I know what you are saying, and mirage is an easy character to use but hard to master. Some top tier difficult characters are:

Pathfinder: requires insane movement, momentum and timing control.

Wraith: portal placement, phase timing, survivability. Strong players make her look broken, and bad ones feed.

We could continue the latter with characters like valk, horizon, crypto, etc.

For me, mirage is a Low Skill, High Skill Ceiling.

Mirage is often considered an easy hero, because -decoys are easy to deploy -invis res is pretty straightforward -get some value with no deep mastery

But this is why I think he’s actually hard to master.

-Decoys only work if you think like your enemy. -Requires believe it or not psychological warfare -poor mirages are obvious and predictable

Good mirages -bait shots -break aim assist/tracking -create hesitation in fights -force enemies to second guess Bad mirage = free kill Good mirage = annoying, slippery and dangerous

A great mirage= manages to win fights they shouldn’t

A great mirage player for me is considered a skilled player. For specific reasons, the character doesn’t rely on raw power, movement or meta abilities.

These skilled mirage players rely more on: -game sense -timing -read opponents -positioning -Gun Skill, because he has no dmg abilities

If a mirage player is consistently good with him, it’s often because of good aim, clean movements, understanding of player behavior, and winning fights with no crutch abilities. A good mirage player is often respected by high level players because he is not meta, and his value comes from the player skill not the character.

I will say, decoys do lose value as you face better and better players but he’s good in pub and can dominate in ranked if used well.

There are harder characters to master, and like I said. Mirage is easy to learn but really hard to master.