I am not exactly sure what makes DPS players become extremely weak around mid platinum and below. But its really reeeeeeeeally evident that something happens around those ranks. Let me lay down the usual signs that your DPS teammates/enemies on average are bad
DPS Moira
This actually does not annoy me that much. It only fosters bad habits. Do you expect the Moira to jump into a group of 4 people and survive in diamond and above? Most likely not, so even if those Moiras do that now they wont advance much in the long run. The problem is - why do they even exist? How can a DPS Moira not only beat pure DPS characters 1v1 but also go unchallenged by them when she charges in? Well, its rather easy to guess why - bad DPS.
Tanks are better DPS than the actual DPS
This is not a joke you are reading, press Tab during a match and check who is on fire. Chances are tanks will be. Along the DPS Moira. This one is also easy to understand, we have the holy trio of easy tank ultimates - Reinhardt, Zarya and now Sigma. They can consistently team wipe with a click of a button. The only comparable DPS with such a devastating ultimate is Reaper(and what a surprise, he is also good at this level). Thing is the devastating tank ultimates are even worse now because almost nobody plays Lucio/Zenyatta. People learned that in 2-2-2 main healers are better overall than them but that also means your team wont have a proper defensive ulti. Finally, I don’t think I’ve seen many Genjis who actually team wipe. Not in mid/low platinum anyway, they most die which is consistent with the bad DPS observations for these ranks.
Tanks almost never die
And this goes all the way to the squishiest tank - Zarya. You’ll mostly see her at full charge and taking the front lines without a single care in the world. Seems like the DPS are either indecisive on what to do with her or ignore her. Most of the times I play tank I almost never die even when losing. And most of the times I die is because a 100 charge Zarya simply runs me down. This one is very consistent with not only the bad DPS but tanks being better DPS, the longer they live the easier their ultimates come online after all.
Beam DPS reign supreme
Why do you think there are so many Meis and Symmetras in the lower ranks? Why do you think they are so successful even when they cant make a proper wall or just spam their turrets everywhere? Beam characters are easier to deal damage with than hit scan/projectile ones. Its a fact consistent with Zarya and DPS Moira also being one of the best DPS at this level. More skillful DPS characters being underutilized is yet another sign of poor DPS players.
So…whats going on here? What makes DPS players from mid platinum and below suddenly so bad when in diamond and above the DPS are fairly competent?
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What? No. Just no. My highest damage records have been with soldier. My average with Mei is far below my average with soldier.
And how often can you secure kills with Solider? You know, in the double shield double main heal meta? Unfortunately I have no way to check the stats but I barely see Soldier being played and its always by poor DPS who use him as a last resort.
In plat? Pretty often. In gold? Very often. People don’t know how to position themselves at that rating.
Have you only played 25 minutes of Soldier this season? Your profile here says so, I dunno if its true. I’d wait to play more games before making conclusion. BUT you could also be a good DPS player, sometimes they do show up.
This season, on this account? Probably. I’ve got 3 accounts and I played role queue beta as well to base this on.
Yeah Buster i agree with many of your points - and i’m at the same rank as you (but a healer main) and it really feels like it’s more valuable to have a good tank over a good dps. Whilst i do enjoy nanoing the occasional genji, most often i will support the tanks.
Dps often are the ones not doing the call out! For goodness sake i make more callouts as mercy than i see the dps make!
Dps are also the most toxic. Still.
It’s not rocket science. A new role queue system has a lot of new players trying DPS, a lot of players who had left the game coming back with ring rust, etc.
Combined with the fact that the mmr system is borked, which results in quite a huge discrepancy in skill in a lot of games. High ranks and low ranked players in the same game.
What you’re experiencing is probably a combination of all of the above, once you look at things within the context of recent changes.
It was like this before though. DPS in mid platinum and below have always been vastly inferior to diamond and above unlike the other classes.
It happens all over the ranks. MMR right now is screwed. And I placed WAY higher on my dps than I should have. Now, while I am a DPS main, I’m still way out of my league. Previous seasons I was always around high plat/low diamond, and for me to get boosted up so high, means that the quality of games for my teammates go down, cause I’m just not as good as people in that rank.
Also, DPS might be bad at that rank because tankplay is awful at that rank. Tanks enable DPS to do things, but no1 at that rank understands how to play tank properly. It’s different as you get lower, cause no-one knows what they’re doing, so it can just seem like DPS might do better there, but really it’s because the quality of tankplay hasn’t really improved that much, at least that’s my view of it.
Let me lay down the usual signs that your DPS teammates/enemies on average are bad
When you think you’re brilliant and others are bad as a general rule then you suffer hard from the Dunning Kruger effect…
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It’s funny how you complain about plat dps when jayne himself has said that the most terrifying players in the widowmaker tryhard lobbies are the plats because its the only thing they do every day. They have the gamesence of a mashed potato and when it comes to movement they are more bots that bots, but omg they can click your head…!!!
But jokes aside, dps are litteraly useless in this game. I mean… A comp that doesn’t involve a single hero from that role dominated the game for a whole year.
Due to performance playing a role in SR gains/losses, DPS have always been overvalued. If everyone those their job at the same level, the DPS will rise more quickly, because everything in this game is catered towards making DPS players feel good (be it auditory or visual feedback, medals, cards, potg, etc). I am a flex player, which means that I play 90% tank, 9.9% support and 0.1% DPS. And when I get DPS, I easily out-damage and out-elim every other DPS on the field. And my aim is subpar, but I play enough support to know what to do so I can survive. I play enough tank to know when to chase and when to back off. I know what the payload looks like.
Once you reach diamond, there is no more performance in determining SR, so the problem goes away a bit.
Role SR will make matters worse and worse though. SR basically tells us, which percentile you are on, and if the 3 roles get graded differently, you will have the bottom 8% or what it is in bronze. It’s a ranking, not a rating. Let me illustrate.
Suppose only 20 people play this game (I call this the “Year 2021 projection”^^). If you rank their abilities and denote them according to their role, it might look like:
TDTSTSSDTSDDDSDTDDDD
Now take for example the fourth support player, who is 10th overall out of the 20. He’s in the middle of the pack, which would mean high gold.
Now in role SR, he is 4th out of 5 supports, putting him rather low on the list, somewhere in mid silver.
Meanwhile right behind him at 11th position is the 3rd best DPS. He would also be high gold, but with role SR he is 3rd out of 10, putting him in high diamond.
Basically role SR means that two players of pretty much equal level might end up in absurdly different ranks, because some roles simply have better players.
If only I could get Widowmakers who know how to headshot. It happens in maybe one of ten games and as it turns out the guy is a smurf anyway, lmao
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Reins and Zaryas don’t team wipe on the click of the button. They create good conditions but they still need dps to finish the job.
I’m not sure I agree with the premise of the question but if there is truth in that then it must be tunnel vision and overview. I mean you described it yourself in the Moira example. And tanks and supports are just better at this cause it’s not their primary objective to look for kills.
I have noticed the quality of DPS players have become much worse since 2/2/2 was introduced. Apparently it’s a bug with the new role select, but the quality of matches has noticeably dropped and I hope they fix it soon.
For me it has been that the team with the Doomfist often wins and if both teams got Doomfist it’s the better one. Doomfist gives waay too much value compared to the skill needed to get kills
I get plats in the enemy team in qp all the time. Most of the time they are hanzos with golden gun an a spark skin aware of the existance of the primary fire melee. It sounds quite simple but pretty much nobody below masters uses it lol.
I think lower ranks get this impression because most Doomfists are smurfs. In one of my last games we had a level 40 Doomfist boosting a silver Mercy. Whether the Mercy paid for it or was a friend was unknown.
Im not talking about lower levels, Im taking high plat low diamond