RSVSR Tips ARC Raiders Triggernade nerf and Kettle fix Meta shift ahead
Embark Studios says ARC Raiders' next patch nerfs Triggernades and clamps down on Kettle macro fire-rate abuse, aiming for fairer PvPvE gunfights, safer extractions, and a real meta reset.
After the holiday lull, Embark's finally talking again, and the mood around ARC Raiders has flipped overnight. The game's pulled in millions, sure, but the last stretch hasn't felt like tense extraction—more like a homework assignment you had to survive. People are still running routes, still chasing that clean evac, but the fights have been getting warped by a couple of "why is this even allowed" tools. If you've been grinding loadouts and checking what's worth bringing, it's not surprising to see players obsessing over ARC Raiders Items while waiting for the next balance pass to land and shake things loose.
Triggernades And The No-Game Deaths
Triggernades are the headline problem, and not because they're simply strong. They've been turning kills into a button press, with the detonation timing doing all the work for you. You don't even have to properly commit to a gunfight. Toss one, float it into someone's path, pop it mid-air, and a medium kit just evaporates. There's the bit that really annoys people: you can't reliably play around it. You can't "outskill" an explosion that shows up right as you round a corner, and you can't always shoot it before it goes off. So the match turns into tiptoeing, not pushing. That's not extraction tension, that's just frustration.
The Kettle Macro Mess
Then there's the Kettle situation. It's meant to be a starter SMG, the kind of thing you use while you're learning recoil and building confidence. Instead, macros have been letting players bypass the fire-rate limit, and it's ugly. You'll see it in the kill feed and you'll feel it when a heavy shield vanishes in a blink. It's not even that the gun becomes "better," it becomes something else entirely—an exploit disguised as loadout choice. And once one squad is doing it, the rest of the lobby either copies it or gets farmed. That's how a meta goes stale: not because people found a clever strategy, but because a shortcut became mandatory.
What Next Week's Patch Needs To Change
From what the community team's been saying, next week is supposed to be a real clean-up patch, not a tiny numbers tweak. Step 1 is obvious: stop Triggernades from deleting people with zero warning, whether that means less damage, slower detonation, clearer audio, or all three. Step 2 is locking down the Kettle's fire-rate abuse so input tricks don't outperform actual aim. Step 3 is the wider sweep—Stitcher tuning, free-kit limits, and whatever else is quietly pushing everyone into the same sweaty template. If Embark gets this right, fights should last long enough to matter again.
A Reset For The Way People Actually Play
When the cheap kills dry up, you'll see what players really value: comms, angles, timing, and who can hold their nerve when extraction gets messy. The underused stuff should creep back in, too, because you won't be forced to bring the same "must-pick" answers every raid. And yeah, people will still chase an edge—players always do—but at least it'll be about decision-making instead of exploiting a loophole. If you're the type who wants to stay stocked while you experiment with new kits after the patch, a lot of folks point to RSVSR for grabbing game currency or items without turning every run into a desperate scavenger mission.