What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here!
In my last Rainbow Six video, exploring the new guns for Operation Chimera, I made a somewhat
troubling discovery.
The in-game fire rate stats of Finka’s Spear.308 and especially that of Lion’s V308 did not
match the actual fire rates I uncovered in my testing.
With the Spear, the difference was moderate (around 730 RPM instead of 780) and I was
prepared to accept that maybe my measurement methods were not accurate enough.
But for the Vector, my tests suggested a fire rate of around 720-730 RPM while the in game
stat tells us that it’s supposed to be 850 RPM!
And of course, the obvious question that came up then was: “If the in-game fire rate stats
are not accurate for the new guns, then what about the old ones?!”
For months now, large parts of my online gun stat spreadsheet have been based on the in-game
fire rate stats.
The damage per second (DPS) stats and following on from there the time to kill (TTK) stats
all hinge on the fire rate and the worst case scenario could be that I got all of that info
wrong!
So as promised, I have gone back and manually measured the fire rate of each automatic weapon
in the game and I have: “Good news everyone!”
In fact, I have two pieces of good news.
First of all, all of the in game stats for existing automatic weapons in Rainbow Six
Siege are accurate.
Pfew, so my beloved DPS stats are not a complete mess after all.
And the second bit of good news is that my measurement technique (which I doubted quite
significantly in my last video) turned out to actually be pretty damn accurate and I’m
somewhat proud of that.
For the existing guns, the average difference between the in-game stats and my measurement
were only 2 RPM for each gun.
For instance, for the FMG-9, I measured a fire rate of 803 RPM when the real number
is 800.
OK, massive drama has been avoided, so what I want to do in this video is quickly go over
my tests and how the results confirm the in-game stats and then go back and take another look
at the V308 and Spear .308.
Now that we can calculate their fire rates accurately and we know that the other stats
can be trusted, we can properly compare the effectiveness of the two new guns against
the competition and I have to say that this new knowledge was eye opening.
I may need to revise my opinion on Finka’s Spear.
It’s actually pretty bad but more on that later.
As always, a pinned comment below will allow you to jump straight to this part of the video
if you are not so much interested in my “quick maffs”.
So first let me show you how I measured the fire rate and how accurate those measurements
turned out to be.
Many thanks to everyone who left ideas on how to measure the fire rate on the last video,
there were some great ideas in there.
It is worth noting here, that I measured the fire rate for each gun by firing them in full
auto mode.
Why is this important?
Well, there are some guns in the game where you can actually shoot the gun faster than
its nominal full auto fire rate, simply by clicking your fire button really fast.
Here is a quick clip of shark tomato demonstrating this feature… or should I maybe call it
a bug?!...
Phenomenon!
We’ll go with phenomenon!
…demonstrating this phenomenon on Frost’s 9mm C1.
Emptying the mag on full auto takes 3.544 seconds and this gives us a calculated fire
rate of 575.62.
On the other hand, emptying the mag while clicking like a maniac, results in a much
higher fire rate of 709.57 in this case and this could potentially end up even higher
with a good clicking run.
Long story short, this phenomenon is not something I’m taking into account; I’m only looking
at the normal full auto fire rate.
And now over to my methodology and results: Here’s what I ended up doing.
You will remember from the last video that I measured the ROF by firing a full mag, measuring
the time it took from the first shot to the last and then dividing that time by the number
of bullets fired.
That gives us the time per shot and if we then divide 60 by that time per shot, we get
the final result as number of rounds per minute.
There is one small issue with this method though and that is that the rate of fire then
varies depending on the number of shots fired.
“Why?”
you may ask.
Well, the reason is that the first shot occurs as soon as you pull the trigger; it’s instant
and that will slightly skew the average time per shot.
Let’s look at a simple example: If we fire two shots from the 6P41, which
has a nominal fire rate of 680 RPM, the first shot occurs instantly and the second one is
fired around 88.235ms later.
This means that we were able to fire two shots in 88.235ms and using the calculations I set
out a minute ago, we end up with an actual, measured fire rate of 1360 RPM.
This is clearly not a very good representation of the gun’s fire rate over a longer period
of time.
The more shots we fire in our timed burst, the less the first (instant) bullet will affect
the overall average.
For example, I timed 8.730s to shoot all 100 bullets of this machine gun and running through
the calculations now, brings us to an actual fire rate of 687 RPM, which is already much
closer to the 680 RPM reported in the in-game menu.
So the conclusion is that shooting longer bursts gives us more accurate results but
up until now, I could never be sure what I should do with that first, instant, shot,
since I only ever measured the fire rate for pistols & DMRs (where I had no in game reference)
or for the new guns (where the in-game stats were inaccurate).
Now that I have finally gone back to double check the other weapons, I have some reliable
reference values to adjust my calculation and the good news is that the change was really
simple.
The in-game rate of fire data simply takes out that first shot completely and calculates
the rate based on the interval between each remaining shot and so all I had to do to my
method is subtract one bullet from the number of shots fired in each burst.
If we do that for the example of the 6P41 we have 99 bullets fired in around 8.730s,
which gives us a per shot interval of 88.182ms; divide 60 by this interval and the end result
is 680.41 RPM and you know what, I’ll take that.
Once this simple adjustment is made, our calculated fire rates become incredibly accurate.
My worst result was for Mira’s Vector, where my three trials resulted in fire rates of
1180, 1196 and 1180 RPM instead of the nominal 1200 RPM used in game.
That’s a deviation of only -1.65% and -0.32%, resulting in an average deviation of -1.21%.
And that was the worst result I had, overall my calculated values were only off by an average
of 0.44%!
Ok, I’m done with my maths bragging now.
The important part in all of this is that we can now go back and recalculate the rates
of fire for the V308 and Spear .308 with the tweaked method and what we end up with are
fire rates of between 703 & 708 RPM for both guns and thanks to Epi for his kind confirmation,
we now know that the rates of fire for each of these new guns is 700 RPM.
With this new found knowledge, we can now go ahead and examine each weapon’s performance
and we can compare it to the other attacker rifles.
The baseline damage stats of 44 and 40 mean that we end up with DPS values of 513 for
the V308 and 467 for the Spear (this is of course at close range before any drop-off,
against level 1 armour ). At long range, those values are reduced to 292 for both guns.
The all-important question here now is: “How do these stats compare to the rest of the
attacker weapons?”
Looking at the assault rifles first, at close range the average DPS in this class is 540
and that means that both of the new guns are below average and in fact, the Spear’s measly
467 DPS will put it almost at the very bottom of the class, with only Blackbeard’s MK17
managing an even worse stat of 410.
In case you were wondering, the 3rd worst rifle here is Ash’s G36 with 494 DPS.
At range, the rifle class will do an average of 313 DPS, which again places both of the
new guns below average but only just with Blackbeard, Zofia and Thermite all ending
up with lower damaging weapons even than the Spear.
So neither guns are great at dealing damage but especially the Spear seems significantly
underpowered at close range engagements up to 25m.
It is worth noting though, that because of the slightly earlier damage drop-off of Lion’s
heavy vector, there is a distance bracket between 27 and 32m where the V308 is in fact
the worst performer in terms of the damage output and it’s only from 33m and onwards
where the MK17 reclaims its rightful place at the absolute bottom of the pile.
Poor old nerfbeard, for some reason I feel a strong connection to him and I feel a bit
bad that he has to deal with such an appalling rifle.
He never deserved this.
He deserved a nerf or two… but not this.
Back to Finka and Lion and of course both of them have access to other weapons as well.
You can choose to bring a shotgun if you’re into that kind of thing or as Lion, you can
bring a 417 DMR and as Finka the 6P41 machine gun.
Are these guns maybe better choices?
Well, the 417 can put out 518 DPS up to 25m which is basically the same as the V308’s
513 DPS.
So no real reason to make the switch unless you anticipate fighting at 20m and above because
here, the 417 will start to provide an advantage with its damage output not bottoming out until
40m and only going down to a minimum of 338.
Keep in mind though that the average distance for kills in Rainbow Six tends to be below
10m so you might struggle to take full advantage of the 417’s longer reach.
The bottom line here is that Lion’s Vector 308 is a pretty good choice for him even with
the revised damage output.
For Finka though, the damage output of the 6P41 is vastly superior at most combat ranges,
starting at 533 DPS and not dropping below the Spear until a distance of 40m or more
where the 6P41 becomes surprisingly weak and only deals 285 DPS.
So in terms of raw damage output, the Spear is sadly one of the worst attacker rifles
you could choose BUT there is one last thing I want to discuss before wrapping this video
up.
The thing we always need to keep in mind is that in order to down an opponent, you only
need to deal 100 points of damage.
And that means that against level 1 & 2 armour opponents, almost all fully automatic attacker
weapons will need 3 shots to down or kill.
So all of the nuanced damage stats we see for the rifles (with max damage ranging from
38 for the Ash’s G36 all the way up to 48 for Capitao’s Para-308) is more or less
meaningless.
The only thing that count’s is how quickly your gun can put out those necessary three
hits, so that’s down to the fire rate and to a degree also the controllability.
And that means that against level 1 or 2 armour, the V308 and Spear have the exact same time
to down/kill of 171ms, which is only just slower than the 161ms average for rifles.
It’s only against level three armour that the Spear will need 4 shots (even up close)
and because of the lacklustre fire rate will end up with the slowest time to down/kill
of all fully automatic rifles: 257ms As always, if you want to look over these
stats for yourself, you can find everything I have discussed today in my online spreadsheet,
link in the description.
In conclusion: In terms of raw damage output, the V308 is just below average but still a
good choice for Lion.
Finka’s Spear .308 has a laughably bad damage output but can actually still perform just
as well as the heavy vector against level 1 and 2 armour due to having the exact same
fire rate and still needing just 3 shots to down/kill.
It’s only against level 3 armour or when Rook plates come into play, that the Spear
starts to underperform significantly and because of that, you might be better off running the
6P41 LMG if you are comfortable enough with the recoil, reload time and all of the other
horrible attributes that the LMGs have in Rainbow Six Siege.
And that’s it, thank you so much for watching!
I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in
the next episode!