Since the turn of the year, Raven Software has done a pretty good job at keeping the Call of Duty Warzone meta as balanced and varied as it can. In the time between its launch in 2020 and around Season 2 of Warzone Pacific, the battle royale tended to struggle in this department, with most seasons being dominated by one or two insanely strong guns that you’d be a fool not to use.
In recent seasons though, Raven has turned the tide on this, nerfing OP weapons more quickly than it has in the past, giving full balancing sweeps to entire weapon classes (last season’s sniper rework being a prime example), and getting the game in a place where there were several weapons you could confidently put into a “meta” category.
However, it seems that things are starting to slip again. Taking a look at the latest weapon usage stats on WZRanked paints a clear picture and shows that we have returned to the days of a limited meta.
By a considerable distance, the most picked weapons in Warzone right now are the NZ-41 assault rifle and the Marco 5 SMG, a Season 4 battle pass weapon. While there are plenty of other decent weapons in Warzone currently, none can hold a candle to this pair right now.
Again, this is not to say there are no other favourable weapons you can use, but it’s clear that there are two guns that are far more favoured than the rest, and in the case of the NZ-41 in particular, it’s been rumbling on for some time.
Thanks to a buff at the start of Season 4, the NZ became massively popular, and two further attempts at nerfing have failed to make it budge from the top of the usage charts.
The Marco’s dominance is slightly more forgivable – battle pass weapons are usually pretty strong to begin with to encourage people to level up to unlock them – but let’s not forget it took just five days for it to become the most popular SMG in the game.
After many months of Raven being diligent at sustaining a healthy meta, it is odd to see things creeping back towards the way they used to be. Guns will always have spikes in usage, but to see this NZ-41 and Marco 5 dominance go on for roughly three weeks now is a bit of a concern.
Of course, as soon as this article is posted, there will probably be some massive update that nerfs both weapons into the ground. But at the time of writing, the amount of people using a Marco 5 Warzone loadout or an NZ-41 Warzone loadout shows were currently seeing a return to the dark ages of the Warzone meta.