Armor has always been a point of contention in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s Blackout mode. While it is absolutely necessary to have — it helps to block damage during a fight — it would rarely last more than one encounter. This often forced players to choose between using up their armor by fighting, or simply hiding until they couldn’t anymore in order to preserve the defensive resource until the last possible moment.
Thankfully, over the last couple of weeks, Black Ops 4 developer Treyarch attempted to fix the game’s armor to be a bit more usable by adding a resource that can restore armor, similar to health. The first change, which came last week as a part of title update 1.09, introduced armor plates to the game. The plates acted just like the game’s bandages, which restore a small amount of health, but for armor, patching up whatever damage it had taken in firefights.
In order to get armor plates, players can either loot it from the ground — though its spawn chances are low — or they can loot it from fallen players. This meant that the winner of a firefight was most likely able to repair their armor after the fight rather than getting punished for using their resources.
After a week of seeing how these changes played out, Treyarch released title update 1.10 which brings a few changes to this system. The biggest change is that all armor will now have the same durability. This should help with level-three armor often overpowering any other type. Also important is that plates can now only stack up to five, down from 10 when they were first released, and the plates themselves will take a little longer to apply — three seconds instead of two.
Overall, this is definitely a nerf to armor plates, but repairing your armor and keeping a few plates in your inventory should still be worthwhile. The new update is now live for all versions of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.
For a full look at what else changed with this patch you can look at the full notes.