This is a text transcript of a Jamcowl video (dated July 13, 2025) that explains how the gas mechanic actually works in Warzone — what has changed, what inaccuracies exist in the discussion, and how to use all the flaws to your advantage.

There have been some changes to the gas play mechanics in Warzone since I made my first tutorial back in Season 1.

Some people have framed these changes as gas play nerfs, and in a sense they're right because gas plays have become more and more complicated, thereby moving them out of reach of the average player, and messaging from the developers both in the patch notes and in the game has been wildly misleading, adding to the problem.

But even though gas plays have been made slightly more complicated and therefore slightly harder, they haven't actually become weaker per se.

It's my view that gas plays are just as strong as they were back in Season 1 because you can survive in the gas just as long as you could back then, you just have to know how to overcome some of the additional hurdles the games introduced in the intervening seasons.

To assist in that project, I've put together this new tutorial, which explains all of the new gas mechanics and a few adjacent game mechanics that might be relevant in as much detail as I can.

I expect for the majority of viewers there'll be something in this video that you didn't know and you're learning for the first time, so I hope you find this video informative if not the most entertaining, and if you appreciate the hard work that goes into really information-dense videos like this one, and you would like to subscribe to the channel, I would really appreciate it.

Now, with the preamble out of the way, let's begin.

The most common misconception is about deployable boxes, which includes munitions boxes, armor boxes, and utility boxes.



You can place munis in the gas, and I do it all the time.

You just have to move within 40 meters of the edge of the safe zone.

This is the same system that governs buy stations and ammo caches, which are also disabled in gas, but only when they've moved more than 40 meters away from the safe zone.



This is also why sometimes a buy station might stay open for a really long time in the gas, because it's not time-based, it's distance-based.

And if the safe zone hasn't moved more than 40 meters away, the buy station won't close.

This can be very confusing to people who think the buy stations close after a certain time in the gas.


There is a permanent buffer zone with a radius of 40 meters around the final point where the circle finished closing.

This means that there is always a region of the map where you can throw a munitions box in the gas, and the message on screen is never true, because you can always place a muni in the gas if you're in the right place.

Also, it's worth mentioning that if you successfully throw a muni in the buffer zone, but the safe zone keeps moving away until your muni leaves the buffer zone, the muni will instantly break on the ground, even if you haven't used it yet.




This has led some people to think that munis immediately break in the gas because they tried it once near the edge of the buffer zone while the safe zone was still moving, and the muni instantly broke in front of them.

But you can avoid this if you pay close attention to where the safe zone is and where you're throwing your muni.

A good way to tell how far away you are at any given time is to open your tac map and put a ping on the safe zone.

That way you can see the distance measurement on the ping itself change as you move towards the safe zone.



I've got literally hundreds of comments from people who didn't know this is how it works.

They try to throw a muni in the gas, and they simply believe the message saying cannot be placed in gas.

I think for the sake of these casual players, this message should be updated to something more accurate and descriptive.



It says airspace is too crowded for a certain number of seconds, and it counts down until you can use your airstrike.

Similarly, if you try to use an ammo cache which has recently been used and it's on a cooldown, there'll be a timer in the message saying how long until you can use the ammo cache again.


That would have the benefit of informing casual players about game mechanic that they might not understand yet, and if nothing else it wouldn't be lying to players like the current message.

This change to ammo box mechanics does affect the old strategy of stacking ammo boxes on a buy station to come back to you later.

It used to be possible to simply go to a buy station, buy as many munis as you could afford, and leave them there on the buy station to come back to you later.

Then you can throw the munis in the gas and get stims from them.



But now if the buy station is too far away from the safe zone, those munis won't be usable in the gas.

The workaround for this problem is to simply pre-pop the munis and leave stims on the ground.

If you're worried about your stims despawning before you come back to them, then it might help to understand why things actually despawn in this game.

If you understand the mechanism, there's actually a technique you can use to make your stuff last longer.

Because the conventional understanding is wrong.

Most people think there's just a simple despawn timer that lasts a few minutes before the loot disappears, and they just want to know how long that is.

But that's not how it works.

For one thing, the time taken for loot to despawn is wildly inconsistent.

Sometimes your stuff might despawn in 1 minute, sometimes 2 minutes, and sometimes your stuff will still be there 7 minutes later.

The trend seems to be that loot despawns faster in the early game and slower in the late game. But that's not because the despawn timer changes throughout the match.

Because despawn speed is inconsistent between matches as well, even comparing the same circle and the same time during the match.

The reason for this inconsistency is that there's no despawn timer at all.

What happens is that whenever loot is dropped on the map, whether from a crate, a dead body, or a buy station, it's added to a finite loot buffer.




That's a list of all the loot items currently on the map.

I have no idea how long that list is, but I suspect it's something like 2000 items.

If the buffer is full when a new piece of loot is dropped on the map, the oldest item gets pushed off the end of the loot buffer, and the new item is stored right at the beginning.

So old items will despawn before new items, but the exact time it takes is completely arbitrary and depends on the behavior of every player on the map and how much loot they drop.




This means that in the early game, when you have more players alive looting crates, dying, and dropping loot, that buffer fills up faster and has a quicker turnover, so your loot despawns faster.

By contrast, later in the game there are fewer players who are looting less because they've already got what they want and all the available crates have been opened already, so the main contributor to loot turnover is players dying.

But even that happens at a slower rate in the endgame than it does in the first circle where teams are landing and fighting over contracts.

This explains why when they first increased the player count of Urzikstan to 150 players, it suddenly caused a problem with loot despawning rapidly in the early game, sometimes less than a minute, because with more players spawning more loot, the loot buffer just got filled much too quickly.

So now that you know why items despawn when they do, you can apply that knowledge to making your stim stack at a buy station.

When you use an ammo box on the ground, it doesn't just drop the excess equipment on the ground, it also drops excess ammo for both your weapons.

Those ammo piles are additional loot sprites on the map, which clog the loot buffer and cause it to get filled faster.

If you're popping loads of munis, especially with multiple teammates, the area can get very very cluttered.



And that's not just cluttering the local area, it's cluttering the loot buffer for the entire map, and it will cause your stash to start despawning faster than it would otherwise.

If you really want your stims to last, it behooves you to drop both your weapons before you hit the ammo boxes, then you're only leaving stims and lethal equipment on the ground.

The same logic applies to stacking stims at an ammo cache for free.

If you drop your weapons before using the ammo cache, it won't drop extra ammo on the ground and you won't be filling up the loot buffer any faster than you have to.

Bottom line, there is no consistent despawn timer between maps or even between matches, but the empirical rule of thumb I've developed for Rebirth is that items dropped after the Firesell in the third circle will tend to last long enough that they never despawn before the end of the match.

Whereas on Verdansk, with 150 players, I find you have to wait until at least circle 4, maybe 5, to be sure that the loot buffer will be able to store whatever loot you drop for the rest of the match.

To be clear, the loot buffer only applies to dynamic loot dropped as the result of player actions like looting or dying.



Those items do not despawn on their own, but if a player interacts with them and then leaves them on the ground, then they become dynamic loot and they're added to the loot buffer.

Another common misconception is that stims don't actually work in the gas.

People think this because they try to use a stim in the gas and they barely get any health back, or it's inconsistent and they don't know why.

This has been the case for nearly three years at this point, since Warzone 2, because stims don't heal you instantly, they take time to fill up your health bar.

And in that time, any incoming damage will interrupt the healing and stop you gaining any more health, including gas damage.

And since the gas hits you once every second, that gives you a one second window in which to use your stim and heal the full amount before the next gas hit.

As a result, correct stim timing is essential to get full health from every stim in between gas ticks.

Because the Black Ops 6 stim animation is so fast, what you want to do is press the stim button right before you get hit by the gas.




Then by the time the stim animation is complete, you will have just taken gas damage, and you'll have a full second for that stim to fill up your health bar before the next tick of gas damage.

The way I do this is I watch the damage chunks on my health bar as they come in and shrink down to nothing, because they take exactly one second to shrink, so you know exactly when the next damage chunk is coming.

When the chunk is only a few pixels wide, that's when I press the stim button.




The best way to get this right is to just take some stims and go into the gas early and just practice, just to get a feel for it.

Because it's much easier to practice this and get it right with no pressure in the early game than in an endgame scenario where your teammates are counting on you.

The PDS was removed in season 3, and even though the season 3 patch notes said it would return in season 3 Reloaded, we haven't seen it properly return to Rebirth or Verdansk outside of LTMs like Havoc Royale.



However, the PDS has still been available this whole time from recons.

Every time you do a recon contract, there is a small chance that the recon objective will drop a PDS, and the PDS still works the same as it always did before.

It provides a protective bubble for 9 seconds, and it will open any buy station in the gas until the PDS expires.

Bear in mind that when the final circle closes every single buy station on the map, they cannot be reopened by a PDS.

However, once that final circle command has gone out, it's actually possible to throw a deployable buy station in the final zone after that point, and the buy station will be usable.

If you throw the deployable buy in the gas, you can throw a PDS on that buy station, open it, and it will stay open forever no matter how far away the safe zone gets.

So this recipe would give you an immortal buy station, but it is extremely difficult to pull off.

So it's very rare, but it's very powerful.

The Munition Satchel or Ammo Vest used to allow you to carry 4 stims, but that got nerfed down to 3.



Then in Season 3, the Bandolier Wildcard, which allowed you to guarantee a Munition Satchel as part of your loadout, got shadow nerfed on Verdansk, even though the Season 3 patch notes said that the only available satchels would be the Armor Satchel and the Munition Satchel via the Bandolier Wildcard.

Bandolier continued to work perfectly on Rebirth Island, but if you tried to use that Wildcard on Verdansk, you simply wouldn't get a Munition Satchel from it.



Except, if you went over to the specially made Season 3 default loadouts, which included weapons like the HDR and the Kilo, there was a Bandolier Wildcard on the default Strategist loadout, and that did work on Verdansk.

So it seemed like this was a glitch, until Season 3 reloaded when the patch notes attempted to rewrite history and pretend that Bandolier was never supposed to work on Verdansk at all.

Then in Season 4, Bandolier was completely scrapped from the game, so there's no way to guarantee a Munition Satchel as part of your loadout.

Without one, the most stims you can carry at once is two.

However, Rebirth has Bioscanners which give you different color keycards, and if you take a silver, gold, or platinum keycard to a buystation, it will give you either an Armor Satchel or a Munition Satchel.

Which means it's still possible to carry three stims at once on Rebirth if you can find a Munition Satchel, either from trading in a keycard, or from looting the body of someone who did.

Another change in Season 4 is the Cough Ping which makes you show up on the enemy minimap like a UAV ping if you're coughing in the gas.



The only way to counter this is to wear a gas mask because that stops you coughing in the gas.

As far as the Ghost perk is concerned, Ghost does nothing to protect you from the Cough Ping.

As you can see in this clip, the enemy has Ghost equipped as one of their main three loadout perks, and even though they're moving around and stimming in the gas, I can still see their Cough Ping every 6 seconds on my minimap.




As far as I can tell, this is absolute proof that Ghost does not protect you from the Cough Ping because I did not have the Birdseye perk and I could still see this enemy who was Ghosted moving in the gas.

Speaking of perks, Irradiated is still available as a ground loot perk on Rebirth.

Irradiated allows you to plate up in the gas even without a gas mask, and it gives you a 10% damage reduction to incoming gas damage.

Technically speaking, because damage values are stored as an int, they cannot have fractional values and they always round down because the decimal point is truncated.


This means that sometimes you might get an effective damage reduction that's slightly more than 10%.


Another useful perk, which is only available as ground loot on Rebirth Island, was just added in Season 4 Reloaded.

Even though the patch notes call it Loot Master, it shows up in the game as a perk called Looting Spree.

This provides extra loot from every single crate that you open, with a much higher chance of useful gas play equipment like stims and gas masks.

So this is definitely worth picking up if you intend to make a gas play.

Like Irradiated, it's ground loot only, so there's no way to put it on your loadout and guarantee having it every match.

But if you can obtain the Specialist bonus during a match, Specialist contains every single perk in the game, including the ground loot only ones like Irradiated and Looting Spree.


The Quartermaster perk is still one of the most powerful perks in the game for making gas plays.

Even though it got nerfed in the patch notes and the patch notes call it Restock for some reason, the Quartermaster perk now recharges your equipment and gives you a free stim every 60 seconds instead of 50 seconds.

Even after this small nerf, it's still incredibly powerful to get a free stim every minute for doing nothing.

So this is the absolute cornerstone of any one of my gas play loadouts.


The Survivor perk does nothing to increase the efficacy of stims, but it does help you self revive faster, which can be crucial in a late gas play scenario where you've got downed by the gas, because the increased gas damage will finish you on the ground if you can't self revive fast enough.

So Survivor definitely will save your life.




Additionally, if you are resetting your gas damage and touching the safe zone, Survivor will minimize the time you have to stand in the safe zone and wait for your health to refill before you go back in the gas.

So Survivor will save your life when you're downed and it may save you a stim if your health is low but you don't want to wait ages for it to refill.

The gas damage itself hasn't changed at all since Modern Warfare 3 Season 1.

It doesn't change throughout the match, every circle has the same gas damage and it doesn't matter how far into the gas you are.

The only thing that matters is how long you have been in the gas personally.

It starts out with a flat 10 HP per second for the first 45 seconds, then it starts to ramp up as you can see in this graph of hand tested damage values which I have linked here.[docs.google.com]

It continues to step up every 10 seconds until you hit the 2 minute mark at which point it spikes to 100 HP per second.



At this point, stims will not be able to keep you alive at all because the gas damage kills you faster than the stims can heal you.

It'll also destroy a gas mask in one tick.

However, if you have an immortal buy station, created in ways I've mentioned earlier, you can continuously buy a gas mask once per second to stay alive past the 2 minute mark.

In this manner, players have managed to pull off world record gas plays in excess of 3 minutes, but it does require a PDS, a deployable buy station, and a huge amount of money to buy one gas mask per second that you want to survive past the 2 minute mark.

A PDS alone will also keep you alive for 9 seconds no matter how long you've been in the gas, because you're not taking gas damage at all while you're inside its bubble.

But it doesn't reset your time in gas.

The only way to reset the gas tick back to normal is to touch the safe zone, and specifically miss a tick of gas damage.

If you step in and out of the safe zone quickly enough that you keep taking consecutive ticks of gas damage, the gas will not register a reset of that damage, so your gas damage will keep ramping up as if you never touched the safe zone at all.

Here's a clip of me rapidly touching the safe zone and going back in the gas to try and reset my gas tick.

But if we watch this in slow motion, you'll see that I take one tick of gas damage, a second later I take another tick of gas damage, I go into the safe zone, but then I return to the gas just in time to be hit by the next tick of gas damage.




I didn't miss a single tick, and as a result my progressive gas damage has not been reset.

This doesn't mean that you have to be in the safe zone for a full second, it just means you have to dip in and out at the right time to miss one tick of gas damage, and then you'll start again from 10 HP per second.

A gas mask or PDS does nothing to reset your time in gas, because if you're in the gas at all, that gas timer keeps on counting up in the background anyway.

However, that's no longer the case.

The durable gas mask is still in the game, but the only way to get it is from the chemical engineering water tank easter egg on rebirth island.

I've left a link down below to a tutorial which will explain how to do that.


That is one part of the three part easter egg that gives you foresight on rebirth island, and it will give you the same number of durable gas masks as you have teammates.



As far as I know, there is no other way to get a durable gas mask on any game mode, and there is no way to get durable on Vedansk.

Perhaps we'll see durables added to the bunkers or red door rooms at some point in the future like they did on the original Vedansk.

I think it would also be good to see foresight as a reward in one of the bunkers, which we also did have back in the Cold War era of Vedansk, but at time of recording, there is no way to get foresight or a durable gas mask on Vedansk only rebirth island.

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