What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here and as you may have seen, the Y3S3 mid-season designer’s
notes for Rainbow Six Siege are out and in this video, I want to present some key takeaways
from those notes.
Which operators are currently the strongest in getting wins and which the weakest?
Should you maybe consider playing certain operators more before they get nerfed?
Let’s go take a closer look!
As we saw in seasons 1 and 2 of this year, the designer notes mainly revolve around two
charts that plot the attackers and defenders on two axes.
The y-axis shows the likelihood of winning or losing when including that operator (the
win delta) and the x-axis shows how often that operator is picked (aptly named the pick rate).
So basically the further right on operator on these charts, the more popular they are
and the further up, the more effective they are on average.
With those basics covered, let’s look at what the charts can tell us.
From an attacker’s perspective the most powerful operators in operation Grim Sky are
by far Blackbeard and Glaz.
Both are classed as underpicked but also overpowered and while the rise in Blackbeard’s win delta
can be explained with the season 2 balancing changes that made his Mk17 more powerful and
allowing him to move slightly quicker, Glaz has not really seen any major changes apart
from his fire rate being upped slightly and his baseline damage being reduced.
But apparently, even this small change was enough to lift him into a position where he
now outperforms most other attackers by a significant margin.
Conclusion, if you are attacking and want to give your team the best chance at winning,
mastering either of these operators right now may well help you achieve this.
Be quick though, because changes for Glaz are already in the works and we will definitely
see him become more of a long range sniper again in the not too distant future.
Other than that, there aren’t really any other standout operators on the attacking
side this season but, now that we have performance data going all the way back to the beginning
of February, we can chart some interesting performance shifts.
Take Finka for instance.
The last change we saw to her was intended to make her more fun but less powerful by
giving her grenades but nerfing her nano-bot ability.
The result of those changes was kind of successful, I guess?!
Her win delta is now very close to 0%, which suggests that she is very well balanced but
her pick rate has gone down even further and she is now the least liked attacking operator of all.
It was a valiant attempt by the balancing team but I guess that just shows that sometimes,
no matter how many frag grenades you give her, you just can’t polish a turd.
Montagne has also seen a significant shift in effectiveness.
He is still picked about 10% of the time (which is low) but his performance has drastically
increased, especially when compared to Operation Para Bellum, where he was the worst performing
attacker of all.
This shows how important it is to not make any knee-jerk adjustments to operators, since
Montagne has naturally balanced out into a well performing operator, despite not having
been buffed in any way that I can remember.
Similarly, Lion hasn’t been changed since the Mid-Season patch in season 1 and yet the
data for the last 3 months suggests that his effectiveness has fallen significantly.
And that is actually a great example to show that the statistical data may be a helpful
tool in identifying certain operators that may be over- or underpowered but at the end
of the day, other factors like the experience of pro-players and the general community still
need to be taken into account.
Having said that, the significant shift in some gun recoils we have seen with the release
of Operation Grim Sky will definitely have affected the effectiveness of some of the
operators, so it should not be surprising to see individual operators rise and fall
in terms of effectiveness even without having been targeted with specific rebalances.
Despite not having outperformed this season Lion is already undergoing a rework that may
end up removing his intel gathering ability altogether or might change it to be far less powerful.
Similar to Lion, Blitz has seen a significant shift in both his pick rate and his performance
and again the last significant changes we saw to him were back in season 1.
Consistent underperformers are still Capitao, Jackal and to a degree also Buck, Ying, Hibana
and Fuze although their negative win delta is nowhere near low enough to be a significant
indicator of any issues with the balancing of these characters.
But of course do keep in mind here that these are just the stats and it is still possible
for operators, like Ying for example, to be extremely aggravating to play against, when
those operators are in the right hands.
Now let’s go over the defenders and going from strength to strength here, becoming more
effective from season to season is the number one top defender for winning: Rook.
In my eyes, he is probably one of the most underappreciated operators in the game.
His armour plates may only allow most operators to soak up one or two more bullets but the
performance data shows clearly that this gadget is the single most effective way at helping
your team to win gunfights and therefore the round.
Interestingly though the second most effective operator this season is apparently Kapkan…
Up from being one of the worst only one season ago and with no significant changes in the meantime.
And if anything, his pick rate has actually gone down a bit over time…
This makes Kapkan possibly the least consistent operator of all since season 1; starting out
as poor, then going to terrible and now great for no apparent reason.
Frost has seen a similar improvement in performance since Para Bellum but at least she received
some minor gun buffs that explain this change.
Lesion is still one of the most loved defensive operators and this season, his win delta finally
backs up his high pick rate.
If we look at some of the worst performing defenders, we have (as always): Castle, Tachanka
and Mira but also joining them down at the bottom this season are Smoke and Clash.
Smoke has suffered for sure due to the SMG-11 recoil nerf this season and the devs have
already acknowledged this by announcing a reversal to this nerf… a re-buff if you will.
This buff dropped, in fact, in today’s patch on the 29th Oct 2018.
Mira has also suffered because of the recoil change compared to last season and she will
also see a reversal of the recoil nerf to her Vector.
Seeing clash in the second to last spot is quite interesting.
The performance stats suggest that she is even weaker than Tachanka right now and yet,
she has already been nerfed once and will be nerfed again in the next balancing patch.
The developers have made it clear that the nerfs to her switching time, power refill
time and victim mobility reset time are intended to put her into the dedicated support player
role she had always been intended for and that this should not affect her pick rate or win delta.
This will finally make clash as dependent on her teammates as she was always meant to
be, but considering that she is already underperforming and under picked (especially when taking into
consideration that she is a new operator for this season) this may make her even less desirable
and even less useful for anyone but highly organised teams.
So concluding remarks for the defenders would be that, as simple as his gadget might be,
Rook is 100% the king of defenders.
He turns 3 speed / 1 armour operators into 3 armours and other teammates become even
harder to kill, plus he is a solid anchor with decent primary weapons and that all important
ACOG for taking on long range gunfights.
The trap META is strong this season although neither the developers nor I have any reasonable
explanation as to why Kapkan has jumped from being one of the weakest defenders last season,
to one of the strongest now.
If you have any theories as to why that might be, leave your comments in the comments section below!
And that is pretty much it in terms of the strongest and weakest operators this season.
The attacker’s performance stats are pretty well balanced while on the defender’s side
we still have strong over- and underperformers.
Did anything in the stats catch your eye?
How are your favourite operators doing and will you consider changing your operator choices
based on the info share by Ubisoft.
Let me know below, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks so much for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next episode!