A Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Mastery Camo Grind Retrospective & Critique

For the first and last time ever, I’ve done the mastery camo grind. Let’s talk about it!

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been out for about a full month and I just finished the Dark Matter camo grind. There were highs and lows and plenty of things I want to criticize (and I will in this article). I did feel a sense of accomplishment when I unlocked my first Dark Matter on the AMES 85, but I was also left disappointed at a variety of points throughout the grind.

Throughout the camo grind, I noticed I could separate each segment of the grind into 3 phases. Phase 1 was all the military camos, phase 2 was all the special camos, and phase 3 was all the mastery camos. 

Now that’s not to say I progressed by doing all the military camos on 33 weapons, then the 2 special camos on the 33 weapons, and so on, because I didn’t. I went through weapon class by weapon class and got gold with each weapon and then diamond for that class. I just noticed that there were those three phases.

I’ve been playing Call of Duty for basically my entire life, but around 2014 I started playing/watching competitive Call of Duty. Over the years, CoD has stopped being a casual title for me and has become a competitive one. I don’t typically play a lot of standard public matches and exclusively play ranked. 

One downside of this, is that my perspective of Call of Duty titles is heavily based on the competitive scene of each given title, which is only a small portion of the game and not the way the majority of players experience the game.

Until BO6, I was always of the opinion that the mastery camo grind was less about skill and more about patience. These camos aren’t a display of talent, they are a display of commitment. I enjoyed BO6 so much at launch that I decided to put my money where my mouth was and actually pursue the camo grind for the first time. I believe I proved my point.

After BO6 came out, I wrote a guide for the Dark Matter grind on Esports Illustrated and then I had to follow my own advice and get it done.

Phase One of the Grind: Military Camos

The military camos were where my first disappointment came. I started with assault rifles as they are extremely powerful in Black Ops 6 and are usually my preferred weapon in ranked. I saw that the military camo challenges for the XM4 were to get 100 headshots. Ok, no problem at all. I then saw that the AK-74 was also to get 100 headshots. 

“Oh, ok. It must be a class specific thing,” I thought to myself. I was wrong.

100 headshots later with each SMG, both shotguns, the LMGs, the DMRs, the snipers, all of them except the launchers and the melee weapons. This was extremely disappointing and I’ll discuss why in more detail below.

Phase Two of the Grind: Special Camos

The special camos were a mixed bag. None of them were difficult, it mostly boiled down to which ones were more annoying than the others. Most of them were a breeze. The 50 kills while moving or 50 kills while using a suppressor were some of the best times because they were effectively just playing the game normally without needing to do any gimmick.

I don’t really have a ton to say about the special camos. The only one that was particularly annoying was point blank kills. However, even that was fairly easy with just a little bit of playing hardcore stakeout.

Phase 3 of the Grind: Mastery Camos

There are 4 mastery camos in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. There’s gold, diamond, dark spine, and of course, dark matter. Diamond and dark matter are straightforward enough and are skill-based challenges. Gold and dark spine are where a lot of the design issues become apparent.

While it’s not necessarily difficult to get double kills or triple kills, from a camo challenge perspective, it’s just simply annoying and, in my opinion, not the best design choice.

The reasoning for this is because it takes control out of the user. For example, 3 kills without dying 10 times is the challenge for unlocking diamond. This isn’t an issue at all because you as the player are in complete control of how to go about doing this. It’s not situational. 

Double kills and triple kills are inherently random. You as the player can’t control whether a second or third player shows up. More skilled players will be able to turn what shouldn’t be a double or a triple kill into one by hitting clutch shots or having good movement to dodge enemy fire and stay alive, but these challenges are ultimately a bit luck based due to how situational they are.

Why Does The Design Fall Flat?

In my opinion, the Black Ops 6 camo grind leaves a lot to be desired and isn’t particularly well designed. There are a few key reasons for that (in no particular order):

• The challenges are all generic and not weapon type specific

• It doesn’t challenge you to truly master the weapons

• It’s less a test of skill and more a test of patience

The first two bullets can be kind of grouped together so let’s talk about them first. I was excited when I started this camo grinding journey because I was under the impression that the “mastery” camos would require me to master the weapons in the game.

As I mentioned in the intro, the competitive side of CoD is basically all I’ve engaged with for years upon years at this point, so many weapon types like shotguns, LMGs, DMRs, snipers, etc. are just weapon types I simply have not engages with very much if at all.

I was looking forward to the challenge of needing to figure out how to adapt my standard playstyle to one that better fits the strengths of each individual weapon type.

Instead, I was left disappointed by how generic the challenges are. As one example, why do I need 100 headshots with shotguns? Shotguns are designed to be shot center mass up close for instant kills that take advantage of the wide pellet spread. Needing headshots in many ways defeats the purpose of using a shotgun in a video game.

I didn’t actually feel like the game challenged me to get better with specific guns. It felt more like a test of endurance, which leads me to the third bullet point.

As I also mentioned in the intro, I’ve always viewed the camo grind as a test of patience and not a test of skill. There is an immense lack of skill expression in regular public matches, especially in hardcore where much of the camo grind takes place, and because of this lots of players who aren’t necessarily that good at the game, can absolutely get the mastery camos done if they’re patient and willing to use every weapon in the game.

There is basically zero skill involved with completing this grind. Better plays can express their skill by completing it faster, but simply completing it is not a testament of skill.

I did a decent chunk of the grind in core rather than hardcore because I find core more fun to play. It took me about 105 hours of playtime to finish the camo grind and I’m happy with my pace. Considering it was my first time ever doing it and I was actively choosing to do a decent chunk in core which is always going to be slower than hardcore, I think I finished the grind at a fair and reasonable pace.

How Can The Mastery Camo Grind Be Improved?

To improve the mastery camo grind, I think the developers should focus more on challenges that force the player to acknowledge the weapon type they’re using. For a lot of these, I was just playing the same way I’d play using an AR or an SMG even if I was using an LMG or a DMR, for example.

Reducing the overall length of the grind would also be an improvement in my opinion, if that length reduction comes in the form of more skill-based challenges that gives the player doing the grind complete control over whether the challenge gets done or not, rather than the situational challenges like double or triple kills that can just simply be completely out of your control at times.

I’d also like to see the camo grind be done in a way that discourages the playing of hardcore. Hardcore is objectively less skill-based than core. It would be more enjoyable if the mastery camos were a testament of skill that can be used to show off your talents to other players, rather than just a symbol of having nothing better to do and a lot of patience.

Overall, I don’t regret doing the dark matter grind, I’m happy to have finally done it once. I think I proved the original points I set out to prove and I doubt I’ll ever do this grind again as a result.