Siege’s Extended Barrel: From Useless to Mandatory

Background

In Rainbow 6 Siege, gunplay is possibly the most important system in the game, right there with destruction, gadgets and intel. The fast time-to-kill, the dynamic movement and the iconic one-shot headshot mechanic all define the feel of Siege’s gunplay, but all of that would be moot if they guns themselves felt bad to use.

Siege’s different guns have different feels to them which attract different type of players. You have guns like the SC3000K with high (but controllable) recoil and high damage, the MPX’s low damage, high rate of fire, and non-existant recoil, and the bullet hose that is the SMG-11. Every gun as a variety of attachments you can put on them, such as grips, sights and muzzle attachments. In general, it comes down to personal preference about which attachments you choose. Got a laser beam? Take the angled grip over the vertical grip. Need more help with horizontal recoil instead of vertical? Take a compensator over the flash hider.

However, for a long time, two of these attachments were effectively useless. The suppressor removes tracers, makes gunshots quieter and removes threat indicators, but it does nothing for recoil and, until Operation Brutal Swarm, reduced damage by 15%. That damage reduction meant it was basically never used, because even with all the upsides, it’s almost never worth having to hit an extra shot, especially when you are effectively choosing to have worse recoil compared to using a recoil-reducing muzzle attachment. Since Operation Brutal Swarm, the damage reduction has been removed, making the suppressor an actual viable choice for guns that the player thinks they can control without recoil-reducing muzzle attachments.

The Extended Barrel

Now that we’ve gotten all that context out of the way, we can come to the main topic: the extended barrel. Prior to Year 7 Season 4, the only thing the extended barrel did was reduce the falloff damage (based on range) from guns by about 15%-20%. Now while this may sound good, you have to consider that even if a gun has a massive 50% damage falloff at the range you’re engaging at, you are only increasing your damage by 7.5% - 10%. Even if you had a 40 base damage gun (most of which in practice do not have significant fall off), you are only gaining 2 damage at most and that is given an incredibly high falloff, only outside of max falloff range with max falloff reduction. At that point, recoil reduction would be far more useful since it would allow you to headshot the other player easier. Now, consider that most gunfights in Siege take place within 10m or less (before falloff even significantly begins) and you can see why the old extended barrel was basically only used if there were no other muzzle attachments available.

After Y7S4, however, the extended barrel got an interesting buff. In addition to the reduced damage dropoff (which as we’ve seen is negligible), it increases the per-shot damage of the gun by 15%. If you recall that a 15% damage reduction made an attachment unusable, you can imagine what a 15% damage increase does. It makes several high damage guns deal over 50 damage a shot, meaning you can down a 1 armor character in 2 shots, previously something that was only able to be done with semi-automatic DMRs. It wasn’t just high damage guns that benefitted from this though.

Analysis of the Change

I did a quick analysis of what this increase in damage actually meant, and it showed just how incredible the extended barrel actually was. I calculated what base damage values it would actually affect the number of shots to down or kill each armor type and I found that for 82% of base damage values, the extended barrel reduced either the number of shots to down or kill a full health target. Now of course, targets aren’t going to always be full HP (however with low TTK and one-shot headshots, they often are), so I did some simulations of every possible health value. For all health values in the “full health” range (125 - 100), the extended barrel made a difference 78% of the time. For all possible health values (155 - 1), the extended barrel dropped in efficacy but still made a difference an incredible 53% of the time. So even assuming the worst case efficacy of the extended barrel (all base damage are equally likely and an enemy could equally likely be at any possible health value), the extended barrel makes a difference over half the time.

Now an argument can still be made that recoil control will give you an easier headshot, but most of the recoil attachments are more effective the longer the spray, which already has a lot of built-in variance, so if you aren’t hitting a headshot early in the spray, the extended barrel will make it so that you have to hit less shots most of the time and if you are, the other muzzle attachments had minimal impact anyway. Given this, it would appear to be that the optimal muzzle attachment is the extended barrel unless it isn’t available. Which just shows how a simple 15% damage change can make an attachment go from useless to mandatory.