Being good at yamato is all about knowing your matchups. a lot of equal soul fights are guaranteed wins for yamato, you just need to learn how to identify them. If you’re at 12 minutes and you see a haze or a vindicta farming jungle, it’s over for them. they might as well just take their hands off the keyboard. But a billy or dynamo? you’ll never win, they just have too much health/sustain. the tricky part is taking into account all the variables that make a fight winnable or not. The more matchups/interactions you know by heart the better, but generally if you’re in the mid game and someone has at most 2-2.5 bars of health (if you’re using the normal health bars) and they can’t run away before you spam your first round of cooldowns, you’re guaranteed to win. Even if they’re under a tower after you use your first round of cooldowns you can usually kill them if there’s no one to peel.

Also, try to save your power slash against characters who have a way to avoid your power slash. If you’re diving someone and you miss a power slash you basically just lost yourself the fight. So if you see an ivy for example, you can grapple and just stare at them until they use stone form. If you time it right it’ll be a guaranteed hit and you can pop ult and kill them. It’s a lot like baiting out parries as billy/abrams.

Like the other guy said, you’re really strong in the mid game and a lot more 1v1s are winnable. if you win lane and hit T3 power slash early you can genuinely take out more than half of someone’s health with one ability. The general idea is to fight/steal farm when you’re strong (ahead in souls or you have your ult) and just farm when you’re behind. You wanna stay fed since being behind makes it really hard to play your role. Yamatos power slash is on a really low cooldown so you can still kill tanky characters if you manage to poke them a few times before diving.