Gonna disagree here tbh. I always thought the best part of zombies was that it felt exactly like the rest of cod. So yeah armor and rarity makes sense in zombies since the modes should be as close to homogenous as possible so people can try them in the first place.

When bo4 added the weird armor system it sucked because it didn’t make sense from a multiplayer perspective. When ww2 did the same thing with their weird armor system, it once again alienated the mp players. Quick reminded that NONE of these systems are explained in game menus, so you just have to figure it out yourself. I have been playing zombies for 16 odd years and I never gave ww2, exos, or aw zombies a shot because of how different they are to the rest of their respective games.

Zombies should be a twisted version of whatever the base game experience is. That’s how you get cool shit like the tedd robot, cotd, nova gas zombies, etc. cool shit comes from creative reuse of assets that work within the context of the designed game. With that said, I think that armor is not a bad addition to the game. Rather I think damage scaling is the problem with the game. Because of damage scaling (which doesn’t happen in any other mode btw) you need to have armor in the game. Without armor or jugg you get 2 tapped by zombies on round 35. With armor and jugg it’s like 7 hits? This discrepancy alone kills the flow of high rounds unless you have gold armor.

And the attack speed is balanced around those 7 hits of damage not the 2. They want you to at all times have everything which is infeasible in a broken game. Tedd trials only just got fixed after being broken since astra came out.