With the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Season 6 came a few new weapons: the Grav assault rifle, the .410 Ironhide shotgun, and the LAPA submachine gun. With new guns comes new things to grind and camos to unlock, but if you aren’t smart about it you can end up wasting a lot of your own time. In this article, we’ll explain the best ways to level up guns and grind camos in Black Ops Cold War’s Season 6.
First and foremost, take advantage of double XP tokens, events, and weekends. Twitter is a great resource to use to stay up-to-date with the latest news on when there’s going to be double XP in-game. It happens semi-regularly, usually around big game updates, promotions, holidays, that kind of thing.
XP tokens are similarly useful, but you’ll likely only ever have a limited amount of them, depending on the user. There are certain tie-in promotional items like Doritos you can buy to get double XP tokens, but this isn’t particularly efficient or cost-effective. Plus, most promotional double XP tokens are not double weapon XP tokens, which is what you’ll need to rank up guns.
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Furthermore, XP tokens are most often given out for small increments of time, and when you use a token, the timer starts counting down immediately, including all your time spent in lobbies and matchmaking. So, ultimately, chaining together XP tokens endlessly is not that viable.
Depending on your skill-level and amount of experience with either multiplayer or zombies, you might want to grind guns in one mode over the other. However, there are some general tips and tricks you should be aware of when it comes to deciding what to play.
Assault rifles, submachine guns, tactical rifles, and light machine guns won’t be hard to level up in any mode, but depending on how much your gun of choice needs certain attachments to be viable, you may want to opt for some zombies to get through some of the gun’s lower ranks quickly before using your weapon to compete against other players.
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Launchers, special weapons, secondaries, these kinds of weapons, are usually best leveled up in zombies, because even when kitted with their best attachments (if they support attachments at all) they aren’t the stronger weapons in the game, so getting tons of kills with them in multiplayer can be challenging.
When playing zombies, playing alone is usually best because you’ll get all the kills yourself, but enemies do scale with the game’s player count, so if you have a squad you run zombies with and you play well together, lasting longer in zombies will let you get more kills overall.
If you have a secondary device with a copy of Cold War on it, joining your main account’s zombies lobby with your alternate account and then just getting all the kills yourself is an effective strategy because you’ll get many more kills than you would just playing alone.
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It’s important to effectively and efficiently level your guns before grinding for camos because what camos you can unlock is dependent on the weapon’s level. Meaning progress towards unlocking certain camos won’t count until your weapon reaches a certain level. If you level it up first before grinding any camos you’ll be able to work towards the maximum amount of camo challenges at one time.
Grinding for zombies camos in Cold War Season 6 is pretty straightforward. There’s quite the variety of maps and modes and things to unlock, and grinding camos doesn’t require you to get to super high rounds or do easter eggs or really do anything complicated. Simply play until zombies have enough health to not be killed quickly and efficiently anymore, exfil, and repeat the process. Diminishing returns tend to set in around round 30 on the classic maps or by round three in Outbreak.
Unlocking multiplayer camos in Cold War Season 6 is a little more complicated. There are tons of modes and maps so much so that it can seem overwhelming. Ultimately, you’ll want to play whatever modes and maps you can drop the most kills in, but there is considerably more tech to consider, too.
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Traditionally, the Fireteam modes have been recommended both to level up guns fast and work on some of the more difficult camo challenges, like melee kills or destroying vehicles, but this isn’t so much the case today.
Fireteam isn’t a super populated mode, so it can be hard to find games quickly with good ping. But more importantly, there is almost no squad play or communication, and with large open maps, the pace of the game is a lot slower, too.
This all adds up to mean that it’s a harder mode to succeed in, and because of how big and open the maps are, games are long and kill counts are usually pretty low. This is a decent trade-off with weapon XP because you get a lot more per kill in Fireteam, but you’ll be getting fewer kills, so it’s kind of a wash.
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The best mode to play for either grinding guns for levels or doing camo challenges is the 6v6 Face Off mode. This mode includes 6v6 Domination, Kill Confirmed, and Team Deathmatch on the Gunfight maps. These maps are tiny, and with so many players, these games are extraordinarily easy to rack up kills in.
You can even complete camo challenges you might not expect in the Face Off playlist, like longshots. Even though the maps are small, they’re designed in such a way that more than a few of the maps have great spots to farm longshots.
Plus, with how crazy the mode is, players won’t be able to always keep track of what’s going on in-game, and you can take advantage of this to complete extremely tough camo challenges like launcher kills or melee kills. Melee is usually a pretty popular strategy in Face Off.
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Outside of Face Off, you’ll want to stick with objective game modes, high player count game modes, and Nuketown. The more players in a lobby, the more kills you can theoretically get. Plus, if the action is crazy enough, you can use that to your advantage, too.
Objective modes, even if people don’t really play the objectives that much, focus the action to certain points on the map, and if you know where to expect players, you’ll waste less time searching for them and spend more time killing them. Unless it’s a particularly small map, avoid modes like Team Deathmatch and Kill Confirmed.
It’s also worth following a few Call of Duty content creators on your platform of choice. Somewhat regularly glitches, exploits, or new and crazy strategies pop up in zombies and can get you tons and tons of XP. However, anything that can, say, rank up a gun from level 1 to max level in just a game is considered an exploit by Treyarch and is usually patched pretty quickly.
While this kind of manipulation isn’t usually necessary to level up normal guns, some guns like the launchers or a melee weapon can be extremely tough to level up because of how ineffective they are in zombies as well as how sweaty multiplayer lobbies can be.
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