In this guide, we guide you through the Main Quests Outbreak Easter Egg. We cover all the relevant locations, optimum weapon loadout, and the best solo strategy to take out the final boss. This easter egg requires proper setup, weapon, and attachments for the final boss fight, unlike the Firebase Z and Die Maschine easter egg. The new custom mods available in Zombies make things much easier, but this guide still covers everything regardless of the custom mod availability. If you find a higher rarity of the same weapon shown in this guide, then you can pick that up and apply your desired custom mod to get the same attachments on a higher-tier weapon! We also have a complete video guide showcasing everything for you to follow along with this written Outbreak easter egg guide.
Video Guide
Setup
You need to set up a couple of things before you jump into a game of Outbreak. This easter egg requires thorough preparation before you can get into the final boss fight. If you are not prepared accordingly, your failure is inevitable (trust us, we failed multiple times). This is certainly one of the harder easter eggs of COD Zombies.
Weapon & Attachments
So far, we’ve seen people running the tactical burst rifle M16 for this boss fight. M16 has become the meta for this easter egg. While it is a viable weapon against the final boss Legion, many players tend to have difficulty due to its burst firing feature and a slower rate of fire than your regular assault rifle. To counter this, another excellent option and our recommended choice is the SMG PPSh-14. That’s right. This classic favorite is one of the best, not just against the regular zombies throughout the easter egg but also the final and one of the hardest bosses in Cold War Zombies.
With the right attachments, the PPSh-14 is an excellent weapon to use in zombies in general. These attachments were selected after a lot of consideration to ensure our PPSh-14 was optimized for both the damage and salvage drop rate. Our PPSh-14 Attachments were as follows:
Optic: Microflex LED Muzzle: KGB Eliminator Barrel: 15.7" Task Force Body: Ember SIghting Point Underbarrel: Bruiser Grip Magazine: Spetsnaz 71 Rnd Drum Handle: GRU Elastic Wrap Stock: Spetsnaz Stock
Custom Mod Save
You can also save the above loadout as a custom mod in zombies for those of you who are not aware. This allows you to apply the custom attachment setups along with the camos on your weapons in the middle of the game.
This is an important feature as, during your game, you might come across a PPSh-14 having a higher rarity than the one you currently loaded into the game with. You pick up that high rarity weapon, but it won’t have the same attachments. This is where the custom mods come into play. You can apply the custom mod to put the saved attachment loadout and camos on that higher rarity weapon. It can help save a lot of time as you won’t have to grind for high-grade salvage or do crystal world events for the aether tool. You can apply the custom mod from your pause menu. Make sure your weapon is equipped when applying the mod.
SMG Blueprint Upgrade
The SMG blueprint was also upgraded to Tier IV. We highly recommend upgrading the SMG blueprint to Tier V.
In the final boss fight, you will notice that when we start shooting the orbs, the critical damage went from around 800 to 2,000. That is the 25% critical bonus at close range, thanks to the SMG weapon blueprint Tier III. If you upgrade your SMG weapon blueprint up to Tier V, then you can do the same amount of critical damage even at longer distances and not just at close range.
Field Upgrades
There are mainly two field upgrades that you need to run for this easter egg with one optional field upgrade. The main field upgrades are the Aether Shroud and Frenzied Guard. The optional field upgrade is the Ring of Fire but in the early rounds (Round 1-3). First, let’s talk about the optional field upgrade. It is just to ensure you do not lose against the elite zombies that spawn during the world events and side-objectives in the beginning rounds as you are still not fully prepared in the game with your custom-built PPSh-14. If you are confident in your skills, you can skip this field upgrade and choose whatever you wish to have. There’s no harm in having it either, though, as you won’t be using the main field upgrades until later into this easter egg.
One of the two main field upgrades is the Frenzied Guard. You need to ensure that it is maxed out to Tier V. There are many good perks that come with different tiers Frenzied Guard has to offer.
The first tier is a no-brainer. Upon activation, your armor repairs fully. This is important as, during the final phases of the easter egg, it can get pretty hectic down in the bunker during the launch keys step. You don’t get enough time to stand by the Arsenal and repair your armor, especially if you’re on PC. The third tier says that the regular zombies will explode when they hit you, which is another good point. The final tier, however, is what makes this field upgrade super useful. It slows down the regular zombies, which is an outstanding feature since, on higher rounds, you get super-sprinters. Super-sprinter is a name given to the zombies on higher rounds as they run extremely fast. This is one of the reasons why buying your perks in a strategic order is also critical. More on that later. Finally, the most important field upgrade of all is the Aether Shroud. You will be running this field upgrade during the final boss fight. Activating Aether Shroud causes the zombies to ignore you. It includes both regular and elite zombies. It is also important to upgrade to at least tier IV (tier V is even better as you get two charges).
This is essential during the final boss fight due to how it is played out. In short, whenever the final boss is stunned, you get a limited window to damage its orbs that come out upon stunning it. There are three orbs, and destroying one will reduce 1/3rd of its full health. To ensure you fully focus fire on the orbs, you activate the Aether Shroud and unload your bullets into one orb. It is difficult to focus fire on the orbs without the Aether Shroud as hordes of regular and elite zombies are constantly spawning. That is all the preparation you need before jumping into Outbreak. Let’s move onto the in-game preparation and how to optimize your preparation steps.
In-game Preparation
After you spawn into a game of Outbreak, you need to start focusing on upgrading your PPSh-14 to legendary rarity (unless, of course, you find one in-game) and pack-a-punch it to level 3. You also need to focus on gathering points for the perks and salvage for a full level 3 armor. Here’s how you can optimize it.
Weapon Rarity
When you first spawn into the game with your custom loadout, you will have a red color strip by the name of your weapon. This indicates a ‘Loadout’ weapon. We need it to reach the orange color, which represents the Legendary rarity. Legendary rarity gives a 300% damage boost. And when this is combined with level 3 pack-a-punch, your weapon becomes a beast.
There are three main ways you can get a higher rarity weapon. Two of them include working for it, while the third is simply finding the weapon in a loot crate. In the Outbreak mode, there are orange crystal world events that spawn quite often. If you complete these, you get an aether tool that can be collected to upgrade your equipped weapon’s rarity. For instance, if your weapon was an Uncommon weapon, picking up the aether tool will upgrade the rarity to a Rare level. Similarly, if your weapon was Epic rarity, it will be upgraded to Legendary rarity upon collecting the aether tool.
Here’s how you can optimize the strategy and make the best use of the aether tool. First, collect 1,500 uncommon salvage (green salvage) to upgrade your weapon rarity from ‘Loadout’ to ‘Uncommon (blue).’ You can now either collect 500 high-grade salvage to upgrade the weapon rarity further or do two crystal events. We recommend doing two crystal events unless you have 500 high-grade salvage to upgrade to Epic rarity and then do one crystal event to reach that Legendary rarity.
There’s only one crystal event in each region. Therefore, it is sort of a gamble. That is why it is best to try and collect 500 high-grade salvage to upgrade to an Epic rarity and then go for the crystal world event to get a free upgrade to Legendary rarity. We need to be prepared by the time we reach Round 5.
As mentioned before, the attachments that we’ve chosen are optimized for damage and salvage drop rates. So, you can expect a lot of salvage drop from the zombies you kill. We’ve tested this. You can learn more about the weapon rarity and bonus damages here.
