Yesterday, Treyarch patched out an exploit that made high-rounding on The Tomb trivially easy. The exploit worked like this: follow the main quest steps until you acquire the Ice Staff and upgrade it, then use a charged shot and pull out the hand cannon (without firing it) to deal crazy AOE damage to all enemies. The exploit allowed you to melt multiple specials and elites in seconds, making getting to round 100 and beyond extremely fast.
CodeNamePizza decided to run a poll on X to see just how many players liked vs disliked the change, and the results don’t surprise me at all.
It shows a near equal divide in the dedicated Zombies player base, which likely makes up a majority of Pizza’s following, with 48.1% wishing the change gets reversed and 51.9% preferring it (at the time of this writing).
I’m not surprised by this at all, as the Zombies community has grown to be so divided on every issue over the years. I actually just expect at least 50% of gamers reading this blog to disagree with me passionately no matter what I say. So with that said, here is my 100% right opinion. I personally think this was a stupid change, and will ultimately hurt the mode. My reasoning for this is that this exploit actually did kind of make the map a bit more appealing to a lot of people, especially casuals. The more casuals that play Zombies, means that Zombies gets better for everyone with Treyarch pouring more time and resources into it. Who cares if far more people get to round 100 on The Tomb than on other maps in BO6. Anybody checking leaderboard will just know that The Tomb was far easier than the rest, and will factor that into whatever they’re looking at the leaderboards for. Plus, this hand cannon glitch did add an alternative way to high round besides mutant injection spamming, and I far preferred the Ice Staff method to the score streak method.
Also, it’s not like this exploit is new. It was first discovered on Origins in Black Ops 2, which was the first map the Ice Staff appeared in. To me, its strange that just now Treyarch decided to patch out something that’s been in games for 11 years.
BUT… with all that said, I really don’t think this is going to change all that much in terms of high rounding The Tomb, as the Ice Staff is quite frankly completely viable at handling elites and specials on its own.
I think the real lesson here for Treyarch is that Wonder Weapons should be massively overpowered, which, besides the Ice Staff, is something that Black Ops 6 has not lived up to. My humble request is that Treyarch retroactively buffs all the Wonder Weapons (minus the Ice Staff) from the rest of the map pool. Pretty please. <3
-@DraakoTP