Call of Duty 2025 Guide FAQ: Answering the Most Common Questions

ok so i've put way too many hours into endgame this month and figured i'd write this up since the game explains basically nothing about how the rotation works

endgame is this weekly rotating thing in bo7 that alternates between three completely different modes every single tuesday at 10am pt. honestly it's kinda like if someone mashed up zombies with spec ops and threw in a little extraction shooter vibe. tbh i didnt get it at first. but once you understand the rotation it's pretty straightforward. just three modes on a fixed weekly cycle

week 1 is endless archive, a 15 floor dungeon crawl, pve only. week 2 is last stand, extraction mode with 4 squads of 3 players each and it's pvpve. week 3 is siege protocol, 20 waves of defense. then it just loops back to the start and repeats the exact same pattern every three weeks without any variation at all. what's nice is your progress sticks around within the same mode for that whole week, so if you get to floor 12 on wednesday you start at 12 on thursday. but once the rotation changes your checkpoint is gone and nothing carries over to the next mode, fresh start every time

endless archive is where most people should be spending their time honestly. floors 1 through 5 are a joke. literally just standard enemies and simple layouts that you can breeze through without thinking. floors 6 through 10 adds armored enemies and some environmental hazards you gotta watch for, not hard exactly but not brainless either. 11 through 15 is when it actually gets real, bosses every other floor with the final boss on floor 15 dropping the monthly exclusive operator skin that everyone is grinding for

for loadouts i've found the ames 85 with fmj rounds is basically non-negotiable, extended mag ii, compensator, vertical foregrip, whatever optic you like. the fmj part matters because armored enemies past floor 7 take roughly 40% less damage without it. not sure if that number is exact. but it's definitely very noticeable when you're suddenly shooting marshmallows at armored enemies and wondering why nothing is dying. secondary i run the asg-89 shotgun for boss floors because the spread makes hitting those awkward weak points way easier up close, and if you pack a punch it the thing melts bosses faster than any ar i've ever tried running through those fights. stim shot for tactical since medkits basically dont exist past floor 7, they just stop dropping completely after a certain point and you're stuck relying on whatever the enemies randomly leave behind. munitions box for field upgrade, those ammo crates on floors 10 and up cost 5000 points each and that adds up stupid fast when you're burning through ammo on the harder floors

so here's the thing that actually makes floors 11 through 15 doable instead of being a miserable slog where you wipe on floor 13 every single time. save your scorestreaks. do not blow a cruise missile on floor 8 just because there's a crowd of enemies and it looks satisfying. hoard everything through the first 10 floors like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold. then on floor 14, right before the final boss door, drop it all at once. sentry turrets aimed at the boss arena entrance. cruise missiles to thin the first spawn wave. chopper gunner saved exclusively for the second phase when things get chaotic. the final boss has way more hp than anything before it and spawns adds that will stun lock you if you don't deal with them immediately, it's not even close to the floor 10 boss in terms of how quickly things can spiral out of control

the june skin is reaper protocol for nazir, drops from the floor 15 boss, available until june 30th so you've got about three more endless archive windows left this month if you're trying to grab it before it rotates out forever. july is supposedly void walker for weaver but that's from datamining. so who actually knows if it's real or just some dataminer seeing what they want to see in the files. may had arctic phantom for sev but that's already gone, rotated out at the end of may and there's no way to get it anymore

last stand is... look i'm gonna be real with you. this mode frustrates me. four squads of three on a shrinking map with pve objectives and pvp encounters mixed together, and the biggest mistake people make is treating it like warzone. it's not. it absolutely is not warzone. it's an extraction mode. pure extraction. the goal is getting out with loot, not killing every single player on the map

land at the edges. don't go center. the radio tower or the dam are both perfectly fine spots to land with enough starter gear for a full squad plus a guaranteed vehicle spawn, while the center technically has better loot on paper but three squads are gonna fight over it and you'll lose at least one teammate before the first objective even pops up on your screen

there's always one primary objective marked with a diamond icon that gives your whole squad a stacking extraction bonus, secondary objectives with circles give individual loot only and arent worth nearly as much if you're trying to get the best rewards. the data cache objective takes about a minute to capture and it broadcasts your position to everyone on the map so do not start the capture until you're fully set up defensively with everyone in position and watching the approach angles. i cannot stress that enough. setting up first is the single thing that separates successful extractions from squad wipes in this mode

one thing i've learned the hard way after way too many failed runs where i got greedy and pushed a fight i shouldnt have. don't start pvp fights. when you hear gunfire in the distance wait for one squad to finish off the other, then push while they're reviving and looting at half health with no plates, and you can clean up the whole thing in like 20 seconds flat if you time it right. and for the love of god extract early if you have good stuff. there are three extraction windows per match. not just the final one. if your squad pulled a seasonal blueprint or a gold weapon part by the 12 minute mark just leave, greed kills way more runs than bad aim in this mode and i am not even exaggerating about that

extraction zones are camped maybe 40% of the time so before you call extraction scout the area with a sniper scope from at least 100m out, if you see any movement at all just rotate to the other extraction point since there's always two active zones until the final window. simple rule: see movement, go somewhere else, don't gamble on the zone being clear when it probably isnt

but honestly if you're solo queuing just skip last stand entirely because it's the only endgame mode without fill matchmaking for team voice, and a squad of randoms without comms is gonna get absolutely farmed by premade trios every single time without exception. endless archive and siege protocol both work fine with random teammates but last stand does not, not even close

siege protocol is the 20 wave defense mode where you hold a central objective against waves that get progressively harder with boss waves every 5th wave. and here's what's weird about it. this mode rewards patience more than aggression which is like the complete opposite of how every cod player i know approaches literally anything in this game

waves 1 through 5 just focus on building barricades at the two main chokepoints, north gate and east tunnel on the default map, with fully upgraded barricades costing 2000 points each and tanking somewhere around 45 seconds of concentrated enemy fire before they break. waves 6 through 10 buy a sentry turret for the north gate and upgrade it once for 1000 points, and that sentry will handle most enemies from that direction so you can focus entirely on holding the east tunnel without splitting your attention. waves 11 through 15 get a second sentry for the east tunnel, by now you should have enough points from kills to fully upgrade both turrets, and the double sentry setup is the meta for a reason since it handles all standard enemies while you deal with specials. waves 16 through 20 is where everything falls apart if you're not completely prepared with maxed out defenses and full scorestreak reserves

for weapons the ames 85 with fmj and extended mag ii works great for waves 1 through 15. but for boss waves swap to an lmg. the pu-21 with fmj and the biggest magazine you can attach. bosses have damage resistance against ars and smgs specifically but lmgs bypass that resistance entirely, and this isnt mentioned anywhere in the actual game menus or tooltips but the community has tested it extensively and confirmed that it works this way

drop a munitions box near the objective before wave 16 starts because you will absolutely run out of ammo without it i promise you. two boxes if you're running a full squad since you'll burn through something like 600 rounds per player across the final four waves combined, and the last thing you want in wave 19 is to be standing there with an empty gun watching the objective health tick down

and the single most important siege protocol tip that nobody ever talks about in any guide or video i've seen. repair barricades between waves, not during them. the repair animation takes 3 seconds and leaves you completely exposed, enemies will absolutely punish you for it every single time. between waves you get 30 seconds of downtime so use every second of it, because going into wave 16 with fully repaired barricades versus damaged ones is literally the difference between clearing it comfortably and wiping with the objective at like 20% health while everyone is screaming

so for farming efficiency here's what i do. weapon xp spam endless archive floors 5 through 10 on repeat, clear floor 10 then quit and restart, each run takes about 12 minutes and gives way more weapon xp per minute than any multiplayer mode in the game. operator xp i do siege protocol waves 1 through 10 since the denser enemy spawns make it faster than endless archive for leveling operators specifically. exclusive skins require the floor 15 boss in endless archive and that's a 35 to 45 minute full commitment with a good group, so do it once per month for the skin then go back to farming floors 5 through 10 for everything else. seasonal blueprints come from last stand extractions with roughly a 15% drop rate from the data cache objective when you have the extraction bonus active, but honestly the randomness can be brutal and some people go weeks without seeing one drop

anyway that's everything i've figured out after way too many hours grinding this mode. feel free to correct me on any numbers, i'm going off memory here and honestly some of the drop rates might be off by a few percent or i might be misremembering which weeks had which skins...