Y5S3.3 Designer's Notes

In this latest edition of Designer’s Notes, we'll go into more detail about the balancing changes that’ll come with the 3.3 patch and give you an insight into the reasons behind these changes.

BALANCING MATRIX AND TOP OPERATOR BANS

WIN DELTA VS. PRESENCE

With only a 1% presence, Tachanka is not played often – but when he gets chosen the Lord enforces his power and provides the highest defender win delta.

Please note that we are using presence to gauge the popularity of an operator. This notion had to be introduced to reflect the implementation of the pick & ban.

Presence definition: pick rate of an Operator when not banned.
Win Delta: The Win Delta is aggregated from Operator’s Win Deltas per Bomb Site.

OPERATOR BAN RATE

Due to a tracking issue, we cannot provide the "No Ban" details this time around, we hope to have it back next time.

OPERATOR BALANCING

Ace

• Reduce the number of S.E.L.M.A. Aqua Breacher explosions to 2 (from 3).

Population targeted by this change: Casual, Top Ranked and Pros.

Ace is currently a very strong and popular Operator as you can see in the Balancing Matrix above.

Our investigation on his performance led us to witness that his hard-breaching gadgets are very effective and have less downsides than Thermite for a similar result.

With this change we aim to reduce the presence of the Operator, maintain Thermite as a credible alternative and to invite Ace players to think twice when placing S.E.L.M.A. on a reinforced wall.

Frost

• Adding the ITA12S as a secondary weapon.

Population targeted by this change: Casual.

As you all know, secondary shotguns are very important in defense to structure the environnement and create rotation holes.

Frost's efficiency currently relies on how often she is played, most players trapped in her Welcome Mats did not expect the Canadian Defender.

On top of that Frost is often placing her traps in staircases close to doors and windows. We hope that by adding a secondary shotgun to her loadout she will benefit from being a bit more versatile, but also to be able to create new pathways to place her Welcome Mats, such as rotation holes requiring Attackers to vault their way in.

Players will be able to be a bit more creative and we hope to bump her presence by a little margin.

Glaz

• Reduce vision recovery time to 0.4s (from 1s).
• Reduce movement penalization by 50% (from 6s to 12s of movement).

Population targeted by this change: Casual, Top Ranked and Pros.

According to our Balancing Matrix, Glaz currently is one of the most underperforming Operator. We are aware that Glaz is an extremely situational Attacker who has to potential to be quite frustrating in certain configurations.

At the moment, we are only trying to help Timur find a middle ground to boost the usefulness of his gadget to make him slightly easier to use and a bit closer to other Attackers in terms of performance.

As usual with Glaz, we will monitor your feedback very closely.

Melusi

• Adding MP5 as a primary weapon (Removing T-5).
• Optics available on the MP5: Red Dot, Holographic, Reflex.

Population targeted by this change: Casual and Top Ranked.

Melusi's performance is extremely solid as she boasts a very high presence and Win Delta in defense. We gathered feedback on this outstanding performance to investigate which balancing lever would make more sense.

The T-5 is currently on of the best Defender weapon and we felt that switching it for the MP5 should lead to an adequate performance reduction. Additionally, only 1.0x optics will be available on the MP5. This should slightly reduce her versatility and ability to win gunfights.

Oryx

• Adding T-5 as a primary weapon (Removing MP5).
• Optics available on the T-5: Red Dot, Holographic, Reflex, Scope 1.5x.

Population targeted by this change: Casual and Top Ranked.

Contrary to the change we did with Melusi, Oryx was suffering from having an underwhelming weapon which turned out to be detrimental to performance in firefights.

Thanks to the T-5, which has proven to be excellent for other roamers, but also with the addition of the Scope 1.5x we are fairly confident that Oryx should see some improvements in that area.

Tachanka

• Removed 1.5x Scope from Tachanka's 9x19VSN.

Population targeted by this change: Casual; Top Ranked and Pros.

To prepare the arrival of the Tachanka rework, we decided to remove the 1.5x Scope from the Lord's SMG.

We believe that he will be able to rely on quite some assets and this scope would likely make him a bit too potent.

Ballistic Shields - Explosion Protection

• Shields bearers are now affected by the Guard Break when hit by an explosion.
• Operators protected behind a shield bearer are no longer taking full explosion damage.
• Shield explosion protection lowered to 66% (from 80%).

Explosion Protection:

The following Operators: Montagne, Blitz, Fuze and Clash will protect any player (hostiles included) from an explosion if the shield bearer is standing between them and the explosion.

It's important to add that players standing behind a shield will suffer proportionally to how exposed their body is to the explosion. Additionally, shields will still be protecting Operators even if stored on characters' backs.

Guard Break:

The Guard Break animation will be proportional to the damage inflicted to the Shield (not to the Operator) and will only be triggered if a minimum of 50 explosion damage is received. The greater the damage the more important the guard break animation will be. (up to 100 damage).

Melee damage, concussion effects as well as the Sonic Burst will trigger the guard break to the highest degree, while Electric damage will only trigger the lowest guard break animation.

Additionally, the rotation speed of the shielded Operator will be reduced during the animation and we also added a new animation for Montagne to prevent his shield from folding up during the Guard Break.

This change has several major goals, the first being consistency. It feels intuitive for Operators hiding behind a shielded ally to be protected in the same way as the Operator standing even closer to the explosion.

With that in mind, we know that this is likely to open the door to more team work and cooperation. Attackers will be able to rely on the passive protection of a shield bearer to plant on a bombsite for instance.

Indirectly, we foresee a renewed interest from Defenders to pick Operators such as Goyo, Smoke as well as the future Tachanka to counter these tactics.

However, explosions will now also trigger the Guard Break mechanism and offer a window of opportunity to damage shield bearers.

On top of that, Clash's CCE Shield is becoming a hard counter for shielded Operators as her ability will now trigger the Guard Break.

We are aware that shields are often a source of frustration, and we hope that the new guard break mechanism will improve this aspect. Our goal is also to improve teamwork and find new interesting ways to play with a shield and for the benefit of your team.

WEAPONS

TCSG12

• Damage drop-off has been made more progressive to reach minimal damage at 50m (instead of 20m).
• Damage at maximum range increase to 68% (from 48%).
• Suppressor damage penalization normalized to -12.5% regardless the range.

Population targeted by this change: Casual and Top Ranked.

The presence of both Kaid and Goyo is currently quite low within the Top Ranked population, we would like to tweak their shotgun to make them a bit more appealing that they have been recently.

The feedback we gathered from pro players tend to indicate that buffing long-range damage by a reasonable margin should not be concerning. With these new specifications, the TCSG12 will now be capable of downing a 2-armor operator at maximum range.

We will keep on monitoring the performance of both Defenders to see if additional adjustments are required.

ACS12

• Damage drop-off has been made more progressive to reach minimal damage at 50m (instead of 20m).
• Damage at maximum range increase to 68% (from 48%).
• Suppressor damage penalization normalized to -12.5% regardless the range.

Population targeted by this change: Casual.

Just like the change abovementioned, and also out of consistency, now that the ACS12 is equipped with slugs, we are increasing the effectiveness of this weapon and long-range.

Given how good the MX4 Storm for Alibi and the Alda 5.56 for Maestro currently are, we don't expect this change to have a massive impact on the presence of win delta of both these Operators.

The ACS12 should now be a bit more viable and more effective at long-range for anyone willing to use it.

OPTICS

The community requested the possibility to equip any x1 optic an any weapon. From our perspective, some elements of these optics are only a matter of preference and have no direct impact on the actual performance of the Operator. However, these optics have different shapes and casings and have, to a degree, a balancing impact. The space taken by the optic on the screen can be something that can make the gun perform better.

On top of that, we want Operators to feel different and have a specific identity. Our intent is to give players a reason to choose certain Operators over others.

If you want to learn more about optics in Siege, Mathieu Lacombe was recently interviewed on the Logic Bomb podcast and provided some additional insights on this specific topic (around the one hour mark).

We also updated the full list of our weapon optics for attacker and defender to reflect the current distribution on the live build and the upcoming Y5S3.3 TS changes.

Click here to download the full assets.

• A few operators are not included in these assets: Kali as she only has her unique scope on the CSRX 300 and Blitz, Montagne & Clash as their only primary option is their shield.
• Tachanka's new primary option, the DP27 is not included either, as it only has access to a custom reflex sight.

---

Try out the latest Rainbow Six updates on the Test Server and earn an exclusive charm through the BugHunterProgram.

Follow us and share your feedback on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and on our forums.