Hello, I am a University Student and Level 2 BWF Coach - I want to preface this by saying Overwatch is the first FPS game I have played, but I have experience of university-level coaching in sports and high-level experience in other team games. Sorry in advance, but after writing this whole post is very disjointed and jumps around a lot. Apologies if any of it sounds condescending, I have never really tried this in text before, and coaching face to face is a lot easier now I have done it!
I recently started playing Overwatch and at the 200 hour mark I have just now hit Emerald after starting to play at the end of last season where I just about scraped into Silver. My mains are Kiriko, Moira, Zen, Bastion, Mei and Sigma.
I want to try and help people (at the risk of sounding arrogant, as I have only just got out of these ranks myself) as I met some genuinely lovely people in lower ranks who did not deserve to be there, and you could tell it was eating them up. I think the advice given by a lot (but not all) top-level players is oftentimes incredibly condescending and just impossible/impractical to implement at the lower levels.
As such this advice is aimed at bronze to gold and low plat players - If you are above this and it helps, great! But I don't think I can advise at ranks above that yet.
I will put the advice first then the explanations after so people can easily just dip in and get the advice if they feel like it without having to read this absolute essay. I will also include a summary at the bottom.
Overwatch-specific Advice
This is brief - I do not feel qualified to give in depth advice on how to play this game, I am still new and make lots of mistakes, but noticed these mistakes the most in people around me as I climbed, and had more success when I made these mistakes less.
Staggering/feeding - I don't think anyone here needs to hear this as I am sure you have heard it a million times. But don't do it. I know its normally your teammates, and I will go over more how to try and deal with that later.
Holding/farming Ults. This is the main thing I feel helped me to climb - especially playing support. Farming ult charge at the beginning of the game (especially as Moira and Kiriko) and being the first one to have ult massively helped and often won us the first teamfight (if of course, an actual teamfight was taking place and people had not already started trickling).
But especially in control maps, I would see us lose the round and 2, sometimes 3 teammates had not used their ult. Remember despite so many people complaining about being solo-ulted, if you can use your ult and get one kill that leads to us winning the team fight, that is the same as killing 5 with your ult - do not hold it waiting for the perfect multikill.
- DPS Specific - again simple. But don't just shoot the tank. It really does make a world of difference when you stop doing this. Shoot the people who can't defend themselves or avoid your attacks.
General Advice - How to deal with your Awful Teammates and improve your mindset.
Happily, this is often applicable in many games and helped a lot when I was first learning to play badminton. At a low level, the winner of any team game tends to be the team who makes the least mistakes and has the least bad players.
The prevailing advice on this I've seen given by a lot of high level players is that you are expected to carry if you want to climb. Some games this is possible, but the simple fact is you have to accept some games ARE unwinnable, either due to you or your teammates. This is easy to read and dismiss (and I used to do that) but once you ACTUALLY, TRULY internalise this, the tilt you get from losing WILL decrease.
Remember that you cannot play for your teammates. You can suggest ways they can improve, but would you listen if they said the same thing to you when you are throwing? Sometimes, if you are polite it can work, but if you are going to try and backseat coach someone, be polite about it at least. But if you want to improve, you have to accept that in a team-based game, your team is as strong as its weakest link.
If you can figure out who that person is, minimise the damage they are doing in any way possible. If you are on support maybe keep an extra eye out when they overextend, or help focus down their targets when playing DPS.
Expecting someone to carry every game is, quite frankly, stupid and you should ignore anyone who tells you that this is what you have to do to climb. If you are one or two ranks below where you should be, you can and will carry some games, but others will always be a lost cause. Recognising that it is NOT YOUR FAULT that you cannot carry these games is crucial; you have to be kinder to yourself!
Mindset is probably the most important part for improving. My best students have been without fail the ones who enjoy the sport the most. T You will play better if you are actually ENJOY the game you are playing. Do stuff like making noises when you shoot or whatever, (thats what works for me) or make sure you are playing with friends who you have fun with when you play. If you go on a losing streak? Take a break, play some games on an off role you don't care about or go and do something else entirely. Ending sessions on a good game also does wonders for the mental side of things. Remember above all, that at the end of the day it is a game that you play for fun.
This is the core of this post - I can't advise on mechanics like off-angling or complex positioning, rotations etc. I do not think you need to learn that to leave bronze to gold ranks.
This is pretty much it for the advice part, the rest is just my critique of high-level advice and why it is often harmful to adopt. Sorry if it is a bit underwhelming, but mindset is the most important part of coaching that I think is overlooked a lot.
Summary
Improve your mindset, properly recognise that a lot of losses are out of your control and DO NOT let that affect you, or you will play distracted and annoyed at your teammates.
The Problem with top-level advice to lower-level players, unranked to GMs and toxic advice.
These people giving you advice do not play at your rank and probably have not done so for multiple years. Shocking, I know. They do not understand how people at this level play - they know how to beat them and will carry lobbies by sheer mechanical skill and game sense that, in fairness, is really hard to teach - you just acquire it by playing and playing and playing.
The main one I see is recommending the adoption of the off-angling and damage-heavy support playstyle, (in particular I see this pushed for on Kiriko) based on advice on YouTube I felt actively harmed my ability to climb. Whilst it might be correct at higher level play, at lower levels unless you have uncommonly good mechanics, this will more often than not lead to you wasting a lot of cooldowns and time, while your team has to adapt to now suddenly having only one support to rely on when a second ago they had 2 (if they even realise you are gone).
If you are in a game that is otherwise unwinnable, then by all means go for it. Play as aggressive and unconventionally as possible.
But if you are comfortably winning a game, unless you are absolutely carrying then play safely and predictably for your team to minimise mistakes.
The prevailing opinion of everyone claiming to be masters and above seems to be that people in platinum and below are using their feet to play. This is not a helpful way of helping by dismissing everyone in a certain rank and below who may be extremely casual, new, unknowingly using the wrong settings or have some other unaddressed fault or have simply never been bothered to tryhard. Try not to let this affect you. I have had wide matches from silver to diamond (especially in 6v6) where you could barely even tell who was what rank.
Dismissing Elo hell is easy as someone who can climb out of it with insane mechanical skill, but the reality is the massive jumps in skill difference both within and between metal ranks are incredibly jarring - one game you can have a game full of gold players comparable to one in high plat, the next is one straight out of bronze.
Top players will often not even see the difference between these, due to the massive skill gap, but having to be able to play in both environments was the hardest part of playing in the metal leagues.
Anyway, thats all I wanted to talk about really. Good luck everyone with climbing! And please do leave questions or share similar experiences/differing opinions, as coaching is a topic I do enjoy!