Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War | How to Rank Up fast

Guide by Jordan Oloman Contributor

Published on Nov. 19, 2020

Master the grind with our guide to ranking up quickly in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

If you’re just kickstarting your Call of Duty career in Black Ops Cold War’s multiplayer mode, then you may be wondering how you can rank up quickly and access the high-level weapons and equipment as soon as possible. You may even want to achieve Prestige so you can enter the Season Levelling system and reap the rewards.

In this guide, we’re going to give you some pointers so you can streamline your multiplayer approach in Black Ops Cold War, and earn as much XP as possible during your precious playtime. Here’s how to rank up quickly in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.

Check the ‘Challenges Nearest To Completion’ page before every match

One of the quickest ways to rank up in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is to use the in-game challenges system to earn large sums of XP. Beyond just playing the game regularly, this is one of the major ways you can pick up extra XP just by tweaking your playstyle slightly.

Before the start of every game, press R1/RB to navigate to the ‘Challenges’ tab in the lobby, choose the ‘Multiplayer’ option and then move your cursor to the bottom panel, which has the numbered challenges.

If you click on this panel it will open the Challenges Nearest To Completion screen, where you can see how close you are to finishing challenges. Many challenges are tiered, with rewards ascending to 5000 XP in some cases.

Try and complete these challenges in your daily matches to bank extra XP and rank up quickly.

Diversify your game modes

Beyond tweaking your playstyle, you can also easily rank up by swapping between game modes regularly. A lot of challenges in the Career and Battle Hardened sections correspond to specific game modes, like one that asks you to win a Free-For-All match or land in the Top 3 in 10 Hardcore matches. Sticking to the same game mode may be good for your muscle memory, but it’s not great for your XP gains.

Especially around launch, Treyarch will no doubt be creating special playlists to help players shift between modes, so watch out for those and dig in if you know you’ve got challenges to complete.

As a rule, game modes with objectives like Hardpoint and Domination are always going to net you more XP than those that are just about eliminations, as you get points for securing areas and holding chokepoints.

Make sure you don’t leave games before the rigmarole of the ending screen has finished either — you get lots of bonus XP for completing matches that you don’t want to miss.

If you're trying to level up specific weapons quickly, try Combined Arms Moshpit.

Use Zombies to rank up quickly

As part of this year’s Call of Duty, your progression is unified across all game modes. This means that if you play Zombies, you’ll also rank up just as easy as you do in Multiplayer. The best part about this is that there are hundreds of challenges in Zombies that are just as easy to complete.

Zombies has its own ‘Challenges Nearest To Completion’ section you can check to pick off challenges quickly. This is an easy way to rank up and take a breather, especially if you can *cough* take advantage of the boundary-breaking map glitches that are yet to be patched out, which let you kill zombies without having to worry about being hurt.

Play with a variety of loadouts

It’s handy to find a gun that you love in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s multiplayer, but sticking to one loadout too regularly can be bad for across the board. You want to be able to adapt in-game to a variety of situations. If there’s a sniper’s nest, you may want to clear it out with your own long-range weapon, for example.

It’s good practice to have a loadout based on each weapon type in your Create-A-Class menu.

Quickly put together a Assault Rifle, SMG, LMG, and Sniper Rifle build with a variety of equipment settings to create four play styles you can swap between when the going gets tough. As well as allowing you to play better, you’ll also be able to power through the early challenges across a variety of guns if you’re constantly switching your loadout.

Some of the XP bumps come from just 25 kills, or 10 headshots, so there’s plenty of XP to be gained by changing your loadout regularly.

Complete Dark Ops challenges

Another means to rank up quickly in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is to complete the game’s ‘Dark Ops’ challenges. These are classified challenges that often require you to play in an alternative style to unlock them.

The game doesn’t tell you how to unlock them, but a few Multiplayer and Zombies challenges that are easily accessible and relatively simple to pull off can be found below:

Multiplayer:

Throw a frag grenade back to kill the enemy that threw it at you (1K XP)
Kill 25 enemies on land while underwater (5K XP)
Wipe a squad of four in Fireteam (5K XP)
Plant C4 on enemy boats and destroy the vehicle, killing the occupants five times (5K XP)

Zombies:

Get two weapons to Pack-A-Punch level 3 with ammo mods, and activate all perks at once (1K XP)
Complete the Easter Egg (5K XP)
Kill 50 enemies with a single score streak unlock from the crafting table (5K XP)
Buy every weapon from the Mystery Box (5K XP)

Use Double XP Codes

As well as various Double XP playlists and weekends to watch out for in the coming months, you can also get access to special Double XP codes by purchasing products in real-life. You can check out the full list of promotions on the Activision blog here, but we’ve listed a few of the companies offering Double XP deals below.