Striker

For the armored vehicle, see Stryker.

The Striker is a semi-automatic shotgun featured in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It has a very large magzine, but fires a smaller amount of pellets per shot than other shotguns.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
The Striker makes its first appearance in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Singleplayer
It has a much higher ammo capacity than any other shotgun, holding 12 shells in its cylinder. Like the M1014, it fires semi-automatic single shots, though this is due to a revolver mechanism rather than gas-operation. The Ultranationalists use it as their primary shotgun, though the actual primary shotgun of the Russian military is the AK-47 based Saiga-12KS-K select/fire shotgun. It is only found with/without a red dot sight, or sometimes Woodland camoflage.
 * One of the Russian soldiers before the breaching wall at the shower room in the Gulag will occasionally hold a Striker with Woodland camouflage.
 * It is possible to find a Woodland camouflage Striker when the enemy deploys smoke screens on "Loose Ends", as a matter of fact, it can be very rarely found in the other camos in "The Enemy Of My Enemy".
 * The Striker is used by Kiril, part of Makarov's team that terrorizes Zakhaev International Airport.

Multiplayer
The Striker is unlocked at Level 34 in multiplayer.

The Striker is great for short-range combat, if used correctly. It needs its rather large 12-shell cylinder because it rarely kills with one shot at medium distance the player should fire two or even three shots as quickly as possible instead. With a Grip the Striker has almost no recoil. Without a Grip the Striker has very predictable recoil which goes up and to the right.

Stopping Power works well with the Striker, essentially giving it more "range" as the few pellets that hit at larger distances will do more damage. Some believe the Striker is better at sweeping buildings than the AA-12 due to its larger ammo count and controllable rate of fire.

The most prominent disadvantage of the Striker is the very long reload (this however can be countered by Sleight of Hand). Each shell is loaded by hand and the cylinder is wound for each shell, so the length of the reload is dependent on how empty the weapon is. Reloading all twelve shells takes an inordinately long time (about 7.5 seconds). Pressing fire while reloading waits for one more shell to load then cancels and does not fire until fire is pressed again so switching weapons or sprinting are quicker, more effective ways of canceling a reload. The long reload can be mitigated somewhat by Sleight of Hand. Another good tactic is to always reload after firing a shot, even if the player has only fired one shot.

The Striker is the only shotgun that suffers very little from equipping a silencer. The silenced Striker is an effective yet uncommon weapon.

When fired without a silencer, the Striker creates a cloud of opaque smoke. This only obscures the target when aiming down the sights, however.

As with all shotguns, aiming down the sights actually increases the spread of the shots to equal or wider than the weapon fired from the hip without Steady Aim. ADS does NOT increase the range of the weapon.

Weapon Attachments

 * Red Dot Sight


 * Silencer


 * Grip
 * FMJ
 * Holographic Sight
 * Extended Mags