Winning duels in Rainbow Six isn’t just about aim.

Being able to flick to headshots with your mouse is only one part of the equation. The other part involves fine-tuned restraint, awareness, and appreciation for tactics. 

Running headlong into firefights is a recipe for disaster. Know when to push, but also know when to hold back and wait for your opponent.  

Being good at Siege is a real test of your ability to be patient. These are some ways to develop that tactical patience and excel at one on one battles.

Reduce visibility

Rainbow Six is not a death-match game that rewards brazen and open conflict.

We’ve written that Rainbow Six is Counterstrike’s sexier cousin. In many ways, Rainbow does inherit some of the same tactics from its meta.

Crouching and leaning, and reducing your visibility to an enemy is essential.  

Pros hold corners tightly. Observe the movement of pixels rather than entire character models that cross your field of view. Expose your operator as little as possible. Gain information on your opponent through ambient sound, cameras, and other special abilities that Rainbow Six’s operators provide (e.g. Pulse’s heartbeat monitor, Lion’s EE-ONE-D, or Dokkaebi’s Logic Bomb).

Tactically, Rainbow Six is a game of information. Seeking that information by rushing into open areas without prior knowledge cedes initiative to your opponent.  

Anticipate, anticipate, anticipate

Initiative, or the ability to engage first before your opponent can, is key to winning firefights.  

Once engaged, battles last only seconds. If you’re good, fights are over before the enemy has a chance to even return fire.

Anticipation is everything in Rainbow Six. Use the small clues the game drops to anticipate movements. Even shadows generated by the environment can tip you off to an opponent’s location.

Being a quick aimer is different from being smart aimer.  

If you know the direction and general area your opponent is in, you can pre-fire down corridors or around corners.

Reduce your own footprint

Keep that last lesson in mind — you also do not want to give your opponents the kind of information that allows them to anticipate you.  

Sound reveals a great deal of information. Sprinting is one of the noisiest behaviours in Rainbow Six. Avoid it when you have the luxury of doing so.  

Keep discipline with your weapons. Unless you’re pre-firing with solid information, gunfire can let your enemies know your location more so than footsteps.

Yet, keep moving

Stationary targets make for easy headshots.  

Although Ubisoft has committed to reducing crouch and lean spam, you will want to always keep moving, crouching, and strafing in engagements.

Practice how to track targets while also pressing your movement keys. If caught in a direct firefight, strafing left and right while laying down fire on a target is imperative. Use natural cover in the maps to duck behind as you reload and plan your next move. Duck frequently in and out behind that cover to throw off your opponent and give yourself critical protection.

Mind the asymmetry of defender vs. attacker

Rainbow Six’s weapon and gadget loadouts are balanced in favor of the attacker. Attackers have more powerful and accurate rifles, less recoil, and almost total access to the ACOG optic.  Defenders mostly have access to weapons that excel at CQB, such as shotguns and submachine guns.

What defenders lack in damage and range, they make up for in fire rate and recoil, and therefore thrive in close quarters combat.  With rare exceptions, like Jager’s HK-416, defenders will almost always be at a disadvantage in longer range engagements. 

Run a loadout and optic you’re comfortable with

Rainbow Six’s customisation offer some degree of choice over how your aiming profile looks and acts.

For some, the added magnification of the ACOG scope is essential to staying accurate and pulling off critical headshots in engagements.  For others, the added shake and recoil of the ACOG can be distracting, finding it easier to use the unmagnified Red Dot, Holographic, or Reflex sights. 

Choose the sighting that is most comfortable for you.  Never feel like you’re second guessing the outcome of a match because you felt that your sights were off or forced you to miss a shot.

When you can, rely on teammates

Although being sharp with your senses and instincts helps, don’t forget that Rainbow Six isn’t a free for all.

Head to head engagements can turn on whether your teammates are able to give you intel regarding the location of your opponents.  Even when dead in ranked or casual, your teammates can watch cameras and give in-game voice callouts to enemy locations.  

Even if your team is silent, it never hurts to ask (or plead).  If someone has been knocked out of the round, diligently watching cameras can be a huge help.

And of course, get better at aiming

Tactics and knowledge can only get you so far.

Aim will always be a critical component of winning at shooter games, and Rainbow Six is no different.

No matter how well-trained in tactics you are, as you climb the Ranked ladder, your opponents will only get faster and more disciplined.  

Quick and accurate fire is a way to bail yourself out of mistakes. While the time to kill in Rainbow Six is very short, being able to “flick” your aim and make quick turns on potential ambushers can make all the difference.  

After two weeks on the Technical Test Server, Rainbow Six Siege Operation Burnt Horizon is officially releasing Wednesday March 6. As always, new operators Mozzie and Gridlock will only be available to Year 4 pass holders for the first week. Outback, Siege’s excellent new map, will be available to all.

Ubisoft aggregated the weeks of testing in an addendum to the original Burnt Horizon patch notes.

Dokkaebi

• Auto-hang up timer of Dokkaebi calls reduced to 12 seconds (down from 18).

Ubi is intensifying the original nerf introduced to the Logic Bomb at the beginning of the test server. In my experience, 18 seconds was still long enough that I always felt the need to stop and hang up the call myself. Bumping it down to 12 sounds like a good middle ground where you can easily let it ring without much annoyance.

Capitão

• Back to Wind Bastion version.

Ubi is completely reversing the changes to Capitão’s fire bolts. The new bolts did feel a bit overpowered. The effective radius was march larger and had huge potential for denying areas from defenders. The devs are going to “take a look at and evaluate the data and feedback we've gathered.” For now, we’re back to the wimpy fire bolts of old.

Gameplay tweaks

Some small, previously unlisted changes were noticed early on by players on the test server, but Ubi took this opportunity to make them official.

• Minimum Clearance Level for Ranked Playlist increased from 20 to 30.
• Reduction in HP after being revived from a DBNO state: PvP = 20 (down from 50), Terrorist Hunt = 15.
• Holosight color is now determined by the base skin of the weapon it is equipped on.

Most notably, “resetting” (in which you intentionally shoot a near-death teammate into the DBNO state and revive them back to 50 health) is effectively going away. Instead of being revived back up to 50 health, you’re now revived to 20. With so much less health after a revive, resetting will almost never be worth the risk.

Despite its inherent ridiculousness as a mechanic, resetting has always been treated as a normal part of Siege’s meta. It was always treated as a sort of workaround to the fact that attackers have no reliable way to regain health. Finka can save a life in a pinch, but her healing is temporary. A proper medic on attack could help fill the hole left by resetting, but I’m not holding my breath.

Ubi has also fixed an issue with head alignment following the lean spam fixes coming to Burnt Horizon. “Previous camera placement at a full lean allowed players to fire without being completely exposed. As part of our fix to counteract lean spamming, we are shifting the camera to the center of the head instead of the far side of the head, even when at a ‘full lean,’” the post reads.

The devs are also using this patch to consolidate the file size of Siege from its whopping 81GB (!) to a more reasonable, yet unspecified size. Unfortunately, that also means the Burnt Horizon patch will be larger than usual. A whole grip of general bug fixes are also on the way. You can check out all of those here.

Ubisoft's latest Rainbow Six Siege teaser reveals that the upcoming Danish operator, arriving in Season 2 of Year 4, will be an “expert in covert reconnaissance and stealth tactics"—and also suggests that a proximity alarm gadget will come to the shooter soon.

The image is taken from a trailer Ubisoft released last week, but this version is much higher quality, allowing players to zoom in and pick out small details. Towards the bottom left is a map of Denmark, over which is a post-it note hinting at stealth skills and the ability to "blend and adapt" to the environment. Could that mean some kind of cloaking device? We'll have to wait and see.

The info also appears on the attacking side of the board, which means the Danish operator is likely to be an attacker.

The other tease is at the far left of the image: it's a piece of blue paper that lists the game's gadgets, and on there is a "proximity alarm", with a red arrow pointing to it. No such item is in the game at the moment, but it's not hard to guess how it'd work. Place it down to watch your back and it'll tell you if an enemy gets near, is what I'd imagine.

For more details on Siege's upcoming Australian operators and their gadgets, click here.

Thanks, PCGamesN.

For Rainbow Six Siege fans, Christmas comes every February at the Six Invitational. It’s the special time when Ubisoft takes the stage and gives a “State of the Siege Address” that sets the tone for the year to come.

This year, among many other great announcements, Ubi revealed that Siege’s Ranked mode would finally be coming out of beta in Season 2. The new and improved Ranked will receive the much loved pick/ban feature as well as an in-game stats hub. It was an exciting announcement that made a lot of people very happy, myself included. What they didn’t address are the biggest problems that still plague the mode: 

• Inadequate punishment for abandoning a match
• Uneven matchmaking that allows high-level players to stomp the less skilled (you know, me) 
• MMR penalties that don’t account for abandons, griefers, or uneven matchmaking 

It’s hard to feel great about Siege’s revamped Ranked when it still has so many pitfalls that keep it from feeling competitive. If two teammates abandon the match, a loss is a loss. If your opponent brought their Diamond friend to a Copper-level match, a loss is a loss. Your rank decreases because of factors completely out of your control. The MMR hit for losing is way more than you get for winning, so you can only ever take one step forward and two steps back.

In about half of my Ranked matches, somebody leaves at some point. They can return if they were disconnected by lag or a crash, but that feature only works about half the time. In most cases, players are leaving because they don’t like how the match is going and they don’t fear the consequences of the abandon. Sure, you get locked out of joining another Ranked match for 30 minutes, but that doesn’t matter if you were closing the game anyway or just want to play Casual.

Matchmaking is hard to get right. Every game has its share of issues, but it’s frustrating to see templates for solutions in other games go unexplored in Siege for years. In Overwatch, an early abandon from a teammate triggers a window for a surrender to be called without anyone losing MMR. That feature alone, tweaked to Siege’s ecosystem, would improve the Ranked experience for everyone overnight.

Dota 2 has Low Priority Matchmaking, a temporary account status that automatically groups together players who often abandon matches or have several reports against their account. Players who make the game worse for everyone else are banished to their own matchmaking hell and everyone else has a smoother experience. Siege needs low priority matchmaking yesterday.

When the credits roll on most matches, it’s commonplace to peruse the enemy’s ranks and find at least one high-level player that shouldn’t have been allowed in. Unlike Siege’s cousin Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, you can squad up with a friend no matter their rank. It’s nice to know that I can always play with friends no matter what, but the lenient rule is constantly abused in a way that sabotages matches from the very beginning. Siege needs some sort of limiter for squadding up with mismatched skill levels.

Make no mistake, the changes that are coming to Ranked are amazing. Pick/ban is a welcome strategical addition to Siege and I’m glad there will finally be resources in the game to track stats. It’s a smart move for Ubisoft to recognize the Road to S.I. mode’s positive reception and feed it back into Ranked. But it’s disconcerting to see Ubi ready to take Ranked out of beta while other issues are still so prominent. It doesn’t instil confidence that they really see these things as big problems.

It’s possible that Ubi is working on the stuff mentioned above. Now that they’ve formed a dedicated team to look at the playlists and improve them, I’m sure they’ll be tackled at some point. But with the pace that Siege moves, we don’t know if that means next season or next year. I reached out to Ubisoft to clarify if they’re working these problems ahead of Ranked’s full release, but I haven’t heard back yet. If solutions to these problems aren’t coming soon, then Ranked isn’t ready to leave beta.