Paired with firearms, the perks in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War follow the same principle in terms of balancing. If a perk is so good that it renders the rest of its gameplay useless, the incentive to use the perk increases and so does the means to build around it. Such is the case with the perk Flak Jacket, a perk that simply mitigates the damage taken via explosives. However, the threshold on “how much damage is mitigated” is exorbitantly high to the point where players have been calling for nerfs since near launch.
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The culmination on how good is “too good” is featured by Redditor tf___’s clip, showcasing the enemy team’s usage of the Flak Jacket perk. With knowledge of the enemy team camped in one room, tf___ throws a grenade in the room followed by a rocket launcher shot. Quickly going into cover, he fires another rocket in the small room. The hit marker showed on-screen signals that the enemy did get hit by the blasts. Lastly, as he goes in for the third rocket shot, he is gunned down by the enemy team who escapes the room.
What makes this clip frustrating is that this was during a Hardcore lobby, which increases the damage of weapons across the board to the point of being a one-shot kill in most instances. Even if the grenade and rockets were splash damage, it should have been enough to do quite a bit of damage, all of which the Flak Jacket nullified. Several Redditors have offered suggestions regarding the future of the perk, saying that it should work like armor plates in Warzone where the Flak Jacket breaks after use.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s gunplay is, obviously, an integral part of the game as well as it should for any first-person shooter. While each gun is its own character with its own personality, some guns are known to be superior to specific situations. When a gun is good in almost every instance, however, it can disrupt the balance of the overall game. A major example was the DMR 14, a rifle so versatile that many players consider it strong even after its highly requested nerfs.
Following the DMR nerf, Treyarch’s next step should be identifying one of its largest elephants in the room. The Flak Jacket is a powerful perk that, believe it or not, the developers had already nerfed in an earlier patch. With the newest season in Call of Duty: Warzone underway, Treyarch will have a lot of kinks to iron out if it wishes to address this glaring issue that existed for far too long in its players’ eyes.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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