Hi everyone, Credit here. Hope you’re having a good day and if you often feel like you’re having issues and losing in select screen, here’s a little help for you.
Yes I’m high gold/low plat and I’m not the best player but trust me, there is something to learn here. It is one of the reasons I have a lot of problems climbing because people don’t understand my intentions.
First off: I’m on console, so I don’t have chat, and 9/10 people don’t go in voice chat unless they want to insult you. It’s very rare you actually get constructive comms, in the very least during hero selection.
So due to the restricted comms, you need to be able to read signs in hero select.
Here goes:
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Spamming a hero in select screen: this means someone wants you to play this. Little tip if you yourself do this: don’t soam mercy and pick a genji or tracer or another hero which in lower ranks tends to just go flank out of LoS of mercy and die. You’ll just trigger everyone. Do this if you actually make a smart pick, such as pharrah on a pharrah map, or a tank. It shows that you want to contribute to the teambuild and that you’re confident in your increased effectiveness with a mercy.
(I sometimes play mercy but nothing triggers me more than picking mercy and have half my team stay perfectly hidden from my GA range leading to my death due to no mobility while you swallow enemy damage by staying in enemy sights and out of mine.) -
Due to lack of comms, try to respect the rule of “first come first served”. If 2-3 people already instapicked dps, please reconsider before still choosing dps. Try evetnually to build on those dps and choose a tank or support you think can fit and feel comfortable with. Don’t hope that any of them will switch. They won’t. They will be triggered, you will be triggered and the game is lost 7/10 times (no random number, I actually keep track of all the games and try to identify trends). On some occasions, people will even join comms as soon as you die on your dps and start giving you one hell of a colourful description of you.
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Don’t force a meta. Especially in lower ranks. I know I said don’t go for a 3rd or 4th dps etc. But that doesn’t mean you should play like the OWL pros. Yes, Winston is not the strongest lately, but if somebody picks him, don’t force him to switch to rein. Don’t force a full deathball or full dive comp. As I said, especially in low ranks, comms are so rare, coordinated attacks hardly ever happen, if you don’t do that, dive is ineffective anyway.
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Avoid (if possible) to pick completely contraproductive heroes. I most of the time never have tanks on my team. Yet it sometimes happen that I have too many of them. You’ll say, nice! Triple tank is always pretty strong. Yeah usually yes, but not when you have rein d.va and winston. That gives you such low global damage. Rein winston or rein/d.va is usually a pretty weak comp and will require your dps to overcompensate for the lacking damage coming from tanks. Rein D.Va can work if your rein is aggressive and your d.va knows how to properly use DM. but generally I would suggest you to avoid such comps in solo Q. Rein winston however is something I would strongly suggest you not to play.
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This one is very important: PLEASE don’t pick a tank/support if you don’t intend to play them. Way too often do i go out of spawn as a dps with a 2-2-2 comp and around 30s later we have 5dps. Just don’t. Nobody forces you to pick heal or tank. I know some of my arguments sound contradictive but listen.
I’m a flex player. Admittedly not the best one, but I always pick last. So I naturally fell into the tank/support position. If there is ONE THING I absolutely HATE, it’s seeing people instapick heal or tank, pushing me to dps, where I’m still comfortable with but I know people in my rank have a lot of issues with tanking, which i’m generally more comfortable with. So I pick dps, leave spawn, and 30s later, 2-3players of my team die and they all go instantly dps triggered mode.
Every time this has happened, I haven’t seen us win that round or even game. Unless we have 2-3 players like me who as soon as we realise this switch to tank/support.
So the tipp I can give you here: IF YOU SEE players who still haven’t picked after 20-30 seconds, that means usually that they are flex players (or that their one trick is taken, but those will most of the time proceed to pick a trollhero so you should recognise those) waiting for a team to be build. They will flex around what they have. So if you see 3 players still not pick after 30 seconds, go dps if you really want that or pick whatever you want to play, they will adapt. I absolutely hate picking dps, have 80% ult charge but being forced to switch because everyone switched to dps and we can’t push without tank/support.
Seeing the whole team switch all the time shows the enemy team that there is no coordination and that the whole team is triggered. I managed to win 8/27 matches that started this way. Out of those, 3 matches were matches where the enemy team was in a very similar spot. Trust me, don’t do that.
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If you’re flexible and this is very console specific: if you see someone spamming a hero next to the one you picked, it often means that he wants you to switch and he wants to play that specific hero. If you’re down with it, give him that hero. I’m not forcing you to do that, just explaining what it means when you see someone do that.
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What I often do and people don’t understand: sometimes I’m not sure what to pick. Let’s say we have a 2-2-1 comp I’m not sure which support to pick, so I will spam among the two support heroes I’m hesitating. That means I’m asking my team which hero I should pick and I would like my team to pick/spam that hero to tell me which one they would be more comfortable playing with. I know this requires trust for people to not steal your hero but trust me, it can go a long way.
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PLEASE. DON’T LOOK AT YOUR STATS. I often see that we’re crushing the enemy team but some of our players don’t feel like they’re being super helpful or feel like they’re feeding/dying to much. If your team is winning, DON’T SWITCH. too often on koth do we have a dominant comp and suddenly someone in our team switches off his hero and we start getting crushed from that point onward. We are not losing the point, we are still in control, the enemy is not even contesting, as long as this is the situation DON’T SWITCH. Even if you feel you’re not doing much, as long as your team is winning, it means that you’re somehow contributing to that. At least I want you to think that way.
I kniw it sucks to keep dying and feel like you’re being bullied, but even that is useful. It means that those players are only focusinh you which gives space to your team to capitalise on that and hold the point. Think of the greater goal not your specific stats. I often pick lucio/ana and get harassed by flanks. However i still position myself in a way that they need to overcommit while I can still do my job of healing or stalling. My stats are often terrible during those matches, but we win. Why? Because I as one player manage to constantly keep 2, sometimes even 3 players away from the point making it a fight on the point of 5v3 or 5v4 thus giving my team an easier time to defend. If they manage to kill me, usually my team wiped theirs and afterwards it’s a 5v2 or 4v2 if we had a few deaths. Once we get there, the enemy team if unorganized will keep trickling in. That’s why, even if your stats are bad but your team keeps pushing at a steady pace or holds point, don’t switch!!
THAT’S IT!
I know it’s long but I hope some of you can learn some things out of this. Sorry for the long read but I won’t add a tl;dr as it is a guide afterall. I might have forgotten some things, don’t hesitate to add those if necessarY. Have a good one!!
