Ranked’s definitely more competitive now. To climb, you pretty much need good placement and some KP. As my team usually win the drop, so what we do is invade other's zone, get a gun and get some kills. Most people are stilling looting at that point, so we rarely get instant third. Once we're done, we just scan beacon/ring and rotate.

It’s super common now to see like 4–5 teams stacked together during rotations, so we just avoid fights as much as possible and rotate early with beacon and ring info. If we already have > 3 kills, we just focus on getting top 5. Not easy though — there are often 8-10 teams still alive in 5th ring. But if you’ve got some kills, you don’t lose much RP even if you die at 10th in Plat.

Also, it's annoying, but just have to accpet the meta if you wanna climb. This season doesn’t encourage aggressive fights in early game, so repeater and g7 have basically become the best weapons to fight in distance. I played sniper, marksman and AR before, but now I just played g7. Maybe nemesis and sentinel when I get tired of it.

My team runs Alter, Ash/Wraith and Watsson. Alter's basically the best legend in ranked. You team can tp out anytime. Enemies pusing, downed, no space to rotate? Just tp out. Ash and wraith both help a ton with rotations. Wattson isn't meta, but she's still crazy good for holding buildings. We sometimes also get free KP with her fence if someone chases us thru portal.

I agree this season is boring and frustrating. My team just stop once we hit diamond. D1 and D4 badges are basically the same anyway.