Is it even possible to climb out low elo with baptiste?

Competitive Discussion
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So I’m a support main who used to be a DPS main before. My peak on DPS is gold, which I got automatically placed after one tricking tracer in placements. My peak on support was 1800SR and I was steadily climbing, but by one tricking ana whom I was obsessed with at the time.

After I started getting bored with ana, I decided to keep climbing by one tricking baptiste. But as soon as I started doing that, I slowly began losing SR. There seems to be many situations (long-range maps, ally/enemy team compositions) that makes it very hard for me to pop off as baptiste in losing games.

I seem to lose the most games on baptise in Havana, Dorado, Busan DownTown, Rialto, Numbani, Ilios Well, Nepal, Hanamura and Volskaya Industries.

With ana, I losed to lose most games on Rialto, Volskaya Industries, Lijiang Tower Control Center, Ilios Well and Hanamura.

So there seems to be two reasons why I lose games as baptiste. One reason, which also applies to ana is because the maps like Hanamura and Volskaya Industries where the map greatly favors the defender and has a lot of corners for them to hide in and not take damage. 2CP is basically who can get the most team-wipes with ultimates to secure the control point, which supports are lacking in. The map (2CP) in general requires some level of coordination to win especially if your team is losing.

And ironically, if your team is losing it’s because your team is lacking in those things. This map in general is harder to pop off as support. DPS usually don’t have this weakness since they have the option to pick defensive heroes like Torbjorn, Symmetra or Mei in defence and Junkrat on attack. But this obviously means that the DPS needs to flex. But even if I was to flex as support, I’m not sure if it will make much difference, since they don’t have team-wipe ults or ultimates that create space like Bob or Molten Core.

The second reason, which only applies to baptiste is due to the long-range nature of the map (Rialto, Havana etc) making baptiste more vulnarable to getting one tapped by a widow or projectile heroes like hanzo, zenyatta, mei and torbjorn. He has no way of fighting back either as his weapon deals very little damage in long-range, and this issue has been further exacerbated by the recent hitscan fall-off revert too.

I’m not really that fussy over climbing. But if I’m constantly losing games after games and deranking all the way back down to bronze just because I one tricked baptiste instead of ana, it does start to make my skill feel unappreciated on him. Oddly enough, as soon as I start one tricking ana, I start winning more games immedietly. This season, my win rate on ana is 63% and I only have 2 hours of playtime on her. On baptiste, I have 5 hours and my win rate is 48%. If I include the difference from all seasons, the difference is even more drastic in favoring ana.

Why is this? Am I just bad at baptiste or is it incredibly harder to climb out of bronze/silver with baptiste? I have a feeling it’s due to the enemy tanks like hog and ball rendering my skill on baptiste less useful. And fragging with ana generally being much easier (and safer) thanks to her lack of fall-off damage.

Thoughts? Do you think it’s even possible to one trick baptiste from bronze to at least gold or plat in this state of the game, especially in my region (OCE; Australia)?

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It is if you’re good enough with him.

I’m personally also bad with Baptiste, my WR with him has always been around 40% :man_facepalming: :joy:

So I just sticked to Ana and climbed with a +55% WR

If you actually want to climb I recommend playing whatever your best at instead (I had to stop one tricking Mercy in order to climb :triumph:)

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Yeah, that’s one aspect of Overwatch that I don’t really like all that much. The game feels too much like paper, scissors, rock rather than how much skill you have on the hero and outplaying the enemies. If the enemy has scissors, and you have paper, it doesn’t matter how much better you are in skill, you will still be greatly disadvantaged. And some heroes like ana just has more advantage and/or less weakness over others, so she is like having both scissors and paper.

I don’t think I’m winning more games on ana because I’m better at using her either. I wouldn’t say my skill on baptiste is that bad, it’s probably almost on par to ana (but I admit I have way more hours on her). I think ana is just a stronger support which makes climbing with her much easier than other supports.

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I agree. Some heroes feel like I need to put in 5 times the effort in order to get the same value as others get simply by existing.

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you can one trick bap all the way to gm if you wanted to. you just have to learn to play selfishly in lower ranks. bronze to plat, you’re basically a dps that has to keep an eye on saving tanks when they feed. past that hes just kinda meta anyway.

i also find ana easier in lower ranks but thats not to say bap is worse, its just a different playstyle.

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I guess I shouldn’t say that it’s impossible to climb on baptiste. But should’ve rephrased it by saying it requires even more effort than ana and will likely take longer, especially if you one trick. On ana I still had a positive win rate even when I was at my peak of 1800SR. Which implies that I could’ve easily been in a higher rank had I not decided to one trick baptiste. But I don’t care too much about SR so I wasn’t that bothered with deranking, it’s the feeling of underappreciation that gets to me especially after a loss.

As soon as I started one tricking baptiste, I deranked all the way down to 1400SR and was in a constant limbo between 1300 - 1400SR. Let’s just say this, I had to go through the process of perfecting my aim in Valorant/Aim Lab/PMAJellies Aim Trainer V5, upgrade my mouse and mouse pad just to have baptiste even be an viable option other than ana. That’s how hard it is for me to get value out of him in lower elo.

Ana in comparison is so much easier to get used to because you can heal and deal damage while staying further away from threat. And scoped shots are single shot hitscans with forgiving hitbox and no fall-off penalties. Which makes healing and dealing damage while scoped in much easier.

Compared to baptiste where you need to learn to track your opponents with your gun in order to land all three bullets consistently. Like when they’re falling in a curved motion, you need to be able to track in a certain way to hit your shots which is significantly harder. And all these efforts into improving aim all the while having the weaker damage of a support and limitations of the damage dealt depending on range gives you a lesser value overall as support.

If you had to be one rank or higher to climb out of bronze as ana. I’d say that you have to be two ranks or higher to climb out of bronze as baptiste because of how hard it is to get value out of him consistently as one trick. Baptiste is just not flexible enough in many of the maps and team compositions to win me games when one tricking. His utility is strong, but not as strong or flexible as ana’s.

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i mean, thats like saying its gonna be harder to climb on torb than mcree. it doesnt really matter.

thats not how that works. I got to my peak last season of 4152 with a 70% winrate on both ana and bap and still fell down to 3800. you could have just as likely reached you limit.

i dont understand what youre trying to get at. baps is harder for you because you haven’t put the time in to get good with him. of course youre going to feel underprepared.

hes a hitscan with a 3 round burst. his shots aren’t exactly difficult to hit. you’re literally just saying you had to practice a hero so hes bad.

so its flick vs track. its really not as big a deal as you are making it out to be.

tracking a falling target is where tracking is easiest. they have little control during the fall meaning their movement is predictable.

the weaker damage? compared to ana? thats just wrong dude. you dont play to baps strengths. thats it.

no. you just need to be a decent bap. just like you need to be a decent ana. if youre a bad bap, thats fine but you cant claim that its the heros fault.

gonna be completely honest mate, I highly doubt any silver player is getting enough value out of either hero’s utility to see a difference there.

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So do you have two accounts where you only one trick ana and another one tricking baptiste? Because playing ana and baptiste and one tricking is different.

I didn’t say that I deranked by using ana and baptiste, it was from one tricking baptise and not using anything else. Before that, I was one tricking ana and I lost few games here and there but was still climbing overall. So I thought I could get away with it with baptiste as well.

Of course I can climb if I use both baptiste AND ana. That’s what I’ve started doing recently actually, because I didn’t want to keep deranking to 1400SR. So now, I’ve risen back up to 1500SR because I’m also using ana when baptiste is obviously not working out for my team; which seems to happen more often than ana. Especially as the game expects you to hard carry games to win in low elo.

As I started climbing to higher elo, I started getting more games where I could just sit back, relax and support my team and easily win games. Instead of me furiously having to constantly avoid getting killed by 2 enemy DPS who for some reason are being ignored by my team while trying to keep my bad tanks and DPS that’s out of position alive with my scoped shots as ana.

How do you manage to ignore the word “limitation with range” in the same sentence of you disagreeing with me? I don’t quite understand. Baptiste does very little damage in long-range maps like Havana (first and third point) and Rialto. If you use baptiste in these kind of maps in competitive, you’re literally playing in hard mode. Have you ever played in metal ranks before? You can never trust your teammates to secure kills or stay alive. Baptiste himself can hardly do any damage due to range limitations, how will he be able to hard carry games?

“Playing to baptiste’s strength” so you mean being able to deal meaningful damage by getting closer to your opponents. Again, you can only do that if your teammates are able to push successfullly, which again isn’t a guarantee in bronze.

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I mean… The game is built on hero counters. If you or your whole team are on the wrong heroes against heroes that have better synergy, that’s kinda on you guys.

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its really not. i play what i want to play, not whats best.

it really doesn’t matter if you one tricked or not. if you one tricked and fell then its still on you. your win rate at your peak means nothing.

you can, if you’re not a bad bap.

the game expects you to carry? why because youre clearly better than everyone else and deserve to climb? its the same in every rank mate. you dont climb by not carrying.

yeah mate, that 100sr makes a massive difference. i can almost guarantee that its all in your head.

i didn’t. it was the exact reason i said you don’t play to baps strengths. if you’re concerned about range, you’re playing bap wrong.

so dont poke. stage a real engage.

its literally meta.

yes. i was silver when I started playing. the difference seems to be, I was willing to learn how to play around the weaknesses of the heros I chose.

exactly.

its not a guarantee in any rank. you seem to be forgetting that the higher rank you get, the better the enemy.
you have the capability to make plays. dont rely on your team if you arent confident in their abilities.

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Meta doesn’t matter if the team composition doesn’t support it. Briggite is meta but if your other support can’t pump out heals like ana/bap/moira, which is essential in bronze, then the fact that she’s meta is redundant. Same with other members of your team.

That’s true I admit. But generally speaking, your team starts being able to switch heroes to tackle the problem better as you climb up in elo. If there are enemy widow preventing your team from pushing past the bridge in Rialto, your tanks will switch to shield tank like sigma or orisa or to dive tanks to counter the widow; or your DPS will do switch to something else instead of junkrat to counter the widow.

But if you selfishly just stay on baptiste in bronze, there’s more chance of you facing a situation where the enemy is preventing your team from being able to push and they only way for that to change is from you switching to other heroes. My point is that ana is one of the more flexible support hero that’s less handicapped by the map, so problems like this arises less often where you have to switch in order to win, that’s all.

You also keep ignoring my questions. So have you or have you not one tricked baptiste out of bronze to higher elo without using any other support? If the answer is no, I’m not too sure if the advice I’m receiving is that useful.

Don’t get me wrong, what you’re saying is factual but it just isn’t gonna work out that well in real scenario. Again, my point is that it’s harder to climb with baptiste as one trick due to maps handicapping him more than ana. Too much effort needing to hard carry in lower elo where there’s little to no coordination from your teammates + being handicapped by the map on how much value you can get out of the hero, just not worth it.

I know there are even worse support to climb solo Q with as one trick from bronze, like briggite so I’m not discounting that either. All I’m saying is that it’s just not worth the hassle of climbing with baptiste out of bronze when climbing is already annoying in itself already with so many variables getting in the way. You might as well only start one tricking heroes like briggite and baptiste once you reach higher elo where there’s actually some level of team coordination where they will start to play around your weakness. But I agree with what you’re saying that sometimes, even in higher elo players won’t adjust to your hero picks either so it’s still a gamble. Sometimes you get matched with a hog one trick in high elo who isn’t willing to switch, and that’s no different from bronze :wink:

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i think you’d be surprised at the amount of one tricks.

again, you’d be surprised. they know what to do but the game is 5 years old and dying. everyone thats good at the game doesn’t care anymore.

right but the issue is, youre arguing about one tricking in a game where switching was intended to be a core mechanic. if you cant swing that situation as bap, then you shouldnt be playing him. you cant complain that you are being countered while refusing to do anything about it.

right, so because one hero is more flexible that makes them better?

the advice youre looking for is get better at bap. I also didnt ignore the question.

incase you didnt catch it through the implication; advice for a hero is the same as advice for a one trick. it doesnt matter that you one tricked bap. i played him consistently in gm on a patch where he was so meta that I practically had to one trick him. i still forced Ana because I couldnt care less about rank.

and what I’m saying is; you cant one trick and then complain about the weaknesses. you are artificially handicapping yourself. its not the hero, its you.

or you could just not one trick. problem solved.

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Agreed, can’t complain there and much appreciated on your input. I also agree that if I keep getting better with baptiste, I’ll undoubtly eventually start climbing on him just as easily as ana. Will I bother one tricking him though to get to that level? Probably not because it’s too much of a hassle. I’m most likely going to switch up between ana/baptiste depending which hero is more suitable.

But you’re right that one tricking can be done with almost any hero if you dedicate enough time to it. I mean there are even pharah one trick like YZNSA who uses nothing but pharah, even without mercy pocket in ranked lol.

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I think the crucial thing here is to acknowledge that skill doesn’t translate equally to every hero.

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Right, but the thing is you’re not always in a safe position to be dealing damage when the opportunity arises for you to track and shoot down falling enemies. Tracking falling enemies is easy to do in custom games, but in actual game it’s a different story.

You can indeed get a lot of value by taking out that junkrat that’s falling from the sky in a curved motion if you can land all six or nine round bursts onto him (depending on whether his getting healed or not while falling).

The problem is while you’re trying to take out that junkrat, your tanks can be at risk of dying to burst damage and the enemy could see you momentarily hyperfocusing on one thing and try to take advantage of that by one tapping you instead. This game can be very hectic and with so many things happening at once, it’s not always possible to keep track of where the enemies are and what they’re doing. But maybe you can develop intuition on when it is the right time to shoot safely as you get better at the game perhaps.

Forgot to reply to this. While this is true in lower ranks, at least with ana’s anti-nade, I can use it selfishly to frag the enemy DPS or support that’s in my LOS. I do that all the time to get few picks here and there. Bap’s lamp in contrast is like Mercy’s rez in a way. You can try and save your bad teammates but if they are bad, saving them won’t matter too much in the outcome of the match.

That was referring to the experience of me climbing overall, from low bronze all the way to 1800SR; not from 1400SR to 1500SR but I can see why you got confused there.

Right. I mainly got motivated to one trick baptiste because I also recently started playing Valorant. I have my in-game sensitivity set in both games so that the Cm/360 are equivalent. I foolishly believed that if I get better at Valorant, then I will see improvement in Overwatch as well with hitscan heroes like baptiste but it was only half true lol.

The fall-off damage penalties in Overwatch really negates anything you do outside of your hitscan hero’s effective range which for bap is between 25 to 45 meters. With this hitscan fall-off revert that we have now, his damage now scales down even further to a mere 30% at maximum fall-off distance (45 meters). Whereas before, it was only 50%. Even 50% is quite a big reduction in damage considering baptise has support level of damage, not DPS. I know there are people arguing baptiste doing DPS level of burst and sustined damage even without his ultimate, but I won’t get into that. And I do fully understand that Overwatch isn’t Call of Duty or CS;GO so I shouldn’t expect hitscan heroes to be strong in all situations without any weaknesses.

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The best way to climb out of low ranks is not to one trick, it is to counterpick the other team. On support, you want to pick to enable your team, but switch to counterpicking the other team when it will have more impact (e.g. brig vs dive, moira vs a doom or genji carry, zen or ana vs a hog carry). Below plat, most players will not do this, so you have the advantage in any game where your teammates or enemies differ from the standard comps that work with popular one-trick supports.

On any account that falls below plat, I generally do not want a Baptiste on my team. His skill floor is too high that most people in gold/silver have below 50% win rates with him. I got to diamond by removing him from my pool, even though I think he’s best with some comps on some maps. I find it hard to balance when to heal with when to damage with him moreso than any other healer. He is also highly aim intensive.

If you insist on playing Bap, stop using exoboots so much like gold/silver Baps are doing so much of nowadays. I love when the enemy Bap does this, as his predictable trajectory makes him so much easier to kill. It’s for getting to high ground, not a substitute for A-D spam.

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You can play any character in the game and climb to GM

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you have a massively powerful mobility tool on bap. if youre not in position then its on you.

no its not. a falling hero is a falling hero. their movement is locked. if you cant hit shots under preasure then again, you sit there and say its the fault of bap. you missed the shots.

if you’re in a position to be burst then you’re positioned poorly. if you hyper focused on the falling target, you’ve made a critical error. again, these aren’t faults with the hero.

this my friend, is called game sense. its not exactly something you can practice but it can be trained if you are consciously playing the game. like for me, my game sense is probably going downhill because half the time im playing on auto pilot. but if you want to get better, this is a key area. its not easy but its arguably one of the biggest factors in someones ‘skill level’ for lack of a better term

yeah i agree that nade is kinda busted.

then don’t save them. if players feed then ignore them and support the ones that done. or even just use lamp to take an aggressive angle and frag. same thing with window. dont give it to your dps if they cant hit anything. do it yourself.

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The bap is all about aiming and dpsing with occasional healing up to 3300. And when you think about aiming I mean actual aiming, like killing 2 in a row in 2 seconds, 3pple hs+3pple hs + again. Nothing that much to talk about, mechanics 1st then everything else. Your aim should be that way, if someone is trying to 1v1 you, you know it is his death sentence.

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