Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege – Year 6 Season 2 midseason update (Y6S2.2)

On the heels of the initial Year, 6 Season 2 update (2.07) released last month, Tom Clancy‘s Rainbow Six Siege has just received a midseason update in the form of significant balancing across several operatives. Before we get into the changes this update made, why don’t we do something a little different and start with what the developers decided not to change?

Beginning with 2.07, the medium-armored operative Nøkk received significant balancing rework, but only on the Test Server. The developers could receive feedback from the community before actually making the rebalancing active on the competitive servers. Her presence reduction specialty was nerfed somewhat by decreasing the noise reduction aspect of the ability and by making it ineffective against laser-based gadgets, like Kapkan’s Entry Denial Devices and Aruni’s Surya Gates). Based on the feedback from the players, it seems like the developers have decided not to make this change permanent. Therefore, the stealthy Nøkk will remain unchanged by this update.

According to the official notes released by Ubisoft, they had very data-driven reasoning for which operatives would receive rebalancing and in what way. Generally speaking, the Ubisoft team analyzed which operatives were getting picked too frequently and which were not getting picked by the players as often. The reason for this is that this is a fairly accurate way to tell at a quick glance which operatives the community of players favors most because they are stronger and therefore are more likely to win. They also analyzed which operatives are more frequently banned, which usually happens because the game host feels like if that operative were an option for joining players to pick, whoever did pick that operative would have a significant advantage and make the game less balanced. With that in mind, the Ubisoft team settled on some changes that they could make to rebalance some of the operatives.

Starting with Alibi, the scope for her ACS12 shotgun was increased from 1.5x to 2.0x, and a 1.5x scope was added to her Mx4 Storm submachine gun. Broadly speaking, this will make her a much stronger operative to choose, as it increases her utility and battlefield dominance and synergizes well with her high movement speed.

On the flip side, the 1.5x scope for Frost’s 9mm C1 submachine gun has been removed. Mostly the reason this was done is that Frost is just too dominant. Lately, the data has shown that she has the highest win rate of all the Defender operatives, along with a very high kill/death ratio, and it’s simply a good time to equalize things a bit.

Zofia is another very strongly overperforming operative, and so the decision was made to increase the vertical recoil of her M762 assault rifle to make it less easily controlled, particularly for extended bursts of firing. The horizontal spread of fire will also be somewhat increased.

One operative that is being sorely underutilized by players is Tachanka. Predominately the reason for this is that it just isn’t very safe to use his Shumikha Launcher because it renders him relatively vulnerable. To counteract that, they have increased the total ammunition of the launcher to 14 grenades. They have also replaced his Proximity Alarm with a Deployable Shield, which will offer him a little more protection while using the grenade launcher.

When all is said and done, it will be very interesting to see how much these minor retouches will do for the balance of the game. I guess we will find out in the next update whether more balancing will be necessary or not. We will keep you updated.

Developed and published by Ubisoft, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is regarded by many as one of the best first-person shooter multiplayer games currently on the market. As of December 2020, the game has reached a remarkable 70 million registered players across all platforms.