Season 1 landed with a weapon balancing pass that touches every class in Modern Warfare 4, and the shape of it matters more than the length of it. Infinity Ward mostly left maximum damage alone. What moved was range, the distance at which a weapon stops hitting for its top number, plus a handful of hit location multipliers. Read it next to the other line in the same notes, maximum health in Hardcore modes cut from 30 to 22, and this stops being a patch note and starts being a loadout decision.
Confirmed. Every number here is read off Infinity Ward's own Season 1 patch notes on callofduty.com, and Dexerto transcribed the same tables independently on November 5. What is not official is how the pass feels at 22 health, because the notes publish damage values and not shot counts.
Why Hardcore SnD cares
Hardcore Search is a shot-count game. You are not managing a health bar across a long trade, you are finding out whether the gun in your hands resolves a duel in one trigger pull or two at the distance the map actually gives you. Damage range is the number that decides that, and Season 1 moved it on the guns most likely to be in an SnD class.
- Range, not damage the M4 holds maximum damage out to 27.94 meters instead of 25.91, the Patriot XMR to 33.53 instead of 31.24, the Mosin-Nagant to 40.13 instead of 36.83, and the Oris 8.6 to 22.61 instead of 19.05. Nothing about the first shot changed. Where the first shot stops being the best shot did.
- Headshot multipliers crept up the M4 and Han 86 go from 1.25 to 1.3 at the head, the Kastov 762 from 1.33 to 1.35 with neck and upper torso up from 1.08 to 1.1, and the Wz.55 Striga from 1.3 to 1.4. The APOC-338 went the other way, from 1.35 down to 1.3.
- The Hyperburst is a different gun now the Hyeon Burst Hyperburst Apex Attachment drops from 30 to 23 maximum damage and loses its medium damage tier entirely, while its maximum damage range extends from 24.64 to 30.99 meters. It trades burst lethality for a flatter, longer profile.
- The VEL 46 got pulled in all three of its damage ranges shrank by 4 to 5 percent while minimum damage rose from 13 to 14. It wants a closer fight than it did last week.
What it means for your class
If your SnD class was built around holding a long lane, the Patriot XMR, Mosin-Nagant and Oris 8.6 all got quietly better at the job you already had them doing. If it was built on the VEL 46 closing distance through a smoke, that gun now asks you to get closer than your muscle memory expects. And if you ran the Hyperburst as a burst-kill tool, that tool was replaced rather than tuned: the attachment that used to delete at range now delivers less per shot over more ground.
Nothing about the first shot changed. Where the first shot stops being the best shot did.
What the numbers do not tell you
The patch notes publish damage values, not shot counts, and they publish one set of values rather than a Core set and a Hardcore set. Infinity Ward also cut Hardcore maximum health from 30 to 22 in the same drop without saying how the two changes interact. So the honest position is this: the tuning table is official and exact, and the Hardcore consequence of it is arithmetic nobody has published. Treat any shot-count claim you read today, including one you work out yourself, as a thing to verify in a private match rather than a settled fact.
Load a private match on a long map, set Hardcore rules, and check the ranges that matter to your class rather than the full table. The two numbers worth confirming yourself are whether your primary still resolves a duel in one shot at the far end of your usual lane, and whether the Hyperburst still earns its slot now that it gives up seven points of maximum damage.