If you have just unlocked a new gun in Black Ops 7: Endgame and it feels useless without attachments, you are not alone; this mode can be a grind unless you lean into how weapon XP really works and pair that with a smart loop, almost like you would when you stack advantages in a CoD BO7 Bot Lobby run, and once you understand that the gun in your hands at the moment an objective completes is the only one gaining XP, the whole flow of a match starts to look very different.

Chasing Weapon XP The Right Way

Most players jump into Endgame and scatter between contracts, side events, and random fighting in the zone. It feels active, but weapon XP moves slowly. If all you care about is levelling one gun, that approach is kind of a trap. You do not need a perfect build, meta relics, or some wild perk combo. You can spawn in with a barebones setup, as long as the weapon you want to level is actually in your hands whenever you finish an objective. That detail gets overlooked a lot. Folks swap to a secondary to feel safer and then wonder why the main gun barely moves.

Why HVT Missions Are The Core Of The Meta

The big shift happens when you stop treating Endgame like a checklist of objectives and start treating High-Value Target missions as your entire plan. On the tac map, HVTs sit there with that simple crosshair icon, easy to see and even easier to reach. Compared with contracts that make you sit in a circle or haul items back and forth, HVTs are quick hits. You push in, delete the target, and you are done in seconds if your aim is half decent. For that tiny time investment, the game throws a big chunk of weapon XP at you plus a nice bump in combat rating. When you stack that over a full match, you see huge progress that is very hard to match with any “play everything” style.

Staying Aggressive And Keeping The Loop Alive

There is one habit that kills this strategy: looting on autopilot. You finish an HVT, the room explodes into loot, and your brain wants to check every crate. That is where time disappears. Instead, as soon as the target drops and the reward pops, you should already be popping open the map, tagging the next HVT, and moving. Think in terms of a loop that runs across multiple zones. Clear one contract in a region, slide into the next area, grab another HVT, and keep that chain rolling. If you sit in one district too long and spam every icon, you drain the map and end up wandering, which is exactly what slows weapon levelling down.

Turning One Match Into Three Matches Of Progress

When you commit to this pace, the match feels different. You are always rotating, always chasing the next target, rarely stuck waiting around. The XP flow starts to feel like it does when people optimise a private grind in a controlled setup such as certain CoD BO7 Bot Lobbies buy routes, but you are doing it straight in Endgame with normal matchmaking, and if you keep that HVT loop tight, one run with solid focus can push a weapon through levels that would normally take three or four casual matches of mixed objectives and random fights.