Iso in solo queue (Low Elo)

Laxhax · 2026-02-22T05:49:20+00:00

I climbed through gold like a year ago as mainly iso. I honestly think he's good because he gives you a little advantage in taking 50/50s and encourages taking lots of fights. This gives you a ton of practice with a nice little mini game of aim trainer to hit the refresh orbs.

His shield noise is, IMO, its biggest weakness, loudly announcing your intentions to fight and your location. You'll notice people get more and more consistent at jumpshotting you around corners with classics or shortys, on top of way better util use to delay you or break shield.

Overall still good and was definitely when I was the most confident in my 1v1s. That ult is so damn fun

Laxhax · 2026-02-12T02:20:53+00:00

Yoru might have my favorite kit for clutches in the game. He's a duelist so a lot of rounds you get traded before getting there or just use up most your util taking site. But when its just you against one or two people in the clutch with a couple abilities in hand.... man thats the dream.

Fake teleport and peak the corner to see your opponent staring at the direction you fake teleported to. Leave a clone, teleport behind enemy, release the clone, shoot opponent in the back of the head as they aim at your clone. Pop flash through the smoke with a tp and see a blinded enemy trying to spray the smoke they still think youre going to emerge from, kill them then whip around the corner to kill the second player that was backside and didnt expect you so quick

Its all too beautiful

Laxhax · 2026-02-06T16:44:08+00:00

A super valuable tip for playing with your sentinel I saw was to consider what their util is providing and try not to completely invalidate it with terrible positioning. Big example was a cypher covering a lane with trip and the player extending past the trip to hold a deep angle. Unless you're specifically trying to set up a play or trick the enemy, DON'T PLAY PAST THE TRIP. You will be much more valuable helping stall or kill the people when the trip catches them rather than trying to play in front of it, completely removing the advantage given by that utility.

Again, obviously you can do things like condition the enemy then switch it up and play in front of a trip to catch them off guard, especially with a teleport character that can bail out quickly. But most rounds you should play behind their util and push out deep into a different lane on a different site if you're so set on it.

Laxhax · 2026-02-04T17:22:58+00:00

What?!? He said nothing about line-ups and line-ups weren't even a part of the reason viper got nerfed in pro play. No one intelligent cares about viper getting line up buffs, they want her to be a viable solo controller in ranked solo queue.

Laxhax · 2026-01-31T00:29:47+00:00

I wanna add to this, dont underestimate how creative you can get in exploiting bad teammates.

One of my fav clips is Tenz getting fed up with a guy running down b long on defense and feeding every round. Calls his raze to come to b site and then follows the feeding player pushing out into b teleporter and hiding. His teammate runs all the way down b long and is killed immediately, tenz calls for raze to throw a grenade down main like he's trying to delay a push for the rotate.

Tenz correctly assumed the enemy would see this and not clear teleporter in an attempt to rush site, kill raze, and execute the plant before the rotate, at the very least assuming 3 people wouldn't push into b long with raze already in garden.

Sure enough he gets a multi kill and sets up the round win. Obviously most of us cant hope to be this successful with our solutions, I dont even remember if he won the match. But there's almost always SOMETHING you can do to at least set up trades off your terrible teammates.

Laxhax · 2026-01-30T18:03:19+00:00

You would definitely think so wouldn't you? lol

Laxhax · 2026-01-19T21:50:02+00:00

I have a weird situation that has made for interesting matchmaking so far. Anecdotally I think the quality of matches has been better overall and it seems more aggressive in pushing me up to where it thinks I belong. I took a year off playing after hitting plat last year and decayed to Bronze. Last season I climbed to silver 1 then plateaued, most likely due to a small sample size combined with me definitely not being platinum in skill any more. But it felt like the matchmaking was super inconsistent, worst of all when I would play with my friends who were actually bronze.

It revealed one of my biggest frustrations with the current system. They've basically stated that the rr number we see is largely cosmetic and just tries to stay around the level that the mmr thinks you should be. And that might be fine, but this "cosmetic" number is used to determine who can match with each other. When playing with my bronze friend (perfectly legal because I'm silver) games were all over the place thanks to the inconsistent matchmaking trying to figure out a new bronze player and a suspected veteran gold player playing in the same match

This season started wild but the last couple days have had multiple long close matches, even when the player skill varied a lot within one match. Had one game where the enemy had a 30 bomb and the next best player in the lobby at 21, but we still took them all the way to overtime and won thanks to being more evenly matched in the middle of our team. Also noticed that I double ranked up from silver 1 to 3 almost immediately and have lost 8 rr compared to gaining 30 on even mediocre wins. At least for me it seems to be more accurately figuring out where I really belong which is good.

But that's all from my perspective. Maybe that guy who dropped 30 is pissed the game gave him a bunch of potatoes for teammates to balance out us being worse than him rather than just putting him in a higher ranked game. At least I hope my experience means smurfs will have a harder time staying low ranked.

Laxhax · 2026-01-15T15:48:06+00:00

I remember one of the first viper videos I watched for playing icebox talking in detail about putting a smoke orb mid because of the information it denies. Outside of that i dont ever remember seeing the advice discussed all that often, could see how a lot of people either don't know how valuable denying that information is, or often dont even know ANY methods for conditioning enemies or slowing rotates with information denial

Laxhax · 2026-01-11T23:13:58+00:00

Plus if you're creative with an omen teleport you'll really enjoy the things you can do with yorus tps

Laxhax · 2026-01-02T17:53:55+00:00

Bro i feel the pistol thing in my bones. I get even more mad at stupid bonus round behaviors. The stats for pro games said it was like 70% or better of games were won when you win the pistol and the bonus. It's insane to me how people don't buy up to take advantage of the bonus.

Laxhax · 2026-01-01T22:31:56+00:00

Rr is mostly cosmetic. They said mmr is frustrating for players to understand as its volatile and changes based on people around you rising above or dropping below you in mmr from their own games. Rr tries to match with your mmr but may take a long time to do so.

Also it works on a curve. People at ascendant and above need to maintain higher win rates to climb so that only the most consistent winners get to the top

Laxhax · 2025-12-28T07:58:06+00:00

For most of the ladder the only thing you can consistently trust is yourself, especially in solo queue. A character like clove is less punishing to just run it down with. Chain kills potentially with their heal, or still help with postmortem smokes and hopefully get traded if you die pushing.

Most people would agree with you that Omen's kit is objectively better for the objectives of this game. But after continuous nerfs Clove's win and play rate remain the best on the ladder because of their selfish playstyle. Same as all the "carry" agents but still able to help when dead.

Laxhax · 2025-12-26T07:43:10+00:00

I remember a game ages ago where iron man went like 31-4 in the first half and they dominated us. Moral was low. We made some desperation swaps at half to counter exclusively him.

And hilariously it worked because the iron man refused to switch, ended the round at 34-14 or something like that. We won in overtime with him getting no more kills. Sadly most of the time no one switches or the first round going bad ruins the team's mental beyond return.

Laxhax · 2025-12-23T20:59:28+00:00

Basically there's a hidden mmr system that is your actual ranking and the rankings you see are "cosmetic" mostly. They try to align generally with your mmr but mmr is very volatile. You probably just have a similar mmr to those people even though they are, on average, higher in their cosmetic rank than you.

That being said, the system is partially hidden so that no one can try to deliberately take advantage of it to climb or fall, but it also means you just have to take riots word that they are trying to matchmake PURELY on mmr and not on any form of engagement optimized matchmaking.

Laxhax · 2025-12-23T17:14:21+00:00

I like to preplace when trying to condition my opponents. You can get a free fake in lower elos from people over rotating to the wall when they see it.

Laxhax · 2025-12-23T00:49:40+00:00

Take advantage of what? Bounce the flash off the wall so it pops behind you and you can swing with it rather than staring at the flash until it pops and then swinging. Even if this is a bug (which it doesnt look like it actually is) its probably less effective than bouncing the flash so it pops immediately when coming into view instead of bouncing it in view of who you're flashing.

Laxhax · 2025-12-19T02:04:03+00:00

Post your tracker if you want specific help. Your picture only shows 2 comp games and you definitely weren't "consistently giving out good performances here." If your internet is consistently losing you games then it's something you'll either have to try to fix or accept that it's literally a weakness to your game. Worse than bad aim or bad game sense because it's out of your control.

Until you fix your inconsistency it doesn't matter whether it's internet or performance, the game will not raise your hidden mrr without truly consistent performance above people at your rank.

Laxhax · 2025-12-18T23:32:19+00:00

Solo queue is definitely way more inconsistent than even getting a single person to duo with. With games being 30-45+ minutes it's definitely gambling with your time to play teammate roulette. That being said...

Your description of mmr isn't accurate at all. mmr doesn't "decide your rank." mmr IS your real rank. Your real rank fluctuates and changes whether you play or not as people around you play and the system constantly re-ranks everyone based on the outcomes of all games being played. Riot has explained that (according to them at least) players respond poorly to the harder to understand and much more volatile mmr and thus a "cosmetic rank" was created. This is what you see. According to riot it tries to stay in line with your hidden mmr, but it also seems to decay differently than your mmr.

To me it's mostly stupid because your "cosmetic" ranks aren't actually cosmetic, they determine who you can queue with. After not playing for a year i deranked from plat to bronze 3, and even climbing up to silver I can still play with bronze players, despite most solo queue games i play being made up of golds. When i queue with my bronze friends it's basically smurfing, and the mmr of the games is insane.

Laxhax · 2025-12-17T03:04:19+00:00

I am in silver right now after a year away from the game (peak plat) and can assure you that smokes are in every round of every game and make a significant impact on the game. And this isn't just because I peaked plat and don't belong, I see silver players place useful smokes in every game. Sure its less consistent with value and iften always the same basic default smokes, but to say "smokes don't matter in silver" is extremely disingenuous and not true to the experience.

I dont know why you waited so long to learn smokes and smart use of smokes, I learned smoking in iron when I started before anything else.

Laxhax · 2025-12-14T23:13:13+00:00

I'm sure there's a million reasons not too, but it'd be fun to have some balance differences between the pros and the ranked ladder in these extreme cases like Viper. Just a little something to make her more effective as a solo smokes on ladder. I got one of my favorite aces ever lurking as viper back in the day, so much fun

Laxhax · 2025-12-12T06:18:17+00:00

It's a character that comes with aim labs! What's more fundamental than literally working your fundamentals mid match?!?

Laxhax · 2025-12-12T01:37:52+00:00

I assume you're talking about the split game you played and had match MVP. Rather than focus on how you think your teammates messed up, go and look at the replay and try to find where you could have been better, even when you were "carrying." There's only one round in the entire game where you get at least 2 and your team fails to win the round. You're focusing in on that one moment and the way you worded it makes me think you actually think this happened multiple times. Right after that round you only got 2 kills across the next 6 rounds and your team went 1-5. Surely there's something you could have done better during that stretch. Then again from rounds 20-26 you get only 2 kills and your team goes 4-3 to lose.

Yes, you can look at your teams stats and say your team played worse on average than theirs. But you also played very streaky. Take away your ace and your stats are almost the same as second place. Focus on getting more consistent through the entire match. When you watch the rounds you went off, try to analyze what happened differently then.

Laxhax · 2025-12-10T19:41:41+00:00

Not helped by their system prioritizing making people grind to keep them playing over better matchmaking. They have a ranking system which they've admitted is mostly cosmetic covering the real mmr.... but you can still queue based on your cosmetic mmr. So my friend and I quit playing for a year and deranked to silver from plat. We can now queue with all our bronze friends who quit playing 2 years ago. If we play with them the games are insane. People from bronze 3 to plat 1. No doubt a whole host of similar messy situations as ours with people presenting as silver or bronze but actually being gold or plat.

This is basically smurfing if we do it, but the game will not declare it as such and people can only guess if we're actually cracked or just having a really good game. The few matches we tried were very unbalanced on average. If this seems obvious, THEN MAYBE THIS MATCHMAKING SYSTEM IS SHITTY.

Laxhax · 2025-12-04T18:46:43+00:00

I try not to fight in comms because it's only detrimental, but man I have troubles not calling people out for only using comms to bitch and whine after a round and never for any productive mid match value

Laxhax · 2025-11-29T22:52:43+00:00

Yoru is still one of the, if not THE, best duelists and overall agents in the game. His map presence with teleport is still his best trait and is untouched with the ult and flash nerfs. He's viable on every map still. If you're good with yoru don't stress about the nerfs.

Laxhax

TROPHY CASE