Rainbow Six Siege Year 8 Season 4 adds Turabao, overhauls frags

Rainbow Six Siege pushes ever onward and year eight season four is the next step with Operation Deep Freeze and the new operator Tubarao.

The next season will be a big one, including a massive overhaul to frag grenades and additions to the community features added in this recent season. And of course, a new operator is also inbound with new defender Tubarao being the namesake of this operation alongside the new map, Lair.

While Rainbow Six Siege is getting long in the tooth at this point and still refuses to go free-to-play, the game continues to add new features that keep it feeling fresh. Here’s what’s on tap for next season, and what the biggest changes are going to be.

Rainbow Six Siege: Tubarão infiltrates Deimos’s secret Lair

New operator Tubarao coming in Rainbow Six Siege Year 8, Season 4

The new agent coming in Rainbow Six Siege year eight, season four is Tubarao, a defender built around an AOE slow. 

Tubarao is bringing the “deep freeze” in Operation Deep Freeze. The new agent has a cryogenic grenade that deploys an AOE slow, allowing him to hold an area and assist with flanks. He can also do work himself with an AR-15.50 and MPX.

Alongside Tubarao is the new map Lair. Lair is a subterranean locale, which is demonstrated both aesthetically and in terms of its layout. The lowest floors of the map are grimy and rocky, while the upper levels are furnished and well-lit. The map is made up of several larger areas connected with narrow tunnels. This makes for abundant chokepoints and bottlenecks that defenders should love. It’s also a level that should serve Tubarao particularly well.

Here’s what is changing in Rainbow Six Siege with frag grenades

Frag grenades are getting a massive nerf and overhaul in Rainbow Six Siege with year eight, season four.

In press materials for Operation Deep Freeze, developers discussed the disproportionate power of frag grenades and how they plan to address it. Numbers were rattled off discussing how players reflexively gravitate toward operators that have access to frag grenades. Alongside this, frag grenades are chosen over 90% of the time over other gadgets. To address both of these issues, grenades are being nerfed while also being made available across more operators.

The developers believe that the issue ultimately came down to the fact that frag grenades were secondary gadgets that offered the power of a primary gadget. To address this, cooking grenades has been removed and the fuse time has been reduced from four to five seconds.

Lion, IQ, Sens, Osa, and Blackbeard will all be able to use frag grenades, starting in Rainbow Six Siege year eight, season four. Each of them will lose a gadget option in exchange.

The goal for the developers is ultimately to have greater diversity in terms of the operators chosen by players and to make choosing frag grenades less of a no-brainer option. The balance team suggested that the plan is to monitor some of these changes and adjust them should it not achieve this effect.