There has been a lot discussion lately about skill in OW and how to balance around it etc. People have various arguments as to what is more important and what should be more important and most arguments have some truth to them. But there is something that I feel like people forget in the argument, which is how do you really improve the different skills and do you actually do that?
The three main types of skills and what they mean in the context of OW are the follwing 3
- Positioning: how many opportunities you get
- Gamesense: how many opportunities you recognize
- Aim: how many opportunities you successfully execute
These are all important, but what should you focus on if you want to improve as fast as possible if you are willing to actually spend the time?
Spending hours mostly just practicing your aim is actually the least effective if you want to get better as a player. That is why that there are Gold and Plat players who genuinly do have the aim of a GM but in the context of OW are dumb as heck. You land more of your crucial shots but you create less opportunities to hit more shots because you don’t work on creating opportunities for yourself and recognizing when you have an opportunity.
Does that mean that good aim doesn’t matter? No, but it’s something that will develop over time whether you intensely grind it or not. Playing against better players with better movement will challenge you and you’ll gradually get better and improve.
By focusing on positioning and gamesense you will create and recognize more opportunites but positioning and gamesense is not something you will just develop over time. Aiming is muscle memory, the more you do a repetitive movement the more used to it you get and you’ll be able to do it without really thinking about it. Positioning and gamesense is something you actively have to think about. You have to reflect on your decisions and plays and analyze them. Why did or didn’t it work, what could you have done to make it work or what could the enemy have done to stop it from working, what does the enemy have that I need to look out for and why along with a lot of other things.
Just playing isn’t enough, you also have to learn when you aren’t playing the game. Let’s say you spend 80% of the time you have dedicated towards the game playing it and then spend the remaining 20% on learning from others be it youtubers, streamers, pros, coaches you will become better because your knowledge of the game is going to increase.
The thing about the OW community as a whole is that we in the sense of Overwatch are generally speaking incredibly stupid. Like below average levels of IQ. The reason being is that the vast majority of people don’t reflect and don’t analyze. Even people who play the heroes that are basically nothing but positioning and gamesense. This is why there are people who are dumb as hell in every single rank, yes even GM which is the top 1%. There are people there who are dumb as hell, of course in the context of OW.
Almost 3 years in now and we still complain about the same dumb things because people just haven’t learned how to deal with those things yet.
I’d say this game comes down to to these key ingredients for being successful/good:
Not in any order
- Ult tracking
- Team composition (must have ult synergy)
- Team Ult management (not blowing ults, but saving some for the next team fight ext ext.)
- Mechanical skill
- Positioning & Communication (shot calling, flankers, resets, ext ext)
I’d say Ult tracking and ult management is one of the most important if you desire to reach the higher ranks. How do you know you are bad at this? Well, do you get surprised when the enemy ults you? It means you weren’t tacking.
I agree, but I feel like all those things fit under the 3 main categories, but yeah you can split them and specify them more.
Yeah I could get more specific but I feel lazy today.
My list is similar, IIRC, I boiled it down to general 7 skills (ie, that are useful to every single character). Also in no specific order:
- Positioning (easier to land kills, harder to die. Probably THE most important skill in the game)
- Decent Hero Pool (The more tools you can use, better you become at judging when you should use each one instead of only using the screwdriver all the time)
- Communication (not necesarily voice chat, you can improve on that with body language and wheel callouts only)
- General Hero Knowledge (ability cooldowns, matchups, TTK, etc)
- General Map Knowledge (sightlines, health pack locations, chokes, flanking paths, etc)
- Ult/Cooldown tracking (two sides of the same coin)
- General Awareness (noticing stuff going on your screen beyond your own crosshair, like killfeeds and “weird red shadows” in the corner)
Since we have heroes that don’t rely on aiming, every projectile hero have different specs for their projectiles (projectile size, speed, arcing, etc), and even hitscan heroes have difference between tracing and flicking, I consider “aiming” a hero-specific skill that you should hone for your hero pool, just like learning good Torb turret positions or where to throw a Self Destruct.
What I meant was that the each of the main skills I was talking about could be devided further, like ult tracking is something that I would consider a part of gamesense for example.
I’d say “mechanics” are the skill you mean when you say “Aim”. This includes landing Winston leaps during Primal, timing Rein barriers, dodging enemy fire with Lúcio, reaction time with Deflect, effectively juking with Tracer, successfull wall placement with Mei, etc…
Point being, I’d say that how successfully you excecute a play isn’t solely reliant on aim, although it does include it. Mechanics is a better blanket term for individual output that’s not reliant on positioning or gamesense.
Other than that, I agree with your overall skill breakdown.
False advertising, played fps games for thousands of hours, and to add to this overwatch for quite some time still trash at aim, and games in general.
If you are not improving at all the you are doing something very wrong. Eitherway, even if you were to just grind your aim nonestop, the impact that it would have on you as a player would be minimal compared to working on other aspects.
My aim change like weather, one day i can hit hs, other day i cant even hit afk players, and secound version is most of my games.
That didnt change for years now, still one game i actualy do something, most im trash for some reason.
Nowadays? every day i have time to or no one ask me to play something else. Mostly now just ffa because sometimes team game with no one to talk to become less interesting.
Before overwatch, i played tf2 litteraly every day for hours.
Weird, would be interesting to see some gameplay footage.
Welp, now im not gona play because i have to leave, i can tho record something later like qp match, and post it on yt so you see how terrible i am, right now i have only POTG recorded and game from year ago but to long record to be honest and im to lazy to ever edit it to something short. And if it goes for potg its usualy luck like where im litteraly was shooting with hanzo in direction where was turret and getting double kill ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
my today gameplay mostly with mc, it take hours to put that on yt XD, gona delete in future from there.
I know i make a lot of mistakes like going on point when everyone was dead from my team, or stun winston insted of genji. Its more to show some of my aiming, but there is not much of it after all it went fast, but enaught to show how it goes usualy for me.
The first thing I noticed apart from your crosshair is that you don’t really have good crosshair positioning, most of the time you basically default to looking downwards basically aiming at the ground. This makes it harder for you to not only see around you but also requires that you do longer flicks than necessary. You barely adjust as you move either. You should practice keeping the crosshair at head height of a “normal” hero.
The way your crosshair moves also feels like you are playing using a controller tbh, very choppy, is your sens very low? You stick to targetts pretty well but when you try to turn it feels like a struggle.
Welp i use sens 20 in game, i have no idea how my mouse is set to 
I was using higher one once, but i was unable to aim at anyone then. For some reason my hand dont wona move when i try to aim now tho :/.
For aiming default for head, i have problems hit bodyshoots, hs gona be nightmare to do XD
Try to google your mouse and see if you can figure out what the sens is. The reason why you are not consistent is because you don’t have good aiming habbits, you literally make it as hard for yourself as possible.
i have it with 3 modes on mouse, and i think i play on 1200 cpi right now, middle one.
If that is true then with 20 sens your effective DPI is 24k (calculated by multiplying your dpi with your in game sensitivity). In general you don’t want to go higher than 10k. You really should lower your in game sens.