The final season for Rainbow Six Siege Year 9 was revealed and we got an early glimpse of what’s coming in December’s update including the long awaited Shield nerfs. Here’s the notable updates coming in Operation Collision Point:
A big notable change in this update is the crossplay compatibility between the consoles and PC opening up the matchmaking pool even further. Players can now party up with their friends on other platforms, including PC, which wasn’t possible before. Players also have the option to limit their playlist pool if they don’t want cross play on.
With crossplay, Ubisoft has also stated there will be relevant ant-cheat parameters involved with the update such as detecting PC players attempting to switch from the PC to the console only platform pool.
Shields have impacted the meta all year, and Ubisoft has vowed to put an end to that with this update. Shields will be receiving a nerf across the board making them less viable as an offensive weapon. Shield melee attack won’t do any damage anymore making that smoke melee push with Blitz utterly useless. Opponents will still go down however but instakills have been taken off the board.
Defenders have a stronger chance of taking a shield operator head on now with melee attacks and increased suppression. The more you melee a shield operator, the more exposed and unstable they get, allowing you to easily take them out now.
With this nerf, the shields will be more utilised as a support tool rather than a full offensive one. So don’t expect anymore Blitz smoke rushes or Montaigne frustratingly holding the only path into site.
With the shield nerf coming into play, Blackbeard gets a rework giving him a more viable choice for attackers.
Blackbeard is given a new shield rather than the small anti-headshot one he had since year one allowing him to be protected even more than before. The shield has a glass panel that goes down and allows you to fire while being in cover – basically a wall panel with a gun out the front. The shield also allows you to penetrate soft walls meaning pushing into site and creating rotates will be easy.
The new rework allows Blackbeard to serve a bigger role in entry fragging with the new shield and ability to create breaches in soft walls.
It’s quite an interesting move adding the rework for Blackbeard now considering the shield nerfs but I’m keen to see how the combination of the two switches up the gameplay. There’s plenty more updates coming to Rainbow Six Siege with Operation Collision Point, check out the reveal livestream below: