Rainbow Six Siege developer Ubisoft recently held a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) with a specific discussion theme of operator balance. As part of the discussion, Siege operator Thatcher, an SAS operator who can employ a powerful EMP grenade gadget, was mentioned, prompting Ubisoft to confirm that it’s not happy with how Thatcher is currently implemented.
Thatcher has been part of Rainbow Six Siege’s roster ever since the game first launched in late 2015, and despite the large number of additional operators who have joined Siege since that initial launch, he has remained a popular pick. This is because Thatcher’s EMP grenades can outright destroy most other gadgets that are caught in their blast radius, allowing him to easily shut down any defense operator who relies on a technology-based gadget.
However, during the AMA, one commenter inquired as to why Thatcher’s EMP grenades only disable, rather than destroy, the unique gadgets deployed by Alibi and Maestro, the two operators who were included in Siege’s recently deployed Operation Para Bellum update. As it turns out, having Thatcher’s EMP grenades temporarily disable gadgets instead of destroying them outright is a change that Ubisoft has been meaning to make for a while, and it’s one that will likely soon be applied across the board if Ubisoft has its way:
“EMP [temporarily] disabling things like Alibi’s Prisma, Maestro’s Turrets, or Bullet Proof Cameras are first steps towards bigger changes that we have in mind for Thatcher. In general, we are not satisfied with the interaction of the EMP and electronic gadgets when this interaction is a simple destruction. We believe that it is often too binary and doesn’t leave enough room for counterplays.”
It’s hard to argue with Ubisoft’s logic. Thatcher’s EMP grenades take very little skill to use, you just find out where an enemy gadget is deployed, throw your grenade, and boom, problem permanently solved. Juxtapose that with the gadgets employed by operators like Twitch or IQ, gadgets that take skill and strong situational awareness to be effective, and it’s easy to see why Ubisoft was dissatisfied with Thatcher’s current implementation. By making it so that EMP grenades merely disable a gadget for a few seconds rather than destroying it outright, Ubisoft hopes to create a stronger back-and-forth meta that still makes Thatcher useful, but not overly powerful.
Of course, Thatcher is far from the only operator whom Ubisoft feels could use some changes, as this newest test server update shows.