagame runs on footstep audio, this is the most valuable single setting in the menu.
Stereo headphones, not virtual surround The positional audio is mixed for two channels. Software surround processing on top of it usually smears the left-right cue that you are actually listening for. Plain stereo, and turn the music down.
Field of view on PC The PC slider runs from 60 up to 120. Somewhere between 100 and 110 is the usual competitive range: wide enough to catch flanks, not so wide that distant targets shrink to nothing. Console players spent most of this game’s life without a slider at all, which is why console and PC lobbies feel different.
Weapon field of view Setting the weapon view to independent keeps the gun model from eating the bottom corner of the screen as you raise field of view. It is a pure visibility gain with no downside and almost nobody changes it.
Controller sensitivity 6 to 8 The scale runs 1 to 20 and most consistent controller players sit around 6 or 7 horizontal with a slightly lower vertical. Higher than 9 and you will overshoot every mounted head-glitch; lower than 5 and you cannot turn on a flank.
Aim-down-sight multipliers per zoom Aim sensitivity is set separately for low zoom and high zoom optics rather than as one number. Set the low-zoom multiplier near 1.0 so close-range aim feels like hip aim, and drop the high-zoom multiplier well below it so a scope actually settles.
Bind slide and crouch away from the stick Slide cancelling and drop-shotting both require crouch while you are still aiming. On controller that means a paddle or a bumper layout; on mouse and keyboard it means a thumb button. Leaving crouch on a key that takes your hand off movement costs you the input every time it matters.
Turn on-demand texture streaming off On PC this option pulls textures over the network during play. Switching it off removes a common source of mid-match stutter and a large amount of background bandwidth, at the cost of disk space. If your frame time spikes when you enter a new area, this is the first thing to try.
Remove the content packs you never load The install is enormous and the in-game content manager lets you uninstall the parts you do not play, for example the campaign or the co-op missions, while keeping multiplayer. On a small drive this is the difference between the game fitting and not.

12 · Ten Habits That Lose Rounds

Ranked by how often they show up in an average lobby. None of these are aim problems.

01 · Tactical sprint as the default Tactical sprint carries the longest delay in the game between deciding to shoot and being able to. Use it in your own half and between objectives; walk or normal-sprint the last stretch. A large share of deaths in this game are a player being shot while the animation finishes.
02 · Five attachments, all of them range A long barrel, a heavy stock, a big magazine, a magnified optic and a suppressor stack into a rifle that takes almost half a second to aim. On a map like Shoot House you will lose every single close fight with it. Two attachments that add power, three that give handling back.
03 · Holding the same angle three times The first time you hold a window it is a position. The second time it is a pattern. The third time it is a grenade. Kill feeds and kill cams give the enemy your exact spot, so move after every second kill from the same place.
04 · Reloading instead of swapping Swapping to your secondary is faster than a reload on nearly every weapon in the game, and Amped makes it dramatically faster still. If you are dry mid-fight, swap. Reload when you are behind cover and nobody is within twenty metres.
05 · Saving the killstreak you never reach If you check your match history and you reach eight kills twice a night, running a 10 and a 12 means you are playing the whole game with two empty slots. Drop the set to what you actually earn and you will find you are calling something in every life.
06 · Never throwing the tactical Most players end a match with an unthrown stun. A stun through a doorway before you enter converts a coin-flip duel into a certainty. Throw it at the start of the push, not after you have already taken damage inside.
07 · Flanking alone into the enemy spawn Spawn logic reacts to where your team is standing. One player deep behind the enemy line does not flank them, it flips their spawn behind your own team. Flank the side of the map, not the back of it, unless your whole team is pushing with you.
08 · Playing Domination for three flags Capturing all three flags pushes the enemy into a scattered spawn that appears around you, and the score lead you gain is usually smaller than the chaos you invite. Hold two, park on the middle flag, and let them queue into it.
09 · Running Ghost on reflex Ghost only does something while an enemy radar is up. Watch the top of your screen for two minutes: if nothing is flying, that slot is doing nothing and High Alert or Overkill would be doing a great deal. Perks are a response to the lobby, not a personality.
10 · Skipping the kill cam Every kill cam tells you where the enemy was, what they were holding, and whether they were mounted. Two seconds of attention per death across a match is a complete map of where this lobby likes to sit. Most players hit skip and then die in the same place again.