Hi.
I’ve been playing OW for close to three years now. During this time, I’ve tried playing Ranking matches four times and every time I rank, my SR comes out lower than the previous time. Other than the ranking matches, I haven’t played any ranked matches.
Apparently I’m making major mistakes according to the algorithm that measures my “skill level” or whatever in calculating my SR but I don’t know what. I feel like I’ve improved in the last three years and according to my statistics I have improved in both average healing and damage output, but my SR doesn’t reflect that. On the contrary, according to my SR, I got worse at the game and at being a healer.
Since the game doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do to get better SR, I’m hoping someone here can tell me. If I knew what I’m supposed to do, I would do it, but the game doesn’t tell me and Youtube basically just told me to “get better”, which isn’t helpful either.
So can someone please tell me how the algorithm measures healer SR and what I need to focus on improving? I mainly play Mercy and Moira.
Thank you in advance!
Forget about competitive rank. If you want to get better at the game then you have to practice. A lot. In terms of winning matches you need to know how to position yourself and what actions to prioritise (healing, rez, damage boost, damage) at what times. The biggest thing to do as a healer is to make sure you don’t die. Death is the worst thing that can happen in a match, so focus on getting that number down if it’s high. When playing on Defence it’s worth dying on point, but otherwise just retreat and regroup when a push fails. This helps your team get back into the fight faster (even a single additional push is worth a lot).
SR isn’t really something you should focus on trying to raise unless you enjoy being disappointed.
Watch who the other support is playing and try to know what the best healer to play for the situation is. The key factors in that decision are both teams’ comp and the map. imo, be ready to play almost any hero if not any hero (the only healer I don’t play is Zen)
Also, don’t forget that in those 3 years of Overwatch, you got better, but the whole community has gotten better as well.
I progress much more in competitive than QP or Mystery heroes for example, because I feel like it’s more of a “game time” mode whereas the others are more “practice time” (even though I am doing my best there too). Maybe it’s the stress of “I need to perform extra well because a loss has consequences” ?
So to sum up my thought, the competitive community might have progressed more rapidly than you during those three years and that would be why you are slowly losing SR. The game is trying to place you at a level where you’d have a sort of 50% winrate. When you get there, you’ll have more fun.
That said, watch streamers, videos on youtube, etc. on heroes you want/like to play. Go for the streamer that is like one-two ranks above, no need to watch top500 when you’re silver (just an example). It helped me identifying the techs I needed to master in order to advance (super jump, fade jumps, etc.).
Also, I agree with the comments above 
Good luck and have fun!
Thank you all so much for your help!
Just play tank, then you can see what other healers do wrong and go from there.
Depends on your rank, but most supports fail to realise that keeping the tanks alive is the easiest win condition.
the miss conception of supports is that you must be a heal bot and that is definitely not true,
you must help the team with getting kills ie also dpsing.
being a heal bot wont do you any good especially if your team is bad and thats true in anything below diamond
Hello,
It is hard to give feedback when we cannot clearly tell what your strengths and weaknesses are and areas you need to improve in.
Can you please provide 2 different replay codes of your games where in one you won and another one which you lost the game.
You can do that by going to career profile > replays > share > and it should provide you with a code.
Playing as healer gives you the least potential to climb in ranks because you have the least playmaking possibilities (not saying there is none, but least is least). My healer SR is around 400-500 lower from tank and healing. Over the time I managed to climb some with tank and damage and stay there, but with healing I am pretty much stuck where I always was. No matter how well you heal, you are only facilitating your damage to do their job better. You can help a lot but you cant do the heavy lifting.
There will be games where you might be the weak link. There will be games where you are the best player on year team. That is the whole matchmaking lottery. But a good damage dealer + bad healer will almost always win vs. bad damage dealer + good healer.