Rainbow Six Siege
Y5S3 Patch Notes:
Operation Shadow Legacy
The upcoming season called Operation Shadow Legacy has been officially announced and thanks to Y5S3 patch notes released by Ubisoft, we know what we are about to get in Rainbow Six Siege.
It’s been a while since I was so optimistic and excited for a new season. This is all thanks to lots of changes to the game that seems like a step in a good direction.
- Chalet map rework
- Ping 2.0
- Optics changes
- Reinforcement pool addition
- New Hard Breaching gadget
- and more!
Operation Shadow Legacy
Release Date
Operation Shadow Legacy was released by Ubisoft on the 10th of September 2020.
The only information players received was about the maintenance right before the season was deployed. Developers pulled a sneaky release claiming “data repackaging” in their below tweet:
🛠Scheduled Maintenance🛠
— Rainbow Six Siege (@Rainbow6Game) September 10, 2020
There will be some maintenance today.
PC: 9:00 EDT/13:00 UTC
XB1: 10:00 EDT/14:00 UTC
PS4: 11:00 EDT/15:00 UTC
Downtime: 1 Hour Per Platform.
There will be data repackaging with this maintenance, so there will be a larger than usual download size.
Shadow Legacy Operator:
ZERO
In the Y5S3 update, Rainbow Six Siege will receive only 1 new operator, which is aligned with Ubisoft’s Year 5 Roadmap.
Shadow Legacy will bring an attacker who is based on Sam Fisher, from a legendary series Splinter Cell. The Y5S3 operator will be called Zero, with 2 speed and 2 armor characteristics.
ZERO'S UNIQUE UTILITY - ARGUS LAUNCHER
Zero will be equipped with Argus Launcher which allows him to fire deployable cameras capable of penetrating the surface it is attached to. In case the camera gets attached to the penetrable surface, it drills through it and allows Zero to view both sides of the surface. Such penetrable surfaces are:
- unreinforced walls and hatches
- reinforced, but not electrified, walls and hatches
- penetrable floors
- barricades
When fired at an un-penetrable surface, Zero’s gadget will still attach to it. However, it won’t allow viewing the other side of the surface.
The Y5S3 attacker in Rainbow Six Siege will, therefore, serve an intel-gathering role on the team.
But Zero’s impact does not end there. In addition to intel, he will also be able to fire 1 taser per camera to either destroy defensive gadgets (i.e. Bandit’s Shock battery, Jager’s ADS, or Mira’s Black Mirrors) or deal minor damage to a defender. As a result, Zero will be like a mix of Valkyrie and Twitch.
Important to note that Zero’s camera will be destroyed when fired at electrified surfaces.
ZERO'S LOADOUT:
SC3000K
New gun in Rainbow Six Siege available only to Sam Fisher aka Zero.
MP7
SMG that was previously available only to Bandit on the defense.
5.7 USG
Good pistol with default silencer attached for Zero.
Universal gadgets for Zero R6 operator will be Frag grenades and Claymore.
The addition of Zero is certainly an interesting one.
I always like intel-gathering operators as information is the king in Rainbow Six Siege. On top of that, intel-based operators tend to require game sense, game knowledge, and reward players for creativity.
Chalet MAP REWORK:
Chalet has been quite an annoying map from the ranked map pool. For the past couple of years, every match on Chalet felt the same due to only 2 bomb sites being defendable reliably.
We will have to see how the rework plays out in a live environment, but it looks solid from what we’ve had a chance to test and see.
For those of you who did not install TS, you can check comparison video made by Thaquil:
PING 2.0
As most seasoned R6 players will agree with, the ping system is an incredibly important and useful tool at the players’ disposal.
Looking retrospectively, the ping system was an unusual feature in FPS games when R6 Siege was released. It was a great feature that simplified the communication and callouts for R6 players.
But as time passed, new games came out with more sophisticated ping systems, which made us all question the simplicity of Rainbow Six Siege one. I think Apex Legends was the game that widely popularized the contextual ping system and showed us that a well-done ping system is worth investing in.
Now in 2020, Ubisoft is finally ready to implement an improved ping system in Rainbow Six Siege.
This might be our favorite change coming in the Y5S3 Shadow Legacy season!
The improvement will be two-fold.
First, all players will be assigned a number to their pings, which will make it easier to distinguish who pinged what.
Secondly, and more importantly, pings will be contextualized. This means that when you ping a barbed wire, your ping will show an icon dedicated to that gadget. Now, you will be able to ping a defuser and no one will be confused about what was pinged, even without voice chat.
REINFORCEMENT POOL
Up until now, each defender had 2 reinforcements available at his or her disposal. This created problems for more busy defenders – some operators have a lot to do during the preparation phase (i.e. Castle).
Sometimes you had to send 2 or more people above the site to set up your defenses, even though not all of them would stay there for the action phase. We had to guide inexperienced players by pinging and telling them what to reinforce.
Now those problems will be gone. The defense in Rainbow Six Siege will have a pool of 10 reinforcements. This means that less busy defenders or those who stay on the site are the ones who can take care of reinforcing required walls (i.e. Rook). In structured teams this change is great!
Unfortunately, it comes with its downsides, but that’s just inevitable. If you have a teammate who wants to troll or does not know the strategy, they can ruin the whole setup more than before. Though, they would probably have ruined your experience anyway if they wanted to.
CHANGES TO SIGHTS
Rainbow Six Siege will have revamped optics with the introduction of the Shadow Legacy update.
As per the Y5S3 patch notes, the changes to the sights will be:
New style for existing sights
Holographic and Red dot sights will have new variants – MH1 & M4S respectively.
RED DOT (M4S)
HOLO (MH1)
New magnification setup
SCOPE 1.5x (NEW)
SCOPE 2.0x (NEW)
SCOPE 2.5x (aka ACOG)
SCOPE 3.0x (OLD)
Overhaul to sights availability
Balance changes will be made for which gun/operator has access to specific magnification options.
Redistribution will have an impact only on primary weapons in Y5S3.
You can find the list of available optics per operator and weapon with below links to Ubisoft’s materials:
We have some mixed feelings about those balancing shifts but will have to wait and see how changes play out once the new season is out.
Optics customization
Rainbow Six Siege players will finally have an option to modify aspects of a reticle, such as color blindness type, sight color, and opacity.
NEW HARD BREACHING GADGET
The attackers get a new universal gadget – secondary breacher. This new gadget will allow breaching through reinforced walls. The hole made by the new gadget is smaller than generated by Hard Breachers.
Secondary breacher can be countered the same way as Hard breaching utility.
We don’t particularly like the addition of another hard breaching gadget.
On one hand, certain operators who were previously rarely picked can be now more viable. This may add variety to attacking rosters.
On the other hand, there’s just so much hard breaching in the game already. Though, Ubisoft tries to balance this new gadget addition with nerf to Thatcher (EMP will only disable temporarily all gadgets, not destroy them).
MATCH REPLAY & MAP BAN
Match replay system will allow players to watch their past matches. The system stores up to 12 last matches. This new feature is in the alpha stage and will be available only on test servers for the time being.
To read more on the match replay system, check our article on this subject.
Last but not least, Ubisoft is adding a map ban feature that will work similarly to operator ban mechanics in unranked and ranked game modes.
Operation Shadow Legacy -
FULL REVEAL PANEL:
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