Despite the gargantuan first season of Black Ops 6 being just days away, Treyarch is still doggedly pushing out updates for the new Call of Duty to get its gameplay in perfect condition. Aside from the addition of two chaotic playlists for fans to enjoy over the weekend, a new patch has taken another swipe at the game’s overpowered (and widely-loathed) Recon perk. In fact, this is the second time in the space of a week that Recon has been nerfed.
If you’re unaware of what’s been making the Recon Combat Specialty perk so problematic in Black Ops 6, let me break it down for you. In BO6, if you choose three perks from the same family, you’ll be granted a bonus perk called a Combat Speciality. For the blue perk family, Recon is the bonus on offer, and it gives you two valuable commodities to help you survive in the FPS game.
The first is an on-screen warning whenever an enemy is aiming at you, reminiscent of the old High Alert perk – this is powerful, but not the main draw of Recon. The second is a brief period of full, directional wallhacks every time you respawn. That means you can see exactly where every opposition player is when you spawn back in after dying – this not only improves your chances of grabbing a few easier kills but if you can communicate each players’ position to the rest of your team, then your entire squad has a good picture of where the enemies are on the map.
At launch, Recon was giving these wallhacks for a period of two seconds. This doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, it’s incredibly overpowered. With how fast the movement is and how small many of the maps are in Black Ops 6, there are times where you could easily rack up two or three kills within seconds of respawning, all thanks to the awareness Recon gives you.
Earlier this week, a sizable update packed with balance tweaks made an initial nerf to the Recon Combat Specialty, cutting its duration down by half a second. Today’s patch gives it exactly the same treatment, meaning that you now only get one second of wallhacks after respawning.
Across these two updates, Recon has now been nerfed extremely hard, but it really was a necessary move. Recon will also still be a hugely viable option in your best Black Ops 6 loadouts, but by giving players less time with x-ray vision it stops it from snowballing into the only meta option.
Elsewhere in this patch, Treyarch has fixed some inconsistencies with XP earn rates and multipliers, and closed off an exploit in which players could get outside of the map on Lowtown.
On top of that, two new playlists have just gone live, and they are the definition of chaos. The first is a 10v10 moshpit which includes Nuketown in its map rotation (yes, we’re already seeing big-team Nuketown this early in the game’s life) and the second is Stakeout 24/7. This lets players continuously grind the game’s tiniest and most hectic map – which is essentially just an apartment building – across a variety of modes.
As we head into another wild weekend of CoD action, be sure to check out everything arriving in Black Ops 6 Season 1 in just a few days time. If you’re also planning to grab some friends and slay some undead, then our Black Ops 6 Zombies easter eggs guide will help you unearth some cool secrets.
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