Black Ops: The Quickest Prestige – Update #1

I’m currently trying to find out the exact quickest route to prestige in Call of Duty: Black Ops, having reached Level 8 on Sunday, allowing me to begin testing.

So my plan was simple – flip the prestige switch, and then hit whichever gametype gave me the most rewards in the least time, and that seems to be Headquarters. I know that it’s possible to get high XP rewards via Search and Destroy, but there’s still the possibility of ending up with nothing at the end of a really bad game – and in Headquarters, you’re guaranteed to get something in a bad game, and lots of XP in a good game. Plus you’ll also get the appropriate bonuses for Killstreaks and various other kill milestones with each weapon.

So what happened?

In the first three games of Headquarters, I went from Level 1 to Level 9, so averaged 3 levels per game.

Things then slowed down a little, with 4 more games lifting 5 more levels until I finished for the day on Level 14, after 7 games, meaning an average of 2 levels per match, and each match generally taking around 10-15 minutes including time in lobby.

So how long does that mean it will take to reach 9th Prestige at the current rate?

Well, let’s say that I average 1 level per match of Headquarters (From experience the 45-50 stretch will take 2 or 3 matches to get through, bringing the average down quite a bit). And with delays and jumping into games etc, say each match is around 20 minutes of waiting in a lobby and playing time.

That’s 1000 minutes per prestige. Or 16.6 hours.

That seems pretty reasonable, considering I may level up slightly quicker as Lifetime rewards tick up to decent levels, balancing out the bigger jumps later in the prestige. It’s also reasonable in line with my experience of levelling up by only really playing Team Deathmatch, which saw me reach level 7 in around 8.5 days of playing time.

Given that I can manage 3-4 hours of Call of Duty on a reasonable night, that means in theory, I could potentially prestige once a week, and reach level 15 by October (assuming I don’t do any work or blogging etc in the evening).

So do you think a prestige a week is a reasonable rate of levelling up? Have you done better?

And if you’re interested, my route so far has been:

• Use the M16 as the standard first gun after some messing around with the MP5.
• Immediately buy Slight of Hand, Ghost, and Hacker Perks, and Claymores.
• Invest in a suppressor for the M16, and Flashbang grenades (I never particularly enjoy smoke grenades).
• And then just keep playing until level 14, at which point every loadout gets their weapon replaced by the Famas.