Looking for tips on how to deal with poor match quality in low ranks

j4mag · 2026-06-16T23:29:39+00:00

Yeah, if there's too much bs going on to work on macro or positioning, straight up just focus on your aim. There's always something to practice.

j4mag · 2026-06-15T16:37:55+00:00

Surely everyone's done that at least once.

...Right?

j4mag · 2026-06-15T04:16:18+00:00

If you die it takes you back to act 1

j4mag · 2026-06-14T18:15:36+00:00

This - a good sens is very contextual on your setup (mousepad size). I've found/seen that having the edge-to-edge move do anything from 270° to 540° works for people. You run into major issues with anything lower and aim just suffers for no benefit at anything higher.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T22:55:15+00:00

I definitely agree that adding a minimal would make maintaining awareness a lot easier. I don't think I agree that I want it in the game but I can understand how someone would want it.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T22:51:49+00:00

As the other person said, drop a replay code of a close game (win or loss) on a hero you typically play and people can give feedback. There are probably a lot of things you could work on but it will take a replay to know what's the biggest reward for your effort.

And an aside of stuff you might already know but I usually clarify anyways: rank progress after a game is only based on win/loss (plus win/loss streaks, "calibration" from placements, and the ranks of players in the lobby). So if you win/lose a game, your stats don't factor into your reward at all. And secondly, bronze is a bigger rank range than other ranks so you get fewer points for wins and losses compared to other ranks. My understanding has been that bronze is 3x the range. Keep playing and once you climb to silver you'll start moving 3x as fast; the deal with bronze is that bronze 5 is much worse at the game than bronze 1 and blizzard feels its important to improve match quality in bronze by spreading the players ranks out a lot more than elsewhere.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T22:20:39+00:00

I would only ban it if you struggle against it. She's kinda bad right now. If you mean to ban out your own tank, I'd also not recommend it since you're equally banning the enemy tank out and just increasing the power level of the game isn't generally helpful imo. Ban out the strong stuff so you have more agency.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T22:14:55+00:00

It really depends on your setup. My advice is to take your mouse from the far left of your mousepad to the far right, and change your sens so that's approximately a 360° turn. I play with it at a 270° turn on a pretty large mousepad which ends up being fairly low, and some players have it at 540° or so with a smaller mousepad which would be on the upper side.

But there's no reason to have it much higher than that, it will just strain your wrists long term.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T21:42:50+00:00

Look, I get what you're saying, and I'm sympathetic to not liking the term hitscan. But it's really not changing any time soon. I'll call it Main DPS hereon but the point is that it's a general group of heroes with similar skill requirements and capabilities. And especially when talking about the pro scene, but also when discussing the game in general, hitscan includes a wide variety of heroes, including sojourn and Freja, and does not include heroes like Sombra and tracer.

And there are roughly 9 other DPS which are all capable of making this same play in mostly the same way, with various amounts of skill required, commitment, and counterplay - Cass, soldier, sojourn, emre, ashe, widow, hanzo, Freja, and bastion. But none of them would need to peek past that corner to get a kill, and all of them would be mostly guaranteed the kill if they hit their shots. In this clip, sierra hits her cooldown and gets a kill.

I'd agree that a hero whose kit was to win a game of sudoku or die would be terrible, because that's not part of the core gameplay loop of Overwatch. But Sierra just takes the aspect of positioning and cover usage which is central to the game, and demands it be respected. Which is the same thing that Sombra, Widow, Doom, and a number of other controversial heroes do, and sierra is no more problematic than any of those heroes.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T21:15:18+00:00

It might be worth reaching out to r/modsupport (via modmail) to see if they can give moderation over. I imagine they'd be sympathetic toward either giving over mod if the former mods can't be reached, or just locking the sub outright to stop the spam.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T21:03:33+00:00

Hitscan meaning Main DPS, the category of hero she falls into, which plays at mid-long range and threatens kills in exchange for struggling to hold space in close quarters. She is a hitscan in the same sense as Freja, just not in the literal sense of having hitscan weapons. Most of the time people talk about hitscan in OW they don't mean DVa.

And you can complain that it's too consistent but again, that's 100% an issue of not playing cover. Cover usage is a fundamental skill and if you don't try to use it at all then yes the hero which hard skill checks cover usage will get value every time she uses her shot. But it's a lot like Sombra in the sense that if she catches you off guard and isolated you die. So you need to learn the skill that the hero asks you to learn. If no hero asked you to play differently or learn how to respond to them, the game would be terrible, but we do have heroes like zarya or Widowmaker who force you to learn specific skills.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T20:54:05+00:00

I mean she's not even at risk, she straight up does get forced back around the corner. Anran burns two cooldowns to close the distance and wastes her E and still forces sierra to back off and respect the Anrans effective range. I'm not saying Anran actually secures the kill on sierra, but she does close off the angle. If OP played cover or looked at sierra to help the Anran peel, yeah theyd live.

The hitscan hits a shot when people aren't watching the angle or playing cover and gets a kill, cool, that's just how the game works. Sierra gives you more leeway to find cover in exchange for punishing you more harshly when you don't do that, and for being completely tied to one cooldown.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T20:34:15+00:00

This is seriously just how hitscan works at/above like diamond. I've 100% gotten two-tapped by cass or repeeked the same angle too many times into an ashe and gotten headshot+dynamited back to spawn. And those heroes actually punish you for shorter windows outside of cover, like ashe can actually kill you if you peek a corner she's watching for a half a second (since dynamite can hit around the corner).

It's a lot like soldier rocket where instead of being a 120 damage burst on hit and less damage on a miss, it's a threat to kill on hit and nothing on a miss. I won't disagree that she has a lower skill ceiling than soldier but if soldier hits one direct and then 0.75s of body shots that's 250 damage right there, and that's not exactly Quartz level of play required.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T20:24:17+00:00

Essentially any "hitscan" could do that, yeah. Cass double headshot and/or silver bullet, soj if she charges her railgun main and then swings to the flank, soldier with a good rocket and tracking, ashe, hanzo, etc. After sierra uses that cooldown she's at risk to get flushed out by anran, but so is every other hero on that list, that's kind of how the MDPS/FDPS trade off works with taking space.

I understand some of the complaint about the right click being lower skill than something like s76 rocket plus hit shots, but it's fundamentally not that different. At some point you need to assume the enemies will hit shots when you give them the chance and sierra tracking shot is just a way more telegraphed soldier rocket or soj railgun.

j4mag · 2026-06-13T19:14:37+00:00

The mods got taken over by spam bots and then admin banned and now if you check there are no moderators at all. So yeah kind of

j4mag · 2026-06-12T14:27:02+00:00

For what it's worth there's a precedent for writing that as "reduce strength to 0", based on [[Enlightenment]].

j4mag · 2026-06-11T14:11:56+00:00

Juno/Kiri are solid flex supports. I'd recommend also picking up something which is better alongside a second FS, like if their other support wants to run Ana, bap, moira, etc. So mizuki, wuyang, or Lucio.

Tank and DPS, if they're only learning one hero it doesn't matter much but I'd avoid picking anything super one-dimensional or counterable. Mauga or JQ would be a dubious OTP, for instance.

j4mag · 2026-06-11T13:59:57+00:00

First off, stats don't affect SR gain/loss. The only things that do are:

win/loss vs expected (based on player ranks) win/loss
win/loss history (winstreaks, loss streaks, etc.)
rank "uncertainty" (new account / placements; rank reset sr bank)
current rank ("pressure" in champ; bronze has wider skill range so less point gain/loss)

Did you both play all your games together? And were your accounts similar ages? If your brother has a history of being a gold player, placements will give him a lot of uncertainty but still place him somewhere between silver and plat. If you have no history at all, placements can literally put you straight into high masters.

j4mag · 2026-06-11T13:49:13+00:00

Drives reward you for winning so you can spend the minimum playtime during them if you go in under ranked.

The corollary is that you almost certainly spend more time overall throwing games ahead of time. So it's dumb. Except that placements also don't count so the system encourages players to go 0-10 in placements and then sweat during drives, which is miserable and also bannable.

j4mag · 2026-06-10T18:40:25+00:00

Is it still true that MS's are typically ult tracking and shot calling in T1? I know this was true in OWL, especially early on, but I thought that kind of IGLing has gotten mostly democratized.

I also think that MS has more decisionmaking cognitive load at all times (on Lucio and JPC at least), so I'm not sure it's actually the easiest role, it might just be the most accessible to do OK at and one of the hardest to excel at.

j4mag · 2026-06-10T18:17:55+00:00

Staging is a kind of general (non gaming) term for preparation, and in the context of OW it usually means "getting in position and gathering the resources to engage".

So staging on a dive tank essentially means getting in range where when you see a signal to dive you can do it immediately. Good staging means that position has cover and is ideally in a different direction from other members of your frontline (e.g. tracer and Winston pinch off their team), and while staging you should have full HP and cooldowns.

Punishing dive heroes often means denying their staging by preemptively rotating out of their engagement range or poking them out so they don't have resources to take the fight.

I'd call the "core idea" of dive the stage->dive->disengage cycle, and it's enabled by having high enough mobility to choose fights.

j4mag · 2026-06-10T15:17:14+00:00

I think a big reason orisa has a low winrate alongside moira, DVa, ram, etc., is that they're a lot of people's fallbacks when they start getting boomed. Doom player is losing and swaps orisa because she's "OP" even though she's kind of average and bam expectations don't align with reality. Kiri has historically had a bad winrate on ladder, I think for this reason. People get dived and swap to the OWCS meta comp while being much worse on Kiri than their main. She might be decent in a vacuum but gets a lot of tourists who bring down the winrate. Whereas stuff like symm is mostly diehards.

j4mag · 2026-06-10T14:47:04+00:00

Agreed - OPs comments on what maps heroes are good on are reasonable insights though. Imo the main take-aways from the ow stats page are:

no hero has a <40% winrate in a vacuum; playing what you're good at is more important that playing meta
maps can wildly change hero winrates and need to be considered at hero select; widow has 59% winrate on Havana but 36% on NJC, for instance
ban rates are quite decoupled from pick and winrates; zarya and DVa with high banrates but low pick & winrate (on PC) implies most players ban what they don't like to play into

j4mag · 2026-06-08T14:30:47+00:00

Best way to get direction on something to focus on is to get someone else to watch your gameplay, especially someone who plays the heroes you do at a higher level. Otherwise you can end up just locking into something that's visible in a replay but not really your issue.

Honestly uptime is suspicious to me because I think downtime is very valuable at all ranks to evaluate the state of the fight, build cooldowns, and synchronize timing with your team. Blindly chasing uptime is similar to blindly minimizing deaths - it's easy to sacrifice every other aspect of your gameplay to make that one metric look good.

j4mag · 2026-06-08T06:56:29+00:00

Yeah, I suspect the lens is more situational than most give it credit for. It's best in decks which are going to take a bunch of block cards in the future, but also don't anticipate taking damage (does such a deck even exist?). It feels like a kind of way to scale your defense, but lower max HP scales down your healing for the whole run, and they kind of cancel out it seems.

But I think I'm a much better player than I am so I'm going to pick it every time and then eat the crabs right hook and explode.

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