Rainbow Six Siege's new blow torch operator revealed

Update: Maverick has been officially revealed, and the leaks and rumors have been confirmed. As you can see in the teaser above, he indeed uses a blow torch, though rather than breaching the wall in this case, he creates a horizontal slit which he can shoot through. His bio indicates that while creating "murder holes" is one of his talents, his blow torch has other uses, too. Maverick’s full reveal will take place during the Six Major in Paris, which begins tomorrow and runs through the 19th.

Our original story, in which fans dug up his name a bit early, follows below.

Original story (Aug 14): Following the official reveal of Rainbow Six Siege’s newest defender, Clash, fans have already been digging for even more info. And thanks to their tenaciousness, we now know the likely name of our new blow-torched attacker: Maverick.

There are already a few things that are adding credence to this theory, the main one being video tags that can be found in the reveal video for Clash on Ubisoft’s YouTube channel. As you can see below, “new operator maverick” is embedded in the video’s keywords for anyone to see. Well, not anyone—YouTube hides these tags on the normal video page, so they’re only visible when viewing the page source in another tab.

Maverick’s mention sits right next to other keywords that we would expect, like “new operator clash” and “hereford base,” so this seems pretty cut and dry. But for good measure, clever redditor veolicitycontrol noticed that trying to open the page for “maverick reveal” on the Siege website doesn’t simply redirect back to the main site like other bogus URLs. Instead, it hits a 404 and stays there, suggesting the page may exist and just isn’t visible yet.

We know from leaks back in May and the Operation Grim Sky reveal that Maverick is an attacker from the Delta Force who will carry a blow torch gadget. This likely means he’ll be Siege’s third hard breacher alongside Thermite and Hibana, an addition players have wanted for a long time. Ubisoft will probably officially unveil Maverick’s name sometime this week, leading up to the full gameplay reveal on Sunday during the Six Paris Major.

Ubisoft has also released a new Designer Notes blog post detailing a few small operator changes before going into Grim Sky. The most interesting change will be coming to Thatcher—his EMP grenades will no longer destroy cameras, only disable them temporarily. “This is a small part of a larger project that we are working on, but have too many dependencies on current systems to implement this at the same time as the rest of the changes. Future changes will include elements that will make Thatcher stronger, but we needed this interaction in place before we can begin working on those,” the post states.

Valkyrie’s throwable cameras, bulletproof cameras, Maestro’s Evil Eye turrets, and the default map cameras all apply here. Right now, this comes across as a simple nerf, but Thatcher isn’t typically used to destroy cameras in the first place. His EMP grenades are most commonly used to safely destroy Bandit's batteries and Mute’s jammers to free up a wall for hard breaching. The nerf is in line with what Ubisoft designers said last month during a Reddit AMA, admitting that they weren’t satisfied with how the EMPs leave little room for counterplays.

After feedback that Twitch’s shock drones were too hard to hear even in a quiet room, Ubi will be making them a bit louder when moving around in Grim Sky. If this nerf is as slight as they make it sound, it shouldn’t change up Twitch’s playstyle too much, but it’s important to know for the Twitch mains out there who might not notice they’re suddenly making more noise when trying to stealth around.

We'll surely have more on Siege's new operators come the Paris Major this weekend.