If you like holding capture points and watching enemies suffer, Season 3 of Black Ops 7 just handed you a new toy. The in-season Scorestreak called the Ion Core is a deployable device that pulses radiation and hurts anyone unlucky enough to be inside its blast area.
What the Ion Core does
The Ion Core will cost 1,175 score to earn once it drops in Season 3. You put it on the ground and it starts a cycle of pulses. Each cycle begins small, grows to a larger radius, disappears, and then repeats. Players caught in the mid-sized pulse take damage.
Here are the main points:
- Deployable device placed on the ground.
- Emits repeating radiation pulses with a growing then shrinking radius.
- Damages anyone inside the mid-sized radius.
- Penetrates walls, working in both multiplayer and Zombies.
Because it damages through cover, the Ion Core is especially useful on objective modes. It can force players off a point, weaken attackers as they try to push, and generally make contesting much more unpleasant.
Overclocks and customization
The Ion Core can be tweaked with Overclocks to make it harder to ignore. Two examples shown so far are:
- Plutonium Core: increases how long the device stays active.
- Chemical Catalyst: shortens the downtime between pulses so it deals damage more consistently.
Those changes are the difference between a one-off annoyance and a constant area-denial tool. How much of a game-changer the Ion Core becomes will depend on how much damage each pulse actually deals when it is live.
We do not have final numbers yet, so the real power of the Ion Core will be clear only after it drops later in Season 3. Based on the description, though, it already looks like a top-tier Scorestreak for players who like to control objectives.
