Please Xbox players hit me up. Need a squad.

This is really the first fps I've played in a long time regularly. I miss the old days where everyone talked **** and said they banged my mom. It was much more entertaining. What happened?

Yeh I really miss that too. It's cause you're only talking to your teammates not the noobs you're killing.

There's still plenty of in-fighting, but it's the ragey, pathetic kind.

After three weeks of Civ, I made a smurf account to go back to Overwatch. The matchmaking is pretty good really, by level 10 I'm playing against low 3000s in quick play, though not at "my" mmr yet (95% wr).

The first couple of games made me feel very guilty, winning 6 vs 1 fights.

What chars do you pick for this kind of hard carry?

Obviously lost twice as soon as I posted that.

Started out as soldier as he's the dps I'm most familiar with, but mostly Zen. http://masteroverwatch.com/profile/p...st-2890/heroes

Yeah Zen is the best hard carry for sure.

Alright, haven't really played in months. I want to be better. I know I'm being lazy by posting this here, but the info out on the web honestly is pretty terrible about how to git gud at this game.

I want to play competitive solo. I am okay (imo) at lucio but find him boring. I also know I use him wrong, I spend most of my time healing and fragging and running us back after a wipe.

So far I am 4-1 on my placements but I stopped because it's stressing me out and I have no idea what I'm doing anymore. I'm okay with hanzo. I used to be good with pharah. I feel i need to stick to one character for now because when I switch I start sucking with the other.

I tried zenyatta but I died sooooo ****ing quick.

How the **** do i get better?

Your life is very valuable, so try not to throw it away. One of the biggest differences I see in really good players vs bad ones is just smart decision making on engaging, and not dying.

I see so many DPS players, Reinhardts, etc just charge in away from their team and die, and it's basically 90% of the time a lost fight. If you're struggling to stay alive as Zen, you probably need to stay further back behind your tanks.

I think Hanzo is a very mediocre/bad DPS unless you have very good aim. Pharah can be ok, but you need to learn when she's being countered, and also prioritize staying alive. Just hiding for a minute when the whole team has your attention, and peaking out for 2 or 3 rockets at a time if they're focusing you will help your team so much more in the long run than suiciding.

Biggest one is just communicate and don't be toxic. I'm learning to just accept that at least 1/3 games will have people with no microphones or people with any willingness to play as a team. It's possible to win those games, but kinda unlikely. An upbeat attitude and willingness to change to heroes beyond just DPS is super important.

That being said, **** everyone who plays this game.

edit: not everyone, just 15 year old DPS "mains" who refuse to change or work together. They make this game so frustrating.

My experience has been relatively easy climbing from 1650 to near masters as I improved. Did it on 2 accounts, primarily solo. I'd say it's primarily 5 general priorities:
#1 Positioning
#2 Hero picks / switching
#3 Good performance focus (intentional with aiming, paying attention to sound, situational awareness)
#4 Talking your team into doing better stuff
#5 Never giving up at any point in a game

#1 Positioning
I think positioning is the most important skill in the game. Once I really understood it my aim climbed 15% on McCree, went to 99th percentile crits on Zen... I wouldn't even say I have particularly good aim, good positioning makes it easy.

Positioning is dynamic, there's 3 zones generally, frontline, midrange, backline. You should almost always be approximately with your team, even if their overall idea is stupid (4/6 spawn camp and couldn't be talked out of it, you have to join). Should be pretty obvious where each hero generally belongs (Rein/Dva front, Zarya/Reaper mid, McCree/Zen back). Flankers should only be played when you can time your engagement with the rest of your team safely.

The ideal position has immediately accessible cover near an attack path and a long term retreat path. Good thought exercise for this would be to ask yourself where Zen should stand for point A Hanamura defense (my baseline position is the stairs / cove to the left of the point facing attack spawn behind the small health pack doorway). You drop back for immediate cover and can immediately turn a corner.

#2 Hero picks / switching The key thing I do with my pick is to solve my team's most likely problem, this means I'm comfortable on lots of heroes but mostly focus on getting highly proficient on one:
-Zen (main)
-Rein
-Dva
-Zarya
-Tracer
-Reaper

For me this plays out 70% Zen, 10% filling, 10% niche meta strat (Dva to break a Junk Rat spammed choke, Pharah flank on Eichen, Ana for Nepal: Sanctum), 10% desperation / reactive switches.

Niche hero picks that can be ideal if you can meet the skill requirement for the situation, generally only using them on a specific map, situation or section:
-Pharah
-Roadhog
-McCree
-Mei
-Genji (maybe? not sure)
-Lucio
-Ana

Anything outside of those heroes I'd argue is not ideal for solo queue as there would be a higher impact choice. Torb for example has some good point A defenses but you'd generally have a higher impact picking Zen and positioning correctly so you rarely die, have the big Trans to save people and can still DPS.

#3 Good performance focus
Sounds are super important. You should rarely be caught off guard by a Reaper drop. Intentionally aiming every shot is key to hitting headshots. Knowing when to take desperate chances, when to switch to stall comp picks, etc. have a big impact on winrate.

Playing the objective seems to be a common failure. For example, never for any reason give up an easy pick off on defense. Trading 1:1 and even 1:2 is usually not worth. I see a shocking amount of people play in front of the choke for kills on defense. Conversely on offense, it's often correct to take big chances even if you die a lot. Plan to wipe everyone on 2cp attack and planning to stall for spawns on 2cp defense.

Another important idea for this for me was "soft eyes" where you don't hyper focus on what you're doing and it allows you to use your peripheral vision to be aware of new threats / changing situations.

#4 Talking your team into doing better stuff
I tend to propose changes between rounds and never request role (tank to support) swaps mid-round. I tend not to worry about DPS, most DPS are bad sub-diamond on both sides, people only freak about it because they gave up the DPS slot not because it's actually the biggest impact on winrate.

High impact requests generally:
-Grab Dva for a surprise Bastion / other cheese / problematic Junk Rat
-Get Mercy to switch if she's missing res
-Getting a Rein
-Getting a Lucio for KOTH
-Switch a DPS to Reaper
-Lower ranks, getting someone off Winston onto another tank

#5 Never giving up at any point in a game
It's very rare you're in an unwinnable spot in OW. One hero swap, a different section of the map or a few clutch head shots can turn an easy push into a brick wall. Always keep trying things until you lose.

Those are really good posts, thanks.

I do definitely die far too often.

so do I just give up on hanzo?

If your goal is to rise the ranks, play other heroes. Learn a couple tank, a couple support, learn a hitscan.

Play Hanzo if you wish, but know that your teammates hate you.

I'm not kidding.

Focus the majority of your efforts on 1-2 of these:
-Zen
-Rein
-Dva
-Zarya
-Tracer
-Reaper

If you're looking for the fun pick, go Tracer main (you can even play it on defense) maybe with some Reaper defense mixed in depending on map.

Hanzo is a lot more useful at higher SRs when your team has some awareness to leverage a pick you provide. There's some downright nasty masters Hanzo mains. That said, in gold, you'll often have to kill 3-4 people per fight and Hanzo just doesn't have the consistent fight potential so it's sub-optimal IMO. Killing 3-4 extremely out of position people as Zen, Zarya, Tracer or Reaper though would be relatively easy.

He could have some map specific (King's Rowe, Hollywood, Numbani) use on attack on point A / some of streets if you're good at it, consistently get picks and especially if you can coordinate with a Zarya on your team for ult combo. Playing him defense below diamond is pointless.

I'm idly trying to learn Zarya as she seems the best way to "fix" a broken lineup if you happen to have the healer(s), but I'm still at the stage where I have to say "e is for other players, shift is for me"

It seems to me that Pharah is under used. She's good as a counter against some comps - often you come across junkrat/mei/rein teams with no way to kill her, but nobody switches and I don't know how to play her. She seems a good one to learn.

It also seems to me that a lot of cwar's improvement has come from thinking about what situation he finds himself in. He talks about that a lot, I think about that not much, except to change to counter enemy comp, which is hard to do when you're the only healer.

Who's good on PTR at the moment? My problem is that I've learnt bad heroes. Mercy, Soldier, Winston are 3 of my top 5. Zen and Rein the other two, so at least I have something playable, but learning the actual good heroes would be a good plan.

Yeah you're exactly correct, IMO this is a MOBA with FPS mechanics added on top with most key decisions being macro decisions. What heroes are good for solo queue also follow a similar formula to ranked LoL (survivability + damage > damage).

For PTR (which they've stated all the changes are going live):
-Dva is insane value right now, Dva was already god tier in gold and very useful in plat, and her main counter is being nerfed hard and the buffs are large
-Zarya is risky right now, dropping her damage will affect her solo queue power a lot but don't know how much
-Pharah jets buff is very good but knock back nerf has effected high level match ups

I think Pharah is a useful pick but not a stable one. She does get played by high level solo queue players but aggressively switched off of. Soldier is her main counter too so him getting buffed isn't great. Good value in gold though (can't aim). One thing to consider, she won't make you better at other heroes, my Pharah main friend is bad at every other hero (mid-Plat).

Dva and Reaper would be the smallest investments as both are easy although more situational. Zarya, Reaper, Dva would give you a lot of flexibility.

If you want to win though, Zen is the best by a wide, wide margin (and is getting a major pseudo buff with Ana Nano being nerfed hard). If you're insta dying on Zen, you're positioning is really bad so learning to play him would probably be very worth.

I've played maybe 20 minutes of all those heroes except reaper :/ D.va I just don't understand at all what I'm supposed to be doing. Zarya I just can't manage to output the insane damage I see on streams. Zen I had some better success with last night when I had some team support. Tracer is hard but I think I could learn her.

When I play with my friends I go hanzo and coordinate my ult with reinhardt/zarya and usually rack up a ****load of kills, I can see why he'd be terrible solo. I mostly play lucio if I am alone.

When this game first came out I loved widow, still do, but she sucks :/ My other favorite is soldier, but he sucks too. I don't like how most of the heroes suck right now/aren't viable.

I'm trying to review my play a bit more, has anyone done this much?

One thing I found in quakeworld was that the better I got, the smoother I got, so some of the jerkiness in the videos is "real", rather than just going from 300 fps to 30 in the video.

Below are some games from this morning.

- I have broken mic settings, so nobody hears me
- I die to genji too often, from ****ing up. Better to not have my finger on fire, but try to pick him off with headshots when he's on the ground.
- I still get a bit panicky when someone gets really close, not sure why. For example, start of Volskaya attack, against Hanzo.

I figure that reviewing my play won't help with those things directly, they're just things I need to be aware of while I play until I internalise them. But this should be good for making better ult decisions, I'd say I'm only making good decisions 2/3 of the time at the moment.

I didn't change to adapt to enemy comp at all, but I guess I didn't need to in these games.

Lijiang: https://plays.tv/video/582b31744d497...ng-15th-nov-01
Volskaya attack: https://plays.tv/video/582b33d99488f...ov-volskaya-01
Volskaya defence: https://plays.tv/video/582b358fbac30...ov-volskaya-02

Damn that volskaya attack was really clean

played a few games of d.va, I don't know why I never did before. ****ing fun and as soon as I switched to her made a noticeable difference on how the game went. not sure how, other than she soaks up a lot of fire and can really **** **** up even at mid distances. I went like 31 kills and gold damage in my last game with a bunch of suit kills.

I like how you can just retreat so easily with her with the rockets and find a health pack and be back in the action in like 5 seconds

Only five players and I died immediately too

Sounds like it would help to talk about objectives a bit. Kills are not always a key indicator of doing well, remember I judge hero picks by their ability to solve the key problems, not get kills. I think you'll see why after the explanation.

Overall:
-When attacking you highly value ability to generate a kills from scratch when it's 6v6 or take space to allow your team to engage
-When defending you highly value staying alive, keeping your teammates alive and denying the attackers an engage (on even footing)

So let's analyze a standard attack on Hanamura point A in a gold game. In gold people pick whatever and don't really coordinate. Hanamura has a very defender favorable choke point (concave damage if you ever played SC2) obviously so without coordination the average attack let's say suffers 1 death average moving through the choke point. So a 5v6 has about a 20% chance of working so the average attack takes 5 rounds to take point A (going to ignore spawn times for the moment). This affects both teams so you pick a hero that doesn't change this dynamic you'll actually have a below 50% winrate (as your opponent will sometimes randomly make a better choice).

So now let's say you pick Dva to mitigate the spam / choke disadvantage. Instead of having a 5v6 average now you have a 5.5 vs. 6 average. Now let's say the average fight is only a 33% disadvantage meaning it only takes 3 rounds on average to take point A (probably a 90-120 second gain in time).

So a quick comparison to Hanzo vs. Dva to see where they would break even:
-Dva prevents deaths and helps create successful engages
-In gold, Dva can very easily booster to an appropriate squishy like Hanzo, McCree, Reaper who can't easily escape guaranteeing at least 1:1 or better value in a team fight (they can't do damage to anyone else that's 1:1, if you kill them and move on that's better than 1:1)
-Dva with the highest total HP in a team fight will take up a lot of a gold team's damage output even if she dies

Now for Hanzo to be 1:1 in this example he has to start by killing at least one enemy. Then he has to average more kills than Dva prevents deaths and average even more kills to compensate for the value of Dva's tankiness. Overall I'd estimate you'd have to get like 2.5-3 kills per team fight for Hanzo to be worth over Dva in gold (doable but probably not how most people are judging themselves). It's very asymmetric because gold teams have unique and high value problems.

In my experience in gold games the biggest problems you need to solve:
-Symmetra, Bastion and Torb that your squishy DPS teams fall apart into
-Getting spammed while attacking choke points / lack of coordination to push through choke points
-Massive value from flanking ults (Pharah, Reaper, etc.)

So that's why I think Dva is god tier in gold, literally perfect for all the meta's biggest issues. Same logic you can see why I think Zen is a god (his heal + discord + ability to finish kills is the highest raw #s impact in team fights and he prevents ult value with Trans). Higher skill teams can probably take a choke easily any time it's 6v5 in their favor while a gold team might still get stuck running into a single Junk Rat thus why Hanzo gets way better at higher SR.

Following this logic you can see why Hanzo is generally weak on defense because all you need to do is put a Dva/Winston in his face and he's instantly invalidated in an engage (even without killing him). This is why he's generally best on say Anubis where he can leverage multiple high grounds to keep his DPS / picks uninterrupted.

Yeah VOD review is really helpful.

Watched r1 Lijang and Volskaya attack. Your positioning is very good and being aware of your slow teammate and playing defensive initially on r1 Lijang had a huge impact.

My only Lijang comment would be you were too aggressive into the Hanzo duel when he was the last one alive (no reason for you as Zen to risk death there) and on point B Volskaya attack you had a really bad Trans at the end there.

Any reason you're playing quick over comp?

Yeh, I'm level 12

Trans at the end was because of the res. I didn't want it to be an "even" fight as I (mistakenly?) thought they still had their ults, if we win that fight we can't lose the round due to their staggered spawn times now, assuming I live.

This is a really good post, thank you. And that's pretty much exactly what happened in the game I switched to Dva

Aha I would never have guessed, you got some good mechanics .

For the trans, you weren't really saving anyone from dying so you could have just waited longer to potentially prevent an ult from someone spawning (obviously it was looking very good in general). Mei / Genji were the only ones at risk and are pretty survivable and the res was only a 3 man with a no charge Zarya, Lucio and a Soldier who was trying to disengage.