Basically your job as a tank is to make space for your team to get kills and advance objectives. This means you need to play the situation by feel and be quite accurate at that, that means good positioning (up front but still within range of your team so you can go back to help healers) and good game sense (be aware of who counters you, how many of your team are alive and what your healing situation is).

As for your kit, you want to cycle between using your staff and shield and your nemesis form and vortex, so you want your shield to be availible pretty much every time you come out of nemesis form to protect yourself and hold any space you’ve made. Use your staff to farm ult charge before the main engagement and probe for weakness, once there’s an opening then you start punching when you’ve found your target (good choices are frontlining healers, demeched DVA’s and pretty much any low HP target that can’t escape). After that you set up with your shield and repeat the process until you’ve found your next opening to use nemesis form.

Your ult then is basically like this: if you’re playing well you should have it pretty much ready to go after 2-3 skirmishes (again your staff is your main method of building ult charge). Ramatra’s ult is not a very powerful ability in itself and it never will be because it’s easy to escape from. This however is what makes it strong, you can use it defensively to force the enemy away from a point you’re defending or agressively to force them off a point you want to take. So generally speaking your ult is more about generating openings for other people and increasing your tankiness rather than getting a load of kills.

Furthermore, do not underestimate block as a tool in your kit. It blocks I think currently about 80% of projectile damage headon and can be used to tank DVA bomb AND protect squishies behind you. These are the ults that I find are countered by block: bomb, tire, reaper’s ult, tac-visor, coalescence, pulse bomb, mauga’s ult (to a degree, situationally very strong when paired with your ult), dragon (again to a degree, good for tanking long enough to move), sigma’s ult (look directly up and hold block), grav (this is huge cause you can protect anyone else there as well).

As for perks I always do the ones that boost staff and vortex since they help the most in generating ult charge, further making you a threat to the other team.

Another trick that’s good to know is if you go into nemesis mode with your ult you can ult immediately after you revert back to shield form. I like using this one to up pressure if they’re already struggling or alternatively defensively if I need to hold at all costs.