The complexity of Rainbow Six Siege is both a blessing and a curse. When trying to get a handle on all 42 operators’ unique gadgets, the task of learning the intricacies and interactions between them all feels insurmountable. To help you better understand how different gadgets can interact with the map and compliment each other, we’ve broken down eight common gadget tricks that you’ll find in Siege.
Courtesy of Varsity Gaming on YouTube.
Bandit Tricking
Bandit tricking is a strategy as old as Siege itself. A large part of Siege’s meta revolves around the struggle between defenders and attackers over the reinforced walls of the objective. Gaining access to far sight lines is a big advantage for the attackers, so the fate of a round sometimes hinges on a few key walls. To guard against the hard breaching power of Thermite and Hibana, Bandit’s batteries can electrify the walls and zap enemy gadgets dead. But if the attackers also bring along the EMP grenades of Thatcher, then Bandit’s batteries are typically destroyed before they can protect anything.
To get around this hard counter for Bandit, players created what is now known as the Bandit trick. It’s done by waiting to place your battery on a wall until you hear a hard breacher placing their charge. If this is timed correctly, the battery will zap the breaching charges before they can go off. The Bandit then picks the battery back up, protecting it from a retaliating Thatcher, and repeats the process again if needed. The trick has since been embraced by Ubisoft as a legitimate part of the meta.
Valkyrie camera placement
Valkyrie is quietly powerful. Her Black Eye cameras can be thrown and stuck almost anywhere on the map and provide invaluable intelligence for your team, in addition to giving dead players something useful to do with their downtime. But after years of being spotted by her cams, players have learned how to quickly scan a room and destroy them.
To avoid this regrettable fate, you’ll have to get extra crafty and find some good hiding spots. Hiding a cam where no one would ever find it is easy enough, but finding a stealthy vantage point that’s still useful to the team is an art of its own. Load up a custom game and experiment with different spots. Avoid predictable corners and try to think lower instead of higher. Break open a box or glass cabinet and slip a camera in.
Shoot a discreet hole in a wall between two rooms and keep a camera there to watch both at once. And most importantly, try to get a useful camera outside. This will be the most difficult, since you only have a few seconds after the round starts to toss the cam before attackers notice. Practice landing the camera in trees or bushes to best hide it.
Courtesy of Jytus on YouTube.
Lion & Jackal
Combining Lion and Jackal creates a simple and deadly combo to counter roamers giving you a headache. Use both of their gadgets at the same time. Find a roamers footprints as Jackal and scan. As the scan begins and reveals their current location, activate Lion’s scan. During the few seconds of Lion’s scan, the enemy has no way of keeping their exact spot a secret. If they move, their body is highlighted red. If they stay still, Jackal scans them.
Use these precious few seconds to move in and take the enemy down. Keep in mind, though, that top-tier roamer Caviera is immune to Jackal’s tracking when using her Silent Step ability, and that Mute’s signal jammers cancel Lion’s scan when in its radius.
Dokkaebi & IQ
Another duo that comes together to form a cool trick, Dokkaebi and IQ are great for rooting out the exact location of any defender. After Dokkaebi calls the enemy team with her Logic Bomb, they have to take a few seconds to take out their phone and turn it off. It’s during this brief moment that IQ can see the phone through walls up to 10 meters away. If the sound of the ringing phone isn’t enough, this trick will ensure the exact location of your prey. Though just like with Lion, Mute’s jammers will prevent the Logic Bomb’s effects if you’re within its radius.
Courtesy of 458 Kit on YouTube.
Countering Clash
A good Clash player is a real problem for the attackers. Her shield allows her to roam the map with relative safety, reporting every move you make to her teammates. To top it off, attempts to melee her shield away can often be thwarted by her shield-mounted taser that slows enemies. She does have a few soft counters, but they both take some coordination to properly pull of.
First and most effective is Zofia. Firing one of her three concussion grenades at Clash will force her to move the shield and expose her lower body. This opening only lasts for a second or two, which is too fast for Zofia to switch back to her weapon in time. Instead, you’ll need a teammate nearby to confirm the kill.
Clash's other counter is Capitao and his fire bolts. Landing a fire bolt at Clash’s feet can quickly eat at her health, but a weary player will be waiting for Capitao to pull out his crossbow and back up accordingly. To account for this, shoot the bolt at the exit she is likely to try to escape to and make her unwittingly walk into the fire, not away from it.
Evil Eye placement
Maestro’s Evil Eyes are excellent tools for zapping enemy gadgets, preventing a plant of the defuser, or just generally zapping the enemy until they go insane. They’re not as flexible as a Valkyrie’s Black Eye cameras, since they have to be installed on a wall or object by hand, but they’re a lot more durable. Finding the right spot for an Evil Eye is more nuanced than simply trying to be discreet. It’s a big hunk of metal and loud when in use, so stealth is out of the equation. Focus on placing them where their wide field-of-view can be best utilized. A great example is on top of waist-high cover in the middle of a room. In a spot like that, you’ll likely be able to watch 90 percent of the area.
To compliment the Evil Eye watching the objective, the other should be placed to watch the most likely attacking route. Placed in a corner to watch several hallways, the Evil Eye will be able harass enemies trying to make their final push. Position the camera far enough from the objective that an attacker would have to turn around and expose themselves to shoot it out.
Deployable shields
Deployable shields are an often-overlooked secondary gadget in Siege. Cowering behind a deployable shield is usually a bad idea, as it paints a clear target on your back and sometimes traps yourself when trying to fight back. But when you have a specific tactic in mind, there are plenty of good ways to utilize one. Most popular is to block a contentious doorway with a deployable shield to make it that much harder for attackers to infiltrate. This is used to discourage entry, encouraging the enemy to funnel in from somewhere that's easier to defend.
The deployable shield can also be comboed with Frost’s Welcome Mat traps to great effect. Placing one on the other side of the shield can often fool attackers hopping over the shield directly into the trap. Many cautious players will shoot the trap as they vault over the shield or toss in a frag grenade, but the real problem comes for shield operators. Unless a desperate Monty or Blitz can get a clear shot on the trap through the door, there’s not much they can do to prevent their death. Trying to hipfire the trap with a pistol as they’re vaulting over the trap has a low chance of actually working, so the shield and trap combo works great as shield repellent.
Courtesy of Macie Jay on YouTube.
Fuze charges
Fuze is an ultra popular operator for beginners. At first, his explosive hockey puck clusters seem like an easy source of kills, but any veteran player knows how to easily dodge their explosive radius. That’s why a truly great Fuze player doesn’t use his charges hoping to get kills, they use them to clear out the objective of defender gadgets.
To use Fuze best, you need to know that fuze charges toss out the grenades in the same pattern every time. Each of the five grenades is propelled in a straight line from left to right order. Use this information to clear out entire hallways of pesky barbed wire, deployable shields, Evil Eyes, Valkyrie cameras, Welcome Mats, and anything else you can think of. This also requires a good amount of map knowledge, so start researching the rooms above objectives to find the best fuze points. Clearing out the objective for your teammates can easily make the difference for a successful attack.
Wrap up
These tricks only scratch the surface of what’s possible in Siege, but they’re a foundation of the tricks you'll need to be aware of to compete at all levels. Just being able to recognize these strategies will help with your situational awareness and let you better work with your teammates to pull of a win.
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