43 Common, 111 Rare, 21 Legendary, 17 Epic, and 3 Ultra Items.

On February 19, Treyarch added Reserves into Call of Duty Black Ops 4. Reserves come in two formats: Reserves Cases and Reserve Crates. A Reserve Case contains one item that can be used in-game and is earned through time spent playing Blackout or Multiplayer. Reserve Crates contain three Cases and can only be obtained by using real world money to purchase CoD points.

Right now, Reserve Crates are priced at 200 CoD Points. The price for CoD points equates to 1 point per USD cent, although the more points you buy, the more bonus points you get. At the $10 level you get 100 Bonus Points, $20 gets you 400 Bonus Points, $40 gets you 1,000 Bonus Points, and $100 gets you 3,000 Bonus Points.

To see if these Crates were worth the dough, I did some testing and spent $100 USD on CoD points which left me with 13,000 CoD Points, enough to buy 65 Reserves Crates.

Three Duplicates, with the 3rd item re-rolling to a Rare Outfit.

At 3 items per Crate, I was left with 195 items with 62 of them being Duplicates. Thanks to the the Reserve Guarantee, every 3rd Duplicate get’s re-rolled into a new item I didn’t already have. Since I had 21 re-rolls, only 41 of my items from the Crates were true Duplicates, meaning they had no value. Doing the math on that, it makes 21% of my $100 useless.

The good thing about re-rolled items is that duplicates that get re-rolled, can’t be of lesser rarity. For example, if I get a duplicate Legendary Outfit as my third duplicate, the re-rolled item will either be a Legendary or Epic.

The third item was a Duplicate Epic that re-rolled into a new Epic.

# of Duplicates None One Two Three # of Reserve Crates 21 29 12 3



Since the re-roll guarantee is based on how many duplicates the player already has (I started this whole process already with two duplicates), I considered any duplicate, re-rolled or not, to be a duplicate when making the chart above.

After opening 65 crates, over 67% of them included at least one duplicate with 23% of them consisting of only one new item. These numbers are important to look at if you are considering only buying one Crate because you only have a 1 in 3 chance that you will get only new items.

While Duplicates are definitely a huge issue, looking at the the contents of the Crates also appears to be shocking. Including duplicate items and sorted by rarity levels, here’s everything I unlocked from $100 worth of Reserve Crates:



Common Rare Legendary Epic Ultra Outfits 61 10 4 2 Stickers 30 Warpaints 36 8 4 Weapon Camos 11 9 Tags 13 Gestures 3 3 Signature Weapons 1



Nearly 80% of all items in 65 crates are Rare or Common, with the most prevalent item type being Rare Specialist Outfits. Ultra items, which are the rarest, only appear in .01% of Cases. So if you open an Ultra item in a Case earned through gameplay, consider yourself very lucky.

The Ultra items I earned with my $100 were the Jane and John Doe Blackout Character Skins, and the Daemon 3XB Signature Weapon. There are still several Ultra items I have yet to unlock, such as Vacation Hudson, SWAT-RFT and KAP-45 Signature Weapons, and a plethora of Mastercrafts.

One of the three Ultra items I got from my $100 spent.

The four Epic Specialist Outfit I unlocked are definitely cool and some could even pass as separate Blackout Character Skins, but their drop rate was still ludicrously low at .02% when opening 195 Cases.

With all that said, my biggest issue with the items from reserves is that too many of them are just useless. This is understandable as their needs to be lower quality items to make the the rarer items truly rare, but I just feel cheated when a majority of the Epic items I unlocked where just the same Weapon Camo but just for different guns. With over 25 weapons in Black Ops 4, you’re bound to get the Street Race and Splatter Camos many times for guns you will never use.

The same goes for Specialist Outfits. With a dozen Rare outfits for a dozen specialists that all look nearly identical, they might as well just appear as duplicates. I don’t see why anyone would use a Rare outfit on a Specialist if they already have a Legendary or higher on that character.

Two duplicates and an Outfit that looks identical to the Duplicate…

The major takeaway from this experiment is that spending $100 will not get you everything the Reserves have to offer. Not even close. The data shows that you’re guaranteed at least several Ultra items and a whole lot of duplicates. While there were some Crates that proved to be worth their asking price, nearly all of them felt like a waste of money.

Check the video below to see me opening all 65 Reserve Crates:



Here are the 7 best things I unlocked from the $100 I spent. Click to enlarge: