No nukes.
Jeff, a few pointers regarding ambush/camping spots from personal experience. Having turned 40 i haven’t got the reflexes to keep up with the young’uns so I have had to play smarter. I use area denial all the time, setting up zones of control and letting people run into my sights. I normally end up top or near the top of my team, and my K/D is around 1,4, which i am happy with.
Check out the maps here. Always run with a claymore to set up some area denial.
Array: I use two main spots; Wandering up and down the Western part of the map behind the crane, all the way at the end of the map. Always lots of traffic there and many don’t check the map edges while rushing to and fro. Also, in the entrance to the round building there is a side room with stair down into a tunnel under the basement. Stay in the staircase and peek over the edge to pick off people rushing into the building and out the window to pick off people on the crane. Put your claymore either in the tunnel below or by the entrance to the room with the stairs (I recommend in the tunnel below). Be sure to check the tunnel below often. Also, if you spawn on the East side, run into the basement of the round building and through this tunnel to get to the spot as fast as possible.
Cracked: Top North-West building is a brilliant camping spot. Set up a claymore on top of the staircase with the flower pot (pointing South). From here you have excellent cover of the Eastern spawn and Southern corridors of the game and most of the camping spots on the South side. Just watch the other staircase into the building (from the North).
Grid: Get on top of the little building in the South-West, put a claymore by the ladder and crouch behind the pipes. From here you have complete control of the open space and the bunkers. You also cover the sniping window in the house and the entrance from the backlot by turning around. This is a pretty popular spot though so watch yourself but if the enemy team is inexperienced this spot is golden.
Hanoi: South-East building. This is my favourite spot of the whole game. Get on the second floor and put a claymore covering the staircase (I like to put my Claymores by the banisters inward towards the stairs). You can now cover the North-East entrances from the window and the Western entrance by jumping onto the roof and crouching behind the cover. I have gotten some fantastic streaks here.
Havana: Western building, second floor overlooking the hotel entrance. Rightmost window so you can’t be seen from the door. Claymore by the door. Here you need to roam around a little though as everyone camps here so you need to go out round back and clear out.
Jungle: Three good spots here. On the Eastern side you can camp out in the North-Eastern corner. I normally place a claymore on the dock where you can climb up and then patrol the area covering the other entrances. On the Western side of the map you can jump up into the stone structure (look for the boards you can run onto and jump over) covering the northern entrances or you can camp by the westernmost building covering both the northern and southern entrances. Here you really need to be on your toes not to get someone in your back, but with a claymore and good teammates you can slaughter the enemy team if they are sloppy.
Launch: Another favourite, but you need to be patient. I get to the northern towers right as i spawn You can run on the pipes on the outside and cover both the east and west entrances. You need a claymore, i normally put it in the towers to avoid someone shooting me in the back. You need to run more or less constantly from one tower to the next, but you do cover both spawns. Most of the action on this map is on the South side though so it might be quiet at times. Also, watch yourself when the rocket goes up, you need to vacate the towers or you will die from environmental damage.
Nuketown: This map is chaos. I have my best and worst rounds here. My favourit spot is in the Northern garage. Put a claymore by the back door and crouch behind the door in the garange. Then you are almost invisible and you cover the western side of the map. you can also take a step left and cover out the front door towards the eastern side.
Radiation/Summit/Villa/WMD are more run and gun maps for me, no real favourite spots here (yet).
Hope this is useful :)
I finally got my KDR in Black Ops up to 1.0, about 3500 kills & deaths, and I’m level 40 on my 1st prestige.
I’m only 31 but I definitely can’t keep up with the fast aiming and firing these kids have, so I have 2 strategies. My flank 'em speedster setup with AK-74, grip, marathon lightweight and steady aim, then my Camping setup with m-16, reflex + silencer, ghost pro, warlord pro, and hacker.
With my running class I have to play careful til I get a spyplane (or someone on my team does) then I try to insert myself in where their team hangs with tac inserts. It’s good when I feel like taking objectives or disrupting campers.
When I camp, it’s all about what Juste said up there, but instead of a claymore I use Motion Sensors. Once you know the approaches to your campsite in-and-out, you can see the dudes coming in, pop out the other way and stab/shoot them in the back. When I do this my clan tag is CAMP and dudes see CAMP etched onto my gun in the killcams, and it makes me happy. I often get teased in the lobbies between matches, their taunts and tears just fuel my camp fire.
That’s funny, I do the same thing with the camp clan tag.
Even when I’m not really camping I sometimes go out of my way to make it seem like I am (eg. I see a guy rounding a corner on a spyplane/blackbird, I’ll go prone in a corner so as to appear to have been camping there even if I was moving around previously) because for a lot of the people you play against in this game, camping against them is such an effective psychological weapon.
I love having games where I kill one guy on the other team like 10 times because he absolutely MUST KILL THE F’in F CAMPER, so he keeps coming back to the spot I’m patrolling, except I’m always in a slightly different spot (usually moved up a bit between where I was and where he spawned).
Since we tend to run a full team with the people I play with we are often in party chat, which sucks a bit because I have to admit I really miss the between-match rants people would go on when I was running particularly campy.
I mostly play Team DM, but if we have more than 6 people in our group (which happens often) we will switch to Ground War, which mixes up TDM and Domination for 9 player teams.
I don’t play the other modes (CTF, Demolition, S&D, etc) much mostly because the people I play with don’t play them and they are the worst modes to play with random jagoffs.
I typically run with the same group of guys as well, and there’s one guy we play with who is like Call of Duty Jesus. We just all hang back til he gets his blackbird then go to work. He typically finishes like with over 20 kills and a KDR of 5+. We checked the leaderboards a couple weeks after release and he was ranked 64th in the world. Insane.
The guys who sport huge KDRs all play with the tactical control setup, though, which I need to force myself to use. I like having that knife come up fast , but proning out with RS is the pro way to play apparently.
I’m nowhere near pro (1.5 KDR as mentioned above) but I do run tactical and have since MW2. I highly recommend it. The situations where you have to go prone in a hurry far outnumber the situations where you’ll want to knife, IME.
I actually don’t do much “drop shotting” or anything like that, but being able to duck and prone fast is extremely useful when you’re in a fire fight and you run out of bullets, you can often just duck behind something and reload and then pop back up again fast enough to pull off a full reload while in a firefight. It also comes in handy when you have to get out of sight quick because you notice on the spyplane that more enemies than you can deal with at once are approaching. This works especially well when you’re running ghost pro because with ghost pro if you prone and don’t move, MANY people will just walk right by you even if they are almost running right over you, because you just look kind of like a dead body that fell in an odd position… so just prone, wait, and then shoot all 3 of them in the back after they walk by :)
To expand on that, there are no more name plate rewards for getting kill streaks. If you wanted to get your 5 nuke name plate, jump into domination and ignore game objectives.
I feel like if they took the map design, netcode, and hit detection from modern warfare and the kill streak design, unlock system, and recording/sharing features of black ops we’d have the ultimate Call of Duty game.
That is extremely useful, as were the other tips and observations. Thanks guys!
Super definitely. I’m hoping Activision realizes this too and none of it was messed up when West+Zampenella abandoned ship.
97th time’s the charm.
Agreed. The low up / high down (5/30) is my current average cable rate, and I should rename my xbox gamertag to MrBlackOpsServer. The net code in the game is an absolute embarrassment considering the numbers of iterations this series is currently at. I can’t count the number of times I have attempted to throw a grenade through a second story window while moving only to have it land short or long, bounce back and hit me in the head like a bad Three Stooges movie, even though I’ve thrown from that same location many times before when I’m not the server.
Hitboxes nowhere near players. Players skating and skipping around as they move through the level. Emptying full clips into players with the hit “X” showing and hearing multiple “phutt” hit sounds without a kill confirm. I guess what really gets my craw is that all of these issues are SO noticeable in this game, punctuated by the ludicrous killcam lag deaths. My current MP game rotation is TF2 on pc, Halo, and RDR. None of those games feel as laggy to the player or have hit timings as noticeably net speed dependent as the MW series. Does TF2, Halo, and RDR cover up the client side lag better? Or am I just a cranky old man who remembers QuakeWorld having better client performance?
And for the love of god Black Ops spawn system, stop choosing me as the spawn area trigger when I’m attempting to flank the enemy. There is a reason I have Ghost and Ninja equipped. It is certainly not to have every Lightweight equipped Forrest Gump freak spawn next to me, thus showing my location on the map. Run Forest Run!
-Tim
Ranting Grumpy Old Man
P.S. So as not to sound like a total hater, love the single player!!!
Everything you said is 100% accurate.
Except for the part about the single player.
I really liked the single player, but I can imagine playing Zork on the terminal without the 360 chat pad is frustrating.
You can plug any USB keyboard into the 360.
I finished this! And for once the single player was more than a I expected story-wise.
I’m in, just for the zombie map probably.