Thanks to constant updates and a steady influx of new characters, the best Rainbow Six Siege Operators are constantly changing. Each one offers unique loadouts, gadgets, and stats offering a choice of strategies to use through the maps and environments.
Ahead of Sam Fisher inclusion next month, we’ve taken a look at the best Defenders and Attackers of 2020 for R6.
Rainbow Six Siege Attackers
The Hard Breachers: Ace / Hibana / Thermite
Dedicated to taking out reinforced walls and making a hole big enough to get through, Ace, Hibana, and Thermite are unmatched at turning a wall into a doorway.
Ace’s Aqua Charges and Hibana’s pellets can both be deployed from a distance, safely bowing up reinforced walls without having to step too near them. Ace’s tool’s staccato deployment is often a dead giveaway of where the enemy is coming from, while Hibana’s slightly quicker but high-pitched explosives are more swift.
On the other hand, you got Thermite, which plants a thermobaric C4 charge capable of turning a whole wall into splinterings in a second in a quieter way than the other two. Aside from the sound of walking near the wall and sticking the adhesive explosive to a wall, the tool is virtually silent before you press the trigger and cause a bang – a good thing if you want to catch the enemy unaware.
The Soft Breachers: Ash/ Sledge / Buck
Any wall, ceiling, or floor without reinforcement panels is a prime target for these three. Ash’s grenade launcher can destroy any soft wall or Defender’s gadgets from afar, while Sledge and Buck can wreak havoc by getting up close and personal with the sledgehammer and Skeleton Key underslung shotgun, respectively.
Add to it a very versatile loadout and quick movement speed, and these three soft breachers can make any defender’s life hell by blitzkrieging the objective room and creating holes in a split second.
The Utilitarians: Maverick / Thatcher / Montagne
Luckily, attacking in Siege is more than just breaching. Defenders are full of gadgets that make the simple act of getting into the objective room a pain, and that’s where operators like Thatcher come in. His EMP grenades can destroy or disable virtually every electronic gadget in the game, meaning all the tools meant to neutralise the attackers’ arsenal are disabled themselves. The grenade even affects sights like red dots and ACOGs, meaning you’ll not only enter the objective room – the enemy will also have a harder time shooting you.
Montagne, meanwhile, is a behemoth with an unbreakable shield that can literally turn any entry point into Darth Vader’s corridor scene in Rogue One. By single-handedly tanking every single shot that comes his way, he can act as the crucible that pushes into enemy territory as his teammates safely take out enemies from behind the protection of his shield. It’s a support role, but very satisfactory when it works out.
Maverick is more of a harasser than an actual support, thanks to his blowtorch than can burn pinholes even through reinforced surfaces to shoot people from unexpected angles. In a pinch, his torch can also be used to cut a proper person-sized entryway, so make sure to employ the tool creatively for the best results.
Rainbow Six Siege Defenders
Anchors: Smoke / Echo / Mira
If you’re the camping kind, few operators are as relevant as Smoke, Echo, and Mira. Smoke’s remote gas grenades can easily block off a whole corridor with a yellow gas that downs attackers in three seconds flat, and with 3 of them, he can easily make one hell of an impact.
Meanwhile, Mira can place bulletproof one-way glass panels that allows defenders to look outside without being seen, giving them extremely important intel on attackers (and often acting as a deterrent because enemies are never sure if someone is or not behind that tinted window). The glass panels work not only as an early warning system, but also allow optimal activation of pre-placed traps like C4 or Smoke’s own gas grenades.
Echo’s two Yokai cloaking drones can attach themselves to the ceiling and fire disorienting ultrasonic bursts that temporarily blind and deafen any enemies caught in the blast, giving defenders a very hard to spot weapon platform that can turn any breach into a .
Roamers: Doc / Bandit / Jager / Clash
If you rather defend by going in the offense, you could do much worse than these operators.
Let’s start with Clash, the Defenders’ answer to Montagne. With a full-body transparent shield equipped with a short-range taser, Clash can single-handedly tank an entry point as the rest of her teammates return fire, and she can shock anyone that gets close enough to try to melee the shield away.
Meanwhile, the GSG 9’s Jager and Bandit bot have deployable gadgets that don’t require them to stick around the activation spot, meaning you can drop their tools down and go roaming as they automatically defend the objective room. Jager is equipped with a Magpie grenade interceptor that automatically nabs any explosives thrown and defuses them in the air, while Bandit can drop Shock Wires that tie to reinforced walls, barbed wires, deployable shields, and other metallic gadgets. The Shock Wires not only electrify and deal damage to anyone and anything in its vicinity – they also prevent the placing of tools like breaching charges, pellets, and even breaching rounds for a nigh-impenetrable angle of defense.
Doc is the most versatile one from this list, as his position as Siege’s only true healer means he’s better used as a middle term between roamers and anchors. Proper use of Doc during a pinch can mean the objective is safely defended, while healing roamers means the enemy might not even get that far. Either way, a good Doc player can mean the difference between a win and a loss – just like all operators in this list.
