i’ve seen a lot of discussion here about flex play. some people say flex play in comp is good because you fill in what’s missing. others say its bad because you should just stick to what you’re good at.
i’m genuinely interested in getting better and i find myself flexing sometimes despite being mostly a support main so.
what’s good, really?
Here’s the thing
PBSR (Performance Based SR) is Blizzards formula for calculating how much SR you will gain / lose for a win / loss AS WELL AS your SR for your win or loss itself. (Between Bronze and Plat, Diamond does not use PBSR)
Nobody knows for sure exactly how this works, but I believe it to be on average stats of your performance on your heroes across the board.
So for example if the average Widow Accuracy for all Widows was 48%, you have to consistently get higher to receive a nice bonus SR for climbing.
Obviously accuracy isn’t the only thing measured, but every hero has these stats, e.g. Ana Enemies slept, Genji damage deflected e.t.c.
So performance determins that extra boost or minimizing your SR losses when you lose.
So if you win and your stats are great, you get a lot of SR
If you win and your stats are bad, you get less SR
And oppositely, if you lose and your stats are great, you lose less SR than if
You lose and your stats are bad
Now the question of flexing is not about whether you should flex, it’s whether you can play your flex hero EQUALLY to that of your other heroes. Regardless of if you even flex a little, i’d say 90% of people that play this game have a main hero or go-to hero that they know they play their best
My advice in this case is to just stick on that hero, and accept the losses as long as you know you are giving a good performance, rather than switching to a flex hero and chancing for a win, and ending up with a loss + bad performance stats.
The main way to rank up is your winrate.
If youre a good flexplayer, you should flex.
If youre a bad flexplayer, you should practice flexing.
If youre a hopeless case, you should avoid flexing and only use it as a last resort.
Whatever nets you wins.
Well, flex is not good and make you harder to climb since you cant learn many heros to your best level. But you need to main atleast 2-3 heros, maybe 1 from each class, or 2 from same class. This is important, since if your hero get counterd or your teammate picked it, you can still have other options.
If rank is the only thing matters, don’t flex unless you need to. Play your best role as much as possible. However, don’t be that guy who locks a genji when need a healer or tank after everyone picks their roles.
Ask if someone can play the role that’s missing saying X is your best role. If not, switch to second best role.
If you main dps, playing off tanks/zen or lucio is easier (but don’t take Ana since she requires both projectile and hitscan aiming. It’s rare to find someone who can play both at the same level.
Flexing has a negative impact on your SR in the short term because you will be filling in roles you’re not as good at. Everybody has heroes/roles they are better on than others. So for example, your best role is support. That means you will find the highest win rate by playing support. So if you only ever play support, your SR will be higher because you continually play your best role. However, if you never flex off support, you never learn to play other roles either. So you will eventually become a 1 trick support main as you climb too high of SR to be able to play other roles without effectively throwing.
Flexing comes at the cost of shorter term SR loss. As you play different heroes you aren’t as good at, you will lose SR. But while you are losing SR, you are learning (presumably). Over time, as you get better with these heroes, your SR will increase to match. You will still have a best role/hero, but your skill set will become more balanced across different roles and allow you the option to flex without feeling like a big detriment to your team. Your SR will never be as high as if you specialize because your time gets divided between heroes so you aren’t as good on any particular one. But you will presumably have more fun doing it because you have more options to play.
Maining is better than flexing, players who flex freely tend to be more of a problem that players who’ll flex if the team really need it. As they usually end up impeding someone who specialises by picking counter intuitively to the needs of the specialist. If I pick Winston the flex always wants to go rein if I go zarya they’ll pick dva etc etc.
Dont flex. If you arent a M/GM already, Flexing isnt gonna get you anywhere. Also, you cannot specialize on a certain role or certain heroes, so you cant improve with them. If you cant improve, you cant climb.
Hehe
Das me right there 
Don’t flex if you want to improve enough to climb. Flex if you want to be a team player/don’t always want to play the same three heroes.
Don’t. Good players > good heroes.
If you flex and your skill with heroes you are flexing is ± same, go for it,. it will help you win more games.
I am flex player and it definitely helps, just dont flex into too many heroes.
Even top500 and OWL players can play more than 1 hero at their level. You just have to find a balance and not over doit.
Flex if you can play multiple roles at an adequate level. Dont flex to healer if you are in gold but your healer skill is at bronze level for example
Just have fun. Only a tiny amount of players are above diamond. The game is designed to pull most players towards the mid ranks. Depends how much you want to put in the time and effort into being a high rank where the game plays much like any other rank but faster and people have better aim.
It’s best to have a hero good at every role, just in case. Playing every character on the roster will hurt you if you want to climb.
However
You could be like me and not want to climb, and get okay at a lot of different characters. It’s all about how you want to play the game.
Not flex, they did imagine a world were it would be normal to flex, but its not the reality 
The entire game is based around in-game hero swapping so only being able to play one hero would set you back… And most of your skill carry over from one hero to another, basically if you put in lots of time on 3-4 main picks you only need to put in very small amount of time on most other heroes to get them close to the same skill level, good enough for them to many times be worth picking over your “main” picks.
Just make sure your main picks are heroes with more transferable skill. Like if you know how to play Zarya good as a tank, McCree good as a DPS and Ana/Zen good as support you basically create a foundation for 70% or so of all heroes in the game. You will obviously have a harder time learning something else if what you play is something that don’t naturally develop your aim for example by simply playing, like a melee hero or a hero with a very unique/niche type of attack like Moira, Genji etc.
Train to have a main in each category…
If we didnt have flex players 4 or 5 dps comps would be more common. Take that with it what you will. I flex because I’m a good tank and support and i want to win and not throw with with multiple dps.
“oMg it NoT tHroWiNg i onCe wOn wItH 5 dPs yOu mEtA sLavE tHeReForE it ViAble”
I disagree. Most skills from one hero to another do not transfer at all, even within the same role. Like look at the support class:
Mercy: There is nothing in the game that is even remotely similar to her.
Moira: Same.
Lucio: Same.
Zen: Same.
Ana: You could say her scope most translates to Widow… but her positioning, unscope, nade, and sleep are all entirely different. There is also nothing similar in the support class to her.
Brigitte: The closest similarity is to… Rein? Except she can’t front line and is way more vulnerable so they aren’t at all similar aside from having a melee attack.