Treyarch has rolled out a new update for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and the patch notes detail plenty of the changes discussed in the studio's recent Dev Talk video. This includes a buff for guns in the submachine class, a nerf for the powerful Drone Pod field upgrade, and adjustments to Black Ops 7's controversial aim-assist.
There's been plenty of community debate around Black Ops 7's aim-assist, which features greatly reduced rotational aim-assist compared to recent Call of Duty games. Black Ops 7 launched with a new right-stick aiming requirement for achieving maximum rotational aim-assist strength, meaning that when the right-stick isn't used or isn't tracking a target effectively, players experience minimal rotational aim-assist strength. This minimum aim-assist is a 35% reduction from what players experienced in the beta.
In the patch notes, Treyarch says the studio "slightly overshot" its target balance, and a small tuning change is made to reduce this aim-assist penalty from 35% to 25%.
"Our goal for this new mechanic and our other aim-assist range changes is to provide the most competitive experience for all players and inputs," the developer says. "Aim Assist is one of the most integral components of gameplay feel, so it's crucial for us to settle on tuning that both feels great to play with and hits our balance goals."
To help provide better balance with Black Ops 7's assault rifles and submachine guns, Treyarch has included a damage range buff across all submachine guns in the game, and all of the assault rifles will feature slightly increased flinch.
The developer says this is just the beginning of the weapon tuning players can expect in the coming weeks.
Additionally, the game's powerful Drone Pod field upgrade is now nerfed with the following changes:
The update includes Zombies changes meant to improve the main Ashes of the Damned Easter egg experience for all players, including adjustments to the difficulty of the boss fight. The boss fight's Hoard Husk will now regenerate after a minute of collection and give 25% more health, and the boss's missile barrage has reduced effectiveness. It also reduces damage to passengers riding in Ol' Tessie and removes the repair cooldown.
To improve the Zombies quest for solo players, Zursa the zombie bear will no longer spawn in solo boss fights before round 100 and will have reduced speed.
This new update also unlocks the campaign's Endgame mode for all Black Ops 7 players to enjoy. Those who unlocked Endgame naturally by beating the campaign will receive a variety of Black Ops 7 rewards. Black Ops 7 features double level XP, weapon XP, and GobbleGum earn rates from now until November 24.
The full Black Ops 7 patch notes can be found below, as shared by Activision.
Season 1 of Black Ops 7 begins in December, which will add the game's first battle pass, Warzone integration, additional multiplayer maps, and a brand-new Zombies map. Season 1's Astra Malorum Zombies map trailer reveals the fight against the undead is headed into space.
We intentionally took a big swing with our Aim Assist changes between Beta and Launch. Now that we've had time to collect data and player feedback, we're making a slight adjustment as we do with all aspects of gameplay over time to hit our targets and address the wide range of feedback.
Black Ops 7 launched with a new right-stick aiming requirement for achieving maximum Rotational Aim Assist strength. When the right-stick isn’t used, or isn’t tracking a target effectively, players now experience a minimum Rotational Aim Assist strength. At launch, the minimum Rotational Aim Assist was a 35% reduction from the Beta. Our goal for this new mechanic and our other Aim Assist range changes is to provide the most competitive experience for all players and inputs. This slightly overshot our balance target, so we’re making a small tuning adjustment to the minimum Rotational Aim Assist.
Aim Assist is one of the most integral components of gameplay feel, so it’s crucial for us to settle on tuning that both feels great to play with and hits our balance goals. As always, we'll continue to closely examine game data and player feedback.
We are pushing an early round of weapon tuning that aims at addressing some of the common pieces of feedback we have been seeing at launch. The main area of feedback has been SMG balance, particularly in relation to Assault Rifles. Most of our changes today aim to reduce the versatility of our highest performing ARs, and improve the mid-range performance of SMGs. You can find more details below. Aside from the SMGs, we have a handful of other individual weapon and prestige attachment adjustments. In general we really like the class variety we have been seeing so far.
This is just the beginning for weapon tuning in the opening weeks of Black Ops 7. We’ll be continuing to dial things in across weapons, prestige attachments, and the general attachment portfolio as we roll into our first season.
Assault Rifles are receiving a small flinch nerf so that they flinch harder than SMGs. This is not a huge adjustment, as we also don’t want to introduce lucky headshots into our full-auto gunfights. This flinch increase is small enough that it may affect players aiming for headshots and not well centered, but still not force most torso shots into headshots unintentionally.
Weapon Class Adjustment
SMGs are receiving a similar list of buffs across the board. Baseline, they are all receiving an improvement to their final damage range to add a handful of meters to some of their mid-range power. In addition, multiple attachments are receiving substantial improvements to their damage range traits. Our goal here is to help SMGs to contend with ARs more effectively out into medium ranges, but also require some build investment to do so especially well. We still want players to make some choices between creating ultra-fast SMG builds and those that have higher range capabilities, but Gunfighter shouldn’t feel like a requirement.
Similarly, the Rear Grip attachments that improve recoil are seeing a buff. There’s a tough handling tradeoff when taking recoil in that node, so we felt there was room to push these further. A few of the SMGs are receiving additional, baseline improvements to recoil as well.
Overall, we think this will give SMGs a more solid footing in Black Ops 7. We’ll continue to fine tune to make sure both SMGs and ARs have a role to play across our map portfolio.
Weapon Class Adjustment
The Warden 308 and M34 Novaline are both very high-power, precision weapons that we see doing very well so far in Black Ops 7. Our sentiment here is the same as the X9 Maverick, in that we are excited to have Marksman Rifles in the mix and want to keep it that way. For now we want to make sure there’s some counterplay to these weapons, and that playing aggressively with them requires attachment investment. Upping the flinch they receive and hitting the handling and mobility is the approach we’re taking for that.
Source
There's been plenty of community debate around Black Ops 7's aim-assist, which features greatly reduced rotational aim-assist compared to recent Call of Duty games. Black Ops 7 launched with a new right-stick aiming requirement for achieving maximum rotational aim-assist strength, meaning that when the right-stick isn't used or isn't tracking a target effectively, players experience minimal rotational aim-assist strength. This minimum aim-assist is a 35% reduction from what players experienced in the beta.
In the patch notes, Treyarch says the studio "slightly overshot" its target balance, and a small tuning change is made to reduce this aim-assist penalty from 35% to 25%.
"Our goal for this new mechanic and our other aim-assist range changes is to provide the most competitive experience for all players and inputs," the developer says. "Aim Assist is one of the most integral components of gameplay feel, so it's crucial for us to settle on tuning that both feels great to play with and hits our balance goals."
To help provide better balance with Black Ops 7's assault rifles and submachine guns, Treyarch has included a damage range buff across all submachine guns in the game, and all of the assault rifles will feature slightly increased flinch.
The developer says this is just the beginning of the weapon tuning players can expect in the coming weeks.
Additionally, the game's powerful Drone Pod field upgrade is now nerfed with the following changes:
- Increased Drone Pod charge time from 2.5 to 3 minutes
- Reduced Drone Pod active drone duration from 10 to 8 seconds
- Reduced Drone Pod damage from 60 to 50 damage
The update includes Zombies changes meant to improve the main Ashes of the Damned Easter egg experience for all players, including adjustments to the difficulty of the boss fight. The boss fight's Hoard Husk will now regenerate after a minute of collection and give 25% more health, and the boss's missile barrage has reduced effectiveness. It also reduces damage to passengers riding in Ol' Tessie and removes the repair cooldown.
To improve the Zombies quest for solo players, Zursa the zombie bear will no longer spawn in solo boss fights before round 100 and will have reduced speed.
This new update also unlocks the campaign's Endgame mode for all Black Ops 7 players to enjoy. Those who unlocked Endgame naturally by beating the campaign will receive a variety of Black Ops 7 rewards. Black Ops 7 features double level XP, weapon XP, and GobbleGum earn rates from now until November 24.
The full Black Ops 7 patch notes can be found below, as shared by Activision.
Season 1 of Black Ops 7 begins in December, which will add the game's first battle pass, Warzone integration, additional multiplayer maps, and a brand-new Zombies map. Season 1's Astra Malorum Zombies map trailer reveals the fight against the undead is headed into space.
BLACK OPS 7 GLOBAL
Aim Assist
We intentionally took a big swing with our Aim Assist changes between Beta and Launch. Now that we've had time to collect data and player feedback, we're making a slight adjustment as we do with all aspects of gameplay over time to hit our targets and address the wide range of feedback.
Black Ops 7 launched with a new right-stick aiming requirement for achieving maximum Rotational Aim Assist strength. When the right-stick isn’t used, or isn’t tracking a target effectively, players now experience a minimum Rotational Aim Assist strength. At launch, the minimum Rotational Aim Assist was a 35% reduction from the Beta. Our goal for this new mechanic and our other Aim Assist range changes is to provide the most competitive experience for all players and inputs. This slightly overshot our balance target, so we’re making a small tuning adjustment to the minimum Rotational Aim Assist.
Aim Assist is one of the most integral components of gameplay feel, so it’s crucial for us to settle on tuning that both feels great to play with and hits our balance goals. As always, we'll continue to closely examine game data and player feedback.
- Minimum Rotational Aim Assist penalty reduced from 35% to 25%.
Weapons
We are pushing an early round of weapon tuning that aims at addressing some of the common pieces of feedback we have been seeing at launch. The main area of feedback has been SMG balance, particularly in relation to Assault Rifles. Most of our changes today aim to reduce the versatility of our highest performing ARs, and improve the mid-range performance of SMGs. You can find more details below. Aside from the SMGs, we have a handful of other individual weapon and prestige attachment adjustments. In general we really like the class variety we have been seeing so far.
This is just the beginning for weapon tuning in the opening weeks of Black Ops 7. We’ll be continuing to dial things in across weapons, prestige attachments, and the general attachment portfolio as we roll into our first season.
Assault Rifles
Assault Rifles are receiving a small flinch nerf so that they flinch harder than SMGs. This is not a huge adjustment, as we also don’t want to introduce lucky headshots into our full-auto gunfights. This flinch increase is small enough that it may affect players aiming for headshots and not well centered, but still not force most torso shots into headshots unintentionally.
Weapon Class Adjustment
- Received Flinch increased from .15N to .18N.
SMGs
SMGs are receiving a similar list of buffs across the board. Baseline, they are all receiving an improvement to their final damage range to add a handful of meters to some of their mid-range power. In addition, multiple attachments are receiving substantial improvements to their damage range traits. Our goal here is to help SMGs to contend with ARs more effectively out into medium ranges, but also require some build investment to do so especially well. We still want players to make some choices between creating ultra-fast SMG builds and those that have higher range capabilities, but Gunfighter shouldn’t feel like a requirement.
Similarly, the Rear Grip attachments that improve recoil are seeing a buff. There’s a tough handling tradeoff when taking recoil in that node, so we felt there was room to push these further. A few of the SMGs are receiving additional, baseline improvements to recoil as well.
Overall, we think this will give SMGs a more solid footing in Black Ops 7. We’ll continue to fine tune to make sure both SMGs and ARs have a role to play across our map portfolio.
Weapon Class Adjustment
- Received Flinch reduced from 0.17N to 0.12N.
Marksman Rifles
The Warden 308 and M34 Novaline are both very high-power, precision weapons that we see doing very well so far in Black Ops 7. Our sentiment here is the same as the X9 Maverick, in that we are excited to have Marksman Rifles in the mix and want to keep it that way. For now we want to make sure there’s some counterplay to these weapons, and that playing aggressively with them requires attachment investment. Upping the flinch they receive and hitting the handling and mobility is the approach we’re taking for that.
MULTIPLAYER
UI
- Increased viewable minimap area an additional 10% on top of previous 15% increase.
Field Upgrades
- Drone Pod
- Increased Drone Pod charge time from 2.5 to 3 minutes.
- Reduced Drone Pod active drone duration from 10 to 8 seconds.
- Reduced Drone Pod damage from 60 to 50 damage.
Scorestreaks
- Hand Cannon
- Increased ammo for the Hand Cannon Akimbo Overlock from 5 to 7 rounds per gun; reduced hipfire spread by 44%.
- Reduced ammo for the Hand Cannon Extended Mag Overclock from 12 to 10 rounds.
- LDBR
- Increased missile count for the LDBR Second Strike Overclock from 9 to 13 missiles per target.
Modes
- Adjusted FFA spawn influencer size for all maps to address bad spawn issues.
Challenges
- Changed the following camo challenge requirement:
- “Kill enemies affected by your Tactical Equipment” to “Kill enemies affected by your Tactical or non-lethal Scorestreak”.
- Fixed an issue where the Popcorn Medal wasn’t being awarded when getting 2 or more kills with the Needle Drone or Semtex Lethal Equipment.
Stability
- Various crash and stability updates.
ZOMBIES
Maps
- Ashes of the Damned
- Reduced difficulty for the Boss fight in Ashes of the Damned.
- Hoard Husk will regenerate after a minute of collection and give 25% more health.
- Missiles have reduced effectiveness and will no longer fire while a Beam Attack is charging.
- Interrupting the Beam Attack no longer reduces its cooldown before round 100.
- Reduced damage to passengers riding in Ol' Tessie and removed repair cooldown.
- Increased cooldown on the boss ramming Ol' Tessie in its immune phase.
- Zursa will no longer spawn in Solo before round 100 and has reduced speed.
- Reduced difficulty for the Boss fight in Ashes of the Damned.
Gameplay
- Closed an exploit that allowed players to stand on a light fixture at Vandorn Farm.
- Closed an exploit that allowed players to block zombie pathing with Ol' Tessie.
UI
- Addressed a rare issue when entering Ol’ Tessie that could cause the HUD to refresh or the boss to spawn without a health bar.
Challenges
- Increased the amount of Dead Wire Ammo kills required to unlock the Pathfinder Camo for the DS20 Mirage from 5 to 300.
- Changed the following camo challenge requirement:
- “Get Kills shortly after using a Field Upgrade” to "Get Kills while a Field Upgrade is active”.
Stability
- Various crash and stability updates.
CO-OP CAMPAIGN / ENDGAME
General
- Endgame is now available for all players who own Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
Loadouts
- Addressed an issue where some attachments on weapon builds would not be present after loading into a match.
Source