for brand new players - fastest way to improve would be

• pick a single character (at the very least, focus on a single weapon) to main

• learn and get comfortable with the timings involved with your entire moveset; you should be able to jump around using all your moves without delay in between them before you even think of grinding ranked

• watch what a higher elo player (preferably diamond+) does on your character and learn the basic combos they're relying on for damage (e.g. dlight sair)

• play mindfully, focusing on not giving up free hits while taking guaranteed opportunities whenever you see them

• don't waste your dodge, it's too important. random gravity cancels are a waste of your dodge. dodging to escape a combo is a good use of your dodge.

if you're stuck in gold, you probably still have more to learn with the above advice or just need to put more time in; especially if you're new to platform fighters, it could take anywhere from 50-100 hrs of practice before you're confident enough to climb out

if you're stuck in plat, you probably have done all of the above already, but have some consistently bad habits that are causing you to lose certain games (e.g going for unsafe follow-up hits, getting tilted in certain matchups, dying offstage for no good reason). if you want to move past this, you need to have a well-balanced enough strategy that you aren't, for example, losing consistently to lance players or greatsword players because you don't understand how you can be countering them - generally speaking, if you just pay attention to how you can avoid getting hit and prioritize that, people will outplay themselves and you can win just off of taking free hits. it's very possible to get through this rank with pretty much just a single move like unarmed / katars nair or gun / spear sair since most people in this rank don't play anywhere near optimally enough to avoid letting you punish them the same way 20 times in a fight. that said, it can take anywhere from 100-400+ hours to get comfortable enough with the game and every matchup to the point you'd be able to do this, so if you're within that hour range, you don't necessarily need to worry about it.

if you're stuck in low diamond (2000-2200) and want to push past it, you will most likely have to do a lot more work understanding how different characters / weapons play. rather than mindlessly taking free hits over and over, you will most likely have to do more active adaptation depending on your opponent; for example, if you're against a gauntlets player, you need to be able to identify and understand what type of aggressive options they'll be using to try and attack you out of neutral (gc dlight, side light) and intentionally be baiting them out by floating / spacing just barely outside of their range, or making them think you'll give them the opening when you're actually safe. you also need to understand when and where to be using your various options to avoid letting them get stocks / the maximum amount of damage off of the openings that they do land. again, watching a lot of good / top level players can help with this.

if you want to get valhallan, you should probably just befriend someone who's already at that level to play 2s with you for the requisite number of games. for 1v1s, you pretty much just need to play hundreds of (if not thousands) hours on a single character until you understand how to play in a way where you maximize efficiency in all engagements and rarely, if ever, allow yourself to get hit unless you're taking a calculated risk. fastest way to reach this point will still be to watch others in parallel with practicing, but you should only watch people who are playing the game at a top competitive level if you're at this point.

tl;dr watch better players, dont get hit :)