Our full list of Blackout Perks covers the ins-and-outs of this unique item type in Call of Duty’s new Battle Royale. Learn the use time, duration, and what all of the perks do in the game. I’ve also noted which perks are best or how useful they are in certain situations.

Perks are a unique addition to Blackout. They are temporary buffs to certain skills like reloading, running, and being able to hear things from further away. A lot of the time you are going to want to use perks right away. It can be difficult to use them while in a fight with all that’s going on, but some can be worth saving.

Quick Blackout Perk Notes

  • You can have as many as six active at once (might be more). You can activate a perk while moving, but you can’t start activating more than one at a time. Perks have different use times and durations. While a perk is in use it will take up a slot in your inventory. Perks don’t stack in your inventory.

Learn more about Equipment in Blackout with our Blackout Equipment List Guide!

Here’s a full list of the perks in Blackout. Most are pretty useful, but there’s a few that you are better off not even picking up.

Awareness

Awareness is one of the best perks you can have currently. Being able to hear enemy footsteps from further away gives you more time to react. Knowing where the enemy is in Battle Royale games is extremely important, and if you have the jump on that then you are far more likely to get the kill.

Brawler

Probably the weakest perk in the game, you are rarely ever going to be in a situation where this is useful and you can actually hit people with your melee attacks. It would only be decent if you don’t find a gun in the early game and have to duke it out with someone, but you’d rather find a gun and your enemy could just run away.

Consumer

Consumer is a strong perk if you are in a fire fight and are needing to heal. It has a long duration, so it’s worth using pretty early on, especially if you have more perks to use.

Dead Silence

Another one of the better perks, Dead Silence gives you very quiet footsteps. Your enemies will have a hard time hearing you coming as long as you aren’t sprinting at full speed.

Engineer

An interesting one, but not the most useful. Knowing where vehicles are can be helpful to spot potential enemies. If you see a vehicle on a hill or in a spot where it didn’t spawn, you can usually infer that someone might be nearby. The issue with this one is that if an enemy is in a vehicle you will likely be able to hear them and identify where they are coming from without it.

Iron Lungs

Iron Lung is obviously good if you like sniping and know how to position yourself in spots where you can take the time to use steady time consistently. The breath time underwater is a bonus, but isn’t going to be particularly useful in most cases.

Looter

Looter is a pretty good perk if you find this in the early game. You’ll be able to immediately see any of the stashes around your area and you can potentially get some very strong loot to take on your less looted foes. Later in the game, however, it’s not so great because looting is less important and you will likely only be looting fallen enemies.

Medic

This is a strong one in the early and late game where you might be taking more damage and need to be healing. Everything about this is strong, and the increased health for downed allies is pretty great, especially if they are low on healing.

Mobility

Wow, this one does a lot for just one perk. It’s a bit all over the place, but overall it’s pretty strong giving you a lot of small advantages. You probably won’t really want to be firing weapons while you are sprinting in most cases, but using equipment might be useful. Moving faster while reloading is always welcome, and taking no fall damage is nice. Swapping weapons is pretty slow in the game, so most of the time you are struck battling it out with whatever you have if you are in an open fight. Having this perk might let you swap to your second weapon fast enough that you might have a chance to use it.

Outlander

This is only good if you are outside of the circle and you don’t have access to a vehicle. The majority of the time this perk isn’t going to be that useful, and you are likely going to want to leave open the inventory space for something else.

Paranoia

Paranoia sounds better than it actually ends up being. By the time you actually hear the noise you are likely being shot anyway, so this ends up being rather redundant unless someone is really holding their aim on you for a long period.

Reinforced

Another of the weaker perks, but can be useful later in the game where players might be more likely to throw grenades and other explosive weaponry.

Skulker

This is an interesting one, but probably not one of the strongest. It can be good when combined with Dead Silence for giving you speed and complete quiet, but other than that the extra speed won’t likely help you in most situations.

This perk enables you to see an outline of your teammates while they are behind walls. It can be slightly useful early on in the game to see where your team is looting, but most of the time you can tell where they are via the name plate and team number next to their name. Weak perk overall, has some fringe usage.