Rainbow Six: Siege Burnt Horizon: five things you need to know about the big patch

Rainbow Six: Siege’s first operation of Season 4 is Burnt Horizon. It adds two new characters, a map, and updates the new player experience with a low level playlist.

New Operators are always the most interesting part of any Rainbow Six: Siege season. But Season 4 comes with more impactful changes than just new content. Some Operators have seen light reworks, while items like the Breach Charge have had a shift in power.

Here are the five things you need to know about Rainbow Six: Siege’s Burnt Horizon update. For a full list of patch notes, continue scrolling down.

New Attacker, Gridlock

Gridlock is a high armor, low movement speed Operator. She can use the F90 assault rifle or the M249 light machine gun. Her secondary options are the SDP 9mm pistol or the Super Shorty shotgun. For gadgets, Gridlock can use Breach Charges or Smoke Grenades.

Her unique ability is the Trax Stinger trap. These are hexagonal road spikes that multiply over an area after Gridlock throws them. Trax Stingers continue to multiply until they cover the area or enemies destroy the deployment gadget. When enemies step on them, the Trax Stingers will deal damage and slow the enemy. Enemies can destroy the traps with bullets, fire, or melee hits.

New Defender, Mozzie

Mozzie has medium armor and medium speed. He can use the P10 RONI submachine gun or the Commando 9 assault rifle. His secondary options are the SDP 9mm pistol or the Super Shorty shotgun. Mozzie can use Barbed Wire or Nitro Cells while defending.

Mozzie’s unique ability is the Pest Launcher. This launcher sends out Pests that attach themselves to enemy remote control drones, taking them over for Mozzie’s personal use. Mozzie can shoot Pests onto drones or set them as traps for Attackers. Once a drone is under Mozzie’s control, he gains full use of it, but cannot take it out of the building he’s defending.

New map, Outback

Outback is Rainbow Six: Siege’s 21st map. It takes place in the Australian desert and consists of a garage, motel, and restaurant. These locations also serve as the maps recognizable callouts. Outback doesn’t have many doors, and players who want to roam will need to destroy walls to get around.

Ubisoft

Enter the Newcomer playlist

Rainbow Six: Siege is a complicated game, and can take hours to learn even the simplest mechanics. The Newcomer playlist is a new feature in Season 4, and will help players acclimate to the game with consistency.

In Newcomer, players will only play the Bomb game type, and can only play on three maps. Attackers will vote where to spawn. The game will determine the bombsite, not the players.

This playlist is only for players under level 50. Casual has also had its action time changed to three minutes and thirty seconds, to help find a middle ground between Newcomer and Ranked. Ranked play requires level 30, to make sure players have time to understand Siege before dropping in.

Operator and game balance

Ubisoft upgraded the Breach Charge gadget. It can now deploy faster and deals less damage to Attackers. For Defenders the explosion is much larger. The lethal range is less extreme for Defenders, but there’s a higher change it’ll deal some damage when exploding.

Operators are also seeing individual changes. Lesion’s mines now deal less damage, and Dokkaebi will hangup after 12 seconds. Players can also use Mute jammers to defend against Dokkaebi’s by standing next to them when when she calls or walking into their range after.

Patch Notes

Operator Balance

Ash

• Removed ACOG from R4-C

Lesion

• Reducing Gu Mine damage per tick from 8 to 4

Maverick

• Increase swap time between SURI Torch and weapons

Dokkaebi

• After 12 seconds, phone calls from Dokkaebi will hang up on their own
• Being in range of Mute jammers will prevent Dokkaebi from calling you
• Walking into range of Mute jammers will hang up phone calls during the call

Clash

• Removing Muzzle Brake on Machine Pistol

Game balance

Lean spam camera placement

• Previous camera placement at a full lean allowed players to fire without being completely exposed. As part of our fix to counteract lean spamming, we are shifting the camera to the center of the head instead of the far side of the head, even when at a “full lean”.

Operator movement and running animations

• With Y4S1, we have cleaned up the animations in the back end, and streamlined them. This will allow us more freedom to implement new features and unique aspects of the game in the future, as the overall animation development pipeline has been streamlined. We have also updated the new running animations based on the player feedback we received so that the head lean is less aggressive to make the sprint animation look more natural.
• Minimum Clearance Level for Ranked Playlist increased from 20 to 30.
• Reduction in HP after being revived from a DBNO state: PvP = 20 (down from 50), THunt = 15.
• Holosight color is now determined by the base skin of the weapon it is equipped on.

Breaching Charges

• Deployment animation is much faster
• Damage on Attacker’s side is reduced from 150 to 50
• Damage area of effect on Defender side is increased
• Lethal damage area of effect on Defender side is reduced

We wanted to make the breach charge safer and more comfortable for the attackers to use.

Player Comfort

Advanced deployment

We will be testing a switch to Advanced Gadget Deployment for all players. We feel very strongly that Advanced Gadget Deployment is the proper way to play Rainbow Six Siege, as it allows for more control over your Operator, as well as increased fluidity.

As always, we will be monitoring feedback on the Test Server, so please let us know what you think about this feature!

Game Health

Shield operation rotation

When Shield Operators turn in place, there is a slight delay before the shield and upper body snap to align with the legs. This can cause a mismatch between first and third person perspectives. We are deploying a change that will make this left and right motion more fluid, and ensure that first and third person perspectives are aligned.

MMR rollback

With the launch of Y4S1, we will be activating the Match Making and Rating (MMR) Roll Back feature. When a cheater is banned, this feature will roll back MMR gains and losses for all players from matches that the banned cheater participated in for that Season. The system will not grant you MMR beyond your max MMR for the current Season.