How can I get from Plat to Diamond (Team League)?

General Discussion
1

Hey everyone, this is going to be a long post.

So I’m at the stage where I’m trying to improve on my game sense and mechanics to be worthy of Diamond league but am finding it hard to just stay in Plat despite what I do or how I grow.

Been watching videos on game mechanics and such to increase my skill when I can (not a lot of free time) and feel like I’ve been learning a lot. However, at the same time I’ve been feeling rather powerless as far as my rank goes. I know that you can carry in this game if you’re master/grandmaster skill but I’m not, simply don’t have the time to devote to the game for that. I do feel though that I have the skill of a plat player and the potential for diamond.

I’ve been incorporating some new things into my game play like if you’re a solo laner and you win your lane . . . do SOMETHING with it, don’t just sit there (ie, get camps and such). Or if you’re solo laning then don’t do a lot of dmg to your wave and let it push closer to your towers (ie, Freeze your lane). This allows you to either bully the enemy hero away from xp soak or xp soak more safely yourself if the enemy team is looking for ganks since the minions are closer to your side.

I’ve been increasing my flexibility in hero roles and forcing myself to get better at heroes that I don’t enjoy playing. During the drafting phase I look at everyone’s profile for the heroes they play and what their win/loss looks like for the day. This tells me what our team needs and also the mentality of my teammates. If I see no one plays support then I’ll flex to a support despite loathing the role (I feel powerless healing).

I try to communicate with my team in and out of the drafting phase to try to figure out what strategy we want to go for. I try to be clear with what I do and don’t need in matches and what I am and am not good at in drafts.

That all being said, I feel mostly powerless despite what I try to do.

In the draft I’ll try to talk to people to see what they’ll play. No response 90% of the time. I’ll try to let my team know what I’m best at during the draft, people seldom listen. I try to warn what the enemy comp is trying to do and what we need to do to counter them, no one listens. I’ll try to warn my team that we only have chip damage heroes (nazeebo, guldan, valla) and no hero with impactful damage (greymane, jaina, ktz) and watch my team wonder why none of the enemy dies in the match. Everything I do in the drafting phase is almost always ignored. The best I’ve been able to do by myself is look at what people’s rosters look like and flex to whatever it looks like my team needs. I feel like I have to flex and hope for the best with the draft while hoping we don’t get a Nova on BFOT or no solo laner on Braxxus.

In game I try to warn people that we have no early game and that we need to play safe just to see my team try to fight all the time over nothing thus snowballing the enemy’s advantage. I try to let people know that we need to play the soak/macro game on certain maps yet they decide to 4-man a lane leaving one of the three lanes un-soaked (me being on the other). I’ll be taking a merc camp on a hero that needs no help whatsoever (Twin Varian, Jaina, Azmodan) and find myself having to tell a teammate to back off, return to their lane and do something useful because they aren’t needed to make tanking the camp any easier. I’ll be in the solo lane trying to freeze my lane (not dmg the minions so they get closer to my towers) so I can bully the enemy hero away from xp gain or be safe from ganks only to have a teammate come down to invade my lane, wipe the enemy minions effectively resetting the lane and ruining my attempts to freeze it. I’ll see the enemy team rotating to gank a teammate and ping danger/retreat only to watch them stay there and die. I’ll see a teammate too far forward with the enemy unaccounted for and tell them that they’re in danger only to watch them die because they don’t listen.

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My point is, I’m trying as much as my time allows me to get better. I feel like it’s not enough because I can’t control my teammates so I want to get better. What can I do to start climbing out of Plat and into Diamond rather than falling out of Plat and into the hell that is Gold League? Is my only option is to stop solo queuing and use some sort of third party site to find competent people I can queue with? I can’t play more hours due to the nature of my job so that’s not an option (I will note that I’m done with being able to play this season after today since I’m heading to Korea for 9 months and wont have my computer over there).

Any advice for next season would be appreciated.

2

here is what i have to say about this general subject.

  1. being able to win through the use of precision heroes.
    – what does this mean? it means playing heroes like alarak, greymane, raynor, valla, kerrigan… and so on that require a good deal of mechanical play from you to really play them ‘well’. some more than others. these are the heroes you play FIRST and climb as high as you can until you hit your first wall.
  2. being able to win through the use of non-precision heroes.
    – these are high skill cap hero ‘enablers’. they help your team setup plays or in general are easy to handle. think guldan or diablo here. basically they are point and click thats all their kits come down to. however, they also have the ability to setup kills for your higher skill cap heroes in your team as well! these are the heroes you want to switch to that will help you climb up after you cant climb with the high skill cap heroes yourself.
  3. i know no one likes to hear this… but not everyone is master level. eventually you may hit a wall where you just cant climb anymore no matter what. the only thing you can do is sit there, probably for a long time, trying to get better. try watching some pro coaching videos about your favorite heroes. also, dont feel like you have to absolutely flex if you are bad at something. i have won games no heals for example. its definitely harder im not going to kid you, but sometimes its better to do what you are good at rather than what you are bad at and just hope for the best.
3

This is one of the things I rly feel like I need to start working on. I avoid KTZ, Alarak and Greymane because they are difficult for me to play but I should prob pick those heroes back up and start learning them.

Been watching a lot of these, not just for heroes I play but for heroes I don’t. They do help a lot and have been allowing me to improve my game mechanics/sense a lot. Been watching a lot from Not Paradox atm.

4

Honestly, it’s just practice. If you haven’t been playing RTS or MOBA games (like original Dota in Warcraft III) for a long time, you’ll have to climb the mountain that all of us did.

Hitting Diamond or Master takes a lot of practice, and you might be stuck in Platinum for a while until you get used to the many intricacies present in games like this.

Since I don’t know you personally and don’t know how you play, I can really only give general advice, but it’s all about playing a ton of games. I wouldn’t play every single game in ranked, though. Take some time out of ranked and go into unranked draft or ARAM just to hone your skills with various heroes, and learn how to play versus other ones in a no-stress environment.

5

How to win the lottery you ask? Get lucky. The team with the most deadweight usually loses in the lower leagues.

What you can control, however, is your own game play and hope people listen to your shotcalling (including draft)… assuming you really know what you’re doing.

6

You want to git gud? Then pick a one trick and drill in trymode w/ instant cooldowns. A single hour of deliberate stutterstepping/combo practice will make you better than 90% of Plats.

Filling is pure stupidity.

Mastering a Hero is like mastering an instrument.

Only an idiot would try to learn fifty different instruments at the same time. And make no mistake, you better be learning, because Plat is nowhere near the skillcap.

Kid, that’s like asking how to play Mozart with only 10 minutes of practice. Skill doesn’t work like that. You don’t git gud without spending the time.

We can tell you how to spend your time more efficiently, but you need to understand that mastering a skill requires a large investment of time and deliberate practice.

The most efficient ways to get good at this game are

  1. One trick
  2. Get a coach
  3. Drills
  4. Deliberate practice

Notice how this is the exact same training method athletic coaches and instrument teachers use. Because it works and has been working for the last thousand+ years.

Bull. We’re not talking national, or even state level here. Being a Master player (top 1%) is like being the best piano player in your high school. Potentially achievable for 99% of people. Basically anyone can be Master with enough time, effort, and dedication.

Of course most people can’t just buy a professional coach and no life a game for a month, but the potential to be a master is always there.

Yeah it’s because almost everything you’re doing is wrong.

You do not draft for comp, you draft for individual winrate.

That means looking up the “best 2-3” Heroes of your four teammates and making a comp out of it.

Rules of thumb for crafting a winning comp in draft, in order of priority

  1. Let one tricks play their one trick or backup.
  2. Let role mains get their role.
  3. Flex get Sup/Tank that they have a good winrate with and have won with recently.

Careful not to get screwed by date/time, always filter by most recent seasons. Lots of players let the majority of their roster collect dust.

7

My advice for you is to make friends.

On TL players are usually 2 ranks higher than their HL rank. This means the average diamonds are gold and platinum players (Sometimes even silvers get boosted to master!)

The matchmaker is terrible sometimes and I have seen 108 pts favored team on TL. I joined as a master duo and got 3 mid low golds against a 5men master/GM team. This is why you have to make friends, to not let the matchmaker do this to you. Even you get platinum teammates they can be silvers or platinums as well. It’s not a secret that you won’t easily climb to diamond with a full silver team.
(that’s why you can see "minimum plat HL when someone is looking for more on TL channel). You need real diamond and platinum friends to climb. Add those players to your friend list who you enjoyed to play with.
It’s going to be a whole new game experience when you trust every teammate, know each other’s play style, don’t have to deal with trolls or random silver feedbots. It’s more competitive, less nerve-wracking and you will improve a lot without even noticing it because you will have more time to focus on your own job instead of fixing random silver’s dumb mistakes for the entire game.