What’s up guys, Rogue 9 here!
Easily the most controversial change in the White Noise mid-season reinforcements patch
in Rainbow Six Siege is the significant nerf to Twitch’s shock drone.
In an unexpected move, Ubisoft is reducing the total number of shock darts down from
30 to 10; that’s 5 for each drone.
This move has surprised and angered many players and in this video, I want to briefly dive
into some of the stats to understand if this nerf is justified and if it will significantly
impact how we will all need to play Twitch going forward.
Quick reminder (I know it’s getting old for some of you) my giveaway is still running
and a new way to earn entries has been added, link in the description below!
So, Twitch nerf: is it justified?
Well, in the patch notes, the game designers give us a little insight into their reasoning
by telling us that: “Twitch right now is too strong.”
Now we don’t get any more detail beyond this but I expect statistics such as win ratio,
K/D ratio and maybe kill assist ratio to be higher for Twitch than the devs would like them to be.
And one possible explanation they give for Twitch’s above average performance is that
30 darts can allow a skilled drone operator to take out far too many defender gadgets.
I think this is an interesting point and while destroying defender gadgets is supposedly
the main function and purpose of the drone, I would argue that there are statistics that
speak against this, but more on that later.
I personally feel that being able to take out 10 defender gadgets is still more than
enough to facilitate an assault in most games and the real (and possibly overlooked) strength
of the drone is actually the damage that it can do against enemy operators.
Sure the fire rate of the drone is relatively slow, the damage is only 10 points and at
least on PC, shooting the drone is pretty easy once you discover it.
So fair enough, being taken down 10 HP at a time from full health is highly unlikely
but if we take a bit of a closer look at the damage stats, we will see that you can already
have a huge impact on a defender’s chances of survival by landing just two or three shots.
Because here’s the thing: As a rule, the attacker weapons are on average a bit more
powerful than the guns of the defenders and with only a handful of exceptions, most of
these weapons will do at least 40 points of damage per shot (and that’s including the pistols).
In fact, it is only Ash’s rifles, Zofia’s pistol, the machine pistols and most of the
LMGs that do less than 40 damage per shot.
Why is this important?
Well, this means that only two zaps with the shock drone will take any 3 speed / 1 armour
defender (and in many cases also 2 armour defenders) from 3 shots to down or kill, to 2 shots to down or kill.
If you land three zaps, then the remaining 2 armour and even in some cases the 3 armour
operators will become 2 hit kills.
Now one less shot to kill might not sound like a lot, but specifically going from 3
required shots down to 2 means that the “time to kill” is cut in half.
Let me demonstrate this on the example of the L85A2, used by the SAS attackers.
Except when Rook Armour is in play, the gun can down any opponent in three shots at distances
up to around 27m.
With a fire rate of 670 rpm, this means that the weapon has a consistent time to down or
kill of 179ms, for three body shots.
The first shot occurs as soon as you pull the trigger and then two more shots.
But if you only need 2 shots to down your opponent, then it’s the first shot plus
one more and that results in needing only half the time, which in this case is around 89.6ms.
If we assume that we are dealing with two players with a ping of 40ms each (quite reasonable
numbers I would say) then that means that the time to down is now so short that the
defender will basically be out of the game before they even know they are under fire.
And THAT, is where Twitch’s real power lies.
Two or three zaps for 10 HP each time might not seem like much but in terms of weakening
the defenders and making them much easier to pick off in firefights, this can go an awfully long way.
I don’t think anyone will have ever taken out 30 gadgets in one round.
It’s not only unfeasible but also completely unnecessary; but being able to cut the time
to down in half for the entire defending team?
Now that can make Twitch a real menace, especially on console where drones are much more difficult
to deal with and I think this factor may well mean that Twitch is outperforming other operators
in terms of win/loss ratio.
And my conclusion here would be that even though I did not see this Twitch nerf coming
and taking away 20 of her charges seems like a massive change, I have to admit that it
probably makes sense.
The second question I want to answer is: Will this change have as much of an impact as we fear?
And again here I want to refer back to a tiny glimpse behind the curtain that the developers have given us.
In a post on Reddit, Ubisoft explained the decision behind the Twitch nerf a little more
and a key statistic they shared there was that “[…] the average number of gadgets
destroyed by one Shock Drone in a single round is 1.4 (this includes cameras).”
So reducing the number of shock charges down to 5 for each drone won’t really have much
of an impact on Twitch in terms of the gadgets she takes out.
Most players will only take out around 3 gadgets per round in total anyway which, even after
what seems like a massive nerf, will leave 7 spare charges and that is still more than
enough to make two of the defenders relatively easy to kill.
It will definitely force Twitch players to be more conscious of their target selection;
you can’t just take out any device you see anymore, you will need to choose a little
more carefully which gadgets to take out or which defenders to injure.
So the bottom line here is that I can see where the idea of nerfing the drone came from
and if the 1.4 gadgets destroyed per drone, per round stat is anything to go by, the impact
of the nerf might not be as drastic as I had initially feared.
Nevertheless, I can understand the worry of many of the players who really enjoy playing as Twitch.
Could this nerf have gone too far?
Yes, that’s absolutely possible and we’ve seen it happen with other operators in the past.
But finding this out is exactly what the test server is for and I for one will be making
some time this weekend to play a few rounds there to see how all of the new changes affect the game.
What are your thoughts on the Twitch nerf and the patch in general?
Let me know in the comments section below!
And with that guys, I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next episode!
In a post on Reddit Ubedi... Udidi... *laughs* ok.. Let me try that one again:
Ubisoft, that's how it's pronounced right? Right!