Modern Warfare 4 cut Hardcore health by 27% in an appendix

Infinity Ward published the Season 1 patch notes for Modern Warfare 4 on November 5, 2026. The page has been edited twice since. It now carries three dated sections: November 7, November 6, and Additional November 5 Updates.

Season 1 brought four maps, two returning modes and a 100-tier Battle Pass, and that is what the launch coverage sorted through first.

The third notes section holds the line that matters most for anyone who plays Hardcore. First bullet under Multiplayer, Gameplay: "Reduced maximum health in Hardcore modes from 30 to 22."

That is the largest change to how fast a player dies in the whole patch, and it arrives inside a list of fixes.

What 22 health does to a gunfight

Thirty to twenty-two is eight points. Divide by thirty and you get 0.2667, so effective health falls 26.7 percent and the damage a player has to absorb is 73.3 percent of what it was before the patch.

With a weapon's output held constant, time to kill scales with health. A 300ms kill in Hardcore becomes something near 220ms. The notes publish no time-to-kill figures, so that scaling is arithmetic on the two published values; we did not measure it.

Fights actually move in steps, because guns fire whole bullets. VEL 46 at minimum damage does 14. Against 30 health, a long-range body shot took three bullets to reach 42. Against 22, two bullets reach 28. One bullet less, at every distance past its final damage drop.

The same threshold runs through the whole arsenal. Any round at or above 22 damage now kills a full-health Hardcore player in one hit. The Hyperburst Apex for the Hyeon Burst falls from 30 damage to 23 and still clears that line, so a change that reads like a 23 percent cut keeps its one-tap in Hardcore.

The biggest change arrived as an afterthought

The addendum opens with its own introduction:

We're not done yet! We have even more #MW4 fixes and improvements rolling out later today with the start of Season 1. These notes are an addition to today's already published notes and have been added separately for easier viewing.

Below that: Multiplayer, then Gameplay, then the health line. It is the opening bullet of a block whose other three entries fix a Proximity Mine attached to a Seeker Drone, an out-of-bounds spot at Wolves Stadium, and a finishing move that clipped through the player.

Three of those four lines are bug fixes. The fourth rewrites the damage model of a mode.

Now compare the weapon section. Every adjusted gun gets a table: maximum damage, every range in metres, minimum damage, hit location multipliers, a pre-patch column, a post-patch column, and a percentage arrow. The Krait P68's lower torso multiplier going from 1 to 1.1 is labelled a 10 percent increase. Someone computed those percentages by hand.

Hardcore gets one sentence, no reason, and no figure beyond the two health values. A pistol's torso multiplier is documented with more care than the health pool of an entire playlist.

Nothing was hidden. The addendum is one click from the main notes, TwistedVoxel put Hardcore in its headline, and Playnews filed the change under a section called Equipment and Hardcore. What the document shows is a difference in editorial weight. Twenty-six percent off every engagement in the mode, written down as a line item between a stadium exploit and a clipping bug.

Performance Mode's limit is the panel

The other line worth slowing down for sits under Global, Stability, near the end of the main notes:

We have opened up "Performance Mode (120Hz)" for all PlayStation 5 & XBOX Series X|S players with 120hz displays, regardless of VRR support. For the best experience, VRR is recommended.

The condition named is a display. Console model does not enter into it: every PS5 and every Series X|S qualifies, base consoles included, as long as the screen takes a 120Hz signal. Until now the same panel without VRR sat below the gate, which is why the sentence bothers to name VRR twice.

The sentence says nothing about resolution, cable standard, or how many games actually hold 120fps. It unlocks access to the mode. VRR stays recommended for image stability and is no longer a requirement.

Every number in the patch

Figures below come from the November 5 notes. Percentages are ours, calculated from the two values in each row.

Item	Parameter	Before	After	Change
Hardcore	maximum health	30	22	-26.7%
VEL 46	max damage range	10.13 m	9.65 m	-4.7%
VEL 46	medium range 1	17.27 m	16.51 m	-4.4%
VEL 46	medium range 2	25.15 m	24.13 m	-4.1%
VEL 46	minimum damage	13	14	+7.7%
Hyeon Burst, Hyperburst Apex	maximum damage	30	23	-23.3%
Hyeon Burst, Hyperburst Apex	max damage range	24.64 m	30.99 m	+25.8%
Hyeon Burst, Hyperburst Apex	minimum damage	25	20	-20.0%
Hyeon Burst, Hyperburst Apex	medium tier	28 damage at 36.58 m	removed	n/a
APOC-338	minimum damage	33	32	-3.0%
APOC-338	headshot multiplier	1.35	1.3	-3.7%
Claymore	arming time	1 s	0.75 s	-25.0%
Claymore	forward trigger range	2.29 m	3.18 m	+38.9%
Claymore	trigger cone	60 degrees	80 degrees	+33.3%
Proximity Mine	arming time	1.5 s	0.75 s	-50.0%

Two independent reproductions of the notes, Playnews and PandaPlay, agree with each other on every row above. The official page prints no build number. The console update is tracked elsewhere as 1.111.

A Claymore that arms in 0.75 seconds and sweeps a wider cone is harder to escape, and it lands in the same pass as the health cut.

What the notes leave out

No explanation is given for the health change. There is no line on regeneration, spawn protection, or how 22 health interacts with the mode's other rules, and no time-to-kill table anywhere in the document.

We have not played this build. This piece stays a reading of the notes and the arithmetic on their numbers; whether Hardcore feels different in a match is not something a document answers.

For the platform side of the same game, we measured Switch 2 input lag at 125ms in a separate test. That one is hardware. Our audit of Phantom Blade Zero's first patch is about the same problem in another release: what a notes page emphasizes, and what it files away.