Mechanics

Black Ops 2 runs on two budgets. In multiplayer, Create a Class gives you ten points and charges you one for every perk, every attachment, every piece of equipment and every Wildcard, which means a Wildcard really costs two: one for the card and one for the extra thing it lets you carry. In the campaign the budget is eleven decisions, spread across eleven missions, and they settle which of the endings you finish on.

Neither budget is presented to you as a budget in game, which is why so many loadouts quietly overspend and so many first playthroughs land on an ending the player did not choose. This guide takes the multiplayer half first and the campaign half second.

What a pick costs you

Perk lists are usually sorted by unlock level. That is the wrong sort for a system with a hard cap, because level tells you when you get a thing and cost tells you whether you can afford it. Here are the seven perks and the eight Wildcards in one table, sorted by what they take out of your ten.

Three Wildcards is the ceiling in a single loadout. Take all three and six of your ten points are gone before you have chosen a gun.

Spending the ten: three jobs a class can do

Take less damage than you should

Flak Jacket sits in Perk 1 and is the reason rushers survive Claymores. Our perks page is worth reading carefully here, because it gives two different figures for how much explosive damage it removes, 25 percent in its table and a cut to 35 percent of the original in its text, with 9 percent quoted for hardcore. Whichever holds, the important caveats are the ones it is clear about: it does nothing about your own explosives, and it does not make you a bigger target, since it shares a hitbox with every other first tier perk despite the armour plating it paints on your character. Tactical Mask covers the other half of the problem in Perk 3, halving what shock charges and flash or concussion grenades do to you, which is what makes a riot shield playable. It does not help against an EMP. Cost for both: 2 of 10, or 4 if you Greed either slot.

Move and handle your gun faster

Lightweight is the cheapest useful perk in the game, available at level 1, adding 7 percent movement speed and removing fall damage. It has a ceiling worth knowing: our page notes that assault rifles and sniper rifles still travel at 95 percent of base speed and light machine guns at 90, so the perk raises a floor rather than making every gun fast. Extreme Conditioning extends your sprint, which is what turns a hardpoint into a race you win. Fast Hands is the most misunderstood of the three, because it does not touch reload speed and it does not raise rate of fire on bolt actions or pump shotguns; the animation when you bring the gun up is quicker, which is not the same thing. It speeds up weapon swaps and equipment use, and it is worth its point if you throw a lot of grenades or carry a shield. Cost: 3 of 10 for all three, spread across two tiers.

Stay hidden and get streaks sooner

Dead Silence takes 60 percent off your footsteps, which is enough to flank and not enough to be silent, since jumping, firing and crossing water or grating will still give you away. Hardline is the one perk on the list with arithmetic attached. It takes 20 percent off what a Scorestreak costs, so a Swarm falls from 1,900 points to 1,520, which our page puts at nearly four kills in the standard modes, and a UAV falls from 350 to 280, which is less than a single kill. That gap is the whole argument: the higher the streak, the more the perk gives back, and on the cheap end you are spending one of ten points to save yourself less than a kill. It earns its slot most obviously in Free for All, where killing is the only way you score. Cost: 2 of 10.

The seven perks, ranked

Our multiplayer perks guide ranks them seven to one, and the order is worth reproducing because it disagrees with how they are usually rated.

1. Seventh, Extreme Conditioning. A Perk 3 that wins you the opening sprint and little else, though it stacks well with a Greed card in the same tier.
2. Sixth, Tactical Mask. Situational rather than weak. It is the perk you bring when grenades are what keep killing you, and the one perk on our list whose unlock level our page never states.
3. Fifth, Lightweight. Cheap, available immediately, and honest about its limits with heavier guns.
4. Fourth, Hardline. Ranked here rather than higher because the saving only matters at the top of the streak list.
5. Third, Flak Jacket. Rated as the strongest perk in the game on short maps, and specifically as a rusher's answer to the Claymores that punish rushing.
6. Second, Fast Hands. A quiet perk that is mostly bought for the wrong reason, and still worth a point for shields and equipment.
7. First, Dead Silence. Top of our list for the simple reason that not being heard changes where you can go.

The eight Wildcards, by what they buy back

Wildcards unlock on their own as you level; nothing needs to be earned. Grouping them by what they hand back makes the trade clearer than a flat list does.

Tactician is the only card on the list that is a swap rather than an addition, which makes it the cheapest of the eight in practice. The full list with unlock levels is on our Wildcards guide, and if you would rather see all of this assembled into finished classes, our class loadouts guide spends the ten points ten different ways.

The campaign runs on eleven decisions

Spoilers from here, because the second budget is made of plot. Eleven moments across the campaign are recorded and read back at the end. Here they are in the order you meet them, with the endings each one feeds.

Eight of the eleven never change. Only three do any work: whether Woods comes out of Pyrrhic Victory, whether you find the file in Time and Fate, and what you do to Menendez at the end.

Who lives, who dies

Ending 2 is the one people reach by accident, because capturing Menendez is the merciful looking option in a scene that offers you a gun. Ending 3 is the same run with the trigger pulled. Ending 4 is what you get when the campaign has gone badly rather than differently, and it is defined by the two things you did not do earlier rather than by anything at the finish.

One inconsistency is worth flagging while you plan a run. Our endings guide lists the Suffer with Me step identically for all three endings even though endings 2 and 3 are the ones where Woods survives, so treat that step as the one to verify against your own playthrough rather than as settled.

The ending this page does not cover

There is a better outcome than any of the three above, and it does not sit on the same eleven step list. It wants Kravchenko interrogated rather than killed, Menendez recorded without looking away, Defalco chased down before he takes Karma with him, the Nexus target shot in the leg twice rather than killed, Harper sacrificed to keep Farid's cover, Briggs shot in the leg to save him, all five Strike Missions completed, and Menendez captured at the end. Our best ending guide walks that run mission by mission, and it is the one to follow if you only intend to play the campaign once.