Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 – Best M8A1 Loadout

Welcome to ourM8A1 Loadout guide for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. In this guide, we will provide you with a powerful and beginner-friendly loadout for the M8A1 Marksman Rifle. The M8A1 features powerful four-round bursts, but has a lengthy burst cooldown that makes accuracy essential. In this loadout, we will build the M8A1 with attachments to further augment the gun’s strengths and improve its versatility.

We cover the best weapon attachments, perks and upgrades for your loadout.

If you want to come up with your own loadouts, you might also be interested in our Top Five Weapons and Top Ten Best Perks for Black Ops 7.

Table of Contents:

• M8A1 Loadout Summary
• M8A1 Loadout – Slot Choices
  • Best Weapons
  • Best Field Upgrade & Grenades
  • Best Perks & Wildcard
• M8A1 Loadout – Best Attachments

Black Ops 7 M8A1 Loadout Summary

The M8A1 is a marksman rifle that features four-round burst fire. These bursts are rapid and powerful, but between the bursts there is a moderate cooldown that can leave you vulnerable. For this reason it is very important that you have good accuracy, as you’ll be at a disadvantage if you need to wait for your next burst. With this loadout, we’ll optimise the M8A1 to build on its greatest strengths and improve on its accuracy and ease of use.

We’ll be using the Gunfighter Wildcard to add as many bonuses as possible to the M8A1.

This loadout will also make use of Dexterity, allowing you move around quickly and aim down your sight when you are jumping, diving and sliding. Once set up correctly, this build is quite versatile and very easy to play, but more skilled players can push it to its limit with expert use of Dexterity’s benefits.

If you like the sound of this, then read on below and I will explain every aspect of the loadout.

M8A1 Loadout – What To Put in All Slots

To begin with, we’ll look at the basic elements of the best M8A1 loadout for Black Ops 7. I.e. the weapons, wildcard, grenades and perks.

Best Weapons

You can slot two guns and one melee weapon.

Slot	Weapon	Description
Primary	M8A1	The M8A1 is a marksman rifle with powerful four-round bursts that can quickly kill an opponent, but can leave you in a tight spot if you miss the shots.
Secondary	Jäger 45	The Jäger 45 is, in my view, the best secondary weapon in the game and can even be used as your main weapon for an off-meta pistol build. But for this loadout it’s purely there as a backup.
Melee	Any	Your melee weapon is not super important. I recommend trying them all out and just using the one you like the most.

Best Field Upgrade & Grenades

You can augment your loadout with a field upgrade and choose one tactical and one lethal grenade.

Slot	Item	Overclock
Field Upgrade	Active Camo	Recloak (Gunfire reveals you temporarily instead of ending the ability)
Tactical	Stim Shot	Combat Performance Boost (Adds a move speed boost)
Lethal	Cluster Grenade	Tighter Packing (One additional mini grenade)

The Overclocks are unlocked by using the items in games. When you reach a high enough rank with the item, you will unlock the overclock. Remember to open the item in your Loadout menu and equip the desired overclock!

The Assault Pack allows you to spawn ammo and equipment to resupply your team. The Lucky Ammo overclock passively increases the amount of score you earn from kills.

The grenades are largely a matter of personal preference and you can change them if you want, but the speed boost from the Stim Shot’s performance overclock is very useful in a game where fast movement is one of the most important qualities of an efficient player.

Best Perks & Wildcard

You can choose three Perks and one Wildcard to fine-tune your loadout. You also unlock one Combat Specialty which depends on the colour combination of selected Perks.

Slot	Item	Description
Wildcard	Gunfighter	Doubles the amount of attachment slots on your guns, which will allow us to stack as many buffs onto the M8A1 as possible.
Perk 1	Ghost	Undetectable by enemy Scout Pulse and UAV when moving, planting, defusing, or controlling Scorestreaks.
Perk 2	Looper*	After spending your accumulated killstreak, you can begin earning a new one on the same life.
Perk 3	Dexterity	Reduces weapon sway. More importantly, allows you to aim down your sight when sliding, diving or wall jumping.
Combat Specialty	Scout	When you get a bullet kill, stay completely hidden from enemy minimaps for 5 seconds. Additional kills during this period reset the timer.

The Gunfighter Wildcard and Dexterity perk are essential for this Loadout to work properly, and I don’t recommend changing them.

The Looper perk allows you to use multiple killstreak rewards in the same life. I prefer to spend it on cheaper rewards in quick succession, which can help out your team a lot by spamming UAVs, for example. But you can try saving up for more expensive killstreaks, too. The better you are at Black Ops 7, the more you can get out of this perk. If you’re a new player and struggle to amass killstreaks on even a semi-regular basis, then you can temporarily replace Looper with another perk of your choice. Just don’t pick a green perk or we’ll lose out on the combat specialty.

Speaking of the Combat Specialty, for combining only red and blue Perks, we get the Scout specialty. Whenever you get a bullet kill, you’ll be invisible from minimaps for 5 seconds. This is excellent for ambushing an enemy and then evading any immediate attempts to pursue you.

See also: What Are Combat Specialties in Black Ops 7?

M8A1 Loadout – Best M8A1 Attachments

Now that the rest of the build is created, all that remains is to customise the M8A1 itself to ensure this powerful marksman rifle fulfills its potential. As mentioned above, you will need the Gunfighter Wildcard to slot all of the attachments mentioned below. You also might need to play the game for a while to unlock everything here. If selecting a placeholder attachment (because an advised option isn’t available yet) avoid anything with negative effects, particularly if they reduce your speed, stability or accuracy.

I hope you liked this M8A1 loadout for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. Check out the pages below for more builds and guides.

More Black Ops 7 Guides:

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