Looking for the Rainbow Six Siege Neon Dawn release date? The new season introduces a new defender, reworks several gadgets, and shifts a number of secondary gadgets – there’ll be a lot of loadout swapping when launch day arrives.
The new operator, Aruni, is a hybrid of Castle and Kapkan. She can place indestructible Surya Gates on windows, doors, hatches, and wall panels, which deal 40 damage to any attacker who passes through them. Surya Gates also fry any projectiles that go through them, deactivating the gate for 30 seconds – these can be reactivated after the cooldown by shooting them. It’s a neat way of slowing attackers down, without putting such a significant obstacle in their path that they couldn’t simply run onto site.
The Y2S1 map, Skyscraper, also returns in Operation Neon Dawn, reworked to enable easier navigation for defenders and cut down on runouts and spawn peeks. However, there are many, many more changes that have been revealed in the patch notes. Join us as we run through every change we’ve spotted, not to mention the predicted Rainbow Six Siege Neon Dawn release date.
Rainbow Six Siege Neon Dawn release date
The Rainbow Six Siege Neon Dawn release date is December 1, 2020 and the release times will be release times will be 05:00 PT / 08:00 ET / 13:00 GMT / 14:00 CET. The patch size for PC players will be 60GB across Steam and Ubisoft’s own platform.
Aruni
In case you didn’t catch it, Aruni is the new defender coming with Operation Neon Dawn. She can place three Surya Gates on hatches, wall panels, windows, and doors, and these cannot be destroyed. The ‘gate’ itself is a laser grid that deals 40 damage to any attacker it touches, and the lasers can be burnt out by any projectile that passes through it. This will begin a 30 second cooldown for the gate, and when this is over you can shoot the gadget to reactivate it. Aruni also has a passive ability that lets her punch whopping great holes in walls, with just six melee attacks needed to create a decent rotation.
Skyscraper
This has been tweaked and tuned rather than completely remade. There are fewer windows and balconies, the interior is larger and more open, and you’ll find there’s a lot less clutter overall. Watch the video above for a better breakdown.
Rainbow Six Siege Neon Dawn patch notes
With the release of the Neon Dawn patch notes, we have confirmation of several operator balancing tweaks, which we’ll list below:
- Hibana can now choose 2, 4, or 6 X-Kairos to shoot from the X-Kairos Launcher. A crosshair and red highlight are visible when ADSing. These visual guides will change according to the configuration selected.
- Jäger’s ADS device has a cooldown of 10s after destroying a projectile. While in cooldown, the ADS will not interact with enemy projectiles. The ADS device now has an infinite number of charges up from the previous 2.
- Echo’s Yokai Drone cloaking has been removed and is now always visible.
- Ash now has 3 Breaching Rounds up from the previous 2. Breaching Round damage is reduced to 50 HP down from the previous 90 HP. Stun Grenades are replaced with a Claymore.
- Twitch’s Breach Charges are replaced with Stun Grenades
- Wamai’s Mag-Nets are reduced to 4 down from the previous 5. The Mag-Net explosion has been removed when the device auto-destroys. Impact Grenades are replacing the Deployable Shield.
- Dokkaebi’s Stun Grenades are replaced with Frag Grenades.
- Valkyrie’s Deployable Shield is replaced with Impact Grenades.
Jäger’s ADS changes will make it much easier for attackers to burn out an ADS and then pour explosives into site. Each ADS device can burn one projectile before becoming dormant for ten seconds and reactivating – they can do this infinitely. Hibana can now cycle between firing two, four, and six pellets at a time, making her a lot more flexible. Read our breakdown of all the changes coming with the Rainbow Six Siege Neon Dawn update for more details on these changes.
Quality of life changes
A new runout timer will punish aggressive players with just one second out of the building to work with before being revealed. There’s a new ‘no-drop’ zone to ease some frustrations about accidentally dropping the defuser when going to plant it on the periphery of a bomb site.
Read more: Here are the best Rainbow Six Siege operators
Finally, Ash’s Breaching Rounds will now ‘stick’ to bulletproof gadgets, making it a more consistent tool for taking down annoying defender toys.