Rainbow Six Siege’s next patch could finally make Oryx good

Rainbow Six Siege’s latest Technical Test Server is trying out dramatic changes for Oryx, Gridlock, and Fuze aimed at making them more fun to play. The new balancing shifts aren’t guaranteed to make it to the live build, but tests like this are typically good indicators of what’s to come in Siege’s mid-season update.

Oryx

Using Remash Dash through a soft wall will not deplete all the dash charges
Increased Dash refresh time to 12s (up from 8s).
Dash recovery time for all dashes is now 0.5s for recovery (Previous recovery times: soft wall = 1s, enemy = 0.7s)

This looks like a modest tweaking of numbers at first, but a quick recovery for the Remah Dash could be exactly what Oryx needs to finally feel useful. Since his release in March, it’s become clear that smashing through walls near enemies is a quick way to get killed. Halving the time needed to pick his gun back up will let Oryx capitalize on his surprise attack before the enemy lines up a headshot. Dashing through walls also won’t reset his dash count anymore, which never made much sense in the first place.

The Oryx buff reads similarly to Amaru’s buffs introduced in Operation Steel Wave last month. An increase to her weapon ready speed has made her way more fun and viable as a mobility-focused attacker. Oryx has the same potential on defense, so this is wonderful to see.

Gridlock

Lowered Gridlock's Trax Stinger deployment time to 9 seconds (down from 13s)
Lowered individual spike mat deployment time to 0.45s (down from 0.7s)
Lowered range of random deploy variation to 0.05s (down from 0.1s)
Added delay before deployment sequence starts increased to 0.45s (previously no delay)

Using Gridlock’s Trax Stingers is getting faster across the board, and it’s awesome. The Trax is currently very sluggish compared to similar traps that protect attackers from roamers. It’s tough to set up a push while waiting 13 seconds for the loud Trax to finish spitting out spikes. Four seconds will make a big difference, but Gridlock still pales in comparison to Nomad’s sticky Airjabs that deploy in a few seconds and can’t be easily countered.

The other interesting tweak is the new 0.45s delay before a Trax starts spitting out spike pads. This could be read as a buff or slight nerf. When tossed into a room with an enemy, it’ll now be easy to shoot the main device before it can deploy any spike mats. That said, the delay also gives Gridlock a moment to ready her weapon before the trap loudly announces her presence.

rainbow six siege — (Image credit: Ubisoft)

Fuze

Increased cluster charges to 4 (up from 3)

Ubisoft’s reasoning behind the extra cluster charge is to give Fuze more “presence” in the round, but I read this differently. It seems like the extra charge is meant to give Fuze more power to destroy defender utility or, more specifically, eat up Jäger and Wamai’s grenade-snatching gadgets to free up room for smoke and frag grenades.

At high levels of play, Siege is currently dominated by the “20-second meta,” which commonly depicts attackers spending most of a round destroying restrictive defender gadgets before they can reliably push into the bomb site (and only using the last 20 seconds to actually shoot things). Ubi is looking for ways to mitigate overwhelming defender gadgets, and another cluster charge for Fuze is likely part of this goal.

The full TTS patch notes include a few other tidbits, like increased feedback for the rare instance that Nomad’s Airjabs propel enemies through walls and other general bug fixes.

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Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.