Ray Gun Mark II

The Ray Gun Mark II fixed the one thing that kills Ray Gun users: itself. Where the original splashes you at close range, the Mark II fires clean three-round bursts of piercing energy that punch through several zombies per shot with almost no splash at all — a corridor weapon where its ancestor is a hazard. Its headshot multiplier is enormous, and Pack-a-Punched into Porter’s Mark II Ray Gun it doubles both magazine and damage.

The first DLC weapon

It made history in how it arrived: shipped with Black Ops II’s Vengeance pack in 2013 alongside Buried, it became the first Zombies weapon ever added to every map in a game post-launch — Mystery Box only, on the whole BO2 roster, for anyone who owned the pack. It was also deliberately rare, with a fraction of the box odds of other weapons everywhere except Buried itself.

Since then

It has never really left: the box across all eight Zombies Chronicles remasters, the Aether maps of Black Ops 4 — where Alpha Omega added four buildable elemental variants — and a return in Black Ops 6 with Shattered Veil, whose main quest builds around three exclusive upgrade paths before Season Three spread the weapon to every map. Its Aether-era origin was never written; only Black Ops 6 finally names a source, salvaged from the Dark Aether by a team that did not come back.