I reached GM, a peak of 4126, by filling but that was when i hit a wall and i am floating between low GM and high masters. In my opinion by filling you automatically become the weakest link in your team but a team is only as strong as its weakest link. This can be to your advantage and disadvantage. By filling i am above average at most tanks and supports for my elo (never really fill DPS but when i do i am a diamond level DPS so i ask for goats sadly) but i am not a specialist in anything. An example would be if i fill as Rein and the enemy team also has someone filling as Rein then i generally win that match-up (about 60-70% of the time). You can tell immediately is someone is filling as Rein but when i fill as Rein and come up against a Rein main i get absolutely destroyed about 80% of the time, he blocks all my shatters and hits all his or i block one by chance. I want to improve and specialise on certain hero’s so i created alternate accounts for each role, DPS, tank and support. (low masters, mid masters and high masters respectively). There are a few problems with this;
1: The community’s attitude towards one-tricking - i go into a game wanting to improve my hanzo and all i get is not caring about the team and i’m throwing when all i want to do is improve.
2: The random assortment of players - i had a game on my tank account where our whole team was tank mains and we got destroyed because nobody could play any other hero’s, we tried goats but it didn’t work at all.
3: The typical tripple or quad dps - this happens a lot, even in GM (EU anyway), and it’s hard to improve my zarya because i take too much poke dmg or my lucio because i have no ana to peel for so all i learn is to play reddit lucio.
4: The toxicity of filling - i get so many games where people reluctantly fill and then flame our dps for doing bad and then proceeding to play hog. This is probably because they arn’t playing dps and end up tilting.
5: Another one is smurfs who play for fun, it’s hard to improve my Mcree for example if i’m a low masters dps going up against a GM tracer player (my dps just isn’t ready for that level of play yet), your whole team then flames you for not killing the tracer. i do offer them to play Mcree but then i’m not improving my dps. (They also don’t do any better than i did anyway but they do think they did however i switched to brig :p).
There is probably a few more that i can’t think of atm but these are the ones that happened yesterday. I can tell i am am not a specialist in any hero because if i watch a few streamers who play the hero, e.g Astro, i can tell i am doing nothing remotely similar to the plays they are able to make, i was basically a heal bot on my support account and was stuck mid diamond until i realised that i was just 80% on heal aura while playing lucio, i wasn’t booping the enemy rein into our team or anything etc. Even with this i had a 55% winrate in GM on lucio with him as my 4th most played hero.
These are the reasons i feel like role que would greatly benefit the community who wish to improve at the game. Forgive me for any spelling mistakes and if this should have been in general instead of competativediscussion.