What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here!
As part of their mid-season balancing notes for Rainbow Six Siege Operation Chimera, Ubisoft
have given us an insight into the statistical performance and pick rate of each operator in the game.
This information includes some really valuable insights because the top performers, in terms
of winning games for their teams, are not the operators who many people might have guessed
(me included).
So, which operators are objectively over or underpowered according to the data?
Let’s go take a look!
But before we begin, let me just take a quick moment to thank the mobile game SWAT and Zombies
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And now, let’s sink our teeth into this data to see which operators are apparently
the best and worst at winning matches.
The data used for this analysis is from ranked PC games, at the Diamond and Plat level, during Operation Chimera.
Ubisoft have provided us with two charts, one for attackers and one for defenders and
each one shows us the operators’ pick rate compared with their Win Delta.
Pick rate is simple enough; it’s a straightforward measure of the percentage of rounds that an
operator gets to participate in.
So if you play a five round match and an operator is played during four rounds, that’s a pick rate of 80%.
The Win Delta is a little less obvious but still pretty simple.
It is the average win ratio when a certain operator is picked minus the average win ratio
when the operator is not picked.
So if 54% of attacking rounds with a certain operator result in a win but only 52% of attacking
rounds are wins without that op, then you end up with a positive Win Delta of 2%.
This makes Win Delta a great measure for highlighting operators that are potentially over- or underpowered.
With that understanding let’s now look at the data that Ubisoft has shared to see what
we can learn from it.
On this graph, the further right an operator is listed, the more he/she is picked.
Looking at the vertical distribution, anyone listed above the central line is likely to
be overpowered and the higher they are, the more powerful they appear to be.
Conversely, the lower an operator is the more underpowered they are likely to be.
So of course we all know at this stage that Lion and Finka are the most OP operators on the attacking team, right?
No, wrong!
According to the Win Delta, Finka is the most overpowered operator in the game but ironically
her pick rate in Ranked is pretty low.
This suggests that she is by far the most underestimated and undervalued operator choice.
I guess it makes sense in a way that the conversations in the Siege community over the last couple
of month have focused on Lion and Blitz, since both of them are right in the defenders’ faces.
If you get taken out because of a Lion scan and rush or if you get chased down flashed,
then meleed and then t-bagged by Blitz you will know that it was those operators that just cost you the round.
But think about Finka.
When she uses her ability, as a defender, you will almost never know about it.
You could lose out against any attacker and not realise that the reason you lost was because
the opponent was boosted and had a faster ADS time and soaked more of your damage.
Finka’s boost is not as “in your face” as many other operator abilities but the stats don’t lie.
With her on the team, the attackers are far more likely to win any given round, compared to playing without her.
Another massive surprise to me is that the second most OP character on the attacker team
is still not Lion or Blitz but instead, it’s Dokkeabi…
Ok her call is annoying and the camera hack can be kind of useful to the attackers but
her primary weapons take a lot of skill to get along with and I am truly surprised to
see that she has such a strong effect on the attackers’ chance of winning a round.
And just like Finka, her pick rate is way below average making her highly undervalued.
But after that, we finally come to the two attackers we all expected to see at the top of the graph.
Both Lion and Blitz have a positive Win Delta of 1.5% and it clearly shows that our suspicions were correct.
They are OP in their current forms.
Interestingly though, while Lion is also one of the most over picked characters, Blitz’
pick rate is still lower than expected, especially considering with how powerful he is right now.
The Win Delta for all of these operators suggests that they are significantly too strong and
probably deserve a nerf and as of now, Dokkaebi is the only one that has not been named in
the list of planned nerfs by Ubisoft.
After these operators, it can be argued that Glaz, Ash and maybe Blackbeard are also still
slightly more powerful than they should be but out of these three only Ash is significantly over picked.
In fact, she is still the most picked attacking operator despite her nerf during the mid-season
patch in Operation White Noise.
Does this justify her getting nerfed even more?
Well, I think we could all settle for her having a bit more of a hitbox.
That alone could make all the difference.
I’m not going to spend too much time talking about the operators that seem balanced at
this stage although it might be worth mentioning that despite being pretty well balanced, Twitch
has a pick rate that is far too high.
That doesn’t mean that I would advocate for her to be nerfed again, in fact I would
say the opposite.
As long as her Win Delta is balanced, then being picked more often is not a bad thing.
The crown for the most balanced attacking operator in the game goes to Sledge.
Both his Win Delta and pick rate are slightly lower than would be ideal but getting an operator
absolutely perfect is essentially impossible.
In terms of the underperforming operators, one of the standouts is (again surprisingly) Hibana.
She has a pick rate that is far above average but apparently she doesn’t bring quite enough
to the table since teams with her will lose more often on average than teams without her.
And picking Thermite is even worse in terms of the win chances of a team although, in
fairness, he is also picked an awful lot less than Hibana.
Not great for your win chances but also not picked all that often Montagne, Buck and Thatcher
although it should be noted that their negative Win Delta is only between -1 and -1.5% and
I would not call this enough to label these guys as significantly underpowered.
With a negative Win Delta of well over -1.5% Capitao definitely still seems underpowered,
even after his buff mid Operation White Noise.
The thing with Capitao is that in the right situations, his crossbow can provide amazing utility.
Blocking off defenders from pushing into a contested area or rotating back to destroy
a diffuser can be extremely useful but how many times is he really going to find himself
in those situations.
What you are left with most of the time beyond that is an operator with either an LMG (which
up until now was a laughable primary class) or a slow firing assault rifle.
I can fully understand how this not only makes him one of the most underpowered but also
under picked operators on the attacking side.
But he is not the worst.
According to the data, the number one operator you can chose if you want to help your team lose it Jackal.
With a Win Delta of around -2.2% he seems to be more of a liability than an asset to
his team and his low pick rate confirms that most players are aware of this.
I always liked Jackal for his great guns although controlling the C7E is not the easiest thing in the world.
But I do have to admit that his gadget is not that useful anymore, especially this season
with Lion providing a very similar but more powerful and easier to use ability.
Plus of course, Jackal’s ability is pretty risky to use.
You have to be inside the target building and then you have to look down and scan footprints,
during which time you leave yourself pretty vulnerable.
And the only footprints you’ll realistically stand a chance of finding are those of roamers
and at the end of the day, those could also be droned out instead.
The bottom line is that Jackal’s lacklustre gadget just doesn’t bring enough to the
table and, as the stats confirm, on average this has a negative effect on his team’s chance of winning.
One last general comment I would like to make on the attacker chart is that I would expect
to see evidence of a positive correlation between operator effectiveness and pick rate.
On average, over hundreds of thousands of games played at a high competitive level,
I would expect players to choose the operators that give them the greatest chances of winning
and if that was the case, we should see the operators roughly aligned diagonally across the chart.
I find it interesting to see that for the attacker chart, this does not really seem
to be the case and that suggests that players are either not aware of the true usefulness
or uselessness of some of the operators or they are just not willing to play them despite
knowing which ones are strong or which ones are weak.
Now over to the defender chart and the first thing to notice here, is that the players’
pick rates are far more closely aligned to the win rates of the different operators.
The better the average performance of an operator is, the more likely they are to be picked;
as can be seen by the general alignment of most of the operators along this diagonal line.
There are a few outliers though and interestingly, it is once again the operators with the best
Win Deltas that are actually under picked.
According to the data, Rook is the greatest asset to any defender team but his pick rate
is only just over 20% while Caveira is the second most winning operator but her pick
rate is actually one of the lowest at less than 10%.
This indicates again that both of these operators are undervalued and certainly for Rook, I
can see why this would be the case.
Similar to Finka’s gadget being really useful but not that obvious, Rook’s armour upgrade
significantly ups his team’s ability to soak damage (as I confirmed in a detailed
test video a while ago) but neither the attackers nor defenders really get to see the effect.
Think about it.
Two operators go up against each other and let’s say the defender wins because of the
extra health pool of the plates.
How many people are going to go away from that contest consciously thinking to themselves:
“Wow, thank goodness I had that Rook plate on, it saved me there!” or thinking “I
just lost that because of Rook!”… nobody really has that realisation, right?
And to me that explains why Rook is undervalued.
Even though his support affects the entire team, for the entire round and (as the stats
tell us) significantly increase their chance of winning neither the attackers nor defenders
will really become conscious of this fact.
With Caveira on the other hand, I believe that it’s the difficulty of using her ability
that lowers her pick rate.
If Cav can pull off an interrogation, it quite often gives the defenders a chance to insta-win
the round but pulling off that ability is incredibly difficult, which may explain the
depressed pick rate.
The next op in terms of the Win Delta is Vigil, who this time also has a great pick rate.
As mentioned in my last video, discussing the Operation Chimera designer’s notes,
Vigil has now become the de facto roamer and his ability to stay hidden from cameras, combined
with his very capable weapon and secondary gadget loadout make him the most effective
roamer right now.
And even though the last round of nerfing has brought down Ela’s pick rate, her Win
Delta suggests that she is still a very effective defender nonetheless.
Losing her impact grenades was a definite blow but as I demonstrated in a separate video,
her gun is actually still very capable as long as it is fired in controlled bursts.
Lesion is the last defensive operator that is somewhat overpowered and he also has the
pick rate to prove it.
Lesion is definitely an important operator in the currently attack heavy meta but I think
that neither his Win Delta nor his pick rate are so high that he needs to be re-evaluated.
Next up we have a band of 7 operators that are pretty well balanced in terms of their
effectiveness with 6 of them being near perfect.
It’s especially great to see Pulse, Valk and Doc clustered so closely around the intersection
of the ideal pick rate and neutral Win Delta.
Kapkan, Frost and Echo are all slightly weak in terms of their Win Delta and pick rates
and while Frost and Kapkan aren’t maybe all that surprising, since their traps are
easily detected and taken care of by higher level players, Echo’s ability to attach
an ACOG to his MP5SD and the way in which his Yokai drone can block a last minute plant
make him an ideal anchor and I am truly surprised to see him at the bottom end of this scale.
Interestingly, Mira is also quite low in terms of her Win Delta even though her pick rate
is decently high.
Mira is a character that is often named as the top defender in the game because of the
value she can add to the team in terms of the anchoring setup.
She is also the top picked defender in the pro-league this season, so it’s really hard
to say why her win rate would indicate that she is underpowered in Plat and Diamond ranked play.
Yes, her primary has a very limited ammo capacity and is better suited to close and medium ranges
rather than long but that doesn’t explain why teams with Mira tend to win less often
than teams without….
If you have any idea why she ends up all theway down here on the chart, let me know in the comments section!
And finally, last and also least, we have the worst two operators in the entire game.
Tachanka has been described by the devs as so broken that they are currently not even
looking into fixing him but Castle is an interesting case here.
For the longest time now, the community has been calling for Castle to be buffed in some
way and the argument against that was always: “Castle is fine where he is, he works really
well in high ranked, coordinated teams and he doesn’t need to be viable at lower skill levels.”
Well, the data here is exclusively for Plat and Diamond ranks and it clearly disagrees
with the notion that Castle works at this level.
Castle not only requires a coordinated effort in order to provide any value to the team
but if the setup is not perfectly clear to every member of the team, then a barricade
in the wrong place can even block a defender rotation at a crucial moment and can even
cause the team to lose.
Add to that the fact that over the lifetime of Rainbow Six Siege, we have received more
and more operators that are capable of quickly taking down Castle’s barricades and the
utility he brings to any defensive team becomes questionable at best.
During the recent Rainbow Six balancing team AMA, it was mentioned that three operator
reworks would be taking place very soon and hints were dropped that Castle might be one of them.
Given his clear track record of being on the losing team more often than on the winning
team, this makes complete sense and I am eager to see what the devs will come up with.
So there we go.
A lot of the data in these operator performance and pick rate charts made perfect sense but
there were also a lot of surprises.
How did your favourite operators stack up?
Were you surprised by how well or poorly they did in terms of average performance?
Let me know in the comment section below and with that; thank you once again to SWAT and
Zombies Season 2 for sponsoring the video (links are still available down below and
still waiting for your click!) and thank you to all of you for watching.
I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next episode!