If you have played Call of Duty Black Ops Multiplayer very much you have most likely reached the rank of commander and unlocked the 5 star emblem next to your gamertag. If you are familiar with previous COD titles you will also know that this doesn’t have to be the end of the road for your leveling journey.
That is because in Call of Duty Black Ops you have the choice to enter prestige mode. Entering prestige mode in Call of Duty resets your current level and weapon set back to level 1 in exchange for unlocking a new emblem next to your gamertag along with extra custom class slots, playertags, and other bonus features of the multiplayer game.
Some of you might have already played 10+ days in Black Ops and you might already be a 15th prestige level 50 player. If that is the case, congratulations. Really the only thing that is required to reach the prestige 15 in Black Ops is time. No matter how bad you are, if you play enough you are bound to get there eventually.
But for those of you who don’t have as much time as you would like to play Black Ops and yet still want to reap the rewards that the later prestige levels have to offer, I have created a Black Ops leveling guide just for you.
Why should I prestige?
OK, first off let’s talk about the benefits of entering prestige mode as outlined below. The first 10 prestiges don’t unlock anything aside from a new prestige emblem and an extra custom class slot every other prestige. Starting at prestige 11 you unlocked additional face tattoos to use on your in game character. At prestige 13 you unlock the ability to change the color of your clan tag and at prestige 14 you unlock the ability to purchase golden camouflage for your weapons (50,000 COD Cash a piece). Finally, prestige 15 unlocks the Prestige Pure playlist, a playlist that matches 15th prestige players against other 15th prestige players, and also entering prestige 15 unlocks the only animated playercard background in the game. Below is a chart to show what is unlocked at each prestige:
Prestige Level Unlocks
Prestige 1 Custom Class 6, Prestige Leaderboards & Playlist
Prestige 3 Custom Class 7
Prestige 5 Custom Class 8
Prestige 7 Custom Class 9
Prestige 9 Custom Class 10
Prestige 11 Face Tattoos
Prestige 13 Clan Tag Colors
Prestige 14 Golden Camo for guns (50,000 CP per)
Prestige 15 Prestige Pure Playlist, Animated Playercard Background
The 15 prestige emblems that will be located next to your gamertag at each prestige are shown below. My recommendation for you is to look at the emblems and unlocks that you will gain for each prestige and decide if it is worth it for you to prestige. I personally like entering prestige mode because I enjoy the satisfaction of leveling up and unlocking things as I play, but a lot of people don’t care about extra emblems or golden camos, in which case I would recommend just staying at level 50 and hording massive amounts of COD cash for everyone to see.
How long is this going to take?
If you have weighed the pros and cons of entering prestige mode and want to get through your prestige levels as fast as possible let me outline the time it is going to take to reach max prestige.
Leveling is based off of experience earned while playing the game. Every time you do something that helps your team you are rewarded with experience. For example getting a kill, capturing a point, or defusing a bomb will all earn you experience.
Aside from the things you do in game you are also rewarded for completing specific challenges and contracts that can be purchased in game. On top of that the game rewards you with a bonus XP multiplier anytime you win a game.
Leveling up in Call of Duty even when using the tips in this guide is still a lengthy process. Depending on the skill of you and your team it could take anywhere from 10-20 hours of in game time played to level through all 50 levels of a prestige. That is typically about 100-200 completed games at around 15 minutes per match.
If you can complete 50 levels within 16 hours of game time played you are leveling at an extremely fast pace. I just reached 14th prestige in 15 days and 3 hours so avarage of my game lveling up is 1 day (24hr)
The Call of Duty Black Ops Leveling System
First of all, to understand how to level quickly you need to understand how the Black Ops leveling system works. There are 50 levels in a prestige, each level requiring exponentially more experience than the one before. I have included a table below to show you exactly how much experience is needed to reach each level as well as the percentage of the prestige that is completed when you reach that level.
As you can see the total amount of experience necessary to prestige is approximately 1.25 million XP. When you reach level 25 you are actually only 18% of the way through the prestige experience wise, so the first 25 levels are going to go by much faster than the last 25 levels.
| Level | Rank Title | Min XP | XP to Next | % Complete |
| 1 | Private | 0 | 300 | 0.00% |
| 2 | Private | 300 | 900 | 0.02% |
| 3 | Private | 1200 | 1500 | 0.10% |
| 4 | Private First Class | 2700 | 2100 | 0.21% |
| 5 | Private First Class | 4800 | 2700 | 0.38% |
| 6 | Private First Class | 7500 | 3400 | 0.59% |
| 7 | Specialist | 10900 | 4100 | 0.86% |
| 8 | Specialist | 15000 | 4800 | 1.19% |
| 9 | Specialist | 19800 | 5500 | 1.57% |
| 10 | Corporal | 25300 | 6200 | 2.00% |
| 11 | Corporal | 31500 | 7100 | 2.50% |
| 12 | Corporal | 38600 | 8000 | 3.06% |
| 13 | Sergeant | 46600 | 8900 | 3.69% |
| 14 | Sergeant | 55500 | 9800 | 4.40% |
| 15 | Sergeant | 65300 | 10700 | 5.17% |
| 16 | Staff Sergeant | 76000 | 11800 | 6.02% |
| 17 | Staff Sergeant | 87800 | 12900 | 6.95% |
| 18 | Staff Sergeant | 100700 | 14000 | 7.98% |
| 19 | Sergeant First Class | 114700 | 15100 | 9.09% |
| 20 | Sergeant First Class | 129800 | 16200 | 10.28% |
| 21 | Sergeant First Class | 146000 | 17400 | 11.56% |
| 22 | Sergeant Major | 163400 | 18600 | 12.94% |
| 23 | Sergeant Major | 182000 | 19800 | 14.42% |
| 24 | Sergeant Major | 201800 | 21000 | 15.98% |
| 25 | Lieutenant | 222800 | 22200 | 17.65% |
| 26 | Lieutenant | 245000 | 23500 | 19.41% |
| 27 | Lieutenant | 268500 | 24800 | 21.27% |
| 28 | Captain | 293300 | 26100 | 23.23% |
| 29 | Captain | 319400 | 27400 | 25.30% |
| 30 | Captain | 346800 | 28700 | 27.47% |
| 31 | Major | 375500 | 30100 | 29.74% |
| 32 | Major | 405600 | 31500 | 32.13% |
| 33 | Major | 437100 | 32900 | 34.62% |
| 34 | Lieutenant Colonel | 470000 | 34300 | 37.23% |
| 35 | Lieutenant Colonel | 504300 | 35700 | 39.94% |
| 36 | Lieutenant Colonel | 540000 | 37200 | 42.77% |
| 37 | Colonel | 577200 | 38700 | 45.72% |
| 38 | Colonel | 615900 | 40200 | 48.78% |
| 39 | Colonel | 656100 | 41700 | 51.97% |
| 40 | Brigadier General | 697800 | 43200 | 55.27% |
| 41 | Brigadier General | 741000 | 44800 | 58.69% |
| 42 | Brigadier General | 785800 | 46400 | 62.24% |
| 43 | Major General | 832200 | 48000 | 65.92% |
| 44 | Major General | 880200 | 49600 | 69.72% |
| 45 | Major General | 929800 | 51200 | 73.65% |
| 46 | Lieutenant General | 981000 | 52900 | 77.70% |
| 47 | Lieutenant General | 1033900 | 54600 | 81.89% |
| 48 | Lieutenant General | 1088500 | 56300 | 86.22% |
| 49 | General | 1144800 | 58000 | 90.68% |
| 50 | Commander | 1202800 | 59700 | 95.27% |
| Prestige | Commander (Maxed) | 1262500 | - | 100.00% |
Match Bonuses
Match bonus XP is exerience earned when you complete an entire match. If you leave during a game you forfeit this match bonus (which is a poor quit penalty to say the least). Your match bonus is determined by your current level, the length of the match and also if you win, lose or tie the match. Your match bonus is multiplied by 1 for a win, 0.5 for a loss, and 0.75 for a tie.
In other words, winning is very important to leveling up quickly, which brings me to my first suggestion. Always play with a team. Your team doesn’t have to be full of MLG caliber players. You just have to have share common goal of going after the objective and playing smart in order to win most of your games. If you already have a group of people that you play with that’s great. If you don’t, I recommend getting involved on some gaming forums or tryout for a clan to get some friends online. You can even add players to your console friends list directly from your recent players. If you are playing the game and get matched up with some good players who you enjoyed playing with send them a message and try to start up a party together. Some of the people I currently play with the most are just players I got matched up with randomly online and really enjoyed playing with.
Challenges
COD challenges are specific tasks that you need to complete in order to earn a set amount of experience. There are two basic types of challenges in Black Ops. Static challenges and Progressive challenges.
Static challenges are challenges that you only need to complete once and you will earn the experience for that entire prestige. For example did you know that you will earn 5000 XP just for earning a bankshot medal (bounce a tomahawk off a surface for a kill)?
Progressive challenges on the other hand are challenges that you complete over time, such as the marksman gun challenge. The marksman gun challenge is a challenge for every gun in the game that earns you experience as you get kills with a particular weapon. There are different levels of this challenge which earn you more XP for every level completed.
All challenges reset when you prestige except the lifetime challenges. Lifetime challenges are generic challenges that you work on when playing any mode in multiplayer and do not reset when you prestige.
Contracts
Contracts are in game bounties which you purchase with cod points and reward you with additional cod points and experience. Contracts are determined by Treyarch and switched every 24 hours to allow more variety on the types of challenges you can complete.
I was surprised to find out how many players don’t actually purchase contracts. I guess they don’t think that completing those challenges will earn them very much experience or help them in their leveling, however I am at prestige 13 and have earned over 700,000 XP on contracts alone, more than half of one prestige all together.
Always try to buy contracts that co-operate with each other. For example get 50 kills with an SMG + Capture 3 flags in CTF. Create an SMG runner class and go play some CTF. Or maybe there is a stab 2 people in the back with ninja contract as well as a get 75 kills with the famas contract. Equip ghost & ninja and a silenced famas and go to work on the other team.
Finally, don’t buy contracts that are going to cause you to do poorly in a game. There might be a 1000 XP contract for getting 50 kills while using the ACOG and Extended Mags on a gun but if you suck while using a poor class setup you are going to end up losing more than 1000 XP from missed kills and frustrating games/losses.
Game types
Let me preface this section by saying that gaming is meant to be fun. If you don’t enjoy a game type, don’t play it. That being said, there are many game types within Black Ops for you to choose from and some of them offer a distinct leveling advantage over others that I will cover with you now.
HQ
The fastest game type to level within when playing with a winning team is Headquarters. Headquarters is an objective game type where 2 teams fight over a certain area. Once the area is controlled by one team they become the defenders of that area, and the opposite team becomes the attackers of that area. The attackers are trying to break the HQ by killing the enemy team and regaining control of the area. Once your team captures the HQ, you only have 1 life and if you die you will not respawn until the enemy team breaks that HQ.
Headquarters earns your entire team 50 experience for every 5 seconds that you have the HQ controlled. The game ends after 20 minutes or after a team controls the HQ for 250 seconds total. 50 XP for every 5 seconds that you control the HQ turns out to be 2500 XP per player on the winning team not including task specific bonuses like kills, captures, challenges and contracts.
It is not uncommon for players to earn 10,000 XP for one game of Headquarters, in fact I was able to earn 44,451 experience for one game of Headquarters alone! (That is like leveling through all of level 41 in one game!)
S&D
The second fastest game type to level with is probably Search and Destroy. S&D is a one life bomb based game type which is played in rounds (Best out of 7). The main advantage of S&D is that you earn a ton of experience for kills and objectives when playing. A kill in S&D is worth 500 XP, an assist is worth 250 XP, and a plant or defuse is worth 500 XP. As you can see if you had a really good round and killed all 6 players plus planted/defused the bomb you would earn at least 3500 XP in that round alone. The downside to playing S&D is that it can be a double edged sword. If you are bad at S&D and don’t get very many kills/plants/defuses you will hardly earn any experience and end up just watching other players for the majority of the game.
I personally don’t like Search and Destroy because I tend to rush a lot and die early to a strategically placed claymore or frag grenade but some of my friends almost exclusively play S&D and level really well when they play it. One more thing to mention about S&D. Search and destroy gives round bonuses not match bonuses and the round bonus multipliers are bigger than in any other game type. (x2 for a win, x1.5 for a tie, and x1 for a loss)
All other gametypes
Now all the other game types have their pros and cons. In fact I enjoy playing a variety of game types when leveling up as it keeps things fresh and allows for different play styles depending on the game. But I would reserve all the other game types for situational circumstances only.
For example, if there is a demolition contract to win 1 game without allowing the other team to detonate a point, go ahead and spend 10 minutes completing that. It is worth it in the long run. Also, there are game type specific challenges that can be completed when you unlock them. For example, did you know that you will earn 3000 XP for completing 2 challenges just by winning 2 games of sabotage in under 2 minutes? (Sabotage is one of the fastest game types out there when you have a good team)
There are also certain challenges that are much easier to complete on certain game types. For example, all of the final killcam challenges are much easier to get when playing free for all. Because FFA ends at 30 kills simply race to 29 kills with your best weapon and then call in all of your killstreaks at the end to try to get the final killcam with your killstreak. Each final killcam challenge is worth 2500XP, that is a very quick way to get some massive XP at later levels.
Class setups & weapons
Class setups are extremely important to leveling up quickly. One of the biggest mistakes players make when trying to level up quickly is that they pick a weapon and perk setup that they enjoy and stick with it through an entire prestige. Not only does this seem boring to me, it also leads to a whole slew of potential experience that you are missing out on. I am going to outline the main ways in which you earn experience through your class setups below:
Weapon Challenges
Each primary weapon in the game has 2 basic weapon challenges, the marksman challenge (kills) & the expert challenge (headshots). These challenges are progressive in that you start off on tier 1 with only 10 kills required to earn 250XP and then each tier the amount of kills required to complete and the XP rewarded increases. Looking at the chart below you can see that the XP per kill is the best at 1000 kills per weapon. Weapon types and weapon attachments also have a similar tier challenge. Weapon types reach it’s peak XP per kill at 2000 Kills and weapon attachments reach their peak at 1000 kills.
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