Overwatch 2 has a very dedicated competitive community and increasing your rank is the most important criterion for such players. This is a heavy team-based focused shooter where all your members and their respective characters play a vital role. You need to play this game a lot to get a hang of your main Heroes but there are some strategies and playstyles that you can incorporate to rank up faster in Overwatch 2.
There are 8 main areas or mistakes to avoid that you can focus on when ranking up fast in Overwatch 2:
- Target Focus
- Learn From Your Losses
- Don’t Pick Characters You Don’t Know How To Play
- Warm Up Before Rank Matches
- Fight Tilting
- Stagnating
- Tracking The Kill Feed
- Staggering
Target Focus
How many matches can you think of in Overwatch 2 where you were up multiple picks and you still lose? The major reason in most cases of such fights is that the right opponent character wasn’t killed first. Overwatch characters generally either get a lot of value from specific stages or times in a fight. It’s important for you to know who is impactful at the right stage of a fight so that you know who to focus on.
For early fights think of Lucio or Winston who use their cooldowns to clear a bunch of space and then have only okay damage heals to follow up, then you have characters who get most of their value towards the end of a fight or during cleanups such as Genji and Tracer who use their mobility and lower damage to pick off the weakened targets.
Finally, you have the more consistent value characters that are going to end up getting their value throughout an entire fight such as Widowmaker, Zarya, or most of the healers. If you’re in the middle of a fight and you see a Widowmaker taking an aggressive stance then that is the character you need to focus on, not their Winston or even the one HP Lucio no matter how out of position they seem. Even if you do manage to get a kill on that Lucio, the Widowmaker has a huge chance of trading that pick and more if she can focus quickly. Even on support, your damage focus is really important especially when you’re deciding what enemy you’re going to be using your cooldowns on.
So be sure to always keep track of what the largest threats on the enemy team are and try to put pressure on them instead of what is closest or simply on your screen.
Learn From Your Losses
Do not make excuses for your deaths or losses instead of learning from them. How many times have you lost the game and blamed it on there being a gap or a difference in one of the roles? It can feel pretty good to shift the blame off of yourself and onto someone else but ultimately it doesn’t do much in the way of learning how to handle that.
In the future, you should always try to come up with a way you could have tried winning that game differently even if it seems impossible. Having this mindset will help you start carrying games harder since you end up having a lot of tools in your bag for when you feel as though you are down a Healer or when you realize your Tank is starting to lose his match-up and you have to even the playing field or when your Widowmaker is ineffective in battle.
Don’t Pick Characters You Don’t Know How To Play
One thing that you might be doing wrong is picking characters that are good in a situation even though you are not good at those characters. You might have some great game sense and know exactly what pick will counter the enemy team however execution in Overwatch 2 is extremely important and if you’re constantly ending up on Heroes that you don’t know how to play you can end up being more of a hindrance than a help.
It’s generally best to stick to your Hero pool and make sure that you have game plans for the weaknesses in that pool or learn a variety of Heroes that cover the flaws of each other for example if you are a Zenyatta main, learning to play Lucio or Moira will give you a more fast-paced character that is less prone to divers. In any case, you should avoid characters that are totally foreign to you when you are trying to rank up.
You can use this to your advantage too. If you notice that a Hero pick you made is forcing an enemy onto a character that they’re not good at then keep picking that character because now you’ve essentially got a free pick every fight.
Warm Up Before Rank Matches
Almost every professional Overwatch 2 player has a warm-up strategy. Far too often players just launch the game after a long day of work or school and start hitting the queues right away. Warm-up routines are really important for entering a low-stress mindset to build some confidence and get your gaming muscles working.
Your warm-ups don’t have to be complex or long but taking out just 5-10 minutes at the start to flick shot some training range Bots can be a huge help. Try to find a routine that fits your aim style and Hero requirements and be consistent with it. Having a routine can help you greatly in getting in the zone so do try this technique.
Fight Tilting
Tilting is that frustrating time when you are on a losing streak and you keep queuing up for another match with a bad taste in your mouth. By doing this, you are potentially asking for bad performance and ultimately hurting your ranking. Identify this pattern quickly and take a break to alleviate yourself.
Your breaks don’t necessarily need to be super long but if you’re feeling the weight and pressure of losing a bunch of games then you absolutely should take a break for yourself and do something simple that you enjoy. Watch an episode of a show or get some food, essentially do anything to bring that heightened state down so you can focus and be as objective as possible in your next game.
Sometimes it’s harder to tilt when you’re playing with a friend you enjoy being around so don’t be afraid to duo in order to avoid this burnout situation. Learn to pick up on when you’re really tilted and don’t shy away from taking a break.
Stagnating
Odds are if you’re here reading this kind of content then you’re actively trying to learn something. Players generally start to associate time played with skill gained, this is not the case as you can see many players who are top level with thousands of hours and ultimately not improving and being completely stuck in their Rank. On the other hand, some players make it to the top 500 in under one thousand hours.
The difference comes down to your mentality. Making sure you are always trying to figure out what you do poorly and trying to find ways to rectify it will ensure that you are constantly on an upwards trajectory. Treat each game like it’s a test of your game sense.
Tracking The Kill Feed
The problem with not tracking the Kill Feed is very common in the ranks from Bronze to Diamond. The kill feed gives you extremely important information in range especially when many of your teammates are not using a mic to communicate. There are a lot of games where your team doesn’t call their picks or their deaths. The kill feed is going to tell you which characters are dead so you can use that to your advantage on how you play the fight.
For example, you saw in the kill feed that your Widowmaker has taken out the opposing team’s main healer which is a signal to play more aggressively knowing that their team is not going to get as many heals for the fight. Having this information includes, you know that as long as you’re doing a lot of damage you’re going to win over time.
The kill feed also tells you which team has an overall pick advantage. You can call out to your team every time there’s an update on the kill feed especially when you are coming back from a Spawn as there is a fight going on. Doing this will not only help you and your teammates know when fights are winnable but it will also end up giving your teammates a lot of confidence when they know that they’re up a pick and if they are low on HP then they can come back with restored health to push effectively.
Staggering
Staggering in Overwatch 2 is whenever you respawn it can be very tempting to just hurry up and get back into the fight or to go in when you think it’s possible to make a solo play. You should ask yourself before walking in every single time if it’s better to just wait and make sure you are fighting with the highest win rate possible.
Every character on your team is a cog in a machine so not understanding your role or theirs can lead to you making choices like going in solo or going in before your team is ready to help you. Make sure as often as possible that you are fighting as a unit for when you aren’t particularly confident in your teammates’ abilities you can at least use them as meatshields to get more value from yourself.
You might have games where your teammates are not living up to your expectations but even someone who is completely unreliable at the game can walk in and use their health pool by taking damage even though this is not optimal. It’s much easier to carry when the enemy team is putting all their damage into your team members instead of you so be sure to use those meatshields.
If you notice a team is very bad at staggering then just make sure you constantly push and go for that little extra damage or go for a pick every single time.
These are some of the strategies and playstyles you can adopt to enhance your ranked game performance. Sometimes it’s more about the mindset than in-game strategies so clear your mind of any stress before queueing up and if you are in a downward spiral then take a break. In the end, it’s all about consistently trying to learn from your mistakes and growing as a player with continuous training.