Climbing out of low bronze is impossible with role queue

Competitive Discussion
81

Low bronze is a prison and a nightmare but there are worse ones to be stuck in.

…I assume. I don’t know, I’ve kind of always been here excluding my first season if I wasn’t playing Lucioball.

However I did manage to pull my Tank and Support ratings back up above 1000 SR from horrible sub-1000 levels through solo-Q even with the godawful handicap that is my janky 6yo laptop.

The secrets:
-Literally do not expect help from your team to do anything. Assume you have to do every job yourself. That doesn’t necessarily mean carry (unless you are a smurf, there is no carrying here) so much as just play smarter, not harder, and enable these dummies with what amounts to secret handholding. Read the killfeed, note what kills you or frequently kills others on your team, then form a vendetta against that particular player and seek to ruin their life the entire rest of the match.

Especially Mei/Hanzo/Reaper/Widow. Your team will not notice or deal with them, or at least not in a timely manner. This is part of why I advocate playing support even if you are a DPS main, you will hone very good ‘take cover’ instincts (or as I call it, the predator/prey or ‘earthquake’ instinct that something bad is about to happen).

-Look at your hero winrates. Do not play anyone you don’t have a 50% rate or better, even if you are arguably good at them. Because your team will not capitalize on what they’re actually useful for.

-Higher DPS output and survivability. Your team will not be able to hit the broad side of a Roadhog, your team will not peel for you regardless of role, so find yourself something that can either take a lot of punishment or at least escape it.

-Make note of how your teammates play. If you know someone is dumber than a sack of hammers (i.e. I had a DPS duo who constantly solo-flanked, dying to a Symm turret nest demanding heals when both I and the Moira had to explain to them “we can’t heal when we’re dead” as the enemy’s Winston just turned us into fricassee every time we tried to push - met with the response of “then don’t die!”), I cannot stress enough how much you should use avoid as teammate cycles and/or block functions if need be to keep them away from you. You can enable some stupid, like the suicdal charging Rein getting into duels with the other team’s Rein, but you cannot enable all of it.

(Also, report blatant throwers, like the battle Mercies and DPS Moiras who think they can just use the queue to pew-pew instead of, you know, their jobs. The latter can sometimes just be bad Moiras but I have seen a serious uptick in the former lately where the Mercy just pulls out pistol and refuses to do any healing or rezzing whatsoever.)

-And an unusual one: use LFG. Not to find an actual group (though sonetimes you will find those rare ones with an ounce of competency), but to report other ones. Every deranker group, every admitted smurf and their partner/stack, report, report, report. I don’t care how futile you think it is. Report anyway. You don’t get rid of cockroaches by rolling over like dogs, you stomp the little f*ckers out.

I probably still won’t see silver again for a long time. Comp is a thankless job. But climbing, while just as thankless, is possible.

And hey. Lootboxes and comp points, at least. Just got my third gold gun for Symm.

Merry Christmas, queen, if the devs won’t love you then I will.

2 Likes
82

CrimsonFlare.exe stopped working, rebooting.

Okay, here we go.

Better than screaming at rigged matchmaker, terrible teammates and smurf GM enemies. It would be even more dumb, plus I would be talking about stuff I don’t know schtuff about.

The game likes to point me at her for sure.

If only I knew the difference.

2 Likes
83

It’s not rigged.

Oh those exist no matter where you go - which is why I say focus on what YOU can change, not focusing on what others aren’t changing.

You see, that’s a LOT of throwing to get down to there - it’s likely that these people are just golds who deranked to fight a rank they feel powerful in. A player at GM would only need to derank to plat to have extreme amounts of smurfing fun. 9 times out of 10, a smurf in bronze will be at most low plat - most likely, gold and silver ranked.

that is the hardpoint isn’t it. Try watching full matches of your hero of choice at say diamond/GM level and pick up on all the things they do. Apply those in your games - and then you should have a fair idea of what to and what not to do.

<3 Gl c:

2 Likes
84

I have an account in bronze (Yeah, I know, I’m sorry) and I can literally solo kill half of the enemy team as heroes like Mercy or Ana most of the time. And my highest sr ever is only 3020, u don’t even need to be that good to get out of bronze

85

Did you want to say “watch replays and compare with ones from Youtube reviews?”

86

Nah - i meant literally what I said, watch the habits and flow of other players who are proficient in the heroes you like. It’s less about self analysis than it is learning from others. as I said - you’re not held back by skill - just allocation of your most precious resource. Time.

So not replays of yours, just look at what others are doing and try to mimic it to learn c:

2 Likes
87

Oh. Okay. 'Cause I was told multiple times to watch and compare and that didn’t work. It’s just matches in my eyes. And speaking of “what you like” - I already have said I don’t have favorites. Just because the game throws me to Moira right after the loading screen doesn’t mean I like her or playing as her. I don’t have a main. Sometimes I try to appeal to team’s needs (asking if they have any), sometimes I just hit select right when it appears. It’s just that.

1 Like
88

Well - loosen up the term from heroes that you like to roles that you like. Each one has subroles within the role - but for the most part the roles function mostly the same with the exception of say widow - she functions much different to the rest of the DPS roster so to learn her you’d be wanting to watch other widow play as the playstyle is non transferable.

I don’t recommend replays because if you could learn anything from watching them with the type of stats I observed, you would have learnt them in game, simply rewatching what looks normal to you won’t do you any good.

Just watch other people do their thing and try mimic it - soon enough you won’t be mimicing you will form your own playstyle, and with your own playstyle you can build from there :3

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89

Yeah, I was once told about that when I failed to keep the conversation on the matter. The game doesn’t seem to want me to know that there are, say, main tanks and off-tanks, thus, I had no idea such a thing even exists and it is somehow important.

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90

I agree they need to do better on informing people of whats what. Without someone flatly saying these are X and those are Y you wouldn’t know outside of trial and error
Main tanks are commonly mislabeled as tanks with shields - however hammond is a main tank, but can ALSO be an off-tank with a change in playstyle, probably the reason they don’t help define them at all (even though they could just loosely define them which would be way better for learners)

Overwatch is complicated. :c

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91

Unfortunately. Especially for someone like me, who is blind to anything that wasn’t told by the game itself. But we all know how it rolls, right?

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92

Well, we can learn it all eventually.
You aren’t blind for not seeing it, I had a firm guiding hand when I started, without that I’d probably still be a lost boi.

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93

…some faster than others, yeah. Heard that.

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94

Do… do… you play with your monitor off? I don’t know how you can know everything and be in bronze. Unless maybe you think you know everything when in reality you know little to nothing.

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95

I play Zarya until I don’t get healed enough to pop off (lots of DPS supports) or can’t get charged and then just go Hog and flank until I start to get punished (sometimes never) and then play with the team.

Basically, if Zarya doesn’t work I just play Hog until the end unless they change their comp (or we do) to something more favorable to Zarya.

I’d probably win more games or climb higher if I widened my tank hero pool. However, as a DPS main, I don’t really want to widen my hero pool that much or it will reduce my effectiveness (practice time) at the roles I have the most fun in (DPS).

2 Likes
96

You would be pretty much me, haha.

Well… guess, I’ll restart my search for a main next year. Maybe I’ll be lucky. Or maybe I won’t.

97

You’re just like me on my tank heroes haha

99

Re-reading your post on Moira actually makes me think you are somewhat a next-step being. Perhaps you could enlighten me a bit on other characters someday?

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100

You should take a look at overbuff.
(Omnicmeta was better for players like us but the website close down. )

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101

I did at some point. Didn’t tell me anything. But to someone it did and now I feel slightly curious.