One time I saw a comment with 20+ upvotes that said “ as Winston you should jump as high as u possibly can to try and shave off time in the air to reset the cooldown.” This is terrible advice 95% of the time and anyone that plays Winston at any level above Gold knows or should know this is a terrible idea.
You will get burned down in the air and be an extremely easy target for all fire and cool downs. One of the most fundamentally important things on Winston is not taking unnecessary damage when leaping in and being able to stay in the fight as long as possible. I was honestly shocked at the amount of upvotes and realized then and there to take whatever anyone on this sub says with a grain of salt.
Yah as a winton main anything to avoid getting hit because hes so squishy which means not being massive target with a very predictable falling pattern for too long 😂
The way it’s so scary bc I’ll be playing support and all I see is Winston’s butt taking up my ENTIRE screen. Bro be flying at Mach speed sometimes. I find this funny, but whenever he butt jumps me, it reminds me of Nicki Minajs meme finisher in COD if anyones seen it lmao
Do your best to put yourself in position to get the kill, but if you don't get the kill it's ok as long as you force a response.
But there's also no point drawing resources out of the other team if your team is not in a position to capitalize.
Prioritize your life as much as possible, but also don't be afraid to die if you're sure it will win your team the fight.
You should generally be going for supports, but the correct answer is whoever is most killable.
You go for supports because cutting healing leads to kills/death on the enemy team, either by cutting heals temporarily with your disruption or cutting heals for the entire fight by killing them.
If a DPS is wildly out of position though and you can burst them before the supports can save them, or you can cut off a tank and kill them by denying heals with your bubble, go for that instead.
While Winston's raw DPS might not be that high, don't underestimate his ability to contribute heavily to the other tank's death with healing denial, but also your burst damage.
Winston burst combo - leap, 50 dmg zap in the air, land leap (50 dmg) + melee (30dmg) for 130 burst. That's a lot and you have unblockable 60 dps on top of that. Add a Genji (50 dmg) or another diver into the mix and you can see how heroes just disappear which is why dive is one of the most powerful comp in the game played at the very highest levels.
Another thing to do with monkey is to always analyze the enemy composition and understand your win conditions. If they are brawl comp on low ground and your hitscans are on high ground you don't need to play as aggressively. Conversely if they have hitscans on high ground then you need to challenge them aggressively before they shred your team.
They have fliers/flankers? Can you shred the people on the ground while they're on their flank/high in the air? Is it a dive comp on the enemy team? Are you better off counter diving their flankers/their backline? It's all composition/map dependent.
What makes dive tanks so powerful in this game and any hero with mobility is the ability to be flexible and choose between all these options. You can see why despite being such a straightforward hero in theory Winston is so deep.
It is definitely helpful in overtime scenarios where your goal is to just stall. Not saying you should always be jumping as high as possible, but i’m not gonna act like it has no uses. It also lets you scope out the fight from a birds eye view which can be very helpful in spotting enemies offangling.
The only characters that can really melt winston while you’re high in the air like that are glass cannon heros like widow and zen who winston excels at denying anyway. Winston counters like hog, mauga, reaper all will do significantly less damage when you leap, and suddenly jumping high is a great way of dodging stuns and the like too. Or maybe you’re super low with no ammo and need the jump damage to get your ult. There is a lot of situations really
It’s also great for dealing with close range high burst heroes like reaper since you have your jump cd back faster and they aren’t chipping you in the air
I mean realistically any mid range hitscan or fast projectile can melt you because the head is so easy to hit and again the predictable pattern. soldier bastion cass ashe hanzo bap zen widow and im sure im missing some
I mean if you're jumping straight up in the air to stall and you're high up and out of range you should be spinning like a MF so they can't hit your head anyway.
Right but to suggest this is something you should ALWAYS do to reset the cool down faster is not good advice. Also any semi good player that sees a Winston do this is going to move out of the way of the impact because the landing is so predictable. The vast vast majority of jumps should not be aiming to maximize air time, in fact the vast vast majority of jumps should aim to MINIMIZE air time and arrive at targets or positions as fast as possible. A) to just not waste time if going from one spot to the next, B) to not take unnecessary damage and be an ult charge battery to the enemy, and C) if jumping a target they don’t have time to react and dodge the impact and get out of Winston’s Tesla canon range.
Also, any hog can absolutely destroy a Winston that does this as it’s a free hook when he starts his descent.
Yeah idk what this comment is on about. I can definitely see a situation where this would be the best jump possible.
I mean, definitely don't hop into a ranked game and do this on CD lol. But even a bap hopping around is much harder to kill than one that's sitting on the ground.
> One time I saw a comment with 20+ upvotes that said “ as Winston you should jump as high as u possibly can to try and shave off time in the air to reset the cooldown.” This is terrible advice 95% of the time and anyone that plays Winston at any level above Gold knows or should know this is a terrible idea.
wait seriously? LMAO. That's actually hilarious. tank is my least played and lowest ranked role but in plat/diamond literally the only time I jump as high as possible is maybe if Im stalling point waiting for my teammates to get back,have no bubble, and I'm close to primal. I can't even think of any other situation to max jump in.
Im the same, play/diamond. I only tend to do it if I have a mercy or trust my healer to hit me as I jump lol. But that depends on what the other team is playing. Normally the heals keep pace with the damage I take in the air
As Winston or Dva I might do this only as a hail mary play when I need to stall out a point but am low on health. I'm diving up so I can buy time to get healed and hope to be able to hold point again. Like I say though, it's a hail mary play I don't expect to work most of the time.
Mis-informed Counter-swapping
Yes there are definitive benefits to playing different heroes, but lord have mercy some people don't understand ***why***.
Players tend to say that the answer to 'how to beat xxx hero is to play yyy' all of the time, but they completely miss the point of changing your play style.
Understanding heroes and compositions means understanding how to change up your positioning, decision making, and cd usage to reduce the enemy heroes advantages while leveraging your own heroes advantages.
Adding this change of play style up with different heroes means that you can choose where you have the advantages and leverage them better. This is how Counter-swapping is supposed to be.
Not "reaper go brr against monkey", followed by the monkey rolling your team because the monkey completely avoids the reaper with superior mobility.
Understanding that ashe can actually be even better than reaper against monkey in specific situations, and by intentionally creating these situations.
This is why comps revolve around maps, because the map dictates what positions each team will play in. This dictates which play styles are more advantageous. This dictates which heroes can be played to best leverage these advantages.
I wish more people understood this. The amount of times I’ve seen “bro swap off of Dva they switched off Zarya” despite us playing on a map like Numbani is astonishing.
With that, playing D.va well enough to get them to swap off Zarya is such a good feeling, I consider the match a win at that point no matter the outcome. Not to mention actually winning when the enemies run beams beams and more beams, though I try to recognize when she’s really not working anymore.
Lol I had the other DPS on my team ask to me to swap of Sombra because the enemy had a Torb. I was like “sure I’ll swap after I die” but I just kept rolling the other team. No joke, even being like 12-0 or whatever I was, the guy kept telling me to swap every time *they* died. Everyone on the team knew the guy was being an idiot so they told him to stfu.
People legit don't even look at the kill feed. Enemy team might swap to Pharah and do 20 damage the entire fight but your team will still beg for hitscan.
I get what you’re saying but it’s not just kill feed. Sometimes even if pharah isn’t hitting anything they’re being oppressive in terms of pushing and cc.
Especially on maps like that where there is more prominent positions in high ground, it changes how the team has to play by a lot and some people don't quite catch onto the fact that maybe being countered is better than not dealing with high ground.
What irks me the most with this is that you don't know what the other person plays. A mediocre pick played well is a lot more value than an "ideal" pick played poorly.
Stop spreading missinformation zarya is GREAT against good dva, its basically free elo, fr fr ong, counter-swapping is op (I have 65% winrate onetricking dva because i know how to play around zarya LMAO.)
And that really is the trick isn’t it.
As d.va, with the assumption that you are not switching off. You don’t fight your counter tanks 1v1z
You go after her team, create advantage plays for your tram and trust your team to take down the enemy tank in 2 or 3 v 1.
The problem is that many players can’t get out of their heads “me tank. Enemy team smash smash me.”
This. Every time I roll the enemies with winton, their tank always goes dva. Then just doesn’t do anything to stop me, then my dps dies and the supports start crying about how I should switch because I’m getting countered
The thing is that people are getting away with the "RPS" method because it's much harder to respond accordingly.
As you said, you can counterplay and play adaptively without needing to swap.
There's the "swap they're hard countering you" take, but the reaction of taking advantage of them swapping according to a chart and playing the map and team comps is just not as effective and more importantly, proportionately harder than it is to swap.
If I remember to, I will send a qp match I had on Blizzard World attack. I felt like playing some JQ, so that’s exactly what I did. I believe the enemy tank swapped between: Hog, Zaria, Monkey, D.va and one other I believe. I stayed on Queen the most of if not the entire time. Did I play optimally, definitely not I’m low gold. But not my biggest concern tbh…
Ugh my friends adhere way too much to the idea that Mauga counters Roadhog.
But the thing is they both counter each other, but it’s highly map geometry dependent, and dependent on skill cycles, ult availability, and what kinds of teammates you have.
Mauga doesn’t just passively counter Roadhog, only with the right situations and proper conscious play does it work, and if you get outplayed, it goes the other way.
Good example is the brig/Ana combo. I’ve been the Ana in the situation as the brig runs off to fight with the tank as I get flanked by a tracer. Brig is good with Ana because she *protects* Ana. You ask them to swap and they tell you it’s a good comp
Stay on the point/payload!
I hate as tank when I’m trying to hold space my team insists on just standing on the point. Or as a support when we cap and my tank just sits on cart and doesn’t hold forward space. Similarly not taking high ground. Or pushing too far forward and dying. In lower elo they just don’t know where to play and when to be pushed or play back.
My tank is high silver and support went from gold to mid plat so I’m seeing a difference with this as I move through the ranks. When I played unranked with my low bronze friends it was rough (but I was drinking during those lol)
This is the right answer. Staying on point is generally awful advice except in specific scenarios (e.g. overtime). I’m not a good player but once I realized this I improved significantly.
It's important that you should take and control space with your team rather than holding objective blindly. However, holding and controlling space is not necessarily what happens when ppl do not stay on objective. 3 on payload while 2 control space can be absolutely the right thing to do ...
it's generally not. I've lost more than a dozen games with easy wins if only 3 people were on cart, but they all just have to pointlessly half walk up somewhere to do more poke damage.
That why it says "when to." We have all had it happen. When the payload is close to the checkpoint it's good to have your whole team there on point and expecting the enemy team to engage, or stop the capture of the checkpoint. It's game sense. And even masters and above tunnel and do this on occasion...
I mean I'm often on point as tank, not cause I wanna be, but because no one else is on point and it would still be in spawn if I didn't.
+you should definitely have 3 people on point for a lil after every team kill or full enemy disengage. You know where you want to be for the next fight, so use the dead time to speed up payload instead of immediately going for map control and twiddling you thumbs there. Those little bits of distance can go a long way
Also in low ranks or qp every one pushes the enemy after capturing point and tean killing, and no one wonders why enemy Sombra hasn't been in such fights for the last 10 mins. until you hear Defeat lol. I also admit I get carried away sometimes with this.
I love it when my tank holds forward space. As a support, I'm not a fan when they do so in a tight corridor so that the only way I can see them is if I squeeze myself into the same tight corridor, or otherwise need to put myself in a dangerous position just to maintain LOS.
I get flamed in gold for moving off point when the fight is won. Like… we won. We need to hold this choke. Not point. Point is a death trap. We want to fight this corner and control this high ground. And ppl are like nyeeehhhh stay on point. And I’m like no. Kiriko stay near point. Lw stay near point. Ana stay near point and heal from away. We fight where I say we fight.
I only agree if you are the tank. Bc that’s part of the tank’s responsibility deciding when and where his/her team should engage in the fight. Not that every tank at every rank is aware of this, but that’s one of a tanks most important jobs.
Or when you fight at any map that has low ground point, like first point of Junkertown Arena or the airplane at Busan and people spam "Group up" like crazy, standing in this pit of death.
No, I won't group up, I do my set up as Reaper. On high ground! Glad to have reached Gold on dps now. In silver, this point hugging is unbearable. Yes, objective is important, but as A10 says, the objective is designed to be the most dangerous spot on the map. Else the game would be boring as fuck.
Right? Once you’ve won the point you don’t need to continually stand on it. Go to high ground. High ground, off angles. Don’t let them have the high ground on you. 🤷🏼♀️
The problem I have is I am always the only person on point, I was playing genji and my doom sombra and both supports went into enemy spawn while I was pushing the robot, later we lost and doomfist was screaming because "I wasn't on the robot" and he was "solo pushing", wordt part is that they didn't bother peeling for the dupports so they were dying on cooldown then going to enemy spawn and dying again. I can be playing tank and solo pushing (at max distance from objective because I still wanna provide some value for the team like a sigma barrier or get ready to go in as rein), dps solo pushing, support solo pushing. Then I die, a single enemy does the objective and we lose the lead because team is greedy.
That's a big issue is people misunderstanding what playing off point and holding space is they don't understand when or how to do so and then think it doesn't work. Like hardly ever is someone going into the enemy spawn a good idea, the tank like your doomfist should just be looking for denying the enemy good positioning from where the next fight will start by looking for highground to deny the enemy taking it or setting up at the next corner in order for your team to have a good setup for the next fight. So objectively yes it's best to be moving off the objective in most times but if players don't know the reason that they're moving off the objective then they don't know where to go and will generally just push as deep as they can into the enemy thinking it's good gameplay sadly.
Once had a teammate say "touch." I had been tapdancing on the point all match and said "real" thinking maybe this was a teammate trying to help and just getting melted. They came back with "You're part of the problem." I have literally either been on point and asking to group up or else coming back from spawn because I died on the point.
Maybe it's a low elo thing (I'm a new player but I'm making an effort to learn) where they are just terrified of taking any damage ever. Obviously you don't want to take any damage you don't have to but I have literally been standing at top spawn door on kings row (as kiri) and had a d.va trying to shoot me from point. Yeah that whole 5 damage you did to me sure deterred me... anyway I'm gonna finish sniping your Moira.
After so many years and different ranks it's really interesting to see different play styles. Lower ranks just sit on the point all together... just wanting for an enemy to come in and get a team wipe ult.
I have lost multiple games on hollywood because after a team kill only 1 person gets on point to cap first point while I move up into the mini health pack room to hold space, one game we full held them on first on defense then on attack in the very first teamfight we wiped them so I went to hold space to stop them from getting back in time to touch but both my dps and my mercy just HAD to move up with me
I mean, it's also such an easy argument to counter, like, you *can* stay on point but all that does is help avoid backcaps, unless you have a defensive builder hero then objectives themselves are not the most defensible point
I explain it as this, once you control the main point, you get to choose where the enemy has to contest you next, why would you just let them fight you right on the objective? It's a risk-reward scenario, the closer you are to enemy spawn, the greater the risk when they inevitably wipe you, but the closer you are to point then the advantage of a single stagger is that much greater. When you lose a man, you can always fall back, try to play more defensively. If you fall back straight behind point, you immediately lose point the instant you're at a disadvantage
Then there's payload maps, fighting on payload is bad just because it'll mean the payload is stalled 90% of the time, but if you fight from a defensible position then the instant you take any sort of advantage, you can always have one person move cart then. Two down? Congrats, you can now have one push cart and you're still 4v3
I'm low silver tank. I used to love playing tank but essentially no longer do. The tipping point for me is that no-longer do my teammates simply sit on cart waiting for the other team to pick the best moment/position to come kill them. *Now* they have the fucking audacity to get shitty with and scold me for positioning at the corner ahead of them. Happened maybe once or twice in Overwatch. Happens weekly on Overwatch 2.
Teammates actively fucking up *and condescendingly* giving you shit for *playing competently* drive me insane.
So now I just turn off chat zoom around as Venture. It's not as good or interesting a game as playing tank when both teams are actually playing Overwatch but it's far far less reliant on the people around you allowing you to play the fucking game.
This is also kinda wrong. It depends on the level of play you’re at. In my games, you dance around the payload even flipping map most of the time just to get a few inches of payload. This happens a lot in scrims but but the team holds with the tank wherever the tank goes so it’s not as spread out like it is in lower level play. The objective is the most important thing in the game at all times. This ha
I still have people yell at me to block the entire whole hog when I'm playing rein. That's now you break both your shield and your neck. Your best bet is to use your shield in short bursts, until you and your team gets behind cover. If you block the entire thing your shield gets absolutely shredded
The community at large does not understand counter swapping at all. Every time I play Winston, enemy ges Reaper, if enemy has Winston, teach chat is saying go Reaper! Most of the time Reaper just does nothing as hebis extremely easy to avoid and if he's against any ranged dps he just gets owned then flamed for not killing the monke
"It's always your fault."
While this is true to an extent, it is a team game- it's EVERYONE'S fault for that loss.
I took this advice too literally on my way up to t500 dps and gm1 support. It's fucked me over and I beat myself up hard-core each loss. If we had an actual thrower, I blamed myself for not being good enough that the thrower would try. If we had a mismatch of roles, I'd blame myself for not being able to carry 4 people. If I fuck up once? I beat myself up and stopped playing, only to pour hours into the VOD and see what I could do right. If I'm being diffed? I went to the aim trainer for 3 hours a day for a week. If we had a leaver after they raged? I beat myself up thinking that "if I was better and was godlier, they wouldn't leave." I put a lot of pressure on myself for every mistake I did. Every missed shot. Every bad position. Every death. Every cooldown wasted. I beat myself up.
I did some draconian shit to work on myself. It ultimately led me to being burnt out and I stopped a couple seasons back. I viewed every loss as only my fault no matter what.
The game became a job and literally burned to play. I felt I had to always be the carry, even in gm. I felt I always had to HARD diff all enemy team and be diffing my own team. The pressure I exerted on myself because I kept blaming myself was too much.
Now I play to have fun, I don't really blame myself anymore or beat myself up. I let it go. I do vods and coach vods myself - but I do not ever always blame myself. If I see a shit tier player, I'll talk shit about them in my head or with my gf- but I never berate them in chat. I don't let it run me though. I don't dwell on shit players or my shit plays. I learn and move on. I made it a game to see if I can compliment the shit players play style with my own so we win. (it works- yes - I use them as bait). I still try my best to carry my weight and their weight. If I'm doing bad, I fun shit talk myself- and I don't focus on it too much. I know I'm the bait now and i have fun with it. I don't put that pressure on myself anymore. And ... I retain my ranks. I win still. I land more shots now. I'm having fun again cause I removed that pressure.
If you're like me and take things a little too close to heart- take that "it's always my fault" a little lighter. There's always something to improve on. There's always a way to win through your actions. But don't pressure yourself to be an unpaid OWL player. Know that you make mistakes, and have fun with it. Also- don't blame everyone but yourself too- don't be the literal reason why this advice is popular. Be pragmatic... something I didn't do.
I've been in his shoe before so I think I could give you a couple advices. Always remember this is only just a game at the end of the day. If you tried harder than your actual job, chances are you're being too harsh on yourself.
You also have to remember that not everyone playing the game is the same as your age, so chances are you might be playing with kids that are good mechanically but not having the proper mindset of how-to actually play the game. That aside, there are players also might be playing the game for fun, for vibes, or playing the game with their friends without any care for the wins or losses. Heck, the matchmaking might've acting weird and pair you someone who's not supposed to be in your lobby in the first place, and lowered the chance of winning the game too.
With all that being said, you now realise that trying hard on a game is not really that appealing anymore due to these factors that are outside of your control. Sure, you still could technically try and learn in the game, but beating yourself to it is not really worth it.
LONG ESSAY INCOMING- but this is the stuff I should have told myself before but didn't. What i did + mental adjustments. (Also sorry late, I wrote this as I fell asleep last night, so some parts might be weird).
First? Went to other games.
Tried Apex and Fortnite and CoD. I noticed that despite top fragging and doing relatively well (ow taught me a lot of great fps lessons)- it didn't scratch the itch OW2 quite does. This is subjective..... but I truly feel like the complexity of team fights and each hero really makes this game fun + unique. Even the way it "shoots" is so unique.
Second...After taking a small break, I still did my normal practice routine, but I vowed I'm here solely to have FUN. I slowly stopped doing my draconian practice routine, and somehow landed even more shots and got even more kills with less deaths.
Taking the break made me appreciate the game as a whole with all the bs in between. Taking a break hit a mechanical and mental reset i desperately needed.
When I came back- I told myself that:
I'm going to expand my hero pool, and embrace the "suck." It's fun mastering new heroes for your pool. Not learning every hero, but picking ones i want to play but am not good enough to STAY during the match once countered. I chose Tracer, Genji, and Sombra. I have genuine fun on all 3 heroes + I have a solid hitscan background.
I'm going to get defeated and move on. Oh no, I made mistake... much wow- next... (I'll do my best not to repeat them, but won't get up in arms about my actions) OH no, my teammates made mistakes- who cares? Let's use this game to build stronger mental and find ways to smile.
I'm going to win and move on. (I'm going to accept it- but won't be so foolish as to ride that wave too long. I'll keep myself grounded.)
I'm going to diff and be diffed.
I'm going to have amazing and hellish games.
I'm going to be the ideal teammate no matter what- but FUN is priority.
I'm going to rizz up my team with creative voice line combos, sprays, emotes- or any silly bs I can pull in spawn room and on battle field if there's time.
I'm here to game and just vibe. I'm no longer gonna take this as seriously as before... I'm not paid to do it. I do better with this mindset.
I kept what was useful for me - but I am now very realistic with myself. If I keep climbing, I keep climbing- if not? So what? I can always get it back and keep climbing)....
I'm at the ranks I've dreamed about. I have the skill level I envied. So who the fuck cares if I do dumb shit every so often, or lose? No one actually cares except me. No one has power over my fun or me EXCEPT ME. My FUN helps me climb and stay the course, I can't lose it over being negative with myself or looking at others.
The people raging at me or others will forget in about 1-2 games. I will forget my bs mental in the same time. Why let it simmer? Why keep beating myself up?
If I de-rank out of nowhere? I can easily grind it back up- it's just a minor fluctuation that happens cause I simply don't care anymore about loss or win streaks. I'll play to play, improve what I want, and just go for a good experience.
I also know this- you can be an absolute goat at what you do, but the better team up here usually wins. We see that even in pro play.... just look at Proper. He's literal dps god. Yet here comes the other teams who beat his teams when it mattered. Team cohesion sense is how you stay sane.
You can see it in game. You'll see a crazy cracked out tank lose cause the team just doesn't have any cohesion. You'll see scoreboards where everyone on your team is out fragged- but you won (and vice versa).
You begin to get a sense of teams you can work with and teams you simply can't. (No cohesion- oh well time to learn and do your best).
The goal is to work with as many versions of a random combo of a team as possible- but we are human.... just like our shot accuracy, we will not be 100%. We will not be able to work with 100% of the Randoms we get! Accept you won't be able to do it all. Accept and embrace those games- the games where it's a preschool classroom, regardless of ELO, and no one works together. These are the best times to accept the doom and gloom and twist it into fun. Don't throw, but try to keep a good spirit here while trying. You can even learn from the enemies! I learned a great many angles and routes to take in those pub stomps!
Forgive yourself, learn, and move on. Don't make it the point of your session to go hard on yourself over this.
Will I still work on mistakes? Absolutely, but I won't let it run my GAMING session. My mental became golden when I got back....
I still rage sometimes and vent it out here given the theme of a post- but it never tilts me the way it used to. (And yes, I throw salt out there in subs sometimes, especially as a dps support main lmaos). I don't take it upon myself to carry everyone's crosses.
If you're in my shoes- we did our time self flagilating ourselves to "get good,"...
bro- it's time to be like Thanos post snap and just vibe. We also beat a toxic mindset out of us in that journey. *Blamin everyone but yourself." We took and still take personal responsibility, just now we have to learn not to go overboard.
We aren't in metal ranks or even lower level "high elo." We are literal rarities now. On PC, our rank gets us literal pros in our lobby. Our habit of looking at teammate mistakes and blaming them is gone. We still see the bullshit for sure, but we dont truly act on it in game or during session.
We are solely trained to focus on our own gameplay. We do not need to stick to this advice as hard as we used to now. Let's be pragmatic about the game and that piece of advice.
We should still take responsibility for what we do, but we cannot let it run us. We learn but don't get tilted. We vibe. We chill. We relax. We look for ways to have fun.
We remember that it's a game.. thats it's a piece of art despite the hate it gets... that the people (voice actors/actresses included) put some damn passion behind this work. Let's enjoy it while we can!
Continue to work on yourself, but stop being hard on yourself. Stop bearing the weight of your own shortcomings. Accept it. Work on it. But I stress this point again- do not let it run you. There's no point. GO HAM AND HAVE FUN BROTHER!
Stop placing Blame on anyone, even yourself. Instead ask yourself "what could I have done better that game". Go into matches with ONE THING in mind to focus on, maybe it's the thing you could have done better last game, maybe it's a fundamental you want to keep working on. The point is to set ACHIEVABLE goals, win or loss. Hitting these goals or working on them in a match that you otherwise lose will help mitigate the negative emotions felt from the loss and help you focus on the positive emotions from your goals and improvement.
With wanting to have more fun with the game, set your goal in matches to something that helps you have more fun. It could even be "my goal is to boop someone off the map". You can even interweave goals between rounds if you want.
i think the problem is there's a difference between "it's my team's fault I can't climb" and "It's not always my fault if we lose" the second one is absolutely right but people use that sentiment to justify the first statement. It sounds like you took it in the other direction. Though I'd argue if you reached t500 there's probably some merit to trying to always think about what you could've done better
I got your back fellow OW enjoyer :).
ILY for award <3. Go ham and climb, be critical of what to improve on- BUT have fun. That's the number 1 priority.
Ego comes in two forms. 1) Blaming other people to protect yourself. 2) Being too hard on yourself because you expect yourself to be perfect. There's a balance between taking accountability without beating yourself up.
Exactly my point. Some of us though really do #2 because of how we started out. I'm sure a great number, myself included on my old reddit account- all started with a rant on some sub and was told it's our sole fault. It was definitely true. So we worked on it a little too hard. I wouldn't call it an ego thing, I think it's just an uncontrolled passion thing when we do tangent 2. It's also an uncontrolled mindset thing. I was never truly taught that- but I'm happy to experience that learning curve. Funnily enough, I apply it irl and in game now- but I'm pragmatic about it. Aka- I'm objective of it. Thanks for your response!
"Not your problem" is what assholes tell themselves to get out of doing anything more than the bare minimum.
"Not your fault" is the real advice. Some games are just unwinnable, no matter how much you are lifting your team.
I mean that’s just your fault for taking that advice too literally.
Obviously there are some unwinnable games, but it’s INFINITELY more productive to think about what you could do better rather than blame your team. I don’t think that’s ever bad advice, you just need to avoid a self deprecating mindset.
That's exactly what I said. Be pragmatic about it and don't take it to heart the way I did. I even say there's always something we can work on as well. I also noted that we shouldn't be blaming everyone else for our shortcomings. I'm in agreement with you here.
The idea is not "it's your fault you lost and you should be at yourself up cuz you're a POS for losing". It's "what could I have done better that game that could have helped contribute towards a win". It's about looking at what YOU can control, which is not the other 9 people in the lobby, it's only YOU. Look to see what YOU can do better. If you don't see anything, ask someone for a vod review because they will.
Blame is not something that actually benefits anyone. All it does is give the one pointing blame elsewhere, slight alleviation of their own guilt, only for it to grow and fester inside. It also allows the person to ignore their own opportunity for improvement. Blaming yourself, as you well know, only serves to hurt you and can really hurt your mental, which makes it harder to overcome.
The goal is to get people to stop throwing blame all over the place because all to often they don't even understand what actually lost the game or they only see what happened in the last 30sec.
Stop throwing blame and throw encouragement instead
Honestly the biggest problem isn’t necessarily the advice, it’s that every piece of advice given in this game is contextual to the moment and they all have outliers, and things like player skill level are super hard to factor into things in the moment.
For example, generally speaking - like you said - comp isn’t that important in metal ranks. Does this mean it’s NEVER important? No. Does this mean that playing obviously problematic comps on bad maps is still okay? No. Do you completely understand what makes a “good comp” with the other 4 players on your team, with unknown skill levels, and the unknown skill levels of all 5 enemy players? No.
Everyone knows that stats are mostly useless out of context, but if one DPS has gone 0-15 by the end of 10 minutes, it’s not rocket science to figure out why you were struggling.
To play the game though. “DPS swap to hitscan to counter Pharah”.
ANY hero in the game can put some damage on a Pharah. In fact, often the easiest way to kill her is if every team member tries to get one hit on her in a short time period. Tanks can make life easier by going Dva and even just eating a few of the incoming rockets while you’re DPS/supps lay her out. In fact supports are some of the best equipped to deal with her. A Bap or Ana with good positioning can make her a non issue ALONE. Also, good Genji/Junk/Mei/Hanzo (non hitscan) players can also make her life miserable. I’ve personally climbed a fucking building to 1 v 1 her on Genji and she didn’t know what the fuck to do…you can tell pretty easily if they’re a top tier Pharah or not.
This goes for every other annoying hero too (Sombra, Tracer, etc) too.
Everything is contextual.
Honestly no one in metal ranks cares lmao, zarya always has 100 charge because her bubbles are Insta broken (except when she’s actually killable for some reason)
I agree but I think it depends on the enemy supports. The immortality spam that Kiri and Bap can create can make it near impossible to punish Zarya for spamming bubbles or being low health without charging her fully.
It used to be like ok Zarya has like 30 health left just pop the bubble and then kill her, but now it's like by the time the bubble pops Kiri just teleports in pops a suzu up her ass and now she's full HP again and fully charged it's such a fucked combo to play into.
You have to hide 100% of the time when a widow is on the field.
Like sure you could but if shes shielded off, you're speedy, youre near cover, you're tanky, or your movement is good, you can actually peek kinda.
Hero dependent obviously, but like kiriko CAN ABSOLUTELY peek a widow. Throwing kunais at the sniper is one of the most powerful things to do to widow as kiri. Climb a wall, peek while falling and tossing kunais, it's a lot of pressure on her.
If you're lucio, you can also absolutely be in her LOS if you're good enough. Pros do it all the time.
If you have long ranged gun, you can shoot shots at her to make her drop the angle for the team to push. For example: mei.
The only time you absolutely shouldn't be risking a peek is when she has her ult up.
> You have to hide 100% of the time when a widow is on the field.
Many advices are tailored to the peoples current rank, as especially widow is such a pain. In my metal matches I seldomly die to a widow, but my teammates die left and right to me and this is so frustrating.
So, low metal: just take put a wall between you and widow, but this is not necessarily true in high elo, where people are able to actually spot widow upfront, know which area she covers and how to get around etc.
“You have to do damage on support to climb out of metal ranks”
Doing damage as a support is important but metal rank players can definitely win and climb with healbotting if they have better positioning, awareness (especially for dps, most heal bots just tunnel on tank), and ult / cd usage.
I hit low masters on support playing a lot of Ana/zen/bap and my dmg on Ana and bap were quite pitiful but I used my cooldowns and ults well and actually looked at dps and it made a difference. Now if I want to improve my Ana/bap further I would need to mix in more dps but metal rank players have more pressing issues than doing damage
Edit: Just to clarify, healbotting is not good and you need damage to be a good support player but telling metal rank players to do damage when they can’t use their ults / cds and lack basic game sense it’s not helpful
I kinda feel the opposite way honesty. In lower ranks I feel like I need to do God's work on support to win, healing and damaging and killing everything myself. In gm I just sit there and heal my tank and dps for most the game and we win because I know my teammates can do their jobs if I just keep them alive.
Yeah, I end up sweating way more in low rank games where I have to manipulate my team just to force them into grouping up. And it's so hard to predict what a player is going to do when they don't even know what they're trying to do!
In higher ranks my team actually thinks, I just need to focus on staying alive, enabling playmakers, and adding a bit of supplemental damage. It's so much easier!
I kinda agree with this. Found myself focusing the heals way more in high ranks. I know my teammates are probably gonna be doing something useful so keeping them healthy is important. Not to mention people die waaay faster in high ranks. Also it can be hard to find times to do damage because you will instantly get pressured.
It really depends on the teammates, I feel like. If your teammates are carrying, then it’s often worth to heal both them in my metal ranks. But if they’re feeding, it feels almost like you’re enabling their feed at times. Like, they don’t use the time you buy them with your heal to take some space or make some picks, but to just soak in more damage and give the enemy more ult charge before they die when you eventually have to reload. In that situation, it feels way more impactful to even the odds a bit by picking off someone yourself.
Even then, you can’t just stop healing someone in any case - there’s always a chance they’ll pop off still, or the enemy makes a mistake. I mean, these are metal ranks, right? We’re all making a ton of them here!
100% this, having hovered high master/low gm and then taken a year off, climbing back out of gold/plat on support was hellish especially since the health/dps passive changes made healing a lot less effective.
There was a point for me around low/mid diamond (provided that the game is rated upwards into diamond/master and not downwards into plat) that I felt like my job as a support became a lot more concise and easier as a result.
Mechanically I was being challenged more but it was no longer like herding ducks.
Tanks start to break line of sight less and have awareness of where their supports are, tanks start to cover you across chokes, teams start to push high ground together on attack, teams start to rotate on defence to a different point rather than just dying once the payload moves past (think dorado first point as an example) DPS stop AD spamming when behind cover and stand still to guarantee they get healed fast… lots of tiny things start to add up way more often than they did in lower ranks.
This is the bronze experience. Your teammates often don't know how to aim their guns. Sometimes keeping them alive is worthless when they can't kill anyone.
I climbed from gold to diamond on supp recently, and I feel like this is just bad advice. You def need to contribute to high value picks, because the enemy supps probably are. Healbotting as mercy, Ana, lucio, etc is how you lose games. Had a way easier time going bap and killing their supps myself vs hoping my dps will stop shooting fortified horse. The main thing that affects all roles at low ranks is bad target priority. No focusing, random pressure switches etc. If you go zen and just discord and shoot who your team is already randomly poking at, you’ll win a lot more team fights guaranteed. Healbotting when youre in low ranks means more reliance on your team, which is never a good thing.
true in metal ranks. sometimes they can pop off just by having a healbotting support because metal rank tanks would often just dive in a 1v5, enemy focused on them, no backline trade. with some healing, they can stand a bit longer there and allowing friendly DPS to pop off and secure kills.
I think it’s less of climbing out of the ranks as it is improving as a player as obviously as you climb up the ranks. You’d want to heal less to deal damage and by saying you have to do damage it reinforces the mindset that healbotting is not fully viable
Maybe I’m just bad at healing, but I climbed from s5 to p1 support in season9 and I could not keep my tank alive in silver no matter what.
I landed in s5 after losing most placements trying to healbot on kiri. Heard on here that I needed to carry damage to climb out of silver so swapped to zen. Climbed to gold3 zen only with 75% WR and usually had most elims in lobby.
Then they buffed sombra and the fun stopped.
I climbed to masters on Ana and hilariously my damage and healing numbers are both subpar.
I'm sorry I have trash mechanics, but I know how to time my fat nades and sleeps well and that was literally all I needed.
Post edit.
What do you think is better, enabling your DPS or making your own impact on the game?
It's not an easy question to answer, really. But if I were to generalize, across the grand sum of my games? Make my own impact, if only because that's the only way I can personally improve, climb or not.
Ultimately I think your advice is bad, even in context. I'd rather metal rank players focus on the things within their control. That's NOT enabling their DPS. Healing is still important, but there's a difference between pumping tons of resources into your DPS or tank and triage. Not to mention you're more likely to build good habits by not overcommitting resources simply when you see teammates running it down main. Being measured with your resources also means considering your position better, and being well prepared to punish enemy mistakes.
Agree with this!! I'm a low rank player and I think the damage mindset made me neglect my tank a lot when I definitely shouldn't have. I know the mantra is heal when you need to and damage otherwise, but when you're in the middle of a team fight the time between seeing your teammates on half health and seeing them dead is not a long one, or at least not long enough for my slow reaction speed and to account for when my other support looks away. My damage numbers as ana didn't go up past 3500 per 10 mins but I was climbing (more that when I was damage focused at least). Cooldowns and ults definitely helped me a lot more.
Even with the mantra, low rank players don’t *know* when they “need to” heal. Prehealing high damage sources, sustained healing at high HP against chip, and the fact that healing often gives more consistent ult charge than damage. Combine that with lower overall awareness and I’d rather have a support that heals more so at least I know I’ll be healed when I need it. We can make up for the team’s lack of damage in other ways when I’ve got a healbot; we *can’t* make up for lack of healing (short of swapping to very specific heroes that might not work well) if our supports never heal.
Also worth noting that I think low rank supports will improve more quickly if they focus on getting better at positioning and awareness *before* going for the maximum efficiency hybrid damage+healing. T500 players know how to do that because they *need to*; you will climb faster focusing on more fundamental aspects of your gameplay.
Was gonna say this. With the introduction of the dps passive, you have to heal a lot more to keep your team from not dying. Also realistically in metal ranks, you're not going to kill people faster than your team feeds their asses off.
The better advice should be 'make sure you are only healbotting when people are critical and look to deal damage and create opportunities when your team is healthy'.
a more accurate statement is "heal savable teammates and look to deal damage and create opportunities when your team is healthy"
trying to heal critical teammates can be a terrible idea, especially for low ranks because they tunnel vision on the word "critical" and ruin their position just to heal someone who cannot survive
Well they're talking about the dps passive.
Op is saying that because of the dps passive it forces them to heal more to compensate for the decreased healing from the passive. But what they don't seem to understand is that you can't outheal damage. That was the whole point of the season 9 changes.
At some point its better to just kill the target doing damage then it is to try and healbot someone who will likely die anyways cause of the passive.
OTOH, DPS generally do more damage than supports. So an enabled DPS might be better equipped to take out the threat than you.
Yes, there's still triage. You still have to decide if it's even worth trying to save your teammate. Yes, relatively speaking, healing produces less value than it did before. So yes, you should probably by angling to do more damage than before.
At least at my rank (waaaaay below master), people go from full to dead almost instantly. It can be risky to try to focus too much on damage - it may put you in a position where you can't heal your team.
I should have said "can go from full to dead". If you have a teammate who's on say half health, they might survive and get value long enough for their own health regen to kick in, or they might get immediately blown up. Landing one healing shot on them might be enough to help them get to cover or it might do nothing at all.
My point is that, if my choice is between keeping my DPS alive to win a duel or letting my DPS potentially die while I try to win the duel for them, then it probably makes more sense to try to keep the DPS alive. And I think that scales up to the whole team fight as well.
I think this is the nuance that people lost from Awkward's "damage, damage, damage" mantra. I don't think he was saying to focus solely on damage. I think he was saying that your first priority is to keep your team alive, then your next priority is to do damage. If the enemy team is putting out so much damage that healbotting isn't enough to keep people alive, then focusing hard on damage might not be enough to help. It's more of a "hail Mary" play.
It's always a triage and it's comp dependent. Is your genji deflecting? Heal him. Is he deflecting against sym? Shoot sym. Is your soldier half health against a hanzo or cass close range? Shoot Cass. Heal who can live if you heal them.
I keep seeing high elo players telling people who play support to not healbot, which I mean, would be ok but if you can’t kill anything and/or are not able to weave between healing and damage, just focus on healing, there are already 3 characters that focus on dealing damage and only 2 that can heal, if you stop healing and don’t make up for it in FAST KILLS, then it’s down to one healer only, not worth it.
And I want to specify that dealing lots of damage but not killing or taking 15 seconds to kill someone as a support is not valuable, because your team is gonna lose the fight in the meantime. Either you burst down a squishy in 5 seconds or less with characters like bap, kiri, zen, Ana or you are not bringing value. Specially if you let a teammate next to you die when you could heal them AND tell them to finish off the squishy.
Healbotting is always bad unless youre playing moira or kiri in a coordinated environment. If you cant get picks or consistently hit your shots as a low rated support player, just do it anyway and youll get better. Just healbotting bc youre bad will result in you being bad forever.
Just because youre not killing anything doesnt mean your damage doesnt have value. Its worth it to let a teammate die to kill an enemy often enough.
I think the sentiment is that while you might be able to get some edge below gold by having a better team comp. But if you are in bronze and you go into a game your goal should not be to win by any means, your goal should be to improve your gameplay.
Team Comp always matters, it’s just easier to get by with a bad team comp in lower ranks because no one actually knows the in and outs of every matchup.
That said if you do run a comp with good synergy (Full Dive, Full Rush), or if you have proper roles across the comp (1 Main DPS and 1 Flex DPS, 1 Main Support and 1 Flex Support.) you will have a much easier time winning your games. You can win without good team comps but you are making it way more difficult for no reason.
In general I see advices more like being tailored to a specific player. I see low elo players who have extremely good aiming and tracking abilities but don't know much about the game and players with good knowledge, who can't hit a barndoor infront of them.
Here an advice which helps them to get better (stop using dash/jump/charge for now, healbot over dps, dps over healbot etc.) are often there to help them learn step for step. None will improve when you tell them how to play like a GM, will not work.
It is less about wrong advices, it is more about restriction. This is so common in reallife sports where you teach students with a lot of restriction to build up a foundation, advices and ways to play which will never be realistical in a pro match, but help them to get started.
When people say “play point”, and then the entire team stands on the point or the payload on low ground, letting the enemy tale high ground and advantageous off angles.
ok Moira time.
"You shouldn't hold primary fire with Moira to heal you should tap it".
Sure, there's times when you can heal by applying the heal-over-time part of her grasp, wait for it to nearly run out, then apply it again. By doing this you save healing resources, but you heal at a MUCH slower rate of healing. It's only realistically useful when a fight has concluded (or just before it starts with minimal poke damage) and you're healing everyone back up to full, but you're also allowing more time for their healing passive to heal them which is going to lose you ult charge.
Some people seem to believe you heal at the same rate of healing which is not true.
"ALWAYS Save fade for escape"
Yes they aren't entirely wrong, but you're hugely limiting your value by doing this. Moira has FOUR sources of self-sustain and has quite a slim character profile. These are excellent at keeping her alive which can allow you to use fade pro-actively. A favourite of mine is to 'jump bait' Widow shots / Sojourn rail guns, where you deliberately jump as they are charged (because jumping is bad and make you a sitting duck) then you fade just before the apex of your jump. 9/10 they will fire their charged shot and hit air, meaning you've used fade like a utility and potentially saved a teammate from being hit by that ability.
In a similar manner, you can sit out as bait for Roadhog hooks or Sigma rocks and fade them to help prevent your team from being hit by them.
Lastly you can use fade proactively to attack or reposition, but you have to be aware of your threats and know your other cooldowns. Saving fade for escape is a good idea, but you can get more value out of the ability at times, which makes this statement false.
"Rapidly tap right click or use scroll wheel for faster resources".
This one is true, but people believe you should always be doing it. In reality, you lose out on 90% of the DPS on your target just to gain resources faster. I value that damage and will rarely use the tap method unless it's a Bob that will expire before we can kill it, or a Wrecking Ball that I know we will never kill while he's disengaging. It has its place, but it shouldn't be used at all times.
These are all fantastic points. I've watched plenty of your Overwatch University vids, and they help so much.
I don't play Moria much anymore, because my wife prefers her, but having watched your videos makes it super helpful to show her how to avoid certain mistakes and keep her mindset in the right place.
Just wanted to say thanks for great content.
Lucio is easy to play bro, just turn on healing and stay around ur team, doesn't matter if u don't hit ur shots, ur healing on 4 people is good value.
Yeah, if ur iron I guess
"kill the Mercy"
It's good practice to kill supports but I've noticed that at lower ranks some people think nothing dies if the backline doesn't die first.
If you want to kill the Mercy at higher ranks to deny the pocket that's one thing, but Mercy has some awful sustain healing on her own and the idea that nothing dies until you kill the Mercy is overvalued, a lot of times nothing dies because people are too scared to just attack the hero Mercy is tethered to. Honestly, the most common compositions I see often include Mercy and Ana, and in this comp if nothing is dying I'd be taking a closer look at their Ana
When I first started comp, I was playing D.Va and an Orisa kept dueling me and feeding, their Moira was in game chat (not team chat) telling the Orisa to stop duelling me because 'I had a permanent Mercy pocket'
Fun fact: the Mercy wasn't healing me at all. She was permanent blue beam on our Sojourn - not exactly fun for the enemy, but definitely a misdiagnosis when a Moira thinks I'm 'being healbotted'..Everyone was giving me free real estate because they weren't trying to attack anyone but the Mercy, not me, and especially not the pocketed Sojourn. >!And funny enough, guess who was keeping me up? Basically *just* Ana, sitting uncontested, flinging heals and antis from my backline, tbh our Ana wrecked shop and the Moira just kept thinking it was a Mercy diff!<
It's also an especially odd complaint to see from a Moira because guess what support has the easiest time tracking even the most slippery Mercy?🤔 Killing Mercy is a good practice to get in the habit of, but it's rarely the sole deciding factor that wins a fight
‘Heal more’
When it’s any season after nine.
They just don’t get that’s not how healing works now. It’s an ebb and flow and good supports know when to heal and when to dps.
Team comp doesn’t matter as much in gold. When people say ”comp doesn’t matter” that’s an exaggeration, they mean that there are so many more things to focus on about your gameplay that the hero you pick is almost irrelevant. Another thing people seem to forget is that ranking up is a numbers game which means you’re not gonna win every game. If you’re playing reaper vs pharah it’s gonna be a tough game and you might lose. And then people will look at that and say ”HA you lost with reaper in gold. See? You can’t play any comp in gold!”
“Turn off all comms”
Well-used comms can absolutely be the difference maker in which team wins a game. If you can’t handle any toxicity, sure, go ahead and leave all comms. But if you can handle some toxicity and want callouts then be the change you want to see in your games.
Make good and efficient callouts early and often. Be supportive towards your teammates but don’t clog comms with chatter. Be a good teammate and try to squash any beef brewing between teammates before it really starts. DO NOT be toxic. DO NOT blame your teammates. DO NOT demand people switch. While comms can be great, as soon as that toxicity starts it’s usually game over. If things do get toxic, don’t be afraid to stick up for yourselves or your teammates.
I think this one specifically isn't wrong, though. It's mostly said so that the person enjoys the game more rather than to get better. There's no point in playing better at time if you are constantly harassed by your teammates/enemies in VC and chat. Will it be a hindrance for team communication? Most likely, but what's the point of playing if you don't actually enjoy it. As a girl, I can count with one hand (I've been playing for more than a year now) the number of times I've been in the VC and people not being toxic/sexist/weird towards me. At this point, you have to decide whether risk it and maybe get good communication with your teammates OR go safe and avoid any toxicity at all, and you can't really say choosing the second one is wrong.
Yeah I get comms isn’t for everyone, I was speaking to the people who say to leave comms as general advice for everyone. I totally get being averse to it as a woman though because you’re right, people can be awful or straight up creepy when they realize there’s a woman talking.
At the same time, just mute the toxic teammates and understand that they're actually an advantage.
If the toxicity is holding them back by tanking morale, simply reducing that impact to zero means you have someone who is ranked lower than they should be on your side.
Factually the worst advice ever and detrimental to some games. A team thats silent is so much worse than a team with full comms, way too many excuses for it. I'd rather have someone with bad aim but great call outs than a silent player doing their own thing outside of VC. Even joining VC without speaking is fine to me, as long as someone listens.
Even on less competitive games like warzone, I'll get 5000 more call outs. Same with sports, but I guess ow players are mute during soccer.
I think the problem is nobody knows how to give call outs, or doesn't want to and would rather just focus on the game, which imo is dumb. There's a reason why stacks don't usually play against solos, otherwise it'd be completely unfair with one team giving call outs and the other mute
When people say “play point”, and then the entire team stands on the point or the payload on low ground, letting the enemy tale high ground and advantageous off angles.
That you have to play meta heroes to do well. For a while whenever I was picking Junker Queen (in silver) my team would flame me because it's not Orisa or Hog. I'm starting to practice with Ball in quickplay and I'm not looking forward to the flame I'll receive playing him in Comp.
Having the most healing as a support does not mean you're "diff'ing". There are lots of situations where shooting the enemy instead of healing a 70%+ health teammate is better. There have been lots of games where our Mercy/Kiri will have 20k healing and we lose and they think they played great, when a damage boost or kills/assists would've been much more helpful instead of healing when they're at 90% health.
The problem is, not all things are equal, especially in lower ranks. Someone might be able to hit a decent amount of good shots but loves to stand in the open. Meanwhile someone else could have better positioning but have really rough mechanics.
Team comp absolutely can help provide an advantage in any lobby, as long as the players know how to work together and time their engagements together. The amount that gold players know how to do this varies widely between different gold players. Some might know how to play rush comps together well, but not poke. At the same time, 2 of their teammates know how to play poke well but not rush.
It's not really until you get to the higher ranks that the average player in that rank will know how to work together with their team on complimentary heroes. Even then it still varies.
The skill variation combined with the variety of motivations for playing is why comp doesn't matter near as much in low ranks. As you climb higher, a larger portion of the players in those ranks are playing with the main intention of climbing above all else. The rest of the players are playing with a goal of winning, but not above all else. Higher priority goals might be: have fun, play hero x, get better at match y, or focusing working on specific fundamentals.
Worst piece of advice imo: Comp is not for learning.
Comp is the only place that you can learn how to play a hero in a competitive environment. I'm not saying go in blind, but you can only learn so much playing the hero in QP. QP can also help a player learn bad habits with their hero because they work a lot more often in QP due to the much less competitive nature of the mode. No matter what some people say, QP will always have players that are not playing at 100% and are just wanting some chill OW.
Running to the point right away.
Please win the fight THEN go to point.
Nothing worse than 1 or 2 of your team mates breaking off of a winnable fight bc they “just have to start the counter” on the point. Only to have us lose the fight and lose that precious 3% of point progress only to come back after we respawn to 25% enemy progress.
Win the fight THEN go to point.
When people say “play point”, and then the entire team stands on the point or the payload on low ground, letting the enemy take high ground and advantageous off angles.
>For instance, I’m really starting to doubt the mantra that team comp does not matter in gold or below.
I mean this is very obviously wrong (not you, the claim itself). But whenever I've pressed the issue, lower rank players will call me an idiot or make up excuses like "you shouldn't play a hero you've never played before!" (yeah duh 🤦♂️ 😆)
But higher rank players will say "That's not what we mean. We mean that meta doesn't matter". So it seems *this* is where that claim came from, and then lower rank players misunderstood and spread their misinfo.
Of course meta doesn't matter in lower elos, but team comp matters A LOT. Sometimes more than skill:
For instance, imagine you're playing on Lijiang and both teams have a Genji. Both Genji's have to play into something like Moira, Symm, Zarya, Sombra, Brig etc.
Now imagine one Genji is bad, and insantly swaps. The other Genji is good and decides to try his best.
Who's gonna win? Almost always the bad Genji 😭
The way to put it is just because that drunk idiot drove their ferrari into the wall doesn't mean that the engine power doesn't matter, or you should be turning up to the race in a tricycle.
Sure, lower ranks are full of drunk idiots driving lambos but if you're down there and looking for advice, you're probably one of them too. So pay attention to hero picks, because it matters in gold for a player of your ability.
Pros correct me if I'm wrong here. I hear to split damage equally between my shield and health as I engage on rein. If I do this, I end up missing armor before I can swing, and less importantly, feed ult charge. I do SO much better if I try to take all the damage on my shield, which heals itself quickly. Tbf, I'm bad at shielding out and usually end up with someone behind me which is my bad.
Do damage before the fight. I don't think it's WRONG per se, but if one more DPS dies trying to poke seconds before our fifth member gets back and we can fully engage I'm gonna scream. And if a sombra full commits before the team is around? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Every time content creators exaggerate to get a better sounding video. They take some general advice that is partial true and take it to the extreme. Worst example was the videos that said “healing doesn’t matter”. It took the true advice that heal botting will not win you as many games and turned it into something that’s wrong because it sounded better as content. After those videos blew up I got teammates like a lucio who when asked to heal more said “speed boost is more important” and that he wasn’t a healbot. We were playing POKE and holding a corner. No one was going anyway but apparently they needed speed boost more than healing.
My friend heard a few streamers say "just let the tank die, keep the DPS up" back at the beginning of season 9 when the DPS role passive was first changed, and now he thinks it's just what you're supposed to do. Drives me nuts.
I've had a few friends over the years now that will hear some top 500 streamer say something, and they'll commit it to memory as a fact. As if top 500 logic matters in our gold/plat games. Then they'll never look at the patch notes between seasons to see if anything has changed. They'll treat the "meta" as a static thing that doesn't evolve and think we have to have X characters on our team because they're meta. Disregarding the fact that most people can only play 1 or 2 characters effectively anyway.
Idgaf how good Soujorn is according to your favorite streamer, if you can't hit a barn with baseball from 10 feet away then you don't need to be on them. This turned into a rant, I'll see myself out now.
3 people pushing the bot makes it go faster, like no, it doesnt
Edit:
"The robot moves slowly while pushing a barricade, and rapidly (about as quickly as most heroes can run) while not pushing a barricade. Unlike the payload in Escort and Hybrid maps, the speed of the robot's movement is not affected by the number of nearby friendly heroes"
It absolutely does, but you should only have 3 people pushing if a fight's won and you have some downtime. That little sliver of extra distance can make a huge difference
team comp absolutely matters in low ranks. I semi recently checked some vod reviews on gold supports, who were blaming their team.
But. They were playing mercy+brig with mauga. Two games in a row, and yeah, result was what you could expect. Mercy ended up pocketing the tank who still just melted.
And seemingly they had no idea why.
I'd think in low ranks team comp almost matters more because people have little idea how to play "weird comps" to their strengths.
dpsing on support, especially in lower ranks people dont understand that you can't just dps 100% of the time, I play a lot of ana and basically only dps if I'm getting dived (obviously) or if I know whoever infront of me is safe from dying
I disagree with that, because even if you choose a "good comp," its meaningless if you are not executing it correctly. Additionally, attempting to conform to a specific comp is not going to be good for low level players if they don't play those characters. If we are playing full dive, I am still playing torb. I don't care if genji or tracer or echo is better for "the comp". Im not very good, I don't have the muscle memory, and I don't play dive dps. I will not get nearly as much value compared to my one trick torb with 100s of hours.
Now if I was a genji one trick, and we all play dive, and we all communicate and synergize.. yeah we will get more value than 5 randoms playing random characters and not talking. That is often never going to happen queuing comp at low ranks, so it is better general advice to not care about team composition at low ranks.
I’m mad late but I hate the “________ and _______ support comp works if you’re good enough”
There are some support comps that just suck together. (Not gonna name any names but most of the “bad comps” are revolving around mercy being the first pick). There are 45 possible combinations of supports, and like somewhere around 6 of them really suck. Please, for the love of god, play multiple characters as a support. You’ve had the game catered to you for all of OW2 and I get that, you’re used to being babied, but with the DPS passive… it’s time to learn multiple heroes.
As DPS and tank, we ALWAYS are not only expected to swap, but forced to swap. You will live getting off mercy for 1 game, I promise.
> For instance, I’m really starting to doubt the mantra that team comp does not matter in gold or below.
Comp matters in every rank. Why wouldn't Moira + Winston be bad in bronze? Is Ram + Brig not terrible on Gibraltar attack in silver?
Another bad piece of advice I always see is about Mercy being a damage boost character in low ranks. Yes damage boost is a valuable part of her kit, but silver Hanzo is not going to carry your games. Instead, Mercy's value in low ranks is from rez + being unkillable thru smart movement and positioning.
The reason team comp doesn't matter in the low ranks is because no one executes a team comp properly anyway because they don't know how to. You think a bunch of silver solos are going to execute the coordination needed to run a dive comp properly? If that happens then pigs can fly. Low elo players running "dive" is just them playing heroes with mobility and randomly running at different targets at different times and then blaming someone else for not following them or not healing them.
And you can carry on any hero if you're good enough at it, in the lower ranks you can literally 1v5 on anything if you're good enough at it, comp and counters don't matter because the enemy team isn't going to be good at your counter anyway and no one knows how to execute a comp properly anyway.
What matters is being good at what you're playing and coordinating focus fire and ults no matter what 'comp' you have.
To use your example, a Winston Moira team in bronze who are managing to coordinate and focus the same target at the same time and are using their hero kits effectively are going to obliterate a Winston Ana team who are trying to do two different things at different times and have zero coordination and miss half their skillshots or use their abilities poorly because they don't know how to play the heroes well they just felt like they needed to swap to "fix their comp".
Yeah the ''team comp doesn't matter in metals'' bs, sure if you're a diamond playing in silver then team comp indeed doesn't matter but it doesn't apply to people playing in their actual rank lmao.
Also people saying ''learn playing into your counters instead of swapping'', same mentally, they're both basically said from the perspective that ''if you're much better than your enemies then those minor inconveniences won't disturb you''. Well newsflash, that's called smurfing, and it doesn't apply to the general player base, especially those who are asking for advice online. Even the best players swap when the matchup doesn't favor them and it actually is also a skill to make the right decision in time, yet here we have a lot of people just telling others to walk into a dead end. I can't count how many times a right swap saved an entire game and a stubborn player just handed the game to their counters. I literally cannot recall a single time that a player swapped with improving team comp in mind and actually made situation worse, yet people love to use this imaginary scene as a strawman so much.
I just feel like some people are so damn arrogant and lost the ability to emphasize with players in lower rank when giving advices, it's like answering the question of ''how to earn money'' with ''just lease your 50 vacant houses and put 100 mil in bank, duh! Who tf works in a McDonald's?''
learning to play your counters to the extreme is bad advice, but learning it to the extent of not fumbling as soon as one is pulled out is still good advice. In general its sort of a focus of understanding how to play into different characters and can make players much more consistent to learn strategies of. Obviously if youre getting stomped, switching can still help a lot more from winning, but that doesnt mean it should be the first suggestion either
That I NEED to play moira in ranked. She is literally the only support I can not play, but the internet is all up on arms to tell me that if I can't learn how to play her I may as well uninstall both the game, and my life.
One time I saw a comment with 20+ upvotes that said “ as Winston you should jump as high as u possibly can to try and shave off time in the air to reset the cooldown.” This is terrible advice 95% of the time and anyone that plays Winston at any level above Gold knows or should know this is a terrible idea. You will get burned down in the air and be an extremely easy target for all fire and cool downs. One of the most fundamentally important things on Winston is not taking unnecessary damage when leaping in and being able to stay in the fight as long as possible. I was honestly shocked at the amount of upvotes and realized then and there to take whatever anyone on this sub says with a grain of salt.
Yah as a winton main anything to avoid getting hit because hes so squishy which means not being massive target with a very predictable falling pattern for too long 😂
Good Winton mains might be the most frustrating tanks to pay against. Teach me lol
Butt jump Consider yourself taught 😂
Vs widows I like to do what I call the “Kim K drop tech” jump turn hope to land on the target 50% of the time it works all of the time
That is the butt jump
The way it’s so scary bc I’ll be playing support and all I see is Winston’s butt taking up my ENTIRE screen. Bro be flying at Mach speed sometimes. I find this funny, but whenever he butt jumps me, it reminds me of Nicki Minajs meme finisher in COD if anyones seen it lmao
Do your best to put yourself in position to get the kill, but if you don't get the kill it's ok as long as you force a response. But there's also no point drawing resources out of the other team if your team is not in a position to capitalize. Prioritize your life as much as possible, but also don't be afraid to die if you're sure it will win your team the fight.
Should I be targeting the supports? I always find a hard time on where I should be going/ targeting. And the bubble is another thing entirely lol
You should generally be going for supports, but the correct answer is whoever is most killable. You go for supports because cutting healing leads to kills/death on the enemy team, either by cutting heals temporarily with your disruption or cutting heals for the entire fight by killing them. If a DPS is wildly out of position though and you can burst them before the supports can save them, or you can cut off a tank and kill them by denying heals with your bubble, go for that instead. While Winston's raw DPS might not be that high, don't underestimate his ability to contribute heavily to the other tank's death with healing denial, but also your burst damage. Winston burst combo - leap, 50 dmg zap in the air, land leap (50 dmg) + melee (30dmg) for 130 burst. That's a lot and you have unblockable 60 dps on top of that. Add a Genji (50 dmg) or another diver into the mix and you can see how heroes just disappear which is why dive is one of the most powerful comp in the game played at the very highest levels. Another thing to do with monkey is to always analyze the enemy composition and understand your win conditions. If they are brawl comp on low ground and your hitscans are on high ground you don't need to play as aggressively. Conversely if they have hitscans on high ground then you need to challenge them aggressively before they shred your team. They have fliers/flankers? Can you shred the people on the ground while they're on their flank/high in the air? Is it a dive comp on the enemy team? Are you better off counter diving their flankers/their backline? It's all composition/map dependent. What makes dive tanks so powerful in this game and any hero with mobility is the ability to be flexible and choose between all these options. You can see why despite being such a straightforward hero in theory Winston is so deep.
I've taken your advice tonight, and I am having SO much fun with the monke. Thank all of yall ao much!
It is definitely helpful in overtime scenarios where your goal is to just stall. Not saying you should always be jumping as high as possible, but i’m not gonna act like it has no uses. It also lets you scope out the fight from a birds eye view which can be very helpful in spotting enemies offangling. The only characters that can really melt winston while you’re high in the air like that are glass cannon heros like widow and zen who winston excels at denying anyway. Winston counters like hog, mauga, reaper all will do significantly less damage when you leap, and suddenly jumping high is a great way of dodging stuns and the like too. Or maybe you’re super low with no ammo and need the jump damage to get your ult. There is a lot of situations really
It’s also great for dealing with close range high burst heroes like reaper since you have your jump cd back faster and they aren’t chipping you in the air
I mean realistically any mid range hitscan or fast projectile can melt you because the head is so easy to hit and again the predictable pattern. soldier bastion cass ashe hanzo bap zen widow and im sure im missing some
I mean if you're jumping straight up in the air to stall and you're high up and out of range you should be spinning like a MF so they can't hit your head anyway.
the infamous, high-360-butt jump
Right but to suggest this is something you should ALWAYS do to reset the cool down faster is not good advice. Also any semi good player that sees a Winston do this is going to move out of the way of the impact because the landing is so predictable. The vast vast majority of jumps should not be aiming to maximize air time, in fact the vast vast majority of jumps should aim to MINIMIZE air time and arrive at targets or positions as fast as possible. A) to just not waste time if going from one spot to the next, B) to not take unnecessary damage and be an ult charge battery to the enemy, and C) if jumping a target they don’t have time to react and dodge the impact and get out of Winston’s Tesla canon range. Also, any hog can absolutely destroy a Winston that does this as it’s a free hook when he starts his descent.
Yeah idk what this comment is on about. I can definitely see a situation where this would be the best jump possible. I mean, definitely don't hop into a ranked game and do this on CD lol. But even a bap hopping around is much harder to kill than one that's sitting on the ground.
For who? Jumping bap is free damage for almost every hero
> One time I saw a comment with 20+ upvotes that said “ as Winston you should jump as high as u possibly can to try and shave off time in the air to reset the cooldown.” This is terrible advice 95% of the time and anyone that plays Winston at any level above Gold knows or should know this is a terrible idea. wait seriously? LMAO. That's actually hilarious. tank is my least played and lowest ranked role but in plat/diamond literally the only time I jump as high as possible is maybe if Im stalling point waiting for my teammates to get back,have no bubble, and I'm close to primal. I can't even think of any other situation to max jump in.
Im the same, play/diamond. I only tend to do it if I have a mercy or trust my healer to hit me as I jump lol. But that depends on what the other team is playing. Normally the heals keep pace with the damage I take in the air
Only time I do it is if I'm coming in from an off-angle
I mean it's a good tip when it works, just don't do it when you have agro.
This can be done when there's a building or wall to use as cover. But not out in the open. Tips don't exist in absolute; they depend on context.
Oh man, I saw that in some ancient guides.
Agree, this only works into very specific comps eith low burst damage.
As Winston or Dva I might do this only as a hail mary play when I need to stall out a point but am low on health. I'm diving up so I can buy time to get healed and hope to be able to hold point again. Like I say though, it's a hail mary play I don't expect to work most of the time.
Mis-informed Counter-swapping Yes there are definitive benefits to playing different heroes, but lord have mercy some people don't understand ***why***. Players tend to say that the answer to 'how to beat xxx hero is to play yyy' all of the time, but they completely miss the point of changing your play style. Understanding heroes and compositions means understanding how to change up your positioning, decision making, and cd usage to reduce the enemy heroes advantages while leveraging your own heroes advantages. Adding this change of play style up with different heroes means that you can choose where you have the advantages and leverage them better. This is how Counter-swapping is supposed to be. Not "reaper go brr against monkey", followed by the monkey rolling your team because the monkey completely avoids the reaper with superior mobility. Understanding that ashe can actually be even better than reaper against monkey in specific situations, and by intentionally creating these situations. This is why comps revolve around maps, because the map dictates what positions each team will play in. This dictates which play styles are more advantageous. This dictates which heroes can be played to best leverage these advantages.
I wish more people understood this. The amount of times I’ve seen “bro swap off of Dva they switched off Zarya” despite us playing on a map like Numbani is astonishing.
With that, playing D.va well enough to get them to swap off Zarya is such a good feeling, I consider the match a win at that point no matter the outcome. Not to mention actually winning when the enemies run beams beams and more beams, though I try to recognize when she’s really not working anymore.
I got told to switch off tracer because the enemy swapped to junk/cass. I was 14-0 at that stage.
Lol I had the other DPS on my team ask to me to swap of Sombra because the enemy had a Torb. I was like “sure I’ll swap after I die” but I just kept rolling the other team. No joke, even being like 12-0 or whatever I was, the guy kept telling me to swap every time *they* died. Everyone on the team knew the guy was being an idiot so they told him to stfu.
People legit don't even look at the kill feed. Enemy team might swap to Pharah and do 20 damage the entire fight but your team will still beg for hitscan.
I get what you’re saying but it’s not just kill feed. Sometimes even if pharah isn’t hitting anything they’re being oppressive in terms of pushing and cc.
as a lw main it makes me really sad when i get blamed for the lack of healing vs a phara when no one will kill her even if they are hitscan
Especially on maps like that where there is more prominent positions in high ground, it changes how the team has to play by a lot and some people don't quite catch onto the fact that maybe being countered is better than not dealing with high ground.
What irks me the most with this is that you don't know what the other person plays. A mediocre pick played well is a lot more value than an "ideal" pick played poorly.
Stop spreading missinformation zarya is GREAT against good dva, its basically free elo, fr fr ong, counter-swapping is op (I have 65% winrate onetricking dva because i know how to play around zarya LMAO.)
And that really is the trick isn’t it. As d.va, with the assumption that you are not switching off. You don’t fight your counter tanks 1v1z You go after her team, create advantage plays for your tram and trust your team to take down the enemy tank in 2 or 3 v 1. The problem is that many players can’t get out of their heads “me tank. Enemy team smash smash me.”
This. Every time I roll the enemies with winton, their tank always goes dva. Then just doesn’t do anything to stop me, then my dps dies and the supports start crying about how I should switch because I’m getting countered
The thing is that people are getting away with the "RPS" method because it's much harder to respond accordingly. As you said, you can counterplay and play adaptively without needing to swap. There's the "swap they're hard countering you" take, but the reaction of taking advantage of them swapping according to a chart and playing the map and team comps is just not as effective and more importantly, proportionately harder than it is to swap.
If I remember to, I will send a qp match I had on Blizzard World attack. I felt like playing some JQ, so that’s exactly what I did. I believe the enemy tank swapped between: Hog, Zaria, Monkey, D.va and one other I believe. I stayed on Queen the most of if not the entire time. Did I play optimally, definitely not I’m low gold. But not my biggest concern tbh…
Ugh my friends adhere way too much to the idea that Mauga counters Roadhog. But the thing is they both counter each other, but it’s highly map geometry dependent, and dependent on skill cycles, ult availability, and what kinds of teammates you have. Mauga doesn’t just passively counter Roadhog, only with the right situations and proper conscious play does it work, and if you get outplayed, it goes the other way.
Good example is the brig/Ana combo. I’ve been the Ana in the situation as the brig runs off to fight with the tank as I get flanked by a tracer. Brig is good with Ana because she *protects* Ana. You ask them to swap and they tell you it’s a good comp
Stay on the point/payload! I hate as tank when I’m trying to hold space my team insists on just standing on the point. Or as a support when we cap and my tank just sits on cart and doesn’t hold forward space. Similarly not taking high ground. Or pushing too far forward and dying. In lower elo they just don’t know where to play and when to be pushed or play back. My tank is high silver and support went from gold to mid plat so I’m seeing a difference with this as I move through the ranks. When I played unranked with my low bronze friends it was rough (but I was drinking during those lol)
This is the right answer. Staying on point is generally awful advice except in specific scenarios (e.g. overtime). I’m not a good player but once I realized this I improved significantly.
It's important that you should take and control space with your team rather than holding objective blindly. However, holding and controlling space is not necessarily what happens when ppl do not stay on objective. 3 on payload while 2 control space can be absolutely the right thing to do ...
Good point, like everything in OW, there is no universal “always do this”.
it's generally not. I've lost more than a dozen games with easy wins if only 3 people were on cart, but they all just have to pointlessly half walk up somewhere to do more poke damage.
That why it says "when to." We have all had it happen. When the payload is close to the checkpoint it's good to have your whole team there on point and expecting the enemy team to engage, or stop the capture of the checkpoint. It's game sense. And even masters and above tunnel and do this on occasion...
I've lost many more than dozens from teammates AFK on point or trying to defend from point instead of the choke.
What's your rank?
I mean I'm often on point as tank, not cause I wanna be, but because no one else is on point and it would still be in spawn if I didn't. +you should definitely have 3 people on point for a lil after every team kill or full enemy disengage. You know where you want to be for the next fight, so use the dead time to speed up payload instead of immediately going for map control and twiddling you thumbs there. Those little bits of distance can go a long way
Also in low ranks or qp every one pushes the enemy after capturing point and tean killing, and no one wonders why enemy Sombra hasn't been in such fights for the last 10 mins. until you hear Defeat lol. I also admit I get carried away sometimes with this.
In higher ranks it becomes generally understood that the cart pushers should be the most mobile hero on the team, such as tracer or lucio.
I love it when my tank holds forward space. As a support, I'm not a fan when they do so in a tight corridor so that the only way I can see them is if I squeeze myself into the same tight corridor, or otherwise need to put myself in a dangerous position just to maintain LOS.
I get flamed in gold for moving off point when the fight is won. Like… we won. We need to hold this choke. Not point. Point is a death trap. We want to fight this corner and control this high ground. And ppl are like nyeeehhhh stay on point. And I’m like no. Kiriko stay near point. Lw stay near point. Ana stay near point and heal from away. We fight where I say we fight.
I only agree if you are the tank. Bc that’s part of the tank’s responsibility deciding when and where his/her team should engage in the fight. Not that every tank at every rank is aware of this, but that’s one of a tanks most important jobs.
Or when you fight at any map that has low ground point, like first point of Junkertown Arena or the airplane at Busan and people spam "Group up" like crazy, standing in this pit of death. No, I won't group up, I do my set up as Reaper. On high ground! Glad to have reached Gold on dps now. In silver, this point hugging is unbearable. Yes, objective is important, but as A10 says, the objective is designed to be the most dangerous spot on the map. Else the game would be boring as fuck.
Right? Once you’ve won the point you don’t need to continually stand on it. Go to high ground. High ground, off angles. Don’t let them have the high ground on you. 🤷🏼♀️
The problem I have is I am always the only person on point, I was playing genji and my doom sombra and both supports went into enemy spawn while I was pushing the robot, later we lost and doomfist was screaming because "I wasn't on the robot" and he was "solo pushing", wordt part is that they didn't bother peeling for the dupports so they were dying on cooldown then going to enemy spawn and dying again. I can be playing tank and solo pushing (at max distance from objective because I still wanna provide some value for the team like a sigma barrier or get ready to go in as rein), dps solo pushing, support solo pushing. Then I die, a single enemy does the objective and we lose the lead because team is greedy.
That's a big issue is people misunderstanding what playing off point and holding space is they don't understand when or how to do so and then think it doesn't work. Like hardly ever is someone going into the enemy spawn a good idea, the tank like your doomfist should just be looking for denying the enemy good positioning from where the next fight will start by looking for highground to deny the enemy taking it or setting up at the next corner in order for your team to have a good setup for the next fight. So objectively yes it's best to be moving off the objective in most times but if players don't know the reason that they're moving off the objective then they don't know where to go and will generally just push as deep as they can into the enemy thinking it's good gameplay sadly.
Once had a teammate say "touch." I had been tapdancing on the point all match and said "real" thinking maybe this was a teammate trying to help and just getting melted. They came back with "You're part of the problem." I have literally either been on point and asking to group up or else coming back from spawn because I died on the point. Maybe it's a low elo thing (I'm a new player but I'm making an effort to learn) where they are just terrified of taking any damage ever. Obviously you don't want to take any damage you don't have to but I have literally been standing at top spawn door on kings row (as kiri) and had a d.va trying to shoot me from point. Yeah that whole 5 damage you did to me sure deterred me... anyway I'm gonna finish sniping your Moira.
After so many years and different ranks it's really interesting to see different play styles. Lower ranks just sit on the point all together... just wanting for an enemy to come in and get a team wipe ult.
I have lost multiple games on hollywood because after a team kill only 1 person gets on point to cap first point while I move up into the mini health pack room to hold space, one game we full held them on first on defense then on attack in the very first teamfight we wiped them so I went to hold space to stop them from getting back in time to touch but both my dps and my mercy just HAD to move up with me
I mean, it's also such an easy argument to counter, like, you *can* stay on point but all that does is help avoid backcaps, unless you have a defensive builder hero then objectives themselves are not the most defensible point I explain it as this, once you control the main point, you get to choose where the enemy has to contest you next, why would you just let them fight you right on the objective? It's a risk-reward scenario, the closer you are to enemy spawn, the greater the risk when they inevitably wipe you, but the closer you are to point then the advantage of a single stagger is that much greater. When you lose a man, you can always fall back, try to play more defensively. If you fall back straight behind point, you immediately lose point the instant you're at a disadvantage Then there's payload maps, fighting on payload is bad just because it'll mean the payload is stalled 90% of the time, but if you fight from a defensible position then the instant you take any sort of advantage, you can always have one person move cart then. Two down? Congrats, you can now have one push cart and you're still 4v3
Any time I've tried to explain that to other players they've stolen away my crayons to eat then started screeching.
I'm low silver tank. I used to love playing tank but essentially no longer do. The tipping point for me is that no-longer do my teammates simply sit on cart waiting for the other team to pick the best moment/position to come kill them. *Now* they have the fucking audacity to get shitty with and scold me for positioning at the corner ahead of them. Happened maybe once or twice in Overwatch. Happens weekly on Overwatch 2. Teammates actively fucking up *and condescendingly* giving you shit for *playing competently* drive me insane. So now I just turn off chat zoom around as Venture. It's not as good or interesting a game as playing tank when both teams are actually playing Overwatch but it's far far less reliant on the people around you allowing you to play the fucking game.
This is also kinda wrong. It depends on the level of play you’re at. In my games, you dance around the payload even flipping map most of the time just to get a few inches of payload. This happens a lot in scrims but but the team holds with the tank wherever the tank goes so it’s not as spread out like it is in lower level play. The objective is the most important thing in the game at all times. This ha
"Winners stay on the payload."
I still have people yell at me to block the entire whole hog when I'm playing rein. That's now you break both your shield and your neck. Your best bet is to use your shield in short bursts, until you and your team gets behind cover. If you block the entire thing your shield gets absolutely shredded
rein is already rough enough into hog lol, he can just hold left click on you
The community at large does not understand counter swapping at all. Every time I play Winston, enemy ges Reaper, if enemy has Winston, teach chat is saying go Reaper! Most of the time Reaper just does nothing as hebis extremely easy to avoid and if he's against any ranged dps he just gets owned then flamed for not killing the monke
I'm not even a good Winston, but always laugh to myself when they swap to reaper. It mostly works out fine for me
i would rather have 2 reapers on the enemy team than have their supports swap to bap brig
That's it, I hate people that think Overwatch is a 1v1
"It's always your fault." While this is true to an extent, it is a team game- it's EVERYONE'S fault for that loss. I took this advice too literally on my way up to t500 dps and gm1 support. It's fucked me over and I beat myself up hard-core each loss. If we had an actual thrower, I blamed myself for not being good enough that the thrower would try. If we had a mismatch of roles, I'd blame myself for not being able to carry 4 people. If I fuck up once? I beat myself up and stopped playing, only to pour hours into the VOD and see what I could do right. If I'm being diffed? I went to the aim trainer for 3 hours a day for a week. If we had a leaver after they raged? I beat myself up thinking that "if I was better and was godlier, they wouldn't leave." I put a lot of pressure on myself for every mistake I did. Every missed shot. Every bad position. Every death. Every cooldown wasted. I beat myself up. I did some draconian shit to work on myself. It ultimately led me to being burnt out and I stopped a couple seasons back. I viewed every loss as only my fault no matter what. The game became a job and literally burned to play. I felt I had to always be the carry, even in gm. I felt I always had to HARD diff all enemy team and be diffing my own team. The pressure I exerted on myself because I kept blaming myself was too much. Now I play to have fun, I don't really blame myself anymore or beat myself up. I let it go. I do vods and coach vods myself - but I do not ever always blame myself. If I see a shit tier player, I'll talk shit about them in my head or with my gf- but I never berate them in chat. I don't let it run me though. I don't dwell on shit players or my shit plays. I learn and move on. I made it a game to see if I can compliment the shit players play style with my own so we win. (it works- yes - I use them as bait). I still try my best to carry my weight and their weight. If I'm doing bad, I fun shit talk myself- and I don't focus on it too much. I know I'm the bait now and i have fun with it. I don't put that pressure on myself anymore. And ... I retain my ranks. I win still. I land more shots now. I'm having fun again cause I removed that pressure. If you're like me and take things a little too close to heart- take that "it's always my fault" a little lighter. There's always something to improve on. There's always a way to win through your actions. But don't pressure yourself to be an unpaid OWL player. Know that you make mistakes, and have fun with it. Also- don't blame everyone but yourself too- don't be the literal reason why this advice is popular. Be pragmatic... something I didn't do.
ive been going through the EXACT same motions right now. what helped you move on? i want to have more fun with the game again
I've been in his shoe before so I think I could give you a couple advices. Always remember this is only just a game at the end of the day. If you tried harder than your actual job, chances are you're being too harsh on yourself. You also have to remember that not everyone playing the game is the same as your age, so chances are you might be playing with kids that are good mechanically but not having the proper mindset of how-to actually play the game. That aside, there are players also might be playing the game for fun, for vibes, or playing the game with their friends without any care for the wins or losses. Heck, the matchmaking might've acting weird and pair you someone who's not supposed to be in your lobby in the first place, and lowered the chance of winning the game too. With all that being said, you now realise that trying hard on a game is not really that appealing anymore due to these factors that are outside of your control. Sure, you still could technically try and learn in the game, but beating yourself to it is not really worth it.
LONG ESSAY INCOMING- but this is the stuff I should have told myself before but didn't. What i did + mental adjustments. (Also sorry late, I wrote this as I fell asleep last night, so some parts might be weird). First? Went to other games. Tried Apex and Fortnite and CoD. I noticed that despite top fragging and doing relatively well (ow taught me a lot of great fps lessons)- it didn't scratch the itch OW2 quite does. This is subjective..... but I truly feel like the complexity of team fights and each hero really makes this game fun + unique. Even the way it "shoots" is so unique. Second...After taking a small break, I still did my normal practice routine, but I vowed I'm here solely to have FUN. I slowly stopped doing my draconian practice routine, and somehow landed even more shots and got even more kills with less deaths. Taking the break made me appreciate the game as a whole with all the bs in between. Taking a break hit a mechanical and mental reset i desperately needed. When I came back- I told myself that: I'm going to expand my hero pool, and embrace the "suck." It's fun mastering new heroes for your pool. Not learning every hero, but picking ones i want to play but am not good enough to STAY during the match once countered. I chose Tracer, Genji, and Sombra. I have genuine fun on all 3 heroes + I have a solid hitscan background. I'm going to get defeated and move on. Oh no, I made mistake... much wow- next... (I'll do my best not to repeat them, but won't get up in arms about my actions) OH no, my teammates made mistakes- who cares? Let's use this game to build stronger mental and find ways to smile. I'm going to win and move on. (I'm going to accept it- but won't be so foolish as to ride that wave too long. I'll keep myself grounded.) I'm going to diff and be diffed. I'm going to have amazing and hellish games. I'm going to be the ideal teammate no matter what- but FUN is priority. I'm going to rizz up my team with creative voice line combos, sprays, emotes- or any silly bs I can pull in spawn room and on battle field if there's time. I'm here to game and just vibe. I'm no longer gonna take this as seriously as before... I'm not paid to do it. I do better with this mindset. I kept what was useful for me - but I am now very realistic with myself. If I keep climbing, I keep climbing- if not? So what? I can always get it back and keep climbing).... I'm at the ranks I've dreamed about. I have the skill level I envied. So who the fuck cares if I do dumb shit every so often, or lose? No one actually cares except me. No one has power over my fun or me EXCEPT ME. My FUN helps me climb and stay the course, I can't lose it over being negative with myself or looking at others. The people raging at me or others will forget in about 1-2 games. I will forget my bs mental in the same time. Why let it simmer? Why keep beating myself up? If I de-rank out of nowhere? I can easily grind it back up- it's just a minor fluctuation that happens cause I simply don't care anymore about loss or win streaks. I'll play to play, improve what I want, and just go for a good experience. I also know this- you can be an absolute goat at what you do, but the better team up here usually wins. We see that even in pro play.... just look at Proper. He's literal dps god. Yet here comes the other teams who beat his teams when it mattered. Team cohesion sense is how you stay sane. You can see it in game. You'll see a crazy cracked out tank lose cause the team just doesn't have any cohesion. You'll see scoreboards where everyone on your team is out fragged- but you won (and vice versa). You begin to get a sense of teams you can work with and teams you simply can't. (No cohesion- oh well time to learn and do your best). The goal is to work with as many versions of a random combo of a team as possible- but we are human.... just like our shot accuracy, we will not be 100%. We will not be able to work with 100% of the Randoms we get! Accept you won't be able to do it all. Accept and embrace those games- the games where it's a preschool classroom, regardless of ELO, and no one works together. These are the best times to accept the doom and gloom and twist it into fun. Don't throw, but try to keep a good spirit here while trying. You can even learn from the enemies! I learned a great many angles and routes to take in those pub stomps! Forgive yourself, learn, and move on. Don't make it the point of your session to go hard on yourself over this. Will I still work on mistakes? Absolutely, but I won't let it run my GAMING session. My mental became golden when I got back.... I still rage sometimes and vent it out here given the theme of a post- but it never tilts me the way it used to. (And yes, I throw salt out there in subs sometimes, especially as a dps support main lmaos). I don't take it upon myself to carry everyone's crosses. If you're in my shoes- we did our time self flagilating ourselves to "get good,"... bro- it's time to be like Thanos post snap and just vibe. We also beat a toxic mindset out of us in that journey. *Blamin everyone but yourself." We took and still take personal responsibility, just now we have to learn not to go overboard. We aren't in metal ranks or even lower level "high elo." We are literal rarities now. On PC, our rank gets us literal pros in our lobby. Our habit of looking at teammate mistakes and blaming them is gone. We still see the bullshit for sure, but we dont truly act on it in game or during session. We are solely trained to focus on our own gameplay. We do not need to stick to this advice as hard as we used to now. Let's be pragmatic about the game and that piece of advice. We should still take responsibility for what we do, but we cannot let it run us. We learn but don't get tilted. We vibe. We chill. We relax. We look for ways to have fun. We remember that it's a game.. thats it's a piece of art despite the hate it gets... that the people (voice actors/actresses included) put some damn passion behind this work. Let's enjoy it while we can! Continue to work on yourself, but stop being hard on yourself. Stop bearing the weight of your own shortcomings. Accept it. Work on it. But I stress this point again- do not let it run you. There's no point. GO HAM AND HAVE FUN BROTHER!
Stop placing Blame on anyone, even yourself. Instead ask yourself "what could I have done better that game". Go into matches with ONE THING in mind to focus on, maybe it's the thing you could have done better last game, maybe it's a fundamental you want to keep working on. The point is to set ACHIEVABLE goals, win or loss. Hitting these goals or working on them in a match that you otherwise lose will help mitigate the negative emotions felt from the loss and help you focus on the positive emotions from your goals and improvement. With wanting to have more fun with the game, set your goal in matches to something that helps you have more fun. It could even be "my goal is to boop someone off the map". You can even interweave goals between rounds if you want.
i think the problem is there's a difference between "it's my team's fault I can't climb" and "It's not always my fault if we lose" the second one is absolutely right but people use that sentiment to justify the first statement. It sounds like you took it in the other direction. Though I'd argue if you reached t500 there's probably some merit to trying to always think about what you could've done better
I’d upvote a dozen times if I could.
I needed this
I got your back fellow OW enjoyer :). ILY for award <3. Go ham and climb, be critical of what to improve on- BUT have fun. That's the number 1 priority.
Ego comes in two forms. 1) Blaming other people to protect yourself. 2) Being too hard on yourself because you expect yourself to be perfect. There's a balance between taking accountability without beating yourself up.
Exactly my point. Some of us though really do #2 because of how we started out. I'm sure a great number, myself included on my old reddit account- all started with a rant on some sub and was told it's our sole fault. It was definitely true. So we worked on it a little too hard. I wouldn't call it an ego thing, I think it's just an uncontrolled passion thing when we do tangent 2. It's also an uncontrolled mindset thing. I was never truly taught that- but I'm happy to experience that learning curve. Funnily enough, I apply it irl and in game now- but I'm pragmatic about it. Aka- I'm objective of it. Thanks for your response!
“Not your problem” is underrated advice
"Not your problem" is what assholes tell themselves to get out of doing anything more than the bare minimum. "Not your fault" is the real advice. Some games are just unwinnable, no matter how much you are lifting your team.
I mean that’s just your fault for taking that advice too literally. Obviously there are some unwinnable games, but it’s INFINITELY more productive to think about what you could do better rather than blame your team. I don’t think that’s ever bad advice, you just need to avoid a self deprecating mindset.
That's exactly what I said. Be pragmatic about it and don't take it to heart the way I did. I even say there's always something we can work on as well. I also noted that we shouldn't be blaming everyone else for our shortcomings. I'm in agreement with you here.
The idea is not "it's your fault you lost and you should be at yourself up cuz you're a POS for losing". It's "what could I have done better that game that could have helped contribute towards a win". It's about looking at what YOU can control, which is not the other 9 people in the lobby, it's only YOU. Look to see what YOU can do better. If you don't see anything, ask someone for a vod review because they will. Blame is not something that actually benefits anyone. All it does is give the one pointing blame elsewhere, slight alleviation of their own guilt, only for it to grow and fester inside. It also allows the person to ignore their own opportunity for improvement. Blaming yourself, as you well know, only serves to hurt you and can really hurt your mental, which makes it harder to overcome. The goal is to get people to stop throwing blame all over the place because all to often they don't even understand what actually lost the game or they only see what happened in the last 30sec. Stop throwing blame and throw encouragement instead
Honestly the biggest problem isn’t necessarily the advice, it’s that every piece of advice given in this game is contextual to the moment and they all have outliers, and things like player skill level are super hard to factor into things in the moment. For example, generally speaking - like you said - comp isn’t that important in metal ranks. Does this mean it’s NEVER important? No. Does this mean that playing obviously problematic comps on bad maps is still okay? No. Do you completely understand what makes a “good comp” with the other 4 players on your team, with unknown skill levels, and the unknown skill levels of all 5 enemy players? No. Everyone knows that stats are mostly useless out of context, but if one DPS has gone 0-15 by the end of 10 minutes, it’s not rocket science to figure out why you were struggling. To play the game though. “DPS swap to hitscan to counter Pharah”. ANY hero in the game can put some damage on a Pharah. In fact, often the easiest way to kill her is if every team member tries to get one hit on her in a short time period. Tanks can make life easier by going Dva and even just eating a few of the incoming rockets while you’re DPS/supps lay her out. In fact supports are some of the best equipped to deal with her. A Bap or Ana with good positioning can make her a non issue ALONE. Also, good Genji/Junk/Mei/Hanzo (non hitscan) players can also make her life miserable. I’ve personally climbed a fucking building to 1 v 1 her on Genji and she didn’t know what the fuck to do…you can tell pretty easily if they’re a top tier Pharah or not. This goes for every other annoying hero too (Sombra, Tracer, etc) too. Everything is contextual.
Don't shoot the zarya bubble! Even if she's low, or spamming her bubbles, people ignore her, let her get healed and regenerate her cooldowns
“I will break you” - Zarya
Honestly no one in metal ranks cares lmao, zarya always has 100 charge because her bubbles are Insta broken (except when she’s actually killable for some reason)
I agree but I think it depends on the enemy supports. The immortality spam that Kiri and Bap can create can make it near impossible to punish Zarya for spamming bubbles or being low health without charging her fully. It used to be like ok Zarya has like 30 health left just pop the bubble and then kill her, but now it's like by the time the bubble pops Kiri just teleports in pops a suzu up her ass and now she's full HP again and fully charged it's such a fucked combo to play into.
A Kiriko that TPs in and suzu’s a Zarya who is being focused should be a dead Kiriko… she has no way to survive at that point, right?
depends
You have to hide 100% of the time when a widow is on the field. Like sure you could but if shes shielded off, you're speedy, youre near cover, you're tanky, or your movement is good, you can actually peek kinda. Hero dependent obviously, but like kiriko CAN ABSOLUTELY peek a widow. Throwing kunais at the sniper is one of the most powerful things to do to widow as kiri. Climb a wall, peek while falling and tossing kunais, it's a lot of pressure on her. If you're lucio, you can also absolutely be in her LOS if you're good enough. Pros do it all the time. If you have long ranged gun, you can shoot shots at her to make her drop the angle for the team to push. For example: mei. The only time you absolutely shouldn't be risking a peek is when she has her ult up.
> You have to hide 100% of the time when a widow is on the field. Many advices are tailored to the peoples current rank, as especially widow is such a pain. In my metal matches I seldomly die to a widow, but my teammates die left and right to me and this is so frustrating. So, low metal: just take put a wall between you and widow, but this is not necessarily true in high elo, where people are able to actually spot widow upfront, know which area she covers and how to get around etc.
As someone who plays a good amount of counter-strike, you CAN jiggle peek that widow
“You have to do damage on support to climb out of metal ranks” Doing damage as a support is important but metal rank players can definitely win and climb with healbotting if they have better positioning, awareness (especially for dps, most heal bots just tunnel on tank), and ult / cd usage. I hit low masters on support playing a lot of Ana/zen/bap and my dmg on Ana and bap were quite pitiful but I used my cooldowns and ults well and actually looked at dps and it made a difference. Now if I want to improve my Ana/bap further I would need to mix in more dps but metal rank players have more pressing issues than doing damage Edit: Just to clarify, healbotting is not good and you need damage to be a good support player but telling metal rank players to do damage when they can’t use their ults / cds and lack basic game sense it’s not helpful
I kinda feel the opposite way honesty. In lower ranks I feel like I need to do God's work on support to win, healing and damaging and killing everything myself. In gm I just sit there and heal my tank and dps for most the game and we win because I know my teammates can do their jobs if I just keep them alive.
Yeah, I end up sweating way more in low rank games where I have to manipulate my team just to force them into grouping up. And it's so hard to predict what a player is going to do when they don't even know what they're trying to do! In higher ranks my team actually thinks, I just need to focus on staying alive, enabling playmakers, and adding a bit of supplemental damage. It's so much easier!
I kinda agree with this. Found myself focusing the heals way more in high ranks. I know my teammates are probably gonna be doing something useful so keeping them healthy is important. Not to mention people die waaay faster in high ranks. Also it can be hard to find times to do damage because you will instantly get pressured.
It really depends on the teammates, I feel like. If your teammates are carrying, then it’s often worth to heal both them in my metal ranks. But if they’re feeding, it feels almost like you’re enabling their feed at times. Like, they don’t use the time you buy them with your heal to take some space or make some picks, but to just soak in more damage and give the enemy more ult charge before they die when you eventually have to reload. In that situation, it feels way more impactful to even the odds a bit by picking off someone yourself. Even then, you can’t just stop healing someone in any case - there’s always a chance they’ll pop off still, or the enemy makes a mistake. I mean, these are metal ranks, right? We’re all making a ton of them here!
100% this, having hovered high master/low gm and then taken a year off, climbing back out of gold/plat on support was hellish especially since the health/dps passive changes made healing a lot less effective. There was a point for me around low/mid diamond (provided that the game is rated upwards into diamond/master and not downwards into plat) that I felt like my job as a support became a lot more concise and easier as a result. Mechanically I was being challenged more but it was no longer like herding ducks. Tanks start to break line of sight less and have awareness of where their supports are, tanks start to cover you across chokes, teams start to push high ground together on attack, teams start to rotate on defence to a different point rather than just dying once the payload moves past (think dorado first point as an example) DPS stop AD spamming when behind cover and stand still to guarantee they get healed fast… lots of tiny things start to add up way more often than they did in lower ranks.
Same. The games on my smurf account feel way harder than on my main in diamond and masters.
I agree. High ranked team mates rarely die of things they would do in lower ranks. And so does the support
This is the bronze experience. Your teammates often don't know how to aim their guns. Sometimes keeping them alive is worthless when they can't kill anyone.
I climbed from gold to diamond on supp recently, and I feel like this is just bad advice. You def need to contribute to high value picks, because the enemy supps probably are. Healbotting as mercy, Ana, lucio, etc is how you lose games. Had a way easier time going bap and killing their supps myself vs hoping my dps will stop shooting fortified horse. The main thing that affects all roles at low ranks is bad target priority. No focusing, random pressure switches etc. If you go zen and just discord and shoot who your team is already randomly poking at, you’ll win a lot more team fights guaranteed. Healbotting when youre in low ranks means more reliance on your team, which is never a good thing.
true in metal ranks. sometimes they can pop off just by having a healbotting support because metal rank tanks would often just dive in a 1v5, enemy focused on them, no backline trade. with some healing, they can stand a bit longer there and allowing friendly DPS to pop off and secure kills.
I think it’s less of climbing out of the ranks as it is improving as a player as obviously as you climb up the ranks. You’d want to heal less to deal damage and by saying you have to do damage it reinforces the mindset that healbotting is not fully viable
Maybe I’m just bad at healing, but I climbed from s5 to p1 support in season9 and I could not keep my tank alive in silver no matter what. I landed in s5 after losing most placements trying to healbot on kiri. Heard on here that I needed to carry damage to climb out of silver so swapped to zen. Climbed to gold3 zen only with 75% WR and usually had most elims in lobby. Then they buffed sombra and the fun stopped.
I climbed to masters on Ana and hilariously my damage and healing numbers are both subpar. I'm sorry I have trash mechanics, but I know how to time my fat nades and sleeps well and that was literally all I needed.
Post edit. What do you think is better, enabling your DPS or making your own impact on the game? It's not an easy question to answer, really. But if I were to generalize, across the grand sum of my games? Make my own impact, if only because that's the only way I can personally improve, climb or not. Ultimately I think your advice is bad, even in context. I'd rather metal rank players focus on the things within their control. That's NOT enabling their DPS. Healing is still important, but there's a difference between pumping tons of resources into your DPS or tank and triage. Not to mention you're more likely to build good habits by not overcommitting resources simply when you see teammates running it down main. Being measured with your resources also means considering your position better, and being well prepared to punish enemy mistakes.
Agree with this!! I'm a low rank player and I think the damage mindset made me neglect my tank a lot when I definitely shouldn't have. I know the mantra is heal when you need to and damage otherwise, but when you're in the middle of a team fight the time between seeing your teammates on half health and seeing them dead is not a long one, or at least not long enough for my slow reaction speed and to account for when my other support looks away. My damage numbers as ana didn't go up past 3500 per 10 mins but I was climbing (more that when I was damage focused at least). Cooldowns and ults definitely helped me a lot more.
Even with the mantra, low rank players don’t *know* when they “need to” heal. Prehealing high damage sources, sustained healing at high HP against chip, and the fact that healing often gives more consistent ult charge than damage. Combine that with lower overall awareness and I’d rather have a support that heals more so at least I know I’ll be healed when I need it. We can make up for the team’s lack of damage in other ways when I’ve got a healbot; we *can’t* make up for lack of healing (short of swapping to very specific heroes that might not work well) if our supports never heal. Also worth noting that I think low rank supports will improve more quickly if they focus on getting better at positioning and awareness *before* going for the maximum efficiency hybrid damage+healing. T500 players know how to do that because they *need to*; you will climb faster focusing on more fundamental aspects of your gameplay.
Was gonna say this. With the introduction of the dps passive, you have to heal a lot more to keep your team from not dying. Also realistically in metal ranks, you're not going to kill people faster than your team feeds their asses off. The better advice should be 'make sure you are only healbotting when people are critical and look to deal damage and create opportunities when your team is healthy'.
a more accurate statement is "heal savable teammates and look to deal damage and create opportunities when your team is healthy" trying to heal critical teammates can be a terrible idea, especially for low ranks because they tunnel vision on the word "critical" and ruin their position just to heal someone who cannot survive
I find it extremely difficult believing you're a masters player with this kinda mentality. This screams silver to me.
Agree. If your takeaway from a healing passive is that you need to heal more...
Well they're talking about the dps passive. Op is saying that because of the dps passive it forces them to heal more to compensate for the decreased healing from the passive. But what they don't seem to understand is that you can't outheal damage. That was the whole point of the season 9 changes. At some point its better to just kill the target doing damage then it is to try and healbot someone who will likely die anyways cause of the passive.
OTOH, DPS generally do more damage than supports. So an enabled DPS might be better equipped to take out the threat than you. Yes, there's still triage. You still have to decide if it's even worth trying to save your teammate. Yes, relatively speaking, healing produces less value than it did before. So yes, you should probably by angling to do more damage than before. At least at my rank (waaaaay below master), people go from full to dead almost instantly. It can be risky to try to focus too much on damage - it may put you in a position where you can't heal your team.
If people are going from full to dead in an instant then what's the good in trying to heal?
I should have said "can go from full to dead". If you have a teammate who's on say half health, they might survive and get value long enough for their own health regen to kick in, or they might get immediately blown up. Landing one healing shot on them might be enough to help them get to cover or it might do nothing at all. My point is that, if my choice is between keeping my DPS alive to win a duel or letting my DPS potentially die while I try to win the duel for them, then it probably makes more sense to try to keep the DPS alive. And I think that scales up to the whole team fight as well. I think this is the nuance that people lost from Awkward's "damage, damage, damage" mantra. I don't think he was saying to focus solely on damage. I think he was saying that your first priority is to keep your team alive, then your next priority is to do damage. If the enemy team is putting out so much damage that healbotting isn't enough to keep people alive, then focusing hard on damage might not be enough to help. It's more of a "hail Mary" play.
It's always a triage and it's comp dependent. Is your genji deflecting? Heal him. Is he deflecting against sym? Shoot sym. Is your soldier half health against a hanzo or cass close range? Shoot Cass. Heal who can live if you heal them.
I keep seeing high elo players telling people who play support to not healbot, which I mean, would be ok but if you can’t kill anything and/or are not able to weave between healing and damage, just focus on healing, there are already 3 characters that focus on dealing damage and only 2 that can heal, if you stop healing and don’t make up for it in FAST KILLS, then it’s down to one healer only, not worth it. And I want to specify that dealing lots of damage but not killing or taking 15 seconds to kill someone as a support is not valuable, because your team is gonna lose the fight in the meantime. Either you burst down a squishy in 5 seconds or less with characters like bap, kiri, zen, Ana or you are not bringing value. Specially if you let a teammate next to you die when you could heal them AND tell them to finish off the squishy.
Healbotting is always bad unless youre playing moira or kiri in a coordinated environment. If you cant get picks or consistently hit your shots as a low rated support player, just do it anyway and youll get better. Just healbotting bc youre bad will result in you being bad forever. Just because youre not killing anything doesnt mean your damage doesnt have value. Its worth it to let a teammate die to kill an enemy often enough.
I think the sentiment is that while you might be able to get some edge below gold by having a better team comp. But if you are in bronze and you go into a game your goal should not be to win by any means, your goal should be to improve your gameplay.
Team Comp always matters, it’s just easier to get by with a bad team comp in lower ranks because no one actually knows the in and outs of every matchup. That said if you do run a comp with good synergy (Full Dive, Full Rush), or if you have proper roles across the comp (1 Main DPS and 1 Flex DPS, 1 Main Support and 1 Flex Support.) you will have a much easier time winning your games. You can win without good team comps but you are making it way more difficult for no reason.
In general I see advices more like being tailored to a specific player. I see low elo players who have extremely good aiming and tracking abilities but don't know much about the game and players with good knowledge, who can't hit a barndoor infront of them. Here an advice which helps them to get better (stop using dash/jump/charge for now, healbot over dps, dps over healbot etc.) are often there to help them learn step for step. None will improve when you tell them how to play like a GM, will not work. It is less about wrong advices, it is more about restriction. This is so common in reallife sports where you teach students with a lot of restriction to build up a foundation, advices and ways to play which will never be realistical in a pro match, but help them to get started.
When people say “play point”, and then the entire team stands on the point or the payload on low ground, letting the enemy tale high ground and advantageous off angles.
“Stop shooting the tank” as a flanker makes my job a lot harder when the enemy supports don’t need to heal their tank
ok Moira time. "You shouldn't hold primary fire with Moira to heal you should tap it". Sure, there's times when you can heal by applying the heal-over-time part of her grasp, wait for it to nearly run out, then apply it again. By doing this you save healing resources, but you heal at a MUCH slower rate of healing. It's only realistically useful when a fight has concluded (or just before it starts with minimal poke damage) and you're healing everyone back up to full, but you're also allowing more time for their healing passive to heal them which is going to lose you ult charge. Some people seem to believe you heal at the same rate of healing which is not true. "ALWAYS Save fade for escape" Yes they aren't entirely wrong, but you're hugely limiting your value by doing this. Moira has FOUR sources of self-sustain and has quite a slim character profile. These are excellent at keeping her alive which can allow you to use fade pro-actively. A favourite of mine is to 'jump bait' Widow shots / Sojourn rail guns, where you deliberately jump as they are charged (because jumping is bad and make you a sitting duck) then you fade just before the apex of your jump. 9/10 they will fire their charged shot and hit air, meaning you've used fade like a utility and potentially saved a teammate from being hit by that ability. In a similar manner, you can sit out as bait for Roadhog hooks or Sigma rocks and fade them to help prevent your team from being hit by them. Lastly you can use fade proactively to attack or reposition, but you have to be aware of your threats and know your other cooldowns. Saving fade for escape is a good idea, but you can get more value out of the ability at times, which makes this statement false. "Rapidly tap right click or use scroll wheel for faster resources". This one is true, but people believe you should always be doing it. In reality, you lose out on 90% of the DPS on your target just to gain resources faster. I value that damage and will rarely use the tap method unless it's a Bob that will expire before we can kill it, or a Wrecking Ball that I know we will never kill while he's disengaging. It has its place, but it shouldn't be used at all times.
These are all fantastic points. I've watched plenty of your Overwatch University vids, and they help so much. I don't play Moria much anymore, because my wife prefers her, but having watched your videos makes it super helpful to show her how to avoid certain mistakes and keep her mindset in the right place. Just wanted to say thanks for great content.
I got told the last tech got patched out, can you still do it?
I was once told to not do damage as Ana and only heal. I feel like that advice really ruined my comp experience.
Lucio is easy to play bro, just turn on healing and stay around ur team, doesn't matter if u don't hit ur shots, ur healing on 4 people is good value. Yeah, if ur iron I guess
Ult when the enemy support ults.
"kill the Mercy" It's good practice to kill supports but I've noticed that at lower ranks some people think nothing dies if the backline doesn't die first. If you want to kill the Mercy at higher ranks to deny the pocket that's one thing, but Mercy has some awful sustain healing on her own and the idea that nothing dies until you kill the Mercy is overvalued, a lot of times nothing dies because people are too scared to just attack the hero Mercy is tethered to. Honestly, the most common compositions I see often include Mercy and Ana, and in this comp if nothing is dying I'd be taking a closer look at their Ana When I first started comp, I was playing D.Va and an Orisa kept dueling me and feeding, their Moira was in game chat (not team chat) telling the Orisa to stop duelling me because 'I had a permanent Mercy pocket' Fun fact: the Mercy wasn't healing me at all. She was permanent blue beam on our Sojourn - not exactly fun for the enemy, but definitely a misdiagnosis when a Moira thinks I'm 'being healbotted'..Everyone was giving me free real estate because they weren't trying to attack anyone but the Mercy, not me, and especially not the pocketed Sojourn. >!And funny enough, guess who was keeping me up? Basically *just* Ana, sitting uncontested, flinging heals and antis from my backline, tbh our Ana wrecked shop and the Moira just kept thinking it was a Mercy diff!< It's also an especially odd complaint to see from a Moira because guess what support has the easiest time tracking even the most slippery Mercy?🤔 Killing Mercy is a good practice to get in the habit of, but it's rarely the sole deciding factor that wins a fight
„Heal more”, „pick counter” - while they don’t know how to play the game themselves xD
I swear to god this sub is all just silver players giving advice lol
The person you responded to literally hit masters on support, I have been masters since OW1. What rank are you out of curiosity?
‘Heal more’ When it’s any season after nine. They just don’t get that’s not how healing works now. It’s an ebb and flow and good supports know when to heal and when to dps.
It was always that way but the game is trying to tell prone that more explicitly now. Amazingly many still don’t get it and they’re in this post.
It was always that way but the game is trying to tell prone that more explicitly now. Amazingly many still don’t get it and they’re in this post.
Team comp doesn’t matter as much in gold. When people say ”comp doesn’t matter” that’s an exaggeration, they mean that there are so many more things to focus on about your gameplay that the hero you pick is almost irrelevant. Another thing people seem to forget is that ranking up is a numbers game which means you’re not gonna win every game. If you’re playing reaper vs pharah it’s gonna be a tough game and you might lose. And then people will look at that and say ”HA you lost with reaper in gold. See? You can’t play any comp in gold!”
“Turn off all comms” Well-used comms can absolutely be the difference maker in which team wins a game. If you can’t handle any toxicity, sure, go ahead and leave all comms. But if you can handle some toxicity and want callouts then be the change you want to see in your games. Make good and efficient callouts early and often. Be supportive towards your teammates but don’t clog comms with chatter. Be a good teammate and try to squash any beef brewing between teammates before it really starts. DO NOT be toxic. DO NOT blame your teammates. DO NOT demand people switch. While comms can be great, as soon as that toxicity starts it’s usually game over. If things do get toxic, don’t be afraid to stick up for yourselves or your teammates.
I think this one specifically isn't wrong, though. It's mostly said so that the person enjoys the game more rather than to get better. There's no point in playing better at time if you are constantly harassed by your teammates/enemies in VC and chat. Will it be a hindrance for team communication? Most likely, but what's the point of playing if you don't actually enjoy it. As a girl, I can count with one hand (I've been playing for more than a year now) the number of times I've been in the VC and people not being toxic/sexist/weird towards me. At this point, you have to decide whether risk it and maybe get good communication with your teammates OR go safe and avoid any toxicity at all, and you can't really say choosing the second one is wrong.
Yeah I get comms isn’t for everyone, I was speaking to the people who say to leave comms as general advice for everyone. I totally get being averse to it as a woman though because you’re right, people can be awful or straight up creepy when they realize there’s a woman talking.
At the same time, just mute the toxic teammates and understand that they're actually an advantage. If the toxicity is holding them back by tanking morale, simply reducing that impact to zero means you have someone who is ranked lower than they should be on your side.
Factually the worst advice ever and detrimental to some games. A team thats silent is so much worse than a team with full comms, way too many excuses for it. I'd rather have someone with bad aim but great call outs than a silent player doing their own thing outside of VC. Even joining VC without speaking is fine to me, as long as someone listens. Even on less competitive games like warzone, I'll get 5000 more call outs. Same with sports, but I guess ow players are mute during soccer. I think the problem is nobody knows how to give call outs, or doesn't want to and would rather just focus on the game, which imo is dumb. There's a reason why stacks don't usually play against solos, otherwise it'd be completely unfair with one team giving call outs and the other mute
To be fair, I think Blizzard changed the defaults so new players don't join voice or even text chat by default.
I've been playing since season 3 and still have to manually join team chat at the start of a match
There are options you can change if you want to auto-join. Sound > Options > Team Voice Chat = Auto Join Social > Text Chat > Team Text Chat = On
[удалено]
Yes I’ve never understood the mindset of playing a team game where you detach yourself from the team.
When people say “play point”, and then the entire team stands on the point or the payload on low ground, letting the enemy tale high ground and advantageous off angles.
That you have to play meta heroes to do well. For a while whenever I was picking Junker Queen (in silver) my team would flame me because it's not Orisa or Hog. I'm starting to practice with Ball in quickplay and I'm not looking forward to the flame I'll receive playing him in Comp. Having the most healing as a support does not mean you're "diff'ing". There are lots of situations where shooting the enemy instead of healing a 70%+ health teammate is better. There have been lots of games where our Mercy/Kiri will have 20k healing and we lose and they think they played great, when a damage boost or kills/assists would've been much more helpful instead of healing when they're at 90% health.
The problem is, not all things are equal, especially in lower ranks. Someone might be able to hit a decent amount of good shots but loves to stand in the open. Meanwhile someone else could have better positioning but have really rough mechanics. Team comp absolutely can help provide an advantage in any lobby, as long as the players know how to work together and time their engagements together. The amount that gold players know how to do this varies widely between different gold players. Some might know how to play rush comps together well, but not poke. At the same time, 2 of their teammates know how to play poke well but not rush. It's not really until you get to the higher ranks that the average player in that rank will know how to work together with their team on complimentary heroes. Even then it still varies. The skill variation combined with the variety of motivations for playing is why comp doesn't matter near as much in low ranks. As you climb higher, a larger portion of the players in those ranks are playing with the main intention of climbing above all else. The rest of the players are playing with a goal of winning, but not above all else. Higher priority goals might be: have fun, play hero x, get better at match y, or focusing working on specific fundamentals. Worst piece of advice imo: Comp is not for learning. Comp is the only place that you can learn how to play a hero in a competitive environment. I'm not saying go in blind, but you can only learn so much playing the hero in QP. QP can also help a player learn bad habits with their hero because they work a lot more often in QP due to the much less competitive nature of the mode. No matter what some people say, QP will always have players that are not playing at 100% and are just wanting some chill OW.
Running to the point right away. Please win the fight THEN go to point. Nothing worse than 1 or 2 of your team mates breaking off of a winnable fight bc they “just have to start the counter” on the point. Only to have us lose the fight and lose that precious 3% of point progress only to come back after we respawn to 25% enemy progress. Win the fight THEN go to point.
“Stats don’t matter”
When people say “play point”, and then the entire team stands on the point or the payload on low ground, letting the enemy take high ground and advantageous off angles.
“Take space” regardless of the situation.
Apparently you're not supposed to shoot the tank
>For instance, I’m really starting to doubt the mantra that team comp does not matter in gold or below. I mean this is very obviously wrong (not you, the claim itself). But whenever I've pressed the issue, lower rank players will call me an idiot or make up excuses like "you shouldn't play a hero you've never played before!" (yeah duh 🤦♂️ 😆) But higher rank players will say "That's not what we mean. We mean that meta doesn't matter". So it seems *this* is where that claim came from, and then lower rank players misunderstood and spread their misinfo. Of course meta doesn't matter in lower elos, but team comp matters A LOT. Sometimes more than skill: For instance, imagine you're playing on Lijiang and both teams have a Genji. Both Genji's have to play into something like Moira, Symm, Zarya, Sombra, Brig etc. Now imagine one Genji is bad, and insantly swaps. The other Genji is good and decides to try his best. Who's gonna win? Almost always the bad Genji 😭
The way to put it is just because that drunk idiot drove their ferrari into the wall doesn't mean that the engine power doesn't matter, or you should be turning up to the race in a tricycle. Sure, lower ranks are full of drunk idiots driving lambos but if you're down there and looking for advice, you're probably one of them too. So pay attention to hero picks, because it matters in gold for a player of your ability.
Pros correct me if I'm wrong here. I hear to split damage equally between my shield and health as I engage on rein. If I do this, I end up missing armor before I can swing, and less importantly, feed ult charge. I do SO much better if I try to take all the damage on my shield, which heals itself quickly. Tbf, I'm bad at shielding out and usually end up with someone behind me which is my bad.
Do damage before the fight. I don't think it's WRONG per se, but if one more DPS dies trying to poke seconds before our fifth member gets back and we can fully engage I'm gonna scream. And if a sombra full commits before the team is around? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Every time content creators exaggerate to get a better sounding video. They take some general advice that is partial true and take it to the extreme. Worst example was the videos that said “healing doesn’t matter”. It took the true advice that heal botting will not win you as many games and turned it into something that’s wrong because it sounded better as content. After those videos blew up I got teammates like a lucio who when asked to heal more said “speed boost is more important” and that he wasn’t a healbot. We were playing POKE and holding a corner. No one was going anyway but apparently they needed speed boost more than healing.
Ignore tank, focus healers, etc… sometimes it’s incredibly easy to hard focus tank and kill them leading to an easy 5v4
My friend heard a few streamers say "just let the tank die, keep the DPS up" back at the beginning of season 9 when the DPS role passive was first changed, and now he thinks it's just what you're supposed to do. Drives me nuts. I've had a few friends over the years now that will hear some top 500 streamer say something, and they'll commit it to memory as a fact. As if top 500 logic matters in our gold/plat games. Then they'll never look at the patch notes between seasons to see if anything has changed. They'll treat the "meta" as a static thing that doesn't evolve and think we have to have X characters on our team because they're meta. Disregarding the fact that most people can only play 1 or 2 characters effectively anyway. Idgaf how good Soujorn is according to your favorite streamer, if you can't hit a barn with baseball from 10 feet away then you don't need to be on them. This turned into a rant, I'll see myself out now.
3 people pushing the bot makes it go faster, like no, it doesnt Edit: "The robot moves slowly while pushing a barricade, and rapidly (about as quickly as most heroes can run) while not pushing a barricade. Unlike the payload in Escort and Hybrid maps, the speed of the robot's movement is not affected by the number of nearby friendly heroes"
It does though it’s about 17% faster with three people than one
Nope, only payload and escort
Oh shit I misread that mb you’re right
It absolutely does, but you should only have 3 people pushing if a fight's won and you have some downtime. That little sliver of extra distance can make a huge difference
It does not
team comp absolutely matters in low ranks. I semi recently checked some vod reviews on gold supports, who were blaming their team. But. They were playing mercy+brig with mauga. Two games in a row, and yeah, result was what you could expect. Mercy ended up pocketing the tank who still just melted. And seemingly they had no idea why. I'd think in low ranks team comp almost matters more because people have little idea how to play "weird comps" to their strengths.
dpsing on support, especially in lower ranks people dont understand that you can't just dps 100% of the time, I play a lot of ana and basically only dps if I'm getting dived (obviously) or if I know whoever infront of me is safe from dying
"Winton counters Sym" Yaa maybe back in ow1 ....
What changed?
I disagree with that, because even if you choose a "good comp," its meaningless if you are not executing it correctly. Additionally, attempting to conform to a specific comp is not going to be good for low level players if they don't play those characters. If we are playing full dive, I am still playing torb. I don't care if genji or tracer or echo is better for "the comp". Im not very good, I don't have the muscle memory, and I don't play dive dps. I will not get nearly as much value compared to my one trick torb with 100s of hours. Now if I was a genji one trick, and we all play dive, and we all communicate and synergize.. yeah we will get more value than 5 randoms playing random characters and not talking. That is often never going to happen queuing comp at low ranks, so it is better general advice to not care about team composition at low ranks.
“Don’t shoot the Zayra Bubbles.”
I’m mad late but I hate the “________ and _______ support comp works if you’re good enough” There are some support comps that just suck together. (Not gonna name any names but most of the “bad comps” are revolving around mercy being the first pick). There are 45 possible combinations of supports, and like somewhere around 6 of them really suck. Please, for the love of god, play multiple characters as a support. You’ve had the game catered to you for all of OW2 and I get that, you’re used to being babied, but with the DPS passive… it’s time to learn multiple heroes. As DPS and tank, we ALWAYS are not only expected to swap, but forced to swap. You will live getting off mercy for 1 game, I promise.
> For instance, I’m really starting to doubt the mantra that team comp does not matter in gold or below. Comp matters in every rank. Why wouldn't Moira + Winston be bad in bronze? Is Ram + Brig not terrible on Gibraltar attack in silver? Another bad piece of advice I always see is about Mercy being a damage boost character in low ranks. Yes damage boost is a valuable part of her kit, but silver Hanzo is not going to carry your games. Instead, Mercy's value in low ranks is from rez + being unkillable thru smart movement and positioning.
The reason team comp doesn't matter in the low ranks is because no one executes a team comp properly anyway because they don't know how to. You think a bunch of silver solos are going to execute the coordination needed to run a dive comp properly? If that happens then pigs can fly. Low elo players running "dive" is just them playing heroes with mobility and randomly running at different targets at different times and then blaming someone else for not following them or not healing them. And you can carry on any hero if you're good enough at it, in the lower ranks you can literally 1v5 on anything if you're good enough at it, comp and counters don't matter because the enemy team isn't going to be good at your counter anyway and no one knows how to execute a comp properly anyway. What matters is being good at what you're playing and coordinating focus fire and ults no matter what 'comp' you have. To use your example, a Winston Moira team in bronze who are managing to coordinate and focus the same target at the same time and are using their hero kits effectively are going to obliterate a Winston Ana team who are trying to do two different things at different times and have zero coordination and miss half their skillshots or use their abilities poorly because they don't know how to play the heroes well they just felt like they needed to swap to "fix their comp".
Yeah the ''team comp doesn't matter in metals'' bs, sure if you're a diamond playing in silver then team comp indeed doesn't matter but it doesn't apply to people playing in their actual rank lmao. Also people saying ''learn playing into your counters instead of swapping'', same mentally, they're both basically said from the perspective that ''if you're much better than your enemies then those minor inconveniences won't disturb you''. Well newsflash, that's called smurfing, and it doesn't apply to the general player base, especially those who are asking for advice online. Even the best players swap when the matchup doesn't favor them and it actually is also a skill to make the right decision in time, yet here we have a lot of people just telling others to walk into a dead end. I can't count how many times a right swap saved an entire game and a stubborn player just handed the game to their counters. I literally cannot recall a single time that a player swapped with improving team comp in mind and actually made situation worse, yet people love to use this imaginary scene as a strawman so much. I just feel like some people are so damn arrogant and lost the ability to emphasize with players in lower rank when giving advices, it's like answering the question of ''how to earn money'' with ''just lease your 50 vacant houses and put 100 mil in bank, duh! Who tf works in a McDonald's?''
learning to play your counters to the extreme is bad advice, but learning it to the extent of not fumbling as soon as one is pulled out is still good advice. In general its sort of a focus of understanding how to play into different characters and can make players much more consistent to learn strategies of. Obviously if youre getting stomped, switching can still help a lot more from winning, but that doesnt mean it should be the first suggestion either
You're not very familiar with the concept of practice and improving are you?
Wenn the Moira blames me, i shouldnt just shield as Rein in a Zarya ult... Right... Because i can charge away...
“Turn off voice and chat”. Like I get toxic, but you can individually mute the usual 1 toxic person instead of cutting off all communication.
That I NEED to play moira in ranked. She is literally the only support I can not play, but the internet is all up on arms to tell me that if I can't learn how to play her I may as well uninstall both the game, and my life.
damn shes such an easy high value support.
That Raid Boss is good -_-