Finally hit champ
Finally hit champ! This was playing zen/ana only and I would love to share what I learned !
Also sorry for marking out my name and image, gm+ is fairly small in my region (west coast usa) and I would prefer not to be identified on ladder
For context I haven't played this game since back in 2018/2019 where I pushed a bit into gm and uninstalled and deleted my accounts
Started playing again in s1 2026 where I placed in diamond and worked up from there to finally hitting champ in about 140hrs of gameplay but probably another 100hours of vod reviews and youtube videos
Here's what I learned and what the highest ROI things were in this journey (
Diamond -> Master: So from starting again in diamond what pushed me up to master was simply doing an all hero challenge where I got a win with every hero. Just learning the basics of all the new and reworked kits, while working off the rust and remembering how to play was enough to get into master
Master -> low gm: This is where I felt like I was losing games due to poor gameplay, and after watching vods I summarised it as firstly bad ult usage and secondly fixing poor macro positioning mistakes and dying at bad times, etc. After practicing them each for a week one by one, writing down notes and reflections after each game, and watching the vods for progress, I fixed these and pushed into low gm. The best takeaway was that with ults, 4 in 5 of my ults were like a 1/10 and wasted, but 1 in 5 were perfect 10/10. If you think of it the average outcome of all my ults equated to about a 3/10. The fix was changing my ult mindset from always looking for the "one perfect ult" to just "good ults that get solid value" and it worked wonders. The best part is I still had that 1 in 5 perfect ult, but the other 4 weren't awful now but instead "good" consistently. This alongside some positioning errors pushed me from master - low gm.
Low gm -> high gm: The biggest gain here was ebb and flow / when to be aggro or passive. This is pretty much about recognising advantage states and when you should back out and give space or really ram into the enemy and clean them up. Awkward has alot of very good content on this especially for support and perfecting this over a week / 2 weeks got me to high gm
High gm -> champ: This is where I literally couldn't pick out any gameplay issues, and when i watched my replays I was literally clutching at straws to guess why I was losing games, so I got a review from a pro player. They point out my macro was good enough for champ, but my micro wasn't very good. There were tiny issues like poor crosshair placements, taking too wide of swings, and micro positioning that were causing me to die or miss easy kills, and fixing these were the last issues that pushed me into champ.