Rainbow Six Siege Begins Testing Significant Jackal Nerf
After Ubisoft introduced Pick and Ban to ranked earlier this year, Rainbow Six Siege players used the mechanic to prove just how much they despise playing against Jackal. Not long after the update went live, ban rates for the Spanish attacker went through the roof, and Ubisoft took notice. There wasn’t much that could realistically be done about the situation, but a few months later, the developers are re-balancing the notorious operator.
Jackal Nerf
As is the case with all major changes, Rainbow Six Siege’s upcoming Jackal nerf will first be trialed on the technical test servers. According to the patch notes, Ubisoft is aiming to “make the information Jackal can get more effective and nuanced”. Additionally, they want to “increase emphasis on cost-reward decision making when Jackal decides how to use that information.”
In a nutshell, the number of pings that Jackal receives per scan now varies on the age of the footprint. Rather than introduce a new mechanic, Ubisoft is putting into play the pre-existing functionality of footprint age. The more recent the scanned footprint is, the more times the respective defender will be tagged. The exact numbers are as follows:
Red print (<15s old): 5 Pings
Yellow print (16s-30s old): 4 Pings
Green print (31s-60s old): 3 pings
Blue print (61s-90s old): 2 Pings
Furthermore, upon a successful scan of footprints, the entire trail will disappear. This prevents Jackal from tracking an operator multiple times using the same set of footprints. Another change to his Eyenox tracker prevents Jackal from being able to perform vertical scans from the floor below.
All in all, these are very interesting changes, and you can try them for yourselves in the test server starting today. Keep in mind that this balance change is only in its testing phase, so its entirely possible that it won’t make it to the live version of the game. Hopefully the Rainbow Six Siege community is satisfied with this nerf and will finally stop banning the operator every game. Now that Ubisoft has nerfed Jackal, it won’t be long before Echo sees a change as well.
