After only a few days with the test server for Rainbow Six Siege’s new Operation Grim Sky, Ubisoft is reacting quickly to feedback and issuing a set of balancing changes. Maverick is receiving the most drastic of changes to better balance him before his official release, but there are also some unexpected nerfs coming for Zofia, Glaz, and eventually Dokkaebi.

Maverick

Increase the amount of time and damage required for the blowtorch to destroy barbed wire

When Maverick first hit the test server earlier this week, players were immediately surprised by how useful his blowtorch was at not just melting walls, but instantly destroying almost anything it touches. Its damage to barbed wire was especially strong, since he could destroy them quickly with almost no noise made. This change still allows him to do that, but it’ll take more time and more of his precious blowtorch fuel to pull off.

Replace smoke grenade with stun grenade

Ubi explained this change by saying smoke grenades gave Maverick overall “too much utility,” which makes sense when you break it down. Maverick checks a lot of the boxes of the most popular and universally useful operators in the game: he’s a 3-speed, has powerful weapons with few downsides, and gadget that is set to disrupt the meta and make the game more Attacker-sided. Smoke grenades are considered the most valuable gadget for capturing an objective or planting the defuser, so taking them away from Maverick unchecks one of the boxes that makes him a must-pick.

Slightly increase the volume of the blowtorch

This change will surely make a lot of players happy. Ubisoft agreed with the feedback that, even when standing close to the wall he’s breaching, the torch is just too quiet. This will hopefully give defenders paying attention more opportunities to be ready for his sudden infiltration.

Ubi also touched one some other aspects of Maverick that players have been complaining about, like the range on his torch, and increasing the fuel cost so he can’t breach as many surfaces. They would like to avoid reducing his torch’s range if possible. “This is an extremely delicate aspect of his gadget, and will require months of work to adjust to ensure the gadget still works properly in all situations. If this is absolutely necessary, we will discuss it further down the line, but this will be a last resort adjustment.”

Ubi is going to wait and gather more data before deciding if Mav needs less fuel for the torch. The gray area here is that the blowtorch can make a lot of openings, but it requires significant practice and a lot of time spent potentially vulnerable. The gadget might prove too powerful at the higher levels but more balanced at lower levels.

Hibana

Reduce the number of pellets required to destroy a hatch from 6 to 4

This less of a balancing decision and more of a necessary fix. Since her launch in Year 1, Hibana has suffered from a bug that sometimes causes some of her breaching pellets to not hit their target. Reducing the number of pellets required to destroy a hatch alleviates the frustration when this bug happens, but still feels balanced in that Hibana will have to use one third of her utility to make it happen.

Zofia

Reduce the number of concussion grenades for KS79 Lifeline from 4 to 3

This change comes somewhat out of the blue, since Zofia’s balance hasn’t been a topic of Ubi in the months leading up to Grim Sky. But nonetheless, the team believes that she “currently has too much utility, which leads to her being able to burn the defender’s ADS too easily, or take a room without much of a contest.” Since her release last year, many players have agreed that four concussion grenades felt like a lot, but it has never been top of mind. From here on, Zofia mains will have to be a little more discerning about when to concuss a room.

Glaz

Glaz is no longer able to destroy Castle’s Armored Panels with the OTs-03

I can’t help but chuckle at Ubi’s reasoning for this one. Essentially, this is a bug that the team is leaving in because they like it. “Originally, we had a bug that prevented Glaz from being able to destroy Castle’s Armored Panels. As this makes sense, and is a positive way of adjusting both Operators, we have decided not to fix it.” The post goes on to say that in the future Glaz’s rifle won’t even be able to penetrate a Castle barricade, but this likely won’t be implemented until one of the mid-season patches for Grim Sky. This is likely part of the team’s grander plan for reworking Castle so that he’s not only useful at the highest levels of play.

Dokkaebi

An interesting note on Dokkaebi bookends the blog post, saying they’re exploring the possibility of her Logic Bomb having a set time limit until the phone call automatically shuts off. Ubi says a timer of 7-8 seconds is interesting, but its theoretical implementation is far enough off that no time frame was given.

Recoil

The post also addresses one issue arising with the new game-wide recoil system introduced in the test server: shotguns now have very little recoil after the first shot. “We are working on a fix, but will not have it ready by the release of Grim Sky.” The fix will likely come at “some point” during the season, which…isn’t hopeful news. This is potentially months that players will have to deal with a bug that effects balance.

Recoil for SMGs is also being reconsidered after it was increased heavily under the new system. “We want to push the secondary weapons to being true secondary weapons, as opposed to their primary weapons. We may go about this in a different way and make adjustments to the recoil in the future, but not prior to the release of Grim Sky.” This is an obvious reference to both the SMG-11 and SMG-12, weapons that are so good that Smoke, Sledge, Vigil and Dokkaebi are better off using them than their primary weapons most of the time.

Following the official unveiling of Rainbow Six Siege’s Operation Grim Sky at the Paris Major, excitement is in the air for Siege fans. But as it turns out, there are a lot of small tweaks and additions in the Grim Sky patch notes and test server that Ubisoft didn’t shed much light on, including a returning map, quality of life additions, and a truly bizarre change to Blitz. Let’s break down everything we’ve found.  

Favela is back, baby

After almost a year banished from the competitive side of Siege for being too unbalanced, Ubi has finally placed Favela back into the map rotation of Casual. Starting with Year 3, the developers have committed to consistently reworking maps and smaller and bigger ways each season. It doesn’t appear that Favela received any huge changes while it was away, so it’s a little curious that Ubi felt it was ready to come back to the game. In any case, it’s a map that players either tolerated, hated, or loved to hate. If I said I wasn’t psyched to play it again, I’d be lying.

Mandatory two-step verification for Ranked is coming

After a severe uptick in hackers and boosters earlier this year, Ubi announced that two-step verification would become a requirement for those wanting to play ranked. This will be going into effect during Grim Sky after an “awareness campaign” period of about one month. Any user who enables the two-step security will receive an exclusive bundle for Thermite. This will also be rewarded retroactively to accounts that already have it enabled.

No more getting stuck with Recruit if you’re AFK

An addition that fans have been asking for since the dawn of Siege, players will finally end up with a random operator if they fail to select one themselves. Up until now, staying AFK during the pick phase left you with Recruit, a default operator lacking any distinct gadget and one less reinforcement. Since the beginning of Year 3 unlocked all base operators for the majority of Siege players, the Recruit has felt more useless than ever. But the option to choose him isn’t going anywhere, so fret not if you enjoy the extra challenge and expanded weapon choice.

A slick new scoreboard and drone UI

The updated scoreboard is awesome for a couple of reasons. It looks great and presents the information more clearly, but it also makes muting the worst people in your match even easier. Right next to everyone’s name are two mute buttons, one for muting voice chat and one for muting text chat. Muting voice chat has been around forever, but muting text chat is completely new, and it took way too long to get here. Nonetheless, I’ve already been making great use of it against a truly toxic Siege community. Does someone on your team make good voice callouts but troll the enemy team in All Chat? Muted.

Also new are some tweaks to the UI while droning. The available commands for your drone have been moved to the left while the compass has been enlarged and moved to the center for help with efficient callouts.

Hatch reinforcements look totally new and function differently

Hatches have been reworked to be less of a “binary” interaction, according to Ubi. The new look and animation for hatches is slick and no longer extrudes awkwardly up from the ground, but more interesting is that they now support partial destruction. This means Maverick’s blow torch can cut through only portions of them to get sight lines and Hibana’s breaching pellets will need to land all six to destroy the whole thing. Considering Hibana’s gadget still has issues with registering pellets that should have landed correctly, this is already becoming frustrating for some players.

Wait… what did they do to you, Blitz?!

I don’t really know how to explain this next one. For some reason, Ubi has updated Blitz’s character art in the smallest and creepiest way possible. Check it out for yourself.

Blitz…are you OK? You look like you’ve been bitten by a zombie, my dude. Why did your eyes change and where did your anger go? If any part of the old you is still in there, we’re here to help, buddy. There is no life in those eyes. Pour one out for zombie Blitz.

But, seriously, why make such a small change? Is it because Blitz’s new leaked Elite skin is looking fresh and Ubi decided blue eyes are a part of his new look? Who knows, but Rook’s elite skin also got a makeover, flipping up his astronaut visor to more easily scope his beautiful face.

Echo’s Yokai drones no longer have a green filter

A very small and appreciated change for my Echo mains out there: it will now be easier to see what’s going on through Yokai drones. When Echo was first released, the green filter was an interesting addition that distinguished it from other cameras in the game, but now with both Bulletproof Cameras and Evil Eyes having similar green filters that see through smoke, it probably made more sense to remove the filter to avoid any misconceptions. Works for me!

Earlier this month, Ubisoft shared the first details of Operation Grim Sky, Rainbow Six Siege’s next season. Today, full details of its third campaign have been revealed from this weekend's Paris Major—including more on its new operators Maverick and Clash, and its reworked Hereford Base training camp map. 

As outlined in the five-minute short above, Maverick is known as the American spook who "went native". A hard-breacher and member of The Unit, his Suri Torch blow lamp lets him burn through surfaces "at an almost inaudible level", says Ubisoft, including reinforced walls. Which is surely great news for those players keen on horizontal shooting.  

Clash, as we learned earlier this week, is an ex-Scotland Yard officer. She can look a wee bit like System Shock's Shodan, and is the first defender to come equipped with a shield. During my short hands-on time with the new operatives—more on that this coming week—I struggled to work out a strategy for taking Clash on. Her shield not only nullifies head-on offence, you see, but also emits bolts of electricity which prevent you closing in from the wings. Needless to say, I copped a few fatal charges along the way.  

With this in mind, I reckon Clash marks a good starter operative for players learning the ropes. Siege now has 40 playable characters, each with their own respective repertoires of special abilities. There's therefore more scope to get overwhelmed than ever. Tooling yourself up with an electro-shield, however, is sure to help reduce newb anxiety.  

Elsewhere, Grim Sky implements modifications to address weapon sights misalignment, and includes adjustments to Operator Idle Pick. 

Expect Grim Sky to feature on PC test servers tomorrow, August 20. No concrete live date as yet, but Ubi says it's "available in September". If the developer follows previous Siege season launches, that might be September 3 or 4. Watch this space. 

Sometimes a detailed breakdown of our performances in competitive games can reveal important things about our playstyle that we might not have noticed. In the case of stats in Rainbow Six Siege, there are so many variables to a match that it’s important to know which operators you truly excel at and where your strategy could use some work. There are a few helpful options for Siege stats, so let’s break down what they are and how they differ.

How do these sites work?

There are four main resources for statistics in Siege: one built by Ubisoft themselves, and three built by third parties. The official one is simply called Rainbow Six Siege Stats. It’s accessed pretty easily from the Siege website, but you’ll have to log in through Uplay first.

R6Tab and R6Stats are third-party sites put together by dedicated fans. No login information is needed—you simply search for any player's record using their in-game name. There is one other resource, Rainbow Six Siege Tracker. This site is a part of the Tracker Network, which has dedicated sites for most of the popular competitive games right now. Each site also works for any player across PC, Xbox One, and PS4. 

What Siege stats website is best?

R6Tab

At the rate that the site is growing, R6Tab feels poised to become everyone’s go-to stat resource for Siege. R6Tab is a brand-new site that takes up the mantle of Siege’s previously best resource for stats, R6DB. After its closure in August, R6Tab founder Nader Halim wanted to fill the void and expand on R6DB’s limited feature set. In the weeks since the site’s launch, over 750,000 players have been added to the site’s database. The big feature here that R6Tab currently does best is its leaderboards. This is useful for yourself, but also when looking up other players to see just how hopeless your efforts were to beat them. Among the top tier of players, the leaderboards are fun for bragging rights, but it only shows players who have used the site, so it’s not a perfect representation.

Right now, a stats page for R6Tab is still in development, but Halim plans to replicate all of R6DB’s features with even loftier goals for the future of the site. “We're planning on making this a community site where players will soon be able to open accounts, follow other players, track their daily stats, discuss various topics, and rate and report players.”

Halim has been hard at work cranking out new features for the site on a near-weekly basis. A recently added button allows player to pull of a list of other players with a similar ranking. Just added this week is a tool that lets players upload a screenshot of their in-game scoreboard and automatically search and find the stats for each player. The site has a Discord bot that can be installed on any server to look up a player’s profile with a simple chat command. Halim is also working on an official mobile app for iOS and Android. The dedication to the project and diligent development cycle has made R6Tab feel like the natural home for stats in Siege in a short amount of time.

R6Stats

By pure coincidence, R6Stats is also in the middle of a rebirth. The site has been around since the early days of Siege, but its developers stopped updating it around the time of Operation Velvet Shell in 2017. After radio silence for over a year, R6Stats V2 surprise launched last month, and it’s looking pretty great. Feature-wise, R6Stats has a similar offering as R6Tab. It does already allow favoriting players, has graphs mapping out your K/D, and has an app released for iOS and Android, all features that R6Tab has promised in the future. The app is a great resource for stats on the go, but the performance is sluggish and the ads are somewhat intrusive, so buy the pro version if that’s a dealbreaker.

The most interesting thing going for R6Stats is the seasonal stats section, which lays out detailed overviews of your performance in the current and past season with more detail than the other sites. Comparing your win/loss ratios and max MMR ranks for each season is a fun way to see how your skill has evolved over time. The team behind R6Stats has committed to new additions and updates to the site this time around, so let's hope that sticks.

Ubisoft’s official tool

Ubisoft’s official stats tool isn’t as fancy as its competition, but it’s perfectly acceptable. It’s simple, functional, and easy to use, but the tool clearly doesn’t see much maintenance and hasn’t added any new tools over time. It does offer one neat stat breakdown not found anywhere else: you can see detailed stats for each type of weapon to see which ones you excel at. Apparently I should stay away from shotguns.

You can also see how many times you’ve used your gadget with each operator, which breaks down differently for each op. For instance, it tracks how many Rook plates you’ve provided to teammates or how many tracking assists you’ve received while scanning footprints as Jackal.

Tracker Network

Tracker Network’s Rainbow Six Siege Tracker provides a lot of the same functionality as what we’ve already listed here, but with a presentation that isn’t quite as elegant. Even in its new relaunched state following Operation Grim Sky’s release, I spotted several inconsistencies in the info. It’ll get the job done, sure, but it’s the tools dedicated to Siege that will likely add new and better features going forward.

What statistics are tracked?

Each site handles its stats a little differently, but some things are consistent. The most basic stats that you’ll find are you win/loss ratios, kill/death ratios, and how those stats break down across all the game’s operators. The official Rainbow Six Stats showcases your most played operators in an especially flashy way, seen below.

Other important pieces of info can be found on all four sites, like headshot counts, accuracy ratings, melee kills, etc. But there’s also a lot of small things different about them that could make one more useful than another for you. For example, R6Tab and R6Stats have leaderboard features that allows you to rank yourself and players encountered against the best in the world.

Wrap-up

For a long time, Siege’s stat offerings felt really sparse. It would be nice for Ubisoft to throw more effort behind its own stat tracking resources, but dedicated fans are doing great work regardless. R6Tab is still a new site, but it has already proven to be a powerful tool. The R6Stats relaunch has the site in a great place and has its own neat features, but it’s hard to say how dedicated development will be moving forward. For now, you’re bestoff using a combination of R6Tab, R6Stats, and the official Ubisoft tool for the best representations of your skill.