The Warzone meta could face some disruption owing to a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare SMG which, combined with a blueprint, possibly makes the Raven Software and Activision battle royale FPS “a bit P2W”.
Blueprints in Warzone essentially provide a shortcut to higher-level guns with more complex attachments, allowing players who purchase them using the game’s CP currency to access weapons with attachments already equipped, rather than having to unlock and affix each attachment separately. CP can be earned either by completing challenges from Warzone’s battle passes, which themselves must be purchased using CP, or by buying the currency directly using real money,
Warzone season 5 allows players to use CP to buy the Tracer Pack: Shadow, which comes with a new player card, emblem, and two weapon blueprints. One of these, the Banisher, adds the commando foregrip and 10mm Auto 30 mags to the stalwart MP5 SMG. Although blueprints are not intended to increase a weapon’s damage or time-to-kill (TTK) stats, it appears that the Banisher MP5 is more powerful than the base gun.
Warzone statistician Symthic shares a video comparing two headshots, one scored with the vanilla MP5, the other with the Banisher. Where the base gun registers 45 damage, the Banisher registers 49, a small but significant increase, especially in the fast-paced and highly competitive world of Warzone.
The #ModernWarfare MP5 might be a bit P2W…
👉Some blueprints like Banisher and Ultimatum have HIGHER 10MM DAMAGE in #Warzone, for lower average TTKs in their first damage range!
Did you snag one of these BPs from the store? 👀 pic.twitter.com/JaEtBs9EnX
— Sym.gg (@Symthic) September 10, 2022
Since the Banisher can only be obtained through spending CP, and CP is most easily acquired through a real-money purchase, Symthic describes the gun, which is based on a weapon from 2019’s reboot of Modern Warfare, as “a bit P2W”.
“The Modern Warfare MP5 might be a bit P2W,” they write. “Some blueprints like Banisher and Ultimatum have higher 10mm damage in Warzone, for lower average TTKs in their first damage range”. Ultimatum is another blueprint also available for the MP5. As originally reported by Charlie Intel, this would not be the first time that weapon blueprints have potentially offered a pay-to-win advantage in Warzone, as the MAC-10 and XM4 have also seen blueprint damage boosts in the past, though these were later removed via patches.
If you want to maintain your advantage over anyone using the Banisher or Ultimatum, make sure to check out our guides to the best Warzone season 5 guns and the best loadout drops. You might also want to try some of the other best battle royale games, including PUBG and Fortnite.