Rainbow Six Siege: Operation Steel Wave Is Live; Here Are The Full Patch Notes

Ubisoft has been teasing Rainbow Six Siege's new season for a few weeks now, and it's finally out. We've got the full patch notes below. Year 5 Season 2 is called Operation Steel Wave, and it adds a significant amount of new content to the game, including two new operators and a rework of the fan-favorite House map. The developers have also buffed the operator Amaru and added a new gadget to the game in the form of the Proximity Alarm.

The attacker Ace is one of the new operators, and he uses a water-powered breach charge called the SELMA to burst through breakable and reinforced surfaces. If it's used on walls, the SELMA can roll down to explode up to three times, making him potentially devastating as a breacher. The other new operator, the defender Melusi, has a unique gadget called the Banshee Sonic Defense that slows attackers and alerts the enemy team to their presence.

In terms of broader changes, the operator Amaru will now only break barricades when she tumbles through them, but she won't have to break hatches before going up. These tweaks will hopefully make her a bit more viable. Ubisoft is also unifying the game's MMR across all regions, which will make reaching the top rank of Champions that much more difficult. This patch comes with a raft of new cosmetics, including an Elite Set for Echo and exclusive Steel Wave weapon skins.

The full patch notes, courtesy of Ubisoft's website, can be seen below:

Rainbow Six Siege Operation Steel Wave Patch Notes

MAP REWORK: HOUSE

At last, House has undergone some major renovations and is ready for more mayhem. While we strived to keep this map as casual as possible, we still felt there were some things we needed to change in order for it to be well balanced.

The first item we need to discuss is the size of the house itself. With this rework, not only have some of the existing areas been made bigger, we also added an entirely new section on the South side, with two rooms on each floor and a staircase to connect them. With this new space, everyone will have more space to move and breathe, but we were also able to add a new Bomb site in TV Room and Music Room.

Many other areas have changed, but three required special attention. Firstly, Garage has been revamped, with only one of its doors being destructible and a new barricade being added to give a different access option, while still making a Defuser plant harder. Secondly, what was once Workshop is now a finished Girls' Room with an attached walk-in closet. Thirdly, lines of sight have been reduced on the North side of the building, with the main door being blocked off and the shuttered window replaced with a hallway.

As you play this new version of a classic map, you'll notice some other things. The Living & Training Bomb site has been removed in favor of Master Bedroom & Boys' Room. Most floors are now breakable, so vertical play will be a lot more viable. Some hatches have been added or moved. Overall, we applied our vision of competitive maps while keeping it fun and making it safer.

AMARU CHANGES

While Amaru has always been acrobatic and dynamic, she hasn't always been as unpredictable as we wanted her to be. This season, we hope to give her the tools she needs to fulfill her role with a few tweaks.

While her hook animations and timings will be smoother, what's really important to point out is that from now on, she will only break barricades when she goes through them (although her hook will still break the glass on a window), and she will no longer need to break a hatch before going up, as she will breach it in the action itself.

SECONDARY GADGET: PROXIMITY ALARM

Our brand new secondary gadget is finally fine-tuned and ready to be used on the field. This thrown sticky gadget is an essential intel-gathering tool, and it works just as well for anchors as it does for roamers.

The Proximity Alarm's small size makes it easy to place in a spot where Attackers might not see them as they navigate their way to the objective, making it all the more easy for Defenders to capitalize on the chaos that ensues when the alarm goes off.

UNIFIED MMR & CHAMPIONS RANK

A big change is coming to our Matchmaking Rating system. In order to prevent matchmaking abuses while switching regions, we will be changing to unified MMRs for each playlist. This means that you will not have different MMRs depending on the region you play in. However, your matchmaking ranking will remain separate in different playlists.

For those of you who are or aspire to be in the Champions rank, this change will in fact cause the Champions' leaderboard to be worldwide, making it all the more challenging to reach that top spot. Additionally, we want to reinforce that the notion that Champions is not just about skills but also about dedication, so a minimum of 100 matches is now required to get the rank, on top of the 5000 MMR threshold.

ELITE ECHO

Have you ever wondered what each Operator might be like, in an alternate universe? In the future? Would they still be with Rainbow, and would they even still be good people?

Echo's Elite Set is one such glance into another world, where he is the hero of his own city, and no criminal can hope to match him in combat. This set contains Echo's Tenkamusou uniform, victory animation, gadget skin for his Yokai Drones and weapon skins for the SUPERNOVA, MP5SD, P229, and BEARING 9, as well as the Elite Echo Chibi charm.

OPERATORS PRICE DECREASE

Four Operators are getting a price decrease with this season. This time, Alibi and Maestro are going down to 15,000 Renown or 350 R6 Credits, and Nøkk and Warden's prices will be 20,000 Renown or 480 R6 Credits.

STEEL WAVE WEAPON SKINS

This time, two new seasonal weapon skins are coming your way to spice up your loadouts in two different ways.

Let the Wooden Carvings skin lead you into battle, with its aged wood and chiseled symbols.

Take a chill pill, the Beach Trip skin is here to make things a little more lighthearted and fun.

Seasonal weapon skins are released upon season launch and can be purchased during that season. Once unlocked, the seasonal weapon skins can be applied to all available weapons

OPERATOR BALANCING

CLASH

• Clash's SMG will switch from having a red dot to using the reflex's green triangle.

ECHO

• Removed the camera shake effect from from Yokai's concussion effects.
• Length of concussion effect is no longer affected by movement. Now has a fixed duration of 10s and the intensity of the vision disruption stays fixed throughout the effect.
• Replaced the Deployable Shield with Impact Grenades.

FINKA

• Increased base hp to 30 (from 5) for teammates revived by Finka's Nanoboost. DBNO Players will stand up with 50 hp (30 from own base hp + 20 from Finka boost).

KAID

• Added LFP586 secondary to loadout.

KALI

• Reduced LV Explosive Lance's fuse time to 1.5s (down from 2.5s).
• Improved CSRX 300 recoil through reduced weapon climb after each shot.
• Replaced P22 Mk5 with SPSMG9 in loadout.

NOMAD

• Added PRB92 secondary weapon to loadout.

ORYX

• Reduced damage taken when dashing through walls to 5 (down from 10).
• Bulletproof Camera replaced with new Proximity Alarm secondary gadget.
• Added angled grip option to Oryx's MP5.

ELA, ZOFIA

• Eliminated the mouse sensibility modifier from concussion effect of the Bosak sisters' gadgets.

YING

• Removed a Candela to bring it down to 3 (from 4 Candelas). - Changed for PC on 04-30-2020.

TWEAKS & IMPROVEMENTS

GAME BALANCING

ACS12 New Slug Bullet Type

There was previously an ongoing bug that allowed the ACS12 to do too much destruction too quickly We've given the ACS12 a new slug bullet type that should make damage more controlled and in line with our design intentions. We'll test it on the PC Test Server first, so please leave us your feedback!

PLAYER COMFORT

Updates to Playlist Guides

We've made some upgrades to the Playlist Guides. The Ranked Guide will now reflect the current season and you will still be able to see all the ranked charm rewards, as well as your previous highest rank for the past 3 seasons.

Map rotations for Quickmatch will rotate automatically three times per season, and the current map pool information will be displayed in the Playlist guides.

Audio Localizations

Localization recordings for the new Operators Ace + Melusi will not be available in French and Russian for the season release. Even when the audio settings are set to French/Russian, players will hear the English voiceovers. Until this is updated, players can turn on the subtitles for Ace + Melusi until the game is updated with localized voices at a later date.

The Japanese localized voiceovers for Frost and Capitao have been updated to be more in line with the current Operators.

GAME HEALTH

Match Cancellation

Match Cancellation is a new feature that will allow players to cancel their current Ranked match under the condition that team sizes are unbalanced at the beginning of the match (eg: if players disconnect before the first round, or if a lobby is formed with less than 10 players). The Match Cancellation vote option will become available for the incomplete team during the prep phase and a majority vote will cancel the match. A canceled match will show as canceled and have no impact on MMR.

Abandon penalties are still in place and players who abandon an ongoing Ranked Match are still subject to escalating abandon sanctions.

If a match cancellation vote is triggered, leaving before the validation of the Match Cancellation vote will also result in an abandon penalty. Players should remain in the game until the Match Cancellation vote is validated and the game has been canceled.

The Match Cancellation feature will first deploy to the seasonal TS for testing and will go live later in the season.

Changes to Ranked Clearance Level and Champion Rank Requirements

• Ranked clearance level changed from 30 to 50.
• To reach Champion Rank, players must have 5000 MMR and additionally, they now must have played at least 100 ranked matches in the current season.

As discussed in our Top Issues blog, the aim of these changes is to make Ranked less accessible to cheaters. By combo-ing increased clearance level requirements for Ranked together with the PvE XP level cap, we can do more to better gate-keep and protect the Ranked environment from cheaters. The additional Champion Rank requirements will also help us in that regard as it will prevent cheaters from trying to fast-hack their way into the leaderboards.

Benchmarking Update

Improved Benchmarking Tool to deliver detailed performance reports about player's hardware specifications and graphics settings. Please note that the values may differ from before as benchmarking is now performed on the map Oregon instead of House.