Rainbow Six Siege Tier List: Best Operators After Y11S3.1

Year 11 Season 3.1 landed on September 22 as a pure refinement patch — eight straight buffs and zero nerfs, according to Ubisoft's own Y11S3.1 patch notes. That's a rare shape for a Rainbow Six Siege update, and it lands on top of the bigger Operation Split Fire rework from three weeks earlier that reshuffled Kali, Dokkaebi and two DMRs. Combined, the two patches move enough operators around that the old Y11S2 tier list is out of date. This is our opinion, built from Ubisoft's verified numbers rather than raw win-rate data, so treat placements as a strong starting point for your own testing.

01What Y11S3.1 Actually Changed

Every operator touched in this patch got stronger, and Ubisoft was explicit that none of it is meant to shift the overall meta — these are quality-of-life passes on operators the design team felt were underperforming relative to their skill ceiling.

• Buck: Skeleton Key total ammo up to 36 (from 31), extending his vertical-play utility through a full round.
• Castle: Armor Panel now takes 10 melee hits to destroy (from 9), buying his site more time against hard breaches.
• Fenrir: F-NATT Dread Mine now reaches maximum gas range in 1.9 seconds (from 2), letting him punish pushes faster.
• Maestro: Evil Eye battery life up to 9 seconds (from 8), a small but real intel uptime gain.
• Thermite: Exothermic Charge damage up to 220 hp (from 200), enough to threaten defenders standing near a reinforced wall.
• Sledge: Breaching Hammer swing time cut to 0.8 seconds (from 1), speeding up his signature wall-bash rotations.
• M1014: Base damage up to 30 hp (from 28) — affects Ace, Castle, Pulse and Thermite.
• SPAS-15: Base damage up to 26 hp (from 24) — affects Caveira and Thunderbird.

02Defender Tier List: Noor Redraws the Board

Noor, the Egyptian defender who launched with Operation Split Fire on September 1, is the biggest single addition to the defender roster this season. Her Horus Lance fires a projectile that either burrows into a ballistic shield and ignites — forcing the shield operator to expose themselves to remove it — or, against a wall, hatch or gadget, spouts flames in two directions to deny a doorway. She's the first direct shield counter in Siege's history, and that alone reshapes how Blitz, Montagne and Wamai get played against her.

• S-Tier — Noor: A dedicated shield counter with no real precedent on the defender side. Any team leaning on a shield operator now has to account for her before pushing a site.
• S-Tier — Thermite: The Exothermic Charge buff plus the M1014 damage bump make him more dangerous both at the wall and in the room behind it.
• S-Tier — Castle: He benefits from both his own Armor Panel buff and the M1014 damage bump on his loadout, making his barricaded sites noticeably harder to clear this patch.
• A-Tier — Fenrir: The faster F-NATT gas cloud is a real quality-of-life win for a gadget that previously gave attackers too much time to walk out of the zone.
• A-Tier — Maestro: A longer-lived Evil Eye means more consistent intel across a round, though the buff is modest on its own.
• B-Tier — Kapkan: The Entry Denial Device now deals 62 hp instead of 60, a small threat increase that mostly matters against operators already at reduced health.
• B-Tier — Echo: Yokai's Sonic Burst now refills every 15 seconds instead of 16 — a minor cooldown trim rather than a real power spike.
• B-Tier — Caveira and Thunderbird: Both ride the SPAS-15 damage buff into slightly faster close-range trades, but neither operator's own kit changed.
• C-Tier — Dokkaebi: The Jegeo Payload now needs a constant, uninterrupted connection to the target's phone, and the tablet stays detectable by gadgets like Solis' SPEC-IO for the whole upload. Trading her EMP Impact Grenades for Breach Charges also removes a tool she used to disrupt cameras and gadgets mid-round.

03Attacker Tier List: Sledge and Buck Move Up

The attacker side saw fewer direct changes, but the ones that landed are meaningful for anyone running fast executes.

• A-Tier — Sledge: Cutting Breaching Hammer swing time by 20% is the single most impactful change for site-execute speed this patch — he opens rotation holes and soft walls noticeably faster.
• A-Tier — Buck: Five extra Skeleton Key rounds sounds small, but it's the difference between running dry mid-vertical-play and holding a lane through a full retake.
• A-Tier — Ace and Pulse: Both carry the M1014 as a secondary and benefit from its damage bump the same way Thermite and Castle do, even though neither operator changed directly.
• B-Tier — Kali: The V-Lance no longer cancels ADS when you swap to it, the CSRX 300's short and long scopes dropped to 3.5x/8x, the pump cycle is faster and max ammo rose to 51. That's a genuine flexibility upgrade, but Ubisoft paired it with higher recoil and wider hip-fire spread, so she rewards precision more than she used to and punishes spray-and-pray follow-ups.
• C-Tier — Aruni: The MK14 EBR lost access to the Muzzle Brake attachment, making follow-up shots harder to control at range — a direct hit to her long-sightline role.
• C-Tier — Tubarão: The AR-15.50 lost its Muzzle Brake too, and its base damage and recoil both moved in the wrong direction, so it takes more shots and more control to close out a fight than it did last season.

04Weapon Buffs Worth Building Around

Two more weapon changes from the Y11S3 designer's notes are easy to miss but worth factoring into your loadout choices: the SPSMG9 now deals 35 hp instead of 33 for Clash and Kali, and Claymore damage is up to 155 hp from 150 for anyone running one as a secondary gadget. Neither is flashy, but both push already-decent picks a little closer to auto-include territory. Lion also got a quieter tweak worth knowing — EE-ONE-D's scan warning now gives attackers just 1.4 seconds to react instead of 1.5, which is a meaningful tightening of the window for anyone trying to dodge a coordinated drone scan by holding still.

05Noor's Launch Bugs Are Mostly Fixed

If you tried Noor in the first weeks of Operation Split Fire and bounced off her because the Horus Lance felt inconsistent, it's worth giving her another look. Ubisoft's Y11S3.1 notes list a long run of Horus Lance fixes: shield operators no longer auto-retract their shield when hit, Montagne's Le Roc Shield stops taking incorrectly-directed flame damage while he's rappelling, players can no longer cheese out of the effect by swapping to a secondary gadget mid-animation, and Ying's Candela now deploys correctly even if she's been hit by the flames. None of these were balance changes on paper, but together they close off the exploits that let good attackers play around Noor for free — which effectively makes her play closer to how she was designed from the start.

Quick-Pick Operators by Tier

1. 1First direct shield counter in Siege history; the Y11S3.1 bug fixes stop attackers from cheesing the Horus Lance.S-Tier
2. 2Exothermic Charge damage up to 220 hp, plus the M1014 buff on his loadout shotgun.S-Tier
3. 3Armor Panel now takes 10 melee hits to destroy, plus the same M1014 buff.S-Tier
4. 4Breaching Hammer swing time cut 20 percent — the fastest way to open a soft wall this patch.A-Tier
5. 5Skeleton Key ammo up to 36 rounds gives him more staying power in vertical play.A-Tier
6. 6More flexible V-Lance and a faster CSRX 300, but higher recoil punishes spray fire.B-Tier

06How Long These Placements Should Hold

Y11S3.1 was explicitly framed as a refinement patch, not a meta-shifting one, so don't expect another balance pass before the season's test-server cycle picks back up. The bigger question mark is Dokkaebi — a rework this significant to her core hacking risk usually gets revisited once ranked data comes in, similar to how Kali's scope changes are likely to get a follow-up tuning pass if her pick rate swings too far in either direction. Aruni and Tubarão are worth watching too: losing the Muzzle Brake on both DMRs is a clean, easy-to-measure nerf, and if their pick rates collapse in competitive play, a partial walk-back on the AR-15.50's damage specifically would be the most likely fix rather than restoring the attachment outright.

If you want a deeper look at what else shipped with the season, Operation Split Fire's full patch page covers the Villa rework, Legend Division ranked playlist and the Wasteland Circuit event alongside the operator changes covered here. For now, the safest openers on either side are Noor and Thermite on defense and attack respectively — both were already strong before this patch, and neither lost anything to get here.

Operation Split Fire's official launch trailer, published August 31, 2026, three weeks before the Y11S3.1 balance patch covered here.

⚡ Operation Split Fire drops September 1! 🛡️ New Operator: Noor 🏆 New Legend Division playlist 🏛️ New Targeted Map Updates 🛸 New in-game event: Wasteland Circuit 🔫 New 3v3 Arcade mode ✨ New Modernized Maps ⚙️ Major Balancing Updates 🛠 Ranked 3.0 adjustments 🔒 R6 ShieldGuard

— Rainbow 6 (@Rainbow6Game), August 15, 2026 on X