Future Call of Duty: Warzone patch will make 'sweeping balance changes' to weapons and TTK

The latest patch notes for Call of Duty: Warzone Season 4 are up, noting the addition of a new limited-time event called Ground Fall, the Verdansk Resurgence Mini mode, Verdansk's new "Red Doors" (rumored to be a new fast-travel system), eight new LGBTQIA+ Pride flag Calling Cards, and a dirt bike.

What's most interesting though, is that underneath all this Raven Software explains what it's planning for a patch that's still to come: "In a future patch, we will be making sweeping balance changes to Weapons." As the notes go on to explain, "Due to some Weapons being far more lethal than others in their class, we feel a reduction in the efficacy of those outliers is necessary. We expect these changes will bring the average Time to Kill up by approximately 60 to 100 milliseconds."

Given that Warzone has a relatively low TTK compared to other battle royale games like Apex Legends, if the average did come up by the maximum predicted amount of 100 milliseconds it would make a noticeable difference. 

Raven plans to "begin laying the groundwork for the upcoming balance overhaul" with tweaks to 15 weapons, nerfing the CR-56 AMAX slightly and the Streetsweeper shotgun more significantly—dropping its max damage range by 24%, decreasing the second damage range by 18%, and decreasing the third damage range by 7%, as well as decreasing move speed by 1%.

At short range the Streetsweeper has one of the best K/D ratios in Warzone, and even with these changes it'll remain deadly in the closer ranges, forcing players to use it a little more situationally. 

Even the Ballistic Knife is up for alteration: "With additional mobility, improved Projectile Velocity, and more generous locational multipliers—letting someone wielding the Ballistic Knife get too close is a mistake you will only make once… or twice per game."

Read the full patch notes to see all the planned changes, and Raven's explanations for each one.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.