What’s up guys, Rogue-9 here and today I want to talk about the problem with Zofia and her recent
nerf. If you are a fan of her all-round skillset and her ability to be played independently while
solo queueing, you will doubtlessly have felt the nerf to her rifle’s recoil quite intensely.
It’s without a doubt a controversial change that has disappointed a lot of fans and in this video;
I want to break down the issues I see with this style of update to the game.
Once again, may thanks to Nvidia and Alienware for sponsoring the video
and there will be another little segment, where I talk about the awesome new graphics
systems available in Rainbow Six Siege and how you can take advantage of them.
So, to break down what has happened to Zofia with the last patch,
why it happened and why I am really concerned about the update, let’s go step by step.
What happened is really simple, they made the recoil of her main weapon significantly harder
to handle than before. Of course everyone can have their own opinions on whether or not it is still
manageable but I personally feel that the recoil is no joke now and pretty challenging to use at
medium to long range, certainly when compared to the rest of the recoil patterns in Siege.
Why was she nerfed like this? The first and foremost reason is that after Ash’s pick rate
has finally fallen this season, Zofia has become the de facto replacement as the entry fragging,
solo queue queen. Nerfing operators that are seen as too popular is nothing new in Siege
and I will touch on that topic in a bit but let’s first explore the designer notes
to see what other reasons the devs give for messing with Zofia.
“Looking at the Balancing Matrix, Zofia continues to have a very high presence, which is
due in part to the high fragging potential and ease of use of her M762.”… whoa, whoa,
whoa there frog boy! Let me stop you right there because that is some grade A ‘merde de cheval’.
The “ease of use of her M762”… what are you talking about.
One of the key defining aspects of Rainbow Six Siege gunplay is that ever since they fixed the
weapon misalignment issue in Year 3 Season 3, the recoil for the vast majority of guns in the game
has been incredibly consistent and easy to manage. There are only a tiny handful of weapons where the
recoil is a real hindrance, so claiming that the M762 is unusually easy to handle is just nonsense!
“In order to bring her more in line with other operators, her M762's recoil has been increased
making it harder to control.” In line with what other operators?!
Buck? Twitch? Surely Ela and a few machine pistols but what else?!
I can literally count on one hand the number of operators that have truly difficult recoil,
so how?! HOW?! Does this nerf have anything to do with bringing Zofia down to everyone else’s level?
This entire line of arguing is total and utter nonsense if you ask me… but it is what it is.
The next claim they make is that the new recoil is actually more predictable than usual. I have
spent some time testing and trying to master this new, more challenging (yet supposedly
more predictable) recoil and I’m not really convinced. With Flash Hider and vertical
grip attached, we get probably the best possible recoil compression but in terms of predictability,
the horizontal spread looks more or less the same as most other weapons in the game.
Sure there are definitely worse ones but there is nothing in this patterns here that screams at me:
this will be so much easier to learn… So, another claim debunked.
When it comes to practically managing the recoil, the gun is definitely much harder
to handle than most. Initially I tried to use my old setup of Flash Hider and Angled Grip
and that was definitely an interesting experience. I personally feel that in order to have any chance
at making good use of the M762, most players will now HAVE to use the vertical grip and once you do,
like I said: the recoil is bad but not the worst. I fired some other guns back to back with the M762
to try to gauge the recoil relative to that of other weapons and I would say that Buck’s C8
is definitely still more challenging to handle due to the lack of grip attachments. All in all,
the difficulty level of the M762 (with Vertical Grip of course)
felt about the same as Twitch’s F2. It’s much more than most guns for sure and will severely limit
your long range chances but at short to medium range, it remains usable. Not great… but usable.
So there’s the why and how but is it really a necessity to nerf over picked
operators, even if they are underpowered? I’m kind of on the fence there: First of all,
it depends on the reason for the high pick rate. If a character is overpowered and that’s why
everyone wants to play them, then of course nerf them! It’s a no brainer; balance is important!
But what if a character is played a lot because people nowadays just don’t stack as much as they
used to and with the Russian roulette we all get to play whenever teaming up with randoms, it makes
complete sense that versatile, self-sufficient operators get picked more often and I personally
think, that’s not really a bad thing. At this point, the devs and all the rest of
us need to admit that the scene is changing. The players who are still left are seeing
more and more of their friends move on from the game and it is becoming more and more challenging
to find a decent stack. That makes solo queue friendly operators more important than ever.
And I get it, Siege is meant to be a strategy and cooperation heavy game but when you get matched up
with random teammates, that level of cooperation just isn’t very viable anymore and when you
relentlessly nerf the self-sufficient characters, there’s only one of two things that can happen:
Either the community adapts and starts making the effort to find new stacks to squad up with…
or players will simply become frustrated that the small handful of operators that they could
pick whenever they couldn’t rely on their teammates, is being taken away from them and
they will simply stop playing. I’ll give you two guesses which of those is the more likely outcome!
So long story short, while I understand that trying to force more balanced pick rates and
more cooperation can seem like a worthwhile goal, I fear that this strategy is be incredibly risky.
It reduces accessibility for less experienced players or those who no longer stacking and given
the cliff edge that Siege is wandering along right now, the chance of these nerfs backfiring is real.
Now, as I mentioned in the beginning, I am digging into the new Nvidia graphics
settings that we have available in Rainbow Six Siege (dedicated standalone video coming soon)
and today I want to quickly walk you through the DLSS or “Deep Learning Super Sampling” setting:
what it does and how you can benefit from it. As the name suggests, DLSS is an AI driven
rendering technology that taps into dedicated processors in GeForce RTX graphics cards to boost
your framerates while at the same time providing crisp and sharp images in your favourite games,
including Rainbow Six Siege. This technology is particularly effective when you are running your
game at larger resolutions, such as 4 or 8k. I tested the DLSS modes in Rainbow Six Siege,
in 4k resolution and these are the results I achieved for the various settings, pretty neat!
I have to say as well though, when I tested the system using the Alienware 25 360Hz monitor,
I did not really see any significant improvement because my 3080 graphics card can easily handle
1080p anyway, so depending on your system and which resolution you are running at,
I would definitely recommend you quickly run Siege’s graphics benchmark
with and without DLSS to check if the system will benefit you.
And that’s our little Nvidia technology update for today, back to our discussion of Zofia!
So that earlier was my general take on nerfing popular operators but let me also say a word
or two on the new trend of making guns less fun to use. Because that’s what these changes are,
right? After YEARS of trying to nerf overpicked operators like Ash and Jäger, the devs have
finally resorted to the one lever that they know will work. Make the guns frustrating to use.
All it really takes is one or two rounds, where a player loses a gunfight because their weapon
kicked off in a weird and unexpected direction and the frustration and disappointment will make them
not want to play that character anymore. And as effective as this method is,
it is also a very obvious double edged sword and getting this kind of change right
is almost impossible. Make the nerf too weak and it basically has no effect at all. As long
as I can still win my gunfights, who cares. Go slightly overboard with the recoil and now
you’ve added a massive dose of RNG into what is supposed to be a highly competitive and
well balanced game. And the frustration from that cuts both ways! It feels absolutely terrible to
do everything right but lose a gunfight because of random recoil but on the flipside, if you die and
get to watch a replay of some guy aiming three feet past you and just getting a lucky spray,
also feels like you’ve been cheated. So the bottom line is that messing with recoil
can very quickly lead to a frustrating experience and while that is a very powerful tool in order to
reduce operator pick rate, the current shaky state of Rainbow Six Siege quite desperately needs the
game to become more fun and more accessible and going into a fight with a challenging gun while
just about every other character is still using laser beams, is just not a great experience.
What do you think about Finka’s recoil nerf and the practice of chopping down the most
popular operators in general? Let me know in the comments section below and with that;
thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video and I will see you in the next one!