The Season 1 notes for Modern Warfare 4 carry a short equipment section that is easy to scroll past. It is four lines, three of them about the claymore, and together they change how a bomb site gets held and how a post-plant gets played.
Confirmed. Every number here is read directly from the equipment adjustments list in Infinity Ward's official Modern Warfare 4 Season 1 patch notes, posted November 5, 2026 ahead of the season going live. These are shipped values, not a plan.
What changed
- Claymore arming 1s to 0.75s A quarter second off the window where a claymore is placed but still harmless.
- Prox mine arming 1.5s to 0.75s Half the old delay. The proximity mine was the slowest trap in the game to go live and now matches the claymore.
- Claymore reach 2.29m to 3.18m The forward triggerable range grows by about 39 percent, so an enemy no longer has to walk nearly on top of it.
- Claymore cone 60 to 80 degrees A third more angular coverage, which matters most on the wide approaches where a claymore used to get walked around.
Why Hardcore SnD cares
Search and Destroy is the mode where equipment timing decides rounds. A trap that is not armed yet is a trap that is not there, and the gap between placing it and it going live is exactly the window an attacker exploits when they rush a site behind a plant.
- Post-plant gets stronger Drop a claymore as you rotate off the bomb and it is live three quarters of a second later. The window for an attacker who wants to walk straight onto the defuse shrinks.
- Prox mines stop being decoration A 1.5 second arm meant a prox mine thrown in reaction to footsteps did nothing at all. At 0.75 it can still catch the player you heard.
- Wide approaches close up The extra reach and the wider cone make the practiced wall-hugging path past a claymore less reliable. Re-walk the angles you used to trust.
- Bomb Squad is worth a second look Explosive equipment that triggers more often makes its counter worth arguing about again, against whatever your team currently runs in that slot.
A trap that is not armed is not a trap. Season 1 shortens that gap to three quarters of a second.
What is not in the notes
The notes give arming times, forward range and cone, and nothing else. There is no listed change to claymore damage, to its rear trigger behavior, or to how a Trophy System or Bomb Squad interacts with it, and no separate Hardcore values are published. The Argonaut health increase and the heavy Crossfire nerf in the same section are killstreak changes, not equipment ones. Everything here is a public-notes value, so test it in a private match before you build a post-plant routine on top of it.