MW4 Prestige explained: Classic vs Regular, and how to spend your Unlock Token

Hit level 55 in Modern Warfare 4 and the game asks you to choose how to Prestige. That choice affects how much of the game you have to unlock again, so here’s how the system works and how to pick.

The levels at a glance

• Levels 1–55: the main climb from Private I to Commander. Almost every level unlocks something: weapons, perks, equipment, field upgrades, killstreaks and loadout slots. See everything by level on our unlocks page.
• Prestige 1–10: ten loops through that climb, each with its own rewards.
• Prestige Master: after Prestige 10, levels keep going from 56 all the way to 1,000. Level 1,000 is Prestige Legend.

DMZ XP counts towards this main level, but multiplayer and Warzone XP doesn’t count towards DMZ’s separate 1–70 level.

Classic or Regular: the big choice

Each time you reach the top and enter a new Prestige, you pick one of two paths. You can switch paths every Prestige.

Most Prestige rewards are the same on both paths; Classic adds bonus cosmetics on top.

Which one is right for you?

Pick Regular if you play in short sessions, depend on a couple of tuned classes, or mainly play for camos. You keep everything and your level number just goes back up.

Pick Classic if you enjoy the early-level grind, want the extra cosmetics, or want the 20% XP boost to speed through the Prestige ladder. Expect to lose your custom classes and to play with a limited kit for a while.

Spending the Permanent Unlock Token

Each Classic Prestige gives you one token, which keeps a single level unlock available forever, even through later resets. Weapons are usually the worst use of it, because a blueprint from the Battle Pass or Store permanently unlocks the base gun anyway. Spend the token on something you can’t get that way: your must-have perk, field upgrade, killstreak or piece of equipment.

What each Prestige gives you

• Prestige 1: an Operator skin straight away, then a loading screen, emblem, charm, decal and a Mosin-Nagant blueprint at levels 10–50.
• Prestige 2–10: each Prestige has its own theme, alternating between Operator skins and weapon blueprints: PPSh-41 (2), SAS skins (3), FiNN LMG (4), Army SF Airborne skins (5 and 7), Axion (6), M4 (8), Reece skins (9) and SANG 9mm (10).
• Prestige Master: an orange level colour straight away, rewards every 5–10 levels up to 99 (including a Han 86 blueprint at 90), then every 25 levels to 1,000. There are 39 level colours to collect and a new legacy Prestige icon every 100 levels. Prestige Legend rewards haven’t been revealed.

Weapon levels and Weapon Prestige

Guns level separately from you, and each level unlocks an attachment. Max levels differ by weapon: the Han 86 tops out at 72, the SANG 9mm at 38.

Once a gun is maxed, you can Weapon Prestige it:

• Weapon Prestige 1 sends the gun back to level 1 and relocks its attachments. You keep its Apex attachment, blueprint attachments, camos, reticles and cosmetics, and attachments shared with other guns stay unlocked.
• Weapon Prestige Master starts automatically once you max the gun again. From then on, nothing resets.

Weapon Prestige has its own four-step Pyroclast camo series. You get the first at Weapon Prestige 1 level 1 and the last at Weapon Prestige Master level 250. Double Weapon XP tokens speed all of this up.

Camos in short

Each gun has eight Military camos for levelling and three Special camos tied to challenges. Finishing those leads to Gold, then Platinum (8 Golds in a class), Harmonic Break (every Platinum) and finally Divergence, which opens the Mastery camos. Multiplayer and DMZ each have three Mastery camos of their own, and Warzone gets three in Season 1. Full challenge lists are on our camos page.

Smaller things worth knowing

• Daily challenges: three a day in multiplayer at 2,500 XP each, plus an 8,000 XP bonus for clearing all three. You get one reroll a day.
• Reticles unlock by getting kills while aiming down that optic. Progress carries over to every gun that shares the optic.
• You can track up to nine calling card challenges at once.

Known issues

On 28 October, Infinity Ward listed a bug affecting players who enter Classic Prestige from the DMZ menus: they can’t create new multiplayer classes until they delete their relocked classes. If you’re going Classic, start the Prestige from the multiplayer menu for now.