Beginner's Guide to Ghost Perk in Black Ops Cold War

In this short tutorial, we are going to look at the Ghost Perk in Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War and exactly how it works? 

Now, for veterans this will be an extremely basic guide and you will learn nothing from this tutorial. So just a disclaimer there especially for people that have played previous Black Ops games but for a lot of people this is their very first Black Ops game and therefore, they're confused about how the Ghost Perk works in this game because in last year's Call Of Duty Modern Warfare Ghost was always active for you if you had it on your class setup it was always working whereas in Cold War and many other Black Ops games Ghost only works if you're moving and people want to know what that threshold is and this movement threshold actually does change from Black ops game to Black Ops Game and Black Ops 4 was incredibly unforgiving. Basically, you had to be sprinting in order for Ghosts to be working at that time and the moment you'd stop sprinting Ghosts would deactivate and therefore, it was a pretty weak perk in that game. In Black Ops Cold War I did a bunch of testing to find out the thresholds and it turns out your movement threshold appears to be exactly 5 miles per hour. So any movement speed below 5 miles per hour and Ghost won't be activating for you. You’ll show up on the radar for enemies that have a spy plane in the air. However, with any movement that's faster than 5 miles per hour this is when ghosts will activate and you will now be hidden from those spy planes as long as you continue moving at that speed. 

Now, that might be a little bit confusing because how do you know if you're going 5 miles per hour or faster? Well, first you could look at the weapon stats and you can see it's usually the aim down sight movement speed you want to be focusing on with any one of the guns in the game. As long as you're standing up and moving forward at full speed even without sprinting Ghost will be working for you because you're going to be moving well above 5 miles per hour. However, with all of the assault rifles, tactical rifles, LMGs and snipers if you don't have any attachments that improve your aim walking movement speed Ghost won't be activating for you. If you're aiming and walking forward for all the other guns the SMGs, the pistols as well as the shotguns Ghost will activate when aiming down sight and walking at full speed and thankfully we actually have a really easy way of telling if Ghost is currently working for you, while you're actually in the game playing and this is if you look at your mini-map you see that you have your own arrow on that mini-map and it has a little bit of a yellow glow around the edges of it when that yellow glow is visible Ghost is not working for you and you'll notice that's how it appears when you're not moving at all even when you have ghost equipped. If however, you start moving faster than 5 miles per hour you will see that it sort of fades away and you've now got more of a faded arrow when you're seeing this faded version of the arrow this means Ghost is currently active for you and spy planes won't be able to pick you up as long as you continue moving at this speed and then you'll notice if you stop that yellow outline will reappear and Ghost has deactivated. So that's a super simple method to see if you're moving enough for Ghosts to be working for you and this is where I wanted to get into.

Just how much you have to move or how little you have to move in order to keep Ghost active because for a lot of people they do want to hold a particular power position but they want to stay off the radar and they want to know how much they have to be moving around in order to stay off the radar. Well, you just have to move in a little bit of a circle and that's just fine and even while aiming down sight. It does depend on the attachments you have.

Now, the downside to doing this especially if you're in a potentially close quarter situation is if you're using ghost and not using ninja then a competent player is just going to be hearing your footsteps anyway and they'll actually have a better indication of exactly where you are compared to if they were seeing you on the mini-map. So that is something to be aware of if you are trying this technique of staying off the radar while still holding a particular position.

There's one last thing that I just wanted to mention here, which is stated in the perk description but Ghost will also be working for you if you're calling in a streak where you have to pull up one of those tablets to be calling in your streak and it will also be active for you when planting or defusing a bomb in search and destroy for instance and with that that pretty much covers it.

Ghost is really as simple as that make sure you're having a look at your arrow on the mini-map to see what your movement speed thresholds are and that should allow you to get a pretty good feel for things as for my opinion on how they've balanced Ghosts this time around with Cold War.

I actually think they've found a pretty good balance. I'm a big fan of having this style of ghost where you have to be moving in order for it to be active because that just takes a lot of the power away from those people that will literally just sit in a random corner and wait for somebody to walk by. Those people will have quite a bit less power if you've got a spy plane in the air. However, at the same time I feel like Black Ops 4's version of Ghost where you essentially had to be sprinting all the time for it to stay active that was far too unforgiving and I didn't like that very much either. I think Cold War has found that perfect middle ground where as long as you're maintaining some movement you're not just sitting in the exact same spot Ghost is going to be working great for you but if you're stopping and just standing still and pre-aiming a lane or sitting in a corner and not doing anything then Ghost will no longer be helping you. Of course that is just my opinion on this.