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Alright! Finally... I’ve missed making a focused, in-depth guide to 1 operator after these last 2 general-game guides I released in May and June, but well, as you guys know these operator guides take longer to write and put together, and also require me to test some stuff both in actual matches and custom matches for mechanics so I can’t be pumping them out consistently while also keeping up with real life responsibilities and so on. BUT, everything to bring great content to Steam and my Patreon supporters. *wink wink* im kidding btw



This guide is about Hibana, one of the most consistently picked attackers due to, well, basically everything about her. Recently she’s gotten a little tweaked down, that means nerfed, due to her just overall prevalence in the professional scene and high pick-rate across all rank tiers pretty much. I like when operators get balanced because that means I can actually practice and get better at them without having the crutch of them being stronger than they should; even if Hibana was pretty fair before, albeit a relatively very good choice for an attacking team.

This is also my first In-Depth guide to an attacking operator, so we’ll have to touch some topics regarding general attack strategy, such as how to handle angles against defenders and how to play within a transit line.

For those unfamiliar, Hibana got her Claymore traded for Breaching charges; and apparently the Bearing9 secondary had its horizontal recoil slightly increased. Add to that the speed reduction to all 3 speeds and you got yourself the Para Bellum Hibana. However, not only she’s obviously still good as those nerfs are barely so, but the meta shift with the addition of the new defenders makes her a crazy versatile pick, even more than before. And even further, the fact that she has her own breaching charges now will make it more main-able for solo-queue players in the lower to average ranks (Copper through mid Gold) where you can’t always rely on your teammates to open a wall or hatch for you, without having to waste X-Kairos shots on soft surfaces.

Also, not as relevant to most people but definitely relevant to Pro League, they made it so Jager’s ADS does not shoot Hibana’s X-Kairos pellets meaning she no longer counters them by launching a clearing shot down the room.

This guide is similar to my guide to Kapkan and guide to Mira. However, those guides got extra long due to having pictures of multiple trap/mirror placements; which this guide doesn't have, so don't worry this guide being stupid long. The only section I did try to make more comprehensive was everything regarding the gadget tech, as that is generally the part most people read and ask me about the most (for Kapkan and Mira as well). That's it:

• Michal Grochowski
  
• Matthew Potter
  
• Manuel Ferrandiz
  
• Bumi665
  
• Bas Kramer
  
• Moses Konsue

So into the actual guide: Hibana is a very good operator with lots of cool stuff to her. She’s the first DLC attacker I recommend new players purchase [siegenerd.com]due to how flexible she is in how she fits basically any team and any map or site. She’s also rather independent, as she has the tools to get you by even if you’re playing solo-queue with particularly a uncommunicative team.


Its quite funny actually, a lot of the brainwork that goes into playing Mira kind of translates to Hibana (although she is an attacker); so this is kinda the perfect sequel to that guide now that I think about it.

Anyway, on the surface you may want to simplify it to “Thermite is more breaching but worse guns, and Hibana is a better fighter but cannot breach as well as Thermite”. But this is far from accurate I’m afraid. The way Hibana’s gadget works when compared to Thermite goes further than just having 3 small charges instead of 2 big door charges; Hibana can place multiple before detonating, Hibana can reduce the fizzling noise on her breaching, Hibana can drop in with a detonating hatch, she can breach from far away (like very far away, more on that later), among other things that Thermite cannot, at the exchange of just a bigger hole.

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes you 100% need a big hole, to deny angles and to create a safer plant area for your team’s defuser. But Hibana has so much cool tech to her way of breaching that you’ll find yourself thinking outside the box and outsmarting enemy defense setups in ways that really push how useful at disrupting environments as just 1 operator being played in a very smart way. We will touch upon all of these as the guide goes on.

For some reference, this is the current state of Hibana in the attacking roster:



Her pick rate seems about right considering she’s a hard breaching operator; however, her win delta appears to be a little under average. The way I see it, it’s not so much that she is a weak operator, because she isn’t, but maybe that her win delta is affected both by being overpicked on situations where she isn’t ideal, and also, when she is required, the site being attacked, or the map, are a little more defender-favoring (hence the attack side considering the needed a Hibana pick in the first place and not trusting not having a hard breacher for example). So don’t be deceived by the graph.

I’m going to have to apologize for kicking the guide off with such a complicated and formless topic, but this is important and I want to get it out of the way. I don’t want to scare off the people who went here looking for something resembling a “Hibana Guide” but I must break this down because it will be really helpful for anyone who’s having trouble timing right their pushing when on the attack side, and getting caught or predicted by random defenders.

Siege has a particular dynamic that defines both attacker and defender playstyles, as well as how they interact with one another. The defender playstyle consists of creating a landscape that favors their objective, as well as using the fact that enemies must come to them as an advantage, both tactically (angles and flanks), or for using the clock as a round-winning tool. Attackers are actually playing to reduce the advantage defenders have by default having access to all these features, this includes droning (or gadgets such as Logic Bombs and Lion Scans) to defeat the defender positioning advantage; and also includes breachers, both soft and hard, that defeats the landscaping advantage defenders have from themselves.

So, your objective as Hibana, essentially, is to put the defenders at a permanent disadvantage (When your garage gets breached you’re at a permanent disadvantage, for example) Even after you get killed, your team must maintain the upper hand over defenders thanks to something you did during the round (killing people counts of course). So your course of action must be always taken with these key points in mind, you drone, you take a roamer out, you open a hatch, you check under, you drone again, you go out and breach a wall or open a mirror, then go back up looking for kills through the hatch, etc (This is what I call the attacker transit line or transit route). You have to streamline your actions for the round as an attacker, otherwise defenders will be able to break through your transit line.

As you know, information is important in Siege; and the reason is that since the time to kill is so low, and headshots are instant death; prediction and planning will always beat reactions. You can’t realistically play without a transit line and expect to be able to survive just “reacting” to enemy peeks or positions, you’ll probably die in the first encounter. The advantage of information over reactions becomes more and more steep as you go up ranks as well. This is what strict transit lines are for. If you want a clear definition about what I mean by it, a transit line is basically just the order and process of the actions you take (especifically as an attacker) during the round; to reduce chances and increase information as much as possible. Transit lines can be simple (for example, even a beginner Thermite player can establish that he needs to 1) Breach the garage, 2) Kill people from the outside.) or complex (an high level Ash player determines from their pre-round droning the safest entrance, then slices the following doorway angles from left to right or right to left depending on possible defender angle holds, then moves to whatever position they must take or soft breach, and so on for the rest of the round). Mid round drones are also taken into the transit line.

If you’re not a beginner, but you’re not super high level, then you probably have a sense of what running a transit line as an attacker looks like; and you’ve probably noticed that once you start straying from it, bad stuff happens.

Certain attackers have a higher need for strict transit lines to be successful. Fuze comes to mind, considering that to be the most effective, he needs to go solo, clear the floor above the objective to be able to place cluster charges without getting killed by a roamer. Or Buck too, that also has to play vertically. Hibana is an operator that very much benefits from a well-executed transit line, mainly because she is a ranged hard breacher, meaning she can rather safely reduce defender’s landscape advantage to make it attack sided (we’ll talk about this on section 5).

Creating and sticking to a good transit line will reduce the amount of times your reaction time is required in an encounter, it will also optimize the use of your time; which is key when attacking (on ranked at least); and finally, it will vastly increase your consistency at being effective during rounds, and surviving until the end.

Now that you understand what they are, let’s see how you put this into practice:

For maximum effectiveness, transit lines, even though you sort of memorize them and re-apply them between matches, change from game to game; and so, you must be able to come up with them or modify them on the spot (or at least before the round begins), during prep-phase and during the first 30 seconds of the round.

Also, if you pulled off a very effective transit line, don’t repeat it exactly as so in the same match, or you may run into a camping roamer or at the very least you’ll be called out beforehand.

• The site that’s being defended (obviously)
  
• If the enemy has more than 2 roamers
  
• If the enemy has a deep roamer like Vigil, Caveira, Alibi.
  
• If the enemy has Mira windows and where are they set up (Standard or non-standard placements)
  
• Non-site rotation holes
  
• If the enemy has a Bandit (and if the shock wires are preplaced or he is intending to trick the wall)
  
• Which hatches are reinforced
  
• What doorways are Castled (if you happen to come across a team with a Castle)
  
• Evil Eye placements if they have a Maestro
  
• Safe doorways (those far from objective/low chance of being camped), with Grzmot or Gu Mines.

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The first thing you have to decide (which you must do during prep-phase), is your first objective. This can be breaching a wall, a hatch, clearing a floor, busting a Mira window, etc. And once you have this decided, you have to decide on a point on entry. Now, depending on the map and your team, you may not need to enter for your first objective, sometimes your team needs you to go along with them to create specific lines of sight, like if you’re pushing a choke point with a Glaz, your team doesn’t really need you opening hatches, etc. For example, if you’re attacking Bank basement, your team needs the hard breacher on tunnel first, and then you can leave for hatches.

Your point of entry has to be generally a doorway or window that is far from defender transitted connectors, and that leads into a single direction hall or room, not a junction. With a transit line, after entry, you are already going towards your next objective so you can drone ahead with 1 direction in mind, which prevents you from being too far from your drone (which translates into you being less time on your drone and vulnerable). We’ll talk about droning and entry in a future section (Section 6).

Once you’re inside, try to stay focused on what’s the next big thing you can do that will permanently reduce defender advantage. This will, most of the time, be the creation of an attacker favored line of sight; be it on a wall or a hatch. We’ll also talk about the logic of angle creation later, but for now, consider that mostly any hole you make in a reinforced wall will give you an advantage, since you’ll make at least a portion of the adjacent room unsafe for defenders to camp or roam about in. Also remember that attackers have more readily access to ACOGs, including yourself, which favors them when making holes on walls as long as they can keep a safe distance into the room’s field of view.

Buck works similarly, just from above and below instead of sideways; and he cannot bust reinforced hatches.

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For the hardcore fans that remember my guide to Kapkan; on the section about EDD Placement I talked in detail about how your placements must be made with Attacker perspective in mind. And attacker perspective is basically just a way for a defender to predict an enemy’s transit line. You think about what their safe entry spot will be, and what rooms they’ll transit to their next objective in the round, and trap doorways accordingly. Caveira is another operator that greatly benefits from having the ability to predict enemy transit lines.

As Hibana, just as you have to think about the Site to determine your entry point, you have to look into the enemy line up and decide how you’re going to drone; as looking for EDDs, Gu mines and hiding Caveiras all require different kinds of droning.

As with the previous operator guides, this is the section where we take a look at “the loadout”.

Now, “The Loadout” is what I call the overall accepted gun equipment and attachment choices on whatever operator, in this case Hibana. And explain why other options are not viable, not ideal, or in what situations you’d actually prefer them.

Adding a laser to the Bearing 9 is not a terrible idea if you are not bothered by it, but it’s not strictly standard practice. Since its a secondary it’s not as bad as running around with the laser on all the time as if you equipped it on the Type-89.

The P229 is good proper pistol as well, but since the other option is a full auto SMG with an equippable sight (that also has a bigger mag than the Type-89 funnily enough), it is rare choice.

The Supernova is just ehhh... I’m just going to say that I see it a worryingly frequently in casual. Shotguns in attack are already a hard gamble, and the Supernova isn’t like the SG-CQB that can get consistent hip-fire one shots kill/injures at 7 meters; it misses, a lot. Hibana just benefits so much with an ACOG, especially considering how you’re supposed to take advantage of your gadget for the creation of attacker favoring, long range lines of sight into defensive positions.

Finally, Stun Grenades are the standard choice (before it was Claymore), leaving Breaching Charges up for your personal preference. For me, I like to take them a lot: there are rounds where I notice I really didn’t use them for much and I would’ve rather have had the Stuns; but I’ve been locked out of rooms without breaching far more times than that, so that’s why I like them. In a good transit line breaching charges are generally more valuable than stuns; and stuns are more of a combat tool, and also a position pressuring tool. This is up to you, you can default to either depending on your style of play. Oh, and if you feel like using a compensator on the Type 89 to better handle horizontal recoil after 10-ish shots, go for it.

Note: This isn’t the section for the tricks and the tech related to Hibana’s Gadget; this is just the section where we break down how it works and what are all the important characteristics to keep in mind.

• The X-Kairos Launcher is Hibana’s Gadget, it shoots little pellets that stick to any reinforced or soft surface and that you can then activate, and after a fuse time, they detonate, creating an opening in the wall.
  
  
• A single use shoots out 6 pellets, in a 3 wide, 2 high pattern. The detonation of the 6 pellets creates a hole slightly taller and less wide than a mira window. A single shot use is not enough to vault through; however you can place them at ground level to prone your way through the hole (you can also crouch walk through if you shoot it in a specific manner which I’ll explain in the next section).
  
  
• X-Kairos pellets are destructible when placed, and also during their fuse time before detonation. If used on an unreinforced wall, smoke and spark will be visible through the wall from the opposite side, allowing enemies to shoot out the pellets before they detonate.
  
  
• The Launcher has 3 available shots, you can shoot and detonate them separately by using them one at a time, or you can place two or all of them at once, detonating them simultaneously. Hibana must reload the X-Kairos Launcher after each individual shot.
  
  
• The reloading happens automatically after each shot, but you can cancel it by sprinting; it will resume as soon as you stop sprinting though.
  
  
• Hibana must have the launcher equipped in order to press the “Detonate” button on her gadget. After firing the last shot, Hibana will automatically holster the launcher and pull out whatever gun you had previously; to prevent this, you can sprint after firing the third shot to cancel the automatic weapon switch, and then detonate.
  
  
• You can “aim” with the Launcher in order to be more precise with your pellet placements. Aiming will project a laser square on the surface you’re aiming on, everyone can see this laser square, teammates, and also enemies.
  
  
• If a pellet hits an incompatible surface or an obstacle, they will break and you will lose them permanently. Examples of these are hard walls (not reinforced, but actual walls) or any model (this could be a teammate, an object on the wall (like a Jager ADS or an Ela Mine).
  
  
• Pellets by themselves are considered a hard breaching explosion, meaning you only need 1 to open a reinforced hatch or to force a Mira Black Mirror open from the exterior side (you must hit the ballistic glass or its frame with the explosion).
  
  
• Pellets will break if they hit an electrified wall, and they will become unusable if they hit a wall in range of a Signal Disruptor (until the Jammer is destroyed).
  
  
• A thermite charge takes 3 seconds to detonate, meaning once it starts fizzling, Bandit cannot place the battery and take it out (as it will explode before the battery is fully placed). Hibana pellets however take 5 seconds, meaning Bandit can react and battery trick them out. The advantage for Hibana though is that if you place the pellets in between two reinforced sections, Bandit can only trick one side at a time, and those pellets will break while the rest will still detonate. It may not create a significant hole but it is enough to force Bandit away from the wall.
  
  
• When shot, the pellets travel through the air in a perfectly straight line; and they have infinite range. They will work even if you can’t see the laser square when you’re aiming.
  
  
• Each pellet works independently, this means they emit sound one by one, and they explode separately (even if they do exactly at the same time).
  
  
• A single pellet explosion will deal 5 damage to a player in the explosion range, from either side (it’s actually 4.5 damage I believe but the game rounds it up so that’s useless information pretty much). This means you can go through a 1 shot (6 pellet) hole as soon as it goes off by sacrificing 30 health; which Thermite definitely cannot do. Probably still a bad idea though.
  
  
• Since X-Kairos pellets are ranged and they stick to their target, they are the only hard breach in the game that can be used vertically, for example to open a reinforced hatch from below.

THE COOL STUFF GUYS, WE GOT TO THE COOL PART OF THE GUIDE EVERYONE. CAN WE SMASH 500 LIKES EVERYONE! SMASH THE LIKE BUTTON IF YOU WANNA SEE SOME TECH.

Ok, so “Tech” if you don’t know is all the cool stuff you can learn to do with an operator gadget/equipement/whatever. For Kapkan it was the barricade trick, for Mira it was the halfway mirror; and so on. Hibana has a few, I have a personal favorite piece of Tech but they are applied in matches.

I decided to break them up into small separate sections just as I did for Mira; because Tech sections tend to be screenshot heavy and I don’t want to turn this into a scrolling party, or to pictures to get mixed up.

For the record, these 5 pieces of tech are ordered from less to more viable/important/relevant:

X-Kairos Pellets will stick only to destructible surfaces; soft and reinforced. Although it is generally a better idea to ask for help; in a pinch, you can use a shot of X-Kairos to destroy Maestro’s Evil Eyes and regular gadget Bulletproof cameras as long as they are placed on such a surface. You can do this both from the front or by destroying the wall they’re placed on obviously. You only need 1 pellet to go off to kill an Evil Eye. The hole will be interrupted since the middle pellets (if you shoot it centered) will bounce off of the device.

For Mira Windows is the same, you only need to hit one pellet to either the mirror itself or the edge to cause it to break.

Hibana is also unique in that she’s the only operator that can hard breach from below; this is a bit of an offshoot of the next ability in this section of the guide (Ranged shots); but works a little differently. Hidden Hatch Breaching as the name implies is just being able to, from different weird angles, busting a hatch open from an X-Kairos pellet placed in its underside.

Now, you must know that X-Kairos Pellets are a bit finicky, especially if you’re playing with high-ping. Now, I haven’t done controlled tests or anything regarding this interaction in particular, but I have seen many times when I am playing Hibana or there’s a Hibana on my team, that if they don’t stand still for a bit and ADS the launcher, the pellets have a chance of bouncing right off the surface; even when its on an able surface. I’m mentioning this because shooting very sharp angles, at the ceiling and trying to get the pellets to properly stick to the hatch’s belly can be a little too much to ask sometimes, so be prepared for it to just straight out not work sometimes.

Here’s a spot that really shows the potential for its use:

Ranged Shots are used very commonly in the Pro League, particularly in maps with very big areas such as Bank.

Basically, they are angles you can learn that allow you to X-Kairos breach a wall or hatch (usually a hatch) from a very very long distance. This saves you time and can be used to avoid walking into defender controlled areas.

Remember, since the X-Kairos shot has infinite range and goes perfectly straight, you can aim with precision from anywhere and get a breach off with your launcher. The reason this is mostly done to breach hatches is because often the X-Kairos pellets travel through doorways or tight areas that may destroy the outer pellets, leaving you with 3-2 and even 1 single pellet on your desired target. Which is enough for a hatch or a Mira window.

When ADSing, you can know pretty much accurately where all 6 pellets are going to go, the 4 from the edges correspond to the inner angle of the laser square; and the 2 center ones are directly above and below the white dot that also appears while holding down ADS:





Since you only need to really aim a single pellet, you can use whatever reference point you want. Some people like using the corner ones for example. I like using the middle upper one; I just aim my white dot and I know the pellet will hit right above it, and adjust accordingly for distance (remember, the pellets travel straight). Here’s a shot you can do, seen a lot in Pro League when attacking Bank Basement:

X-Kairos Pellets are individual units, that explode, stick to the wall and fizzle individually. This means they also play back sound individually; which is pretty logical and intuitive after all. What you may have seen people do when opening hatches is purposely miss or destroy 5 of the 6 pellets after shooting a reinforced hatch. Basically what this does is, since you only need a single pellet to blow it open, you’re reducing the total fizzle noise you’re producing by shooting it open so enemies under it can’t hear it is about to blow open; for some hatches, especially those that are right on top of the bomb sites or common holding positions this can work wonders to catch people off guard.

With thorough enough droning, and once you’re done helping your team, you can drop in through the hatch as soon as it opens by standing on top of it while detonating. Since the pellet explosive is really small, by standing on the opposite side of the hatch you can drop through unharmed, and worse case scenario 1 pellet is only dealing 5 damage to you.

Hibana is the only operator that can drop through hatches this efficiently, and she can do it with both soft and reinforced hatches; which is sometimes an overseen feature of her because of how risky it is.

The key is to drone before dropping, and make sure people aren’t aware of you being above them; or having the room right under the hatch clear and the move sideways into enemies. Usually when people hear a hatch blow open, they don’t assume a person is already down the hatch at once, but they wait and listen for the drop in after the explosion (which never comes because you’ve already dropped). It does happen that I do a hatch-breach-drop in a prone position; and when enemies react to the hatch being open the always ADS up the hatch hole looking for attackers peeping in, but you’re already down laying on the floor while they are looking at the ceiling.

Holes made by a single X-Kairos shot is not tall enough to vault through, however, there’s a way to crouch walk through the holes.

In Siege, some small destructible surfaces/objects lose collision once they are super low on the ground; that is to avoid frustrating “tripping” and your character getting stuck on random pieces of wall. That’s why you can just walk freely through this thing when you connect bombsites:





It is also the reason this trick works. You can crouch through freely because the last wooden piece, even if it’s still “solid”, it loses collision with player models because it’s at that low area:



The idea is just shooting your Hibana pellets as high as you can, while still having it’s lower side within this no-clip range. If you aim too low, it won’t be big enough to crouch through because your head will get stuck, if you aim too high, the hole will be higher than this and the lower bit of the wall will not lose collision.


Align the low side of the laser square with the floor and the wall:



Then place the low side of the laser exactly at the height of the white dot in the first picture:





And then it works, here I’m crouching inside the wall:



This works exactly the same way with reinforced walls, obviously.

You don’t even need all 6 pellets, you can do with just a 2x2 hole as long as you get the height right. Believe it or not, you can crouch-walk through that no problem.

As with most launchers, projectiles can be fit through very tight openings in order to breach something on the other side of a wall. Notable examples for Hibana are opening Hatches or Mira windows through floors and ceilings, by shooting the X-Kairos in between the metal bars; or by shooting through drone holes, for example this one in Theme Park:

As I’ve been saying throughout the whole guide, Hibana is all about lines of sight. Not like a Blackbeard, or a Glaz, but in that she creates lines from a range and can then set up angles that favor her by distance, height, and to take advantage of the fact that she has an ACOG primary, while most defenders do not.

There’s a couple factors to take into account when breaching through a reinforced wall; most of which are second nature to most siege players, such as not making a hole that will make a particular push more dangerous, or creating a transit-hole in a place that’s easy for enemies to pressure safely, etc.

Finally, you must think about what these holes will mean in practice; as the best angles can be far from ideal as they may mean you have to stand in a roamer friendly position and get easily spotted and called out. This happens with a lot of hatches that are in between stairs for example; this is one of the reasons people were annoyed Hibana lost her Claymore too.

Due to Hibana’s hard-breaching nature, she’s an attacker that is very objective focused, her attack line is generally centered around attacking the site, making the necessary breaches for the plant to come through, get rid of problematic Mira windows, and so on. So most of your knowledge has to come down to how you handle anchor defenders, and the environment around the bomb site, and not so much baiting out roamers or playing vertically, like other attackers.

Defenders, both anchors and all arounders, play with danger zones and safe zones; what makes a zone safe or dangerous is a combination of how the map routes interact with it, and how much of a focal point that spot is for lines of sight, and lines of fire.


Look at these examples on Theme Park Drugs Site:



Inside here in the bathroom, you can hold safely; since the possible angles you could get shot from (not counting the ceiling), only happen one at a time; you can sorta shuffle yourself into the toilet cover and worry about one line of sight; and react through sound to the other 2. This is a safe zone. However here:



Standing here to hold for example the entrance from locker room, leaves you open from a ton of different lines of sight. This is a dangerous zone. You’d only really attempt this as a defender if you have solid intel that most of the zones leading into your position are clear, so you only have to worry about 1 of them.

Your task as Hibana (for some sites with wide soft-reinforced walls) is to imagine the interior of the site, figure out where the safe zones are, and then break the walls in such a way that the lines of sight you create make those safe zones danger zones. Anchors then have to move to more unsafe positions or to stay fight at a disadvantage.

You also have to think through the lines of sight you’re creating cannot be operated from the “inside” by a defender from a safe zone. A good rule of thumb is “can a Rook kill me from the other side of the room if I open a hole in this wall?”.

This is related all to the second point:

This one is simpler: Think about how much room there is to maneuver in each side of the hole you’re about to make. The bigger your side of the room is compared to the enemy’s, the better target advantage you’ll have. We’re gonna be working with this scenario:



There’s 2 rooms; a big one and a smaller one, the red X is Hibana, and the blue X is a random enemy. They are between a reinforced wall and in the middle of it (in red) is a head-height X-Kairos hole.

Now, target size is all about distance and perspective:



Unlike the enemy in blue, Hibana can walk backwards, making her field of view tighter, so she can focus at thoroughly scanning through the hole with her ACOG; standing further away makes her a smaller target too. While the enemy in blue is forced to a certain distance.

The risk of standing really far away and looking through the breach is that you may tunnel vision yourself and get shot from the side, but we’re ignoring that factor for this experiment.



Let’s say the blue enemy knows Hibana is to the right side of the hole so he gets closer to peek. Now, he doesn’t know exactly where Hibana’s head is to prefire it, and his field of view through the hole is very wide (because he is close to the opening), plus Hibana is a smaller target, so she’s at a great advantage by default.

Combine both the concept of target size and field of view size with the management of danger zones for defenders within the bomb site to poke the best holes possible in the objective’s walls.

As a hard breacher, Hibana’s role pretty much impossible to replace mid-round, which means you have to be especially careful about not making the wrong move and getting killed before you can get stuff done. There are many occasions where I play my Hibana round extremely methodically, get everything done and in the end get killed without getting any kills myself; and in retrospect realize the round was won because a hatch I opened, or a mirror I denied from the defenders. The point is, the more careful you are will generally translate to a better round result or chance for attackers to win, even if they are down on numbers or time, because of huge tactical and route advantages made possible by you. Which leads us to the title of this section, the two more important bits of gameplay related to this: Entry and Drone Management, which are coincidentally both very closely related.

Before we continue, I must bring up some differences between Casual and Ranked that’ll become apparent from this point onward. First of all, Hibana, as good as an operator she is, you can’t default to her in any site, just because there are other operators that sometimes are more required than her for an attack lineup. In Ranked, you can guess the site you’re about to attack, often very precisely, and then choose Hibana accordingly, like when attacking basements with more than 1 hatch, etc. In casual you can’t do that, and sometimes you’ll pick her on the off chance you get the site you want, if it doesn’t happen, attempting to constantly hard breach and play slow may not work; just understand that from the beginning. Casual’s very random and non-structured nature sometimes makes operators like Hibana, or like Mira in the case of defense, far worse than they are “statistically represented”, don’t get frustrated.

For Ranked however, there’s two new layers for you to pay attention to: Fast routes (sometimes the super safe approaches are impossible on the 3 min timer), and having better control over your droning; having two drones and being able to choose your spawn lets you pick up you pre-round drone easier, or to enter the building without droning with your second drone but just check a pre-set drone inside like a camera.

Now, this is a section sort off general to attack operators, as I said in the preface; but it applies very much to Hibana in particular:

Drones are either a pretty big or minor element in Siege, depending on what skill level you’re looking at. For more experienced Siege play, Drones gain some extra value; it goes something like this:

• First Drone roams the map at random looking for the objective room, finds it, scans operators vigorously until it gets shot.
  
• Second Drone is either not used or used once to check a full route (multiple rooms), then left behind.

• First Drone finds the objective, then leaves to avoid getting destroyed and hides it at a random spot relatively nearby, hoping it isn’t found.
  
• Second Drone is used to declare a room empty and then move on. Then it is re-used to declare the safety of another room, but isn’t picked up after the first use.

• First Drone is taken to the exterior as soon as it spawns (let others find objective or assume default meta objective was chosen by defenders), then driven to the pre-selected spawn. Drone is picked up as soon as the attacker spawns and round is played with 2 drones.
  
• Both Drones then serve as “a second drone”, actively used to check rooms and spot roamers, but then abandoned for the sake of keeping in-building rotations hasty and alert.

• First Drone is either taken outside for pick up or used to spot as many defenders as possible and determine possible strats (count roamers, note key gadgets to keep in mind: Valkyrie, Echo, Mira, Kapkan, Lesion, etc).
  
• Most, if not all attackers, spawn together, a designated “droner” drives their second drone around a particular attack objective (can be to determine if an area is clear of roamers or if the enemy is bandit tricking, etc). The “Droner” is always a non-entry frag operator, such as Hibana, Dokkaebi, Thermite, etc. If the droner finds a roamer near the entry point, instead of spotting, he calls it out verbally for the other 4 members of the team to converge on the enemy and clear them out.
  
• If the “droner” double-drones from the beginning, droner strats can be applied later in the round to check in-site enemy positioning, such as angles being held by ACOG defenders and so on, in order for entry members to pre-fire them or flash-frag them out.
  
• Droner based strats, if the team is highly coordinated and has highly skilled fraggers, can be the fastest way to clear rooms; since the actions of droning and pushing in are happening at once by two brains instead the same person doing one thing and then the next (which is also less accurate since from the drone starting point enemies move and can reposition by simply hearing the drone coming and assuming the entry point of attackers and their route).

• Unless you’re taking part of a droner+entry fragger duo (which is unlikely since its something mostly on the higher level squads do), you can use your drone in other ways specific to your role.
  
• If you’re a playing a careful, non-entry frag operator such as Hibana, depending on the map, you can consider the following
  
• Drones are obvious: When you’re using a drone not only the drone is making noise that gives away its position, but your character ceases to make normal “active” noises such as footsteps. Smart defenders can tell when you’ve started droning even if the drone is far away and they can’t hear it, just based on your change of “sound activity”; if that makes sense.
  
• Defenders that can hear, and sometimes even see an active drone will drastically change their behaviour. In some cases they will change their position completely, in others break the drone and stay, expecting the attacker will think they have left after breaking the drone; and others will act like they didn’t even see the drone by not moving their cursor to it; and then listen for it to not be manned to move (this is the most high-skill approach to getting droned, but it can sometimes backfire, for instance, sometimes you miscalculate the moment the drone gets “unmanned” which gets you prefired, spotted, or the user might realize you were acting not seeing the drone.
  
• PD: If you want to act not seeing a drone, ADSing like a hologram or sprinting are two ways for your character model to not move their head, that way not making it obvious you’re looking about for the drone’s position.
  
• Instead of droning rooms, hide your drone in rooms preemptively, that way you can have eyes inside the room without making any noise; this makes defenders unaware you’re looking at them, or looking for them; allowing for a much safer entry and more consistent intel.
  
• A lot of guides online will give you “drone hiding spots” for inside a lot of sites; and people always fail at these because they try to get to them during the prep-phase.
  
• The key to having a “camera” drone that’s not going to be moved at all, and is just going to be used as a silent camera is to get them into position while there are no defenders in the room, or close to the room so they don’t hear all the drone jumping about and so on.
  
• The most effective “drone cameras” you can set up are in rooms far from objective that you may want to use as your entry point to the building, but that may have a roamer in them. In the prep-phase, don’t even bother to go to OBJ, and just take your time to get your drone to a really good vantage point of that room, and try to have it ready and set before its T-10 for action phase; that way you guarantee no roamer could have heard it getting up to the drone spot before you got to check the feed after spawning.
  
• Quick Note: This is something I do pretty much all the time when I’m playing Lion; the difference is that once I see the roamer in there with my pre-set drone is that I pop a Lion scan and flash in with total certainty of where the roamer is standing; and the best part is, since they don’t even know they were droned in the first place, they don’t ever expect the Lion scan was sent for them and they just stand still at a random spot instead of running and hiding in the 3 second scan-prep period.

After you’ve determined what site you’re attacking, and your entry point; and have used your drone in a positively useful way; we can go back and talk about your transit line. Let’s use all the info we’ve learned so far to set a detailed, in-depth example of a full round transit line (with step by step thought explanation) looks like:




So, currently, for the most part, Kitchen/Trophy is the standard first round of defense pick; the second one being Snowmobile Garage/Wine, which makes the first round a great occasion to pick Hibana, as she’s useful on both of those sites. In other common site mixup maps (like Consulate where defenders sometimes go garage and sometimes go CEO first round) this doesn’t always happen (Hibana isn’t really as useful on Consulate CEO for instance).



Since most of my team will spawn campfire and I’ll go cliffside since I want to go up the stairs, I need to make sure I don’t accidentally spawn with the defuser. My objectives are to open kitchen hatch, and help my team go into trophy room (I’ll achieve this by opening up the wall between trophy and main entrance; this opening can serve as the actual entrance for my team, but it can also just nullify the safe-zone around the door frame inside trophy so that the defender holding the trophy window has to leave.

So my line is going to be go up the ladder, check the second floor around master bedroom and office (and bathroom), go into master bedroom, open the hatch, check the rest of the second floor to south-west area; then open main entrance wall from up the stairs.

To begin, during Prep Phase, I’m going to drive my drone straight to office and pre-place it as a camera. I know that at least 1 person is going to be coming to master bedroom to reinforce the hatch; so I want to keep my drone out of their way, not only so it doesn’t get destroyed, but also so any roamer that’s going to be upstairs does not look for a drone once action phase begins.

With this placement, I can watch office obviously; but I’m also really close-by master bedroom so I can drone it without driving inside again and without breaking any windows to throw my drone in from the first floor. This view in particular also warns you about potential spawnpeek run-outs from the door.



Action Phase. Once I spawn, kill cam, check first floor and then re-check my drone for anyone on the second floor:









All clear? Fireplace doors closed or clear, then I can go up the ladder and start my entry process:



I still have to drone master and the rest of the right hand side of the second floor for roamers. Open a hole in this window barricade (by shooting) so any second floor roamer isn’t immediately aware I’m already up in the second floor outside (except Pulse).









Drone this sucker out all the way to the bathroom. If clear, then drive all the way back so I can re-utilize the drone to check the left side of the second floor later.



Don’t hide it this time, that way if someone is coming from the library side and shoots it, I’ll hear the single shot being fired by the defender gun and I’ll recognize that as my call to hold master bedroom’s door with my ACOG. Normally people roaming won’t expect this kind of random angle holds from attackers unless they get spotted or lion-scanned or logic bombed.



Break in through master bedroom so I don’t risk myself by going near the library-side of the second floor (which I haven’t droned yet). Also pay attention to metal clunking sounds (defender going up the stairs).



Fizzle this one and immediately hold the angle:



You can also shoot some of your X-Kairos Pellets off the hatch so it's silent when it breaches, however you're distinct Type89 or Bearing gunshots will be heard by roamers and they will react if they know what you're doing. IF you really really want to do it, and you have time, you can manually knife 5 of the pellets, so you're totally sneaky about blowing the hatch. There's generally no need to be so stealthy with a hard breacher; you have the option though.



All clear, time to open the second wall:

This will allow my team to walk into trophy but also it will make defenders inside trophy try and leave (or hold the hole as a second angle to worry about other than just the window).

Those are all my objectives for the round. Now I have 2 things I can do, I can do a risky rush which can either be successful and get me kills and let me insite (through fireplace into dining); or at least trade myself to a defender. Or I can use my two drones to help my team get kills on defenders by either spotting them and letting my team work around the intel, or spotting them causing them to re-position, granting my team angle advantage. Either way, driving my drones down to the site and spotting people (or calling out if I’m in squad) will put stress in the defender’s setup. If we have numbers advantage at this point; having my 2 drones just to ♥♥♥♥ with defenders trying to anchor will be very beneficial to my team’s push attempt.



For this purpose you don’t have to be sneaky with your drone driving. In fact, making defenders try and chase your drone or distract them from the angle works really well too as a help to your team.

If the anchors let your drone slide through, try to sneak it somewhere where it can watch the defuser plant once it happens; that way even if you die you can call to your teammate if there’s a clutch situation, when the defuser is being broken so he can push in without guessing.

New section hype. Alright, so I really had to add this on here because, as some may agree, Hibana is a little overpicked, and that comes mainly from players overestimating how useful hard breaching can be. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is extremely important most of the time, but sometimes picking a hard breacher, even if you need a particular wall open, isn’t that practical or useful in practice, for whatever reason. Here’s some things to go through when deciding if you have to pick Hibana, and when to determine perhaps Thermite is the better option; or maybe a different kind of operator altogether.

• Pick Hibana when the key hard wall to breach is on a defender heavy zone. Meaning you can take advantage of the range and not put yourself (the hard breacher in danger). Thermite is ideal when you have more time and safe area to place the big boy charge, that’s why he’s so much better than Hibana at opening garages, but not so much at dealing with a Mira window or some setup of that sort.
  
• Hibana is the best option to open reinforced hatches. Not only she has 3 charges instead of 2, but she can open up the hatches from a range, and silently if she so chooses. Maps like Oregon laundry, or Chalet Snowmobile Garage that have more than 1 or even 2 useful hatches are great Hibana pick occasions. Opening all of them and letting your team know will open up tons of attack routes and even just route to drone the objective faster without going through defender-watched doors or drone holes.
  
• For these reasons, Hibana works great for more complex transit lines, while Thermite is more of a “break wall + push in” kinda pick. Hibana can go into the building, use breachings to play vertically if necessary; she has the ACOG and also the sidearm to engage close quarters better or to keep fighting when she runs out of ammo (happens a lot with her 20 round mag).

• Bank: Basement (Lockers/CCTV) - Plenty of Hatches and the chance to kill Mira windows from a range.
  
• Chalet: Basement (Snowmobile Garage/Wine) - Lots of Hatch Routes. Kitchen/Trophy - Hatch & Ranged Wall Breach opportunities.
  
• Clubhouse: Basement (Church/Armory) - 3 Useful Hatches.
  
• Kafe: Train Museum/Dining - Hatch & angles from the stairs.

Note that Hibana is good at most sites, these listed are only the ones that are spectacularly good, like having a bunch of hatches, or some stuff that cannot be replicated by Thermite.

That’s all. Alright, for this guide I started out trying to bring the level of depth in my Kapkan and Mira guides, but at the same time trying to keep it focused and not as stretched out as those 2 were. So I made it shorter and definitely less redundant (I hope).

The other reason it didn’t came out as long as because I decided to skip on the more obvious sections such as “friends & foes” and instead focused on just the more important interaction which is the decision between Thermite and Hibana. One of the reasons I didn’t think a section such as “friends & foes” was as helpful, or something like a breakdown of each gun Hibana has is because that really was only relevant to really novice players; and that section of the community is just getting into the game and is not really looking into guides such as mine.

I think this guide came out alright, and I believe it will certainly teach some people at least some little trick or piece of advice that will help them when they suddenly remember the guide mid-round.

Until the next one, signing off:

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