You have a number of options to choose from when picking what to use in your various classes in Call of Duty. The weapon and corresponding attachments make up the lion’s share of the loadout, but the other factors like your equipment and perks can make the difference between you surviving an encounter or not ending up in the gulag.

From just the time it’s been active, regular players will know what the go-to weapons and items to have are. The Kilo, the Mac-10, Ghost, Amped, all of these are widely accepted as being elements that can form the make-up of a good loadout. Then there’s the other things that don’t make for a good loadout…

Medical Syringe

If you wanted to know one of the least picked up pieces of equipment in Call of Duty Warzone, the Medical Syringe would be very near the top of that list (but not quite king of the mountain).

Now there’s a very serious footnote that should go along with this; the Medical Syringe isn’t worth using if you’re playing the game like a good, wholesome individual who doesn’t stoop to the bottomless pit of cheating. However, there are some nefarious players out there who take advantage of the “infinite tacticals” exploit to use the stim to remain in the gas for near eternity, sometimes from the first circle.

While the stim might have some use in regular multiplayer with the more contained but just as frenetic action, in Warzone it has very rare cases of being genuinely useful. It’s also just far more beneficial to have a Stun Grenade or a Heartbeat Monitor in your back pocket than this life-refilling injector.

While “stim glitching” isn’t active at the time of writing, it’s a problem that’s shown its face three times now, so we may not have seen the last of it.

Decoy Grenades

To say Decoy Grenades are “useless” is a bit harsh, but the fact that they occupy the same slot that would be used as a much more effective tactical grenade like Stun or Flash Grenades, heck even Snapshot Grenades have a more valuable use than these, means that it just is not worth using them over the other options you have.

I think about something’s usefulness in video games like Call of Duty in the sense of how many situations or scenarios is it a powerful tool to have. The aforementioned Stun and Flash Grenades are arguably at the apex of the tactical equipment slot, with the Heartbeat Sensor coming in at a very close second.

Flash/Stuns will give you a fighting chance when an enemy gets the drop on you, and someone unaware is almost certainly a confirmed kill. The Heartbeat Sensor gets less powerful the further you get into a game due to more people getting their loadout (and by proxy the Ghost perk), but it’s run by so many people (in Solos especially) for a reason.

Decoy Grenades are simply just outranked by almost every other piece of equipment in their category.

Spotter Scope

I am going to nail my colors to the mast and say with confidence that this is by far, the most useless thing that one could be unfortunate enough to end up with.

Added in Season Four, it seemed by including this bit of kit that Raven wanted to have this be a big addition for players who adapted themselves into a makeshift Support role and make the game a more tactical affair where encounters are approached with careful consideration. Unfortunately, Call of Duty is not a tactical shooter, despite your ability to tactically choose where to find the cheapest CoD keys. It just doesn’t work that way. The person with the bigger and better gun will almost always beat the person with the smaller gun.

While I get wanting to add in a new dynamic for people to approach gunfights, having a Heartbeat Monitor is a much stronger way to make you the recon role for your teammates.

Recon (Weapon Perk)

Perks on weapons are very rarely used, they’ll only really occupy one of the coveted attachment slots if you’re levelling up a weapon and don’t have many options to choose from. The fact that the ability to select them for the Cold War weapons shows that they couldn’t have been popular with the developers, or the people working behind the scenes realised they were a seldomly used upgrade.

From my experience of actual playing and watching various content creators, there are occasional instances where the odd player will use Sleight of Hand if they’re running an LMG like the PKM or the Breun that leaves you exposed for an extended period of time. It may potentially be used on a Sniper Rifle, but often get bumped for use of more contextual perks like Focus or FMJ.

While I understand Raven wanting to diversify the way people play with different perks, but Recon revealing enemy nameplates from further away just doesn’t make it worth taking up a slot to make your weapon better.

Scavenger (Perk)

Back in the days of Modern Warfare 2, Scavenger Pro combined with Lightweight Pro and a USP.45 with the Tactical Knife was either a really fun set up that you used to endlessly roam around the map and get lots of kills, or it was a vicious plague on the lobbies you went in and you hated every pro CoD account that used it.

In the standard multiplayer for Modern Warfare, this will come in handy for players who frequently terrorize their lobbies with high kill streaks and need to plunder extra ammunition from their fallen foes. In the landscape of Verdansk, bullets aren’t that hard to come by, and finishing off just one person will often max out your reserves of SMG/Pistol or Assault Rifle ammo.

With the supplies that Scavenger tops up being so plentiful in Warzone, more often than not by the time you’ve acquired your loadout, the perk will be pointless to have. If the perk did replenish your tactical and lethal grenades, it would be much more useful, but I imagine that Raven scaled it down to only refill throwing knives in order to make it balanced. In doing that, they’ve basically neutered the perk into irrelevance.