Edit: If you find this helpful, leave a like. Thanks! Also, I can do VoD Reviews for anyone interested, and have a good amount of free time in my current schedule if anyone is interested in some personal coaching.
Hello everyone!
I am a high master player, generally around 3800 with occasional GM peaks. With the new forums I thought it would be a good opportunity to share what I know to help everyone reach there fullest potential in ranked play. This post got really long so feel free to skip around and respond to the parts your most interested in.I have climbed from mid gold to low master on multiple accounts, so I am familiar with how the lower tiers of the ladder play out.
Things to keep in mind:
- I don't know all the answers! I am a very aggressive tank main, and an old WoW raid leader, so some of my advice might not suit how you play, and I'm sure there are tons of small tricks and tips about heroes that I don't know. My main hope here is to open a dialogue, not to preach how to play.
- That being said, I do think I know a lot! Ill be the first to admit that I am not the most mechanically skilled player, especially compared to the other players in masters, and believe I earned my rank mainly by my communication and positioning.
- if anyone wants I can watch some of your comp games and see what you might need help on. (thx to drdab in the comments for the idea)
- Just because your SR is higher then someone else it dose not mean they can't help you or that your automatically "right" about something.
- I plan on monitoring this form pretty frequently to respond to any specific questions people may have, so feel free to ask away.
In this initial post i’ll focus on what I consider the 3 main paths to success, Teamwork, Mechanical Skill, and Strategy.
Teamwork and Communication
Overwatch is, above all else, a team game. The best way by far to ensure a win is if your team is working together. Of course, that cant always happen, but here are a few ways to cultivate communication. While a lot of this may seem trivial, I believe all of it is necessary.I should also say that from what i’ve seen Teamwork is the most useful of these skills for climbing between Platinum and Master, as a tank or healer main as long as your decent at the other two. As a DPS your mechanical skill is whats going to take you up the ladder (hence the frequency of skilled but uncoraparative Shimada Bros)
Team chat
Team chat wins games.Be in team chat
Having an in game voice chat is an extremely powerful tool. Use it. If you want to get to the highest rank you can, you need to be in team chat. I understand there can be annoying people, especially if you play off-meta heroes, but you need to at least give it a shot, and if there being negative just silence them. Even if you don't have a mic, or don't like talking, you need to be able to listen to anyone shot-calling.Encorage others to use team chat
Many people don't use team chat. Ask them to, polity. More often then not, there either in a group and forgot to change to team chat, or just tired of toxic people harassing them for things that dont even matter like being in plat with a gold border or playing post-nerf mercy and other off meta picks. If they still refuse, still try to coordinate things like ult combos and hero picks in text chat.Dont be Toxic
just dont. Your throwing.Target Calling
Not everyone shot calls, and not everyone needs to. But it is defiantly a useful skill. If you dont want to, dont. Heres some pointers for people who do.Who should call targets
Everyone should be calling out if they see a "free" kill. However, you generaly do want a main shot caller. This really dosent matter as much below diamond but generally you want either your most aggressive tank or zenyatta to do it. Generally you don't want DPS shot calling simply because they really do need to be focusing on there mechanical play. Zen makes a great shot-caller in a lot of cases because you usually want to focus his discorded targets. After Zen, tanks are good because they can make the space needed to focus the target in most comps.Picking Targets
The most important targets you want to call out are people who have made mistakes, usually squishy targets who are out of position or misused there cooldowns. A few of the most frequent cases of this is a genji using deflect and then diving your back line with dash. Normally if something like that happened, the genji would only need a few seconds to climb over something to effectively escape, but if you call him out and your team is around it should be an easy pick. Other important calls are tracers who are in your back-line with no recall, Winston's who jump into your team after dropping a shield, Moira's who fade twords your team a bit to aggressively, but basically any hero who has used all there ability's and is even slightly out of position should be called out .Another important situation for callouts is when your team trys to dive the enemy backline. It is crucial for your diving players to be on the same target, so calling that out can really help.
One more important reason to focus a target is to bait out there ult. Ill talk more about ult baiting later but generally if you know the enemy zen or Lucio has his ult you should try to focus him down so he wastes it saving himself (or holds it and dies), especially before you attempt to use offensive ults of your own.
Profile lookup
Career profile lookup lets you look at your opponents time played and stats with every hero while in game with them. This information can be great for identifying there one-tricks, weak links you might target, and other things.At the start of every game you should use the first 20 seconds or so quickly looking up the profiles of the entire enemy team. This may sound fast but its important that you also have time to try to share the information you find with your team.
Things to look for are:
Easily counted one-tricks or mains, like snipers or genji.
If noone on the enemy team is a comfortable healer player, then focus the enemy healers hard, they wont know how to survive.
If they have no DPS mains, there is a much larger possibility of seeing 4 tanks.
Theres plenty of other things you can learn and infer from this information, you should try to do this in comp and share what you find with your team.
Mindset
Your mindset is important. An overwatch game is NEVER over until the last overtimer ends, act that way. The reason some games end up being such curb stomps is not because the enemy team is better then you, its because someone on you team decided "oh well this ones a loss" after an early fight and stopped trying. Every game is winnable until someone decides it not.There are many things that can negatively effect your mindset without you even realizing it. Losing is one of them, I highly recommend that if you lose 2 games in a row you hop into Quick Play for a bit, wreck some people, feel good have fun, and then hop back in. This is what I always do (besides last season were I just kept telling myself “well im probably not gonna lose the next one!!!” and went on like a 7 game lose streak RiP.)
Lastly, dont play drunk it makes you play way worse. It dosent really belong here but having really warm hands is gonna make you play better, running your hands under hot water between games can give you a huge edge!
Strategy
Hero Select
Games can be won or lost in champion select, especially if people are adverse to switching. It is important to know what heroes to play to pair well with your teams picks as well as to counter the enemy team, heres some advice on that.Picking your healers
You may not always have support players who can play any support, but if you do you should always try to make the most out of that advantage.*THIS WAS WRITTEN BEFORE SEASON 10.
There are many new 2/3 healer comps involving brigette. will update with more detail if anyone asks.
One important thing to recognize is that some healers have vastly different healing outputs then others. Mercy, Ana, Bridgette(assuming her current PTR numbers dont change) and Moira can pump out massive amounts of both solo and team heals, so you almost always want one of them. These are the “main healers”. I also want to point out that Ana is by far the hardest of these to play, while usually having the same potential. I recommend against playing Ana below Plat, however ofcourse if its a hero your comfortable on then go for it, and if your team is playing it dont complain, she can be very useful.
Generaly, you also want an “off healer”. These are heros who can put out some heals to help, and sustain the team if the main healer dies early in a winnable fight, but heal less then the others and offer other forms of support for the team. The only two heros in the game that are purely off healers are Lucio and Zen. I would not try this below Diamond, because it requires alot of team play, but sombra can also be counted as an off healer at times and played as such, by hacking packs around the fight to sustain your team. This is however very map dependent, its good on lunar colony and hanamura were there are just megas everywhere, and a few other places. While having an off healer is generally favorable, a second main healer is also fine.
Another important thing to keep in mind for these two is there powerful healer ults. Zens is generally much stronger, countering almost any ult combo in the game but there a few situations where you may want Lucio, to stop high burst damage combos. Lucio gives an immediate shield, protecting your team from huge burst combos like Zar+Tracer, RiP Tier, or giving them enough time to kill a good phara out of her ult before she kills everyone.
You almost always want 2 healers, besides in rare cases on attack payload were you can pass on an off healer due to the payloads decent healing output on your team, but again this is hard to do without strong team play.(Payloads heal you when you stand on them on attack).
Picking your Tanks
Similar to healers, there are main tanks and off tanks. The two main Main tanks, refer to by the development team as "anchor tanks", are Rein and Orisa. These two have a similar niece, but very different play-styles. Rein tends to be far more aggressive, and played on maps where there is a tight choke he can control or on assault where the teams are going to be fighting closer together (especially li-jang control tower, Reins best map IMO), where as Orisa is much more defensive and usually likes to setup on a high-ground or other advantageous spot near or on the objective and hold it until the objective is lost/held, such as the gas station on route 66, pointA on horizon, or high-grounds on Anubis.Winston can also be played as a main tank, and due to his insane mobility can re position what parts of the map your trying to play around every few seconds. Winston should be picked when there no clear choke and potentially lots of important high ground areas that would normally be nearly inaccessible to rein/orisa. Examples of this are the second part of Hollywood, certain pushes on Dorado, and some assault maps. Winston is the go-to main tank for any dive comp, being able to quickly move to the enemy backline without having to go through there tanks. Every team should have a main tank, Winston being the most versatile of these.
Just like healers, there are also off-tanks Zarya, D.va, and Hog. While they cant control important parts of the map and create space for your team, they can assist your main tanks helping them do there job in a variety of ways. Every main tank right now has an off-tank that synergies exceptionally well with there kit, witch i talk more about in hero synergy, and you should generally want to play these heros in pair with there favorite main tank, but as usual I have to add in that of course your not always going to get the teams you want, and these heros can all be strong on there own. (especially hog at lower ranks).
Picking DPS
This might sound weird after all the detail I put into the other roles, but just let your team play what dps there most comfortable on. Its always going to be better to have someone comfortable on hanzo doing that then forcing them to play like a tracer or mcree if they dont know how/ arent used to aiming that way, especially at lower ranks.Its important to keep counters and synergies in mind, and switch if needed, but the strongerst DPS is generally the DPS you or your teammates are best at, unless there being counted.
This is something that applies all the way up to masters at least, and in some cases even the pros build there team comps/strategies around what there strongest DPS players are comfortable playing.
Hero Counters
Most hero have strong counters. If your team is being shut down by one strong player, it is important that you switch to counter there hero. Here I will make a list of heroes that can most effectively carry games and how to shut them down.- Widow/Hanzo Strong snipers can carry games. The best way to counter a Widow is to play a better Widow, but thats not everyone's skill set. The next best thing is to hard dive her. Winston and D.Va are powerful widow counters, and because of her far back positioning shes generally out of range of her healers. Genji can also ruin her day. The same applies to Hanzo, though he generally will be playing much closer to his team.
- Phara An uncontested Phara can dominate, especially below diamond. The most effective way to take her out is a good Widowmaker. Mcree is the next best, folowed by 76. They can consistently damage her and there ults both shut her down. If noone on your team plays a strong hit-scan hero, you probably just lose some SR RiP. As TermnatrSkul points out in the comments, D.va can also be effective at killing phara if you boost into her and E while shooting, and usually punch her once you reach her.
- Genji Genji is a very high skill hero who can tear your back-line apart if ignored. Luckly, the heros that counter Genji are fairly easy to play. What you want are beam heroes who can kill him through his reflect, and apply contant pressure to him keeping him away from your healers/dps. Moira, Winston, and Zarya are really good for this. I also am obligated to say that Symetra is not horrible for countering Genji, despite her weak kit she can prevent him from flanking with turrets and all her damage ignores reflect. Genji is also fairly weak against 4 tank comps.
- Tracer Just have your off healer go brigette
- Mei With Mei's buff, many players have been concerned about having to deal with her, especially at low levels. Mei dose not have any real mobility besides some verticality from wall, and can generally only get freeze off when your to far from your team, or in team fights. If Mei is giving your team issues, try swapping to a mobile tank like winston or D.va, and staying out of her range when alone, but also moving in to protect any of your teammates who she starts freezing. Body blocking the freeze is very effective.
- Sombra One of the hot topics on the forums recently is that Sombra is the new OP meta defining god hero, who shuts down every tank and cant be counted. I disagree. If anything, the ult charge change on her health pack is a much larger nerf then the quick cast on hack. If shes being focused with any sustained dps, she still wont be able to consistently get hacks off. Focusing Sombra denies her a chance to hack, and usually forces her to teleport out of the fight for a few seconds giving you a short 5v6 scenario. Sombra is often played to counter shield heroes like zenyatta, Bridgette can keep armor up on zen under his shield to make him less vulnerable to these kinds of attacks.
Hero Synergy
Every Hero has some Synergies with at least one other hero but I just wanted to outline some of the most important ones.- Orisa+Roadhog/snipers Orisas orb gives hog a great hook opportunity, as well as a good chance to line up headshots.
- Rein+Zar Rein is one of the best targets in the game for Zar to charge up, and zars bubbles give Rein an opportunity to really wreck poop up.
- Lucio+Rein/Hog/Reaper These three heroes suffer from short ranges (hog not as much) but Lucio remedy's some of this with speed boost.
- Bastion+Rein/orisa Bastions really not that playable without a strong shield.
- Phara+Mercy You've all seen it folks. Obviously not as good with the Mercy nerf but still not bad on Eichenwald and some assault points. Below gold its free wins if your phara can land a fair amount of shots.
- Torb+Symetra Once Sym gets a shield gen up and torb gives everyone armor, your team effectively has 150 more ARMOR, making them take significantly reduced damage from sustained damage heros like 76,bastion,orisa and tracer.
Team Comps
This could be a post in itself, but I'm just going to outline some of the most well known team compositions, how to counter them and there core components. Id also like to point out that this is one of the least important aspects of climbing, more often then not the strongest comp you can play on the ladder is when everyone on your team is just playing whatever there most comfortable with, as long as you have at least a healer and a main tank.These comps only become inportant above mid diamond-ish, and even then sometimes people dont know how they work or how to play them so dont push hard for a meta comp.
Season 10 Combo focus
The core here is Rein, Zar, Hanzo, and brigette. One other healer is nessesary, often moira or mercy and most of the time this is played with a third healer, eaither zen or lucio. Ana has become far more popular here as well in the last few days with her buff.
The comp is just focused on farming ults and making sure noone dies until you can do zarya combos. With mercy boosting dragonstrike, and some additional spam, or an aditional moira ult, you can often kill players throgh zenyatta transendence.
Dive
Dive has become one of the most played comps on the ladder. A Dive comp is an agressive comp focused on jumping on the enemy healers and taking them out quickly.The main heros plaued for this comp are D.Va, Winston, Tracer, Genji, Zen, and another healer. (Mercy used to fill this role but with the nerf Moira and Lucio have also been played in dive at times).
The best way to deal with a dive comp is to either dive better, or play some anti-dive heros.
Anti-Dive
season 10 note: dive is not incredibly good anymore
This is a team comp focused mainly on countering dive teams. This comp plays more reativly and should slowly push in and react to and punish enemy dives.
For this you usually want a shield tank, there synergistic off tank, a Moira for her strong escape, and importantly a Mcree, or sometimes a junkrat (or both). The Mcree should play back near the healers and flashbang diving opponents, mainly the DPS, and then the team should focus them down. Alternatively you can have a junk using conc mines to peel for the healers, and focus down the tanks.
With the anouncement of Bridget, it looks like were geting another strong option against dive. Her knockback and stun should be decent for peeling diving players off healers, depending on the range and cooldown, and giving everyone armor makes them much less vulnerable to a hard engage.
This is a well balanced comp that dosent really have a hard counter.
Pirate Ship / Protect the president (Junkertown Only)
This is a comp almost only played on Junkertown . Its thankfully less popular with the mercy nerf, but still played on like half the Junkertown games im in. Essentially everyone just protects bastion while he shreds.You need an Orisa for this, and generally you want a Hog to combo with her but sometimes people take a Rein for more shields. you obviously need Bastion, and a healer. Some people play this with a solo healer and 2 more dps, but the other three slots can be almost anything.
Countering this is not that card and theres a number of ways to do it. Tracer is good at quickly farming Pulse bombs off the tanks and sticking bastion, D.Vas defense matrix is pretty good for handling it, Junkrat can break the shield pretty fast from out of bastions sight, but should be wary of orisa balls. Hog can hook the bastion, witch usually get him killed, and Mei can pop the bastion up above his team for easy hog hooks and focus. With some coordination and doing any couple of these things you should be able to take it out.
Slambulance
As a Rein main I love this, Its a super aggressive comp centered around running into the enemy team and doing tons of AoE damage and Healing, quickly getting coalescence and other strong ults up to finish fights.This is a four tank comp that uses Lucio and Moira as healers. The Tanks that are used for this are Rein, Zarya, Hog and D.va. This is mainly played on 2CP. The strat for this is to just run strait onto the point, protect the healers and get Moira’s ult up quickly with huge AOE tank heals.
Slambulance runs 4 tanks, so you deferentially want a Reaper, hes the key to beating most 4 tank comps. Anas bio-grenade can shut down the AOE heals severely crippling the comp, and a lucio should be used to give your reaper a chance to get in range.
Your Hero Pool
There is nothing wrong with maining a hero, and playing that hero any opportunity were its a strong pick for your team. One-Tricking, and refusing to play anything else, on the other hand, can hurt your win rate. While there are some seriously talented one-tricks out there, like Feuwy500, I honestly think that they could be even better if they just practiced some other heroes.I honestly recommend everyone have one main hero, and one main role. My main is Rein, and I play an amazing aggressive Rein and get like 8 charge kills a game and counter the sheet out of other Reins and win every shield war even if my dps is garbage. I have barely played rein for the last like 4 seasons.
Even thogh I love Rein he just is not as important as he was a year ago and Ive played alot more Winston and D.va recently. Its important that you can play at least a few heros in your main role, so you can make sure to play things that synergize with your team.
Its also important to be able to be able to play at least one hero from the three main roles at an acceptable level for your SR. This really is not as hard as it may seem, Moira is strong from bronze to GM and shes fairly easy to play, as long as you make sure to not keep your piss jar full (heal your team sometimes). For a tank to flex to I would recommend winston. He can be a strong off tank, and a not horrible main tank, and requires little to no aim. If your having trouble staying alive as him playing a passive Rein is fairly easy and beneficial to the team.
Creating Advantages
Ult Economy
This is by far one of the most important things strategically especially at higher levels. You basically want to make sure that you have ults to counter any ults that the enemy team is going to use, and that the enemy team dose not have ults to counter your ults.Heres a list of key concepts to keep in mind:
Spawn Advantage
Whichever teams spawn room is closest to the objective has spawn advantage. In a long drawn out fight where kills are staggered, witch ever team has spawn advantage will be heavily favored. This scenario is most notable on 2CP or final points on Payload maps.Some important things to keep in mind when fighting a team with a heavy spawn advantage are that if you go in when your team is still spawning, even if you get like 4 kills, there going to be re spawned before your team even gets there. You did nothing but waste your time and feed ults.
In these cases it is more important then ever to stay grouped. It is also important to make sure that you kill the enemy team as quickly as possible, preferably with a huge ult combo so they have no chance of spawn contesting.
Winning fights
If your team still has 6 players, and you kill any 2 enemy's, then that fight is over and you've won. Yay! But never stop there! if your team is stabilized (everyone near full HP, most have some ability off CD, ect.) you should really push your advantage and try to get some extra stagger kills. One thing to note while doing this is to not overextend, a good way to tell if your overextended is if you can see the enemy spawn, OR you cant see the objective anymore, OR none of your teammates are nearby. Dont overextend, but always push a player advantage as far as you can.Misc.
The following category's are miscellaneous tips and tricks.Overtime Spawns (2CP)
In 2CP, defenders get significantly longer spawns in overtime. If theres only like 30 seconds left on the clock and you know its your last push, just wait until the ten second mark before going in so your kills are more meaningful.Tilting the enemy team
I never claimed to be an angel, and all's fair in war. If someone makes a missplay some of you might not be above making a lighthearted joke about it in match chat and I cant say I haven't seen games won or lost because of that sort of thing. If your SR is worth more then your morals throw some shade at the enemy who backpedaled off a ledge.Dealing with rank Decay (and getting hard stuck)
I dont have the time to play whatever number of games a week blizzard expects for me to not decay, so ive put together some strategies to deal with it. Decay only effects players above diamond, so dont worry about this if your not there yet.- Dont finish your placements until the last 2 weeks of the season.
Decay dosent happen when your unranked, so keeping your placements unfinished will prevent decay
- Ignore it, its fake news.
Decay lowers your SR, but your MMR seems largely unaffected. The few times I have decayed I climbed back extremely fast, because SR will always trend twords your MMR.
Mechanics
Mechanical Skill is overrated, its not the sole decider of whether you win or lose in this game, but its incredibly important nonetheless.This section will discuss how to hone your mechanical skill.
Practice
Practice. Like Actually practice. If your trying to land abilitys or aim or do anything better set up a custom lobby, put some bots in, make yourself invincible and practice hitting them.Watch Streams
You dont know what you dont know. The best way to find out what you dont know in my opinion is watching the best players and see what they do that you dont. IDDQD and XQC both stream and give really solid tips.Another thing that is really helpfull is to always do practice shots while waiting for games to start. Just practice hitting things like basketballs and other decoration.
Coaching/Self Coaching
Record your ranked games (theres a really nice battle.net client steaming feature you can use, its already on your computer, and console has built in streaming as well.) and rewatch some of them. Be honest with yourself and find were you made mistakes, and think about what you could have done better.If you cant, find someone to show you your mistakes and think about what you could have done better, and what you will do better in the future.
Hardware
If your playing at less then 60 FPS, your crippling yourself. Im using a pre-build dell from 2010 with some doo-doo second hand Graphics card i got for like 100 bucks and I get like 70 FPS. You really dont need more then that.If your monitor is a square and not a rectangle, get a new one and also sue whoever sold you a square monitor, those shouldent exist.
Dont use a ball mouse or a trackpad. Preferably, get a mouse with two side buttons and set them up to Punch and Reload. And for gods sake make sure your using a wired mouse.
This one might seem weird but its actually one of the more important ones, make sure you have a decent full sized gaming mouse pad and aim with your arm not your wrist, the difference after like a week long adjustment is usually massive.
You should probaly get a headset but to be honest I used to use apple earbuds plugged into my microphone jack as a microphone for years
Anything more then this is not going to make or break your gameplay below like GM, but if you dident have all this stuff set up then you should see solid improvement when you do
Hero tips and tricks
Every hero has countless small tricks that can really benefit your game play to learn. I cant list all of them here (i might make some posts for individual heroes), but you really should try to look into all the hero tricks. Ill list a few examples of these sorts of things:Mcree: High noon can be activated and then quickly canceled to instantly reload your gun
(dont do this if your below masters though your gonna look like a fool)
Winston: Punching just before you land a jump will deal the punch damage and cancel the animation, adding 30 damage to your jump pack hits for free. This is extremely powerful for bursting down squishy players.
Doomfist: If you jump just after a punch, it will send you flying forward and you can get an extra like 50% distance. This is good for getting back from spawn in a hurry and quickly re-positioning or escaping (dont fully charge punches on escapes or your going to get killed).
Mercy: Similar to how the doomfist jump trick works, you can go much further when you jump to your teammates while holding space. (tip from DQCS)
Zarya: Shooting your alt fire just behind your feet will bounce you forward slightly, giving you some extra movement in cases when you need it.
Reaper: Punching after reaper throws his guns in the reload animation will shave a very small amount of time off the animation, and can occasionally get you some extra damage if you end up reloading in a fight.
Rein: Instead of holding down your left click when you swing, its sometimes better to tap it, wait for the animation to finish, and the second it dose tap it again. This will cause you to always sweep the enemy’s to your left, moving them out of position. Also, if your not shielding there is no reason to not be swinging, use flame strike as much as you safely can, and you move at full speed with your shield up while jumping, so its good to spam jump and only put your shield down for the moment you touch the ground when your trying to quickly move and the enemy team dosent have insane Pick potential (snipers/hog).
So overall...
Play nice, play with your team, and git gud.
I hope you gained some insights from this, and as I said ill be monitoring this post for a while to answer any specific questions (starting tomorrow, i’m going to bed), and I honestly play a lot more QM then ranked so if anyone wants to do some of those i’m usually down for it.
I will be updating this post nearly daily, and responding to comments. Feel free to ask any questions you may have about things like how to play certain maps or anything else.
Happy climbing.
![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5" ":slight_smile:")
