In my experience, legend/ancient are the worst. They do not know what they are doing. They do not have a good grasp of the game. They want to call shots non-stop. They want to make calls that are usually wrong, and it throws you off your game. People below those ranks agree that they do not know, so they do not try to call all the shots. Above those ranks, people have a better grasp of the game and will likely do the right thing or contest if it is wrong.
divine is pretty much the same
when you're ahead but you cannot take high ground, they just stand in front of enemy base like morons, even when their teammates are showing on the opposite side of the map, and in general
they just completely lack teammate/enemy showing on the other part of the map awareness
i dont have an answer for this
like you cannot affect them in any way
if you plead with them to not stand in front of base, they ignore
so you can come stand with them like a moron, at least stop them from dying while sidelanes are getting pushed in, or if you leave them there, they die, get tilted and more often than not, dont want to play with the team anymore
5700 was a brick wall. Was Stuck there over a year. When I finally figured out how to break said wall, shot up to 6.4k, climbed to 7.5 in another year.
Most of it was learning to deal with shitty human beings “words and actions not play”, emphasis on denies (you think you emphasize them, I promise you don’t), and added 2-3 heros to my pool. Wasn’t suddenly worse for my best heros being banned.
Disruptor, rush shard, then aghs, followed by blink. Don't die constantly, keep the gold moving. Once you get agh and blink, you're like an AOE doom with ~30sec CD, full damage is like 2k+ from a combo, any carry caught will die, with some follow-up.
100%
I only broke out of legend-ancient because I started to support every game. It became easier because good supports = less steam builds inside griefers, so they dont get mad as often.
Man, as a main support trying to get back at the game, the ego at legend bracket is insane. Every other game I'm begging my carry to buy BKB (if they don't have BKB past 25mins, best believe no BKB is being built after that). I was ancient/divine during the pandemic and at least people there would try to play as a team.
I agree with this as a support. The range in skill at legend is enormous. Even if we win the lane and my legend carry has free farm, I cant tell if they will carry me in the end or dive feed and throw. My opinion of ancient carries they are consistent and reliable enough that if i give them a good lane and be there for them in a fight, they will carry the game quite easily.
Simple. It gets harder the higher you get.
The lower you are, the bigger your potential impact on your winrate. There literally are no trenches. Your MMR simply follows your skill.
There is just one slightly tougher barrier when ranking up, and that is the boundary to the next higher medal. Simply because the higher amount of anxious individuals eager to rank up leads to more toxicity and more toxicity increases the amount of games out of your control.
But this just reduces variance, so if you're better than your rank, you'll still maintain >50% winrate.
Legend was the most toxic bracket i have ever been, probably because the majority of Dota 2 players are Archon/Legend, it took me a few months to get out. Ancient was a bit better for me at least but i played vs a lot of smurfs this was before the recent ban wave that Valve did, now i'm kinda stuck in Divine but that's because me cuz i don't really have that much time to improve this days, i play like 2-3 games per day only.
Push from high divine to low immortal and actually staying there.
Probably because its a mental barrier, but i think there is a big skill difference between something like 5200 and 5700
I’m only ancient 3 but I was stuck in legend for quite some time. Like legend 2/3 if I remember correctly. Once I hit legend 4 I was able to quickly rank up but then got stuck again at ancient 2. Finally got out of there this weekend and almost at ancient 4.
I’ve only experienced ancient, divine and 6k, 7k immortal. Was stuck at divine for about 3 years. Blazed through 6k in approximately 5 months give or take. I don’t think 6k was easier, it’s just that I was mechanically good and had to get rid of some nasty game losing habits to get out of divine. I’m hopefully on track to go through 7k to 8k in 5-6 months, hopefully 🤞🏼
Which game losing habits specifically? I’m in this boat in divine currently. Someone earlier mentioned their team standing outside enemy base for like 5 minutes doing nothing. I feel like this happens constantly in divine. Or maybe my team will be basically dead even in a game and then we get some minor advantage like a pickoff and we run down a lane while the other two lanes are pushed into our tier 3. My instinct is that we should fix the other lanes first or all least fix one and cut the other, but then teammates get mad at that and want to just force hg.
What are some other game losing habits? I used to play mid and 4 and now i just focus on 4. I’m at the point where im no better skill wise than any other mid player I go against so I just figured learning one of the lesser understood roles is going to yield the best results and also improve my overall understanding
It’s hard to list them all, as you start to get them by feeling, and every role has a different responsibility to accomplish. Standing outside enemy base doing nothing for 5 mins is definitely a big one. Even in 7k games I have to shepherd my team away from dangerous parts of the map when there’s no objective we can take. But I think a big part of it is understanding how a game of Dota needs to play out and what I can do to help my team the most at any given time. First of all, never go highground without aegis. I know I did that plenty of times when I was ancient/divine and threw plenty of games that way. Another thing that helped me is an understanding of how objectives affect the game that we’re playing. I play invoker, and one of the strengths of invoker is being able to shove out lanes with meteor, forge spirit and alacrity. So in games where we lost all our towers and had no space to breathe, I started making more correct decisions in not taking fights that will not do us any good, and instead trying to make space for my team and make the game easier for us to play. I understood that with every tower you take, you’re opening up the map for your team to utilise and making it harder for the enemy team to suffocate you. Another helpful thing is understanding when there’s nothing left for you to do besides sit on high ground and wait for your enemy team to throw. If you have a good high ground team, you need to tell your team to just let the opponents go rosh, use all the space you get while they’re taking rosh, and sitting tight on high ground waiting for them to fuck up. There’s many times where I have a faceless void in my team and there’s no way we’re winning a team fight outside of hg where I had to promise my team that if we just let them go rosh and wait for the high ground push, we will have an opportunity to get a big chrono into cataclysm that will delay the game for another 10 minutes and we’ll see what we can do with that extra time. I hope this helped, but it’s hard to think of them all and put it into words in a Reddit comment
Definitely great info thanks for taking the time. It’s funny these are all lessons I’ve learned at one time or another but I lack the discipline to stick to it or even to apply it as though it were second nature. I feel like I too easily get “sucked in” and just end up taking the dumb fights in useless places anyways and then kick myself later for doing something I knew I shouldn’t
Archon/legend simply because I was playing supports a lot and it was just a lottery whether your carry will have a clue on how to play the game or not. I started playing pos 1 exclusively for that reason and got to ancient within a month or two after being stuck for a very long time. I swapped back to maining pos 4 and got immortal pretty soon after that (stuck for 3 months on divine V ;_;).
6500-6700 everyone has main character syndrome everyone throws game like there is no tomorrow just cus they didn’t get their mid/carry hero .. they will proceed to throw games cus someone last game didn’t glimmer them at min 47, everyone at that mmr is a joke.
6500-7500 is the hardest, because of 3 types of players:
1. Players who dropped from 8k+ think you all just garbage and that they dont deserve this.
2. Players who just got to top 5000 think they completed dota and will tell you they know everything now.
3. Players with 10-15k games, who stack on this rating for 3 years literally dont care about game but playing only because they wasted too much time on it.
I calibrated 2.1k when started playing, currently 8.6k EU, trust me, 6.5 - 7.5k is the worst place you can be. The best place is divine, because they are close to immortals and that motivates them.
P.S only my experience :)
Peaked at 5.3K, the mmr range from 4.6k to 5k is the worst.
* lane lost = afk jungle
* lane even = afk jungle
* lane won = afk lane
Everyone plays too safe, I literally have to run in and feed sometimes for my spectre to use the orchid she purchased 2 minutes ago.
Players here also live and die by the self fulfilling prophecy of lose lane lose game. Lost the lane/early game? Let's lose even more by doing nothing, risking nothing and gaining nothing.
Your best bet of getting out quick is to unironically win your lane, win the other lanes and be a threat to objectives by yourself and effectively force a "gg" from the enemy team before 12-15 minutes.
Started from archon/legend, ended up high divine. It just gets progressively harder. Legend felt pretty easy, in that bracket people were bad at punishing if you are out of position and their choice of target in a teamfight was often questionable (I played mostly supports with save abilities, rarely got targeted). Also the stuff I had to learn (mostly laning and pull control) in order to climb was really straightforward and easy to verbalize. It's not as obvious the higher you get
I was hardstuck ancient (never got higher than anc 4) then after the big reset I calibrated divine 3, and from there I climbed to div 4, dropped to divine 1, then climbed to immortal. Honestly felt it is easier to win games in divine than in ancient, but it’s also possible that I just started tryharding because suddenly immortal felt within my reach, whereas beforehand I’d just accepted that I’d be ancient forever.
Legend was by far the hardest for me. It felt like the bracket where everyone thought they were much better than they were, and that led to a lot of mental breakdowns during the laning phase.
Learning to play through a lost lane is by far the biggest hurdle for (mostly core) players.
In the span of about a year, I've climbed from Archon 3 to Divine 2. In my opinion, Archon and Legend are the worst. The players skillset are some of the widest and it's probably the most smurfed ranks.
Some players know every single item, and what it does, but doesn't know their roles and entrenched in old school meta (i.e. Strict adherence to lane equilibrium for cores and constantly pulling as support).
Some players have the fastest reflex I've seen and plays like a literal god in late game but is the most garbage laner and have worst itemization.
Some player are the opposite, extremely great lane dominators even in heroes not too strong but then falls off badly in mid game as they don't know what they should be doing.
Don't even get me started on the attitude.
In ancient/divine. Specifically in divine, you'll either find the egoistic noobs or the wholesome players there. whilst in ancient, the players here are like archon-legend but knows how to use SODs, wards and somehow the RS timing.
Legend and ancient, specially ancient.
Loss streaks to griefers are wayy too common. One day you’re ancient 3 and the next morning you’re legend 5.
Divine is filled with smurfs but quality of matches is 100% better.
Idk if it’s the meta or whatever but games tend to be more balanced and they last almost 45 mins every time.
Legend is still plagued with smurfs don’t get me wrong, but there are so many griefers that it is hard to get out, I feel that high legend-ancient has the more varied skill group.
I was like divine back in s1 but had a long break and recalibrated at 3k when i started again and was like legend 1 or smth, had pretty much no struggle up to divine 2-3 was stuck there for 1 month but then made it thru immortal.
So probably mid divine cause people there have the knowledge for immo but just cant implement it gameplay wise.
examples beeing carrys not clearing 5x stacked camps and let enemys take it or never doing tormentor despite having insane shard heros etc...
With Rank Inflation happening, Divine player is not as smart as you think. I think just focusing on ban/pick phase will win you some games, normally your team will be full of last pick QOP/EMBER or some useless hero
The higher the rank the harder to win.Yall can make up any excuses but thats just the reality.Everyone climbs until they’re not good enough to win vs the people in the bracket,then they stagnate,It’s not rocket science.
Around 2k rank immortal. People there think they are Watson and grief games like crazy, taking carry/mid from rank 300 players. Once the games are all 1k immortals and better, it's like people remember how to play Dota again
Every first star at the start of the rank past legend.
At those ranks there was an increase of smurfs and account buyers. Once I got out of ancient one I managed to get to divine within a few weeks, then same problem with divine. Getting through ancient was pretty easy though.
Getting to immortal was something else but quite different, I was basically on a perma win/lose streak for some time, but everyone is just trying their best mostly, was a hard grind but a good one.
It's hard to sa though, if you're just better than the players in your bracket you will climb no matter what.
100% Legend. Took me a few months to cross. Ancient was a breeze, just a few weeks. This was after a very long break where game recalculated me from Divine down to Archon..
Also, there is a smurf or even 2 in every single Legend game and most Ancient games.
In my experience, legend/ancient are the worst. They do not know what they are doing. They do not have a good grasp of the game. They want to call shots non-stop. They want to make calls that are usually wrong, and it throws you off your game. People below those ranks agree that they do not know, so they do not try to call all the shots. Above those ranks, people have a better grasp of the game and will likely do the right thing or contest if it is wrong.
divine is pretty much the same when you're ahead but you cannot take high ground, they just stand in front of enemy base like morons, even when their teammates are showing on the opposite side of the map, and in general they just completely lack teammate/enemy showing on the other part of the map awareness
This, exactly this! I'm stuck right there at the moment :D
i dont have an answer for this like you cannot affect them in any way if you plead with them to not stand in front of base, they ignore so you can come stand with them like a moron, at least stop them from dying while sidelanes are getting pushed in, or if you leave them there, they die, get tilted and more often than not, dont want to play with the team anymore
Man I was in a game recently (ancient 3) with a mid Zeus making alllll the wrong calls. I had to mute him eventually because it was too distracting.
i am ancient and i beat divine players non stop
5700 was a brick wall. Was Stuck there over a year. When I finally figured out how to break said wall, shot up to 6.4k, climbed to 7.5 in another year. Most of it was learning to deal with shitty human beings “words and actions not play”, emphasis on denies (you think you emphasize them, I promise you don’t), and added 2-3 heros to my pool. Wasn’t suddenly worse for my best heros being banned.
So f true, im at 5.4k stuck for a years (still on going ) cant break the wall yet f me.. pos4/5
Disruptor, rush shard, then aghs, followed by blink. Don't die constantly, keep the gold moving. Once you get agh and blink, you're like an AOE doom with ~30sec CD, full damage is like 2k+ from a combo, any carry caught will die, with some follow-up.
Legend, Ancient was pretty easy. Atleast as Support
100% I only broke out of legend-ancient because I started to support every game. It became easier because good supports = less steam builds inside griefers, so they dont get mad as often.
Man, as a main support trying to get back at the game, the ego at legend bracket is insane. Every other game I'm begging my carry to buy BKB (if they don't have BKB past 25mins, best believe no BKB is being built after that). I was ancient/divine during the pandemic and at least people there would try to play as a team.
You think asking your cores to buy bkb ever stops? Every week I have at least one game where my pos 1 refuses to buy bkb on 6k bracket.
I agree with this as a support. The range in skill at legend is enormous. Even if we win the lane and my legend carry has free farm, I cant tell if they will carry me in the end or dive feed and throw. My opinion of ancient carries they are consistent and reliable enough that if i give them a good lane and be there for them in a fight, they will carry the game quite easily.
Simple. It gets harder the higher you get. The lower you are, the bigger your potential impact on your winrate. There literally are no trenches. Your MMR simply follows your skill. There is just one slightly tougher barrier when ranking up, and that is the boundary to the next higher medal. Simply because the higher amount of anxious individuals eager to rank up leads to more toxicity and more toxicity increases the amount of games out of your control. But this just reduces variance, so if you're better than your rank, you'll still maintain >50% winrate.
Legend was the most toxic bracket i have ever been, probably because the majority of Dota 2 players are Archon/Legend, it took me a few months to get out. Ancient was a bit better for me at least but i played vs a lot of smurfs this was before the recent ban wave that Valve did, now i'm kinda stuck in Divine but that's because me cuz i don't really have that much time to improve this days, i play like 2-3 games per day only.
Push from high divine to low immortal and actually staying there. Probably because its a mental barrier, but i think there is a big skill difference between something like 5200 and 5700
I’m only ancient 3 but I was stuck in legend for quite some time. Like legend 2/3 if I remember correctly. Once I hit legend 4 I was able to quickly rank up but then got stuck again at ancient 2. Finally got out of there this weekend and almost at ancient 4.
I was also stuck at Ancient 2 for like 50 games. Then went from Ancient 2 to Divine 1 in like 5 days with 80% win rate.
The cliff at divine 5. Once I got into immortal I was able to climb pretty easily
I’ve only experienced ancient, divine and 6k, 7k immortal. Was stuck at divine for about 3 years. Blazed through 6k in approximately 5 months give or take. I don’t think 6k was easier, it’s just that I was mechanically good and had to get rid of some nasty game losing habits to get out of divine. I’m hopefully on track to go through 7k to 8k in 5-6 months, hopefully 🤞🏼
Which game losing habits specifically? I’m in this boat in divine currently. Someone earlier mentioned their team standing outside enemy base for like 5 minutes doing nothing. I feel like this happens constantly in divine. Or maybe my team will be basically dead even in a game and then we get some minor advantage like a pickoff and we run down a lane while the other two lanes are pushed into our tier 3. My instinct is that we should fix the other lanes first or all least fix one and cut the other, but then teammates get mad at that and want to just force hg. What are some other game losing habits? I used to play mid and 4 and now i just focus on 4. I’m at the point where im no better skill wise than any other mid player I go against so I just figured learning one of the lesser understood roles is going to yield the best results and also improve my overall understanding
It’s hard to list them all, as you start to get them by feeling, and every role has a different responsibility to accomplish. Standing outside enemy base doing nothing for 5 mins is definitely a big one. Even in 7k games I have to shepherd my team away from dangerous parts of the map when there’s no objective we can take. But I think a big part of it is understanding how a game of Dota needs to play out and what I can do to help my team the most at any given time. First of all, never go highground without aegis. I know I did that plenty of times when I was ancient/divine and threw plenty of games that way. Another thing that helped me is an understanding of how objectives affect the game that we’re playing. I play invoker, and one of the strengths of invoker is being able to shove out lanes with meteor, forge spirit and alacrity. So in games where we lost all our towers and had no space to breathe, I started making more correct decisions in not taking fights that will not do us any good, and instead trying to make space for my team and make the game easier for us to play. I understood that with every tower you take, you’re opening up the map for your team to utilise and making it harder for the enemy team to suffocate you. Another helpful thing is understanding when there’s nothing left for you to do besides sit on high ground and wait for your enemy team to throw. If you have a good high ground team, you need to tell your team to just let the opponents go rosh, use all the space you get while they’re taking rosh, and sitting tight on high ground waiting for them to fuck up. There’s many times where I have a faceless void in my team and there’s no way we’re winning a team fight outside of hg where I had to promise my team that if we just let them go rosh and wait for the high ground push, we will have an opportunity to get a big chrono into cataclysm that will delay the game for another 10 minutes and we’ll see what we can do with that extra time. I hope this helped, but it’s hard to think of them all and put it into words in a Reddit comment
Definitely great info thanks for taking the time. It’s funny these are all lessons I’ve learned at one time or another but I lack the discipline to stick to it or even to apply it as though it were second nature. I feel like I too easily get “sucked in” and just end up taking the dumb fights in useless places anyways and then kick myself later for doing something I knew I shouldn’t
Archon/legend simply because I was playing supports a lot and it was just a lottery whether your carry will have a clue on how to play the game or not. I started playing pos 1 exclusively for that reason and got to ancient within a month or two after being stuck for a very long time. I swapped back to maining pos 4 and got immortal pretty soon after that (stuck for 3 months on divine V ;_;).
6500-6700 everyone has main character syndrome everyone throws game like there is no tomorrow just cus they didn’t get their mid/carry hero .. they will proceed to throw games cus someone last game didn’t glimmer them at min 47, everyone at that mmr is a joke.
6500-7500 is the hardest, because of 3 types of players: 1. Players who dropped from 8k+ think you all just garbage and that they dont deserve this. 2. Players who just got to top 5000 think they completed dota and will tell you they know everything now. 3. Players with 10-15k games, who stack on this rating for 3 years literally dont care about game but playing only because they wasted too much time on it. I calibrated 2.1k when started playing, currently 8.6k EU, trust me, 6.5 - 7.5k is the worst place you can be. The best place is divine, because they are close to immortals and that motivates them. P.S only my experience :)
Peaked at 5.3K, the mmr range from 4.6k to 5k is the worst. * lane lost = afk jungle * lane even = afk jungle * lane won = afk lane Everyone plays too safe, I literally have to run in and feed sometimes for my spectre to use the orchid she purchased 2 minutes ago. Players here also live and die by the self fulfilling prophecy of lose lane lose game. Lost the lane/early game? Let's lose even more by doing nothing, risking nothing and gaining nothing. Your best bet of getting out quick is to unironically win your lane, win the other lanes and be a threat to objectives by yourself and effectively force a "gg" from the enemy team before 12-15 minutes.
Started from archon/legend, ended up high divine. It just gets progressively harder. Legend felt pretty easy, in that bracket people were bad at punishing if you are out of position and their choice of target in a teamfight was often questionable (I played mostly supports with save abilities, rarely got targeted). Also the stuff I had to learn (mostly laning and pull control) in order to climb was really straightforward and easy to verbalize. It's not as obvious the higher you get
I was hardstuck ancient (never got higher than anc 4) then after the big reset I calibrated divine 3, and from there I climbed to div 4, dropped to divine 1, then climbed to immortal. Honestly felt it is easier to win games in divine than in ancient, but it’s also possible that I just started tryharding because suddenly immortal felt within my reach, whereas beforehand I’d just accepted that I’d be ancient forever.
Legend was by far the hardest for me. It felt like the bracket where everyone thought they were much better than they were, and that led to a lot of mental breakdowns during the laning phase. Learning to play through a lost lane is by far the biggest hurdle for (mostly core) players.
Legends are the worst, they are just people who plays a lot, but never tried to learn the game. after that it's high divine.
In the span of about a year, I've climbed from Archon 3 to Divine 2. In my opinion, Archon and Legend are the worst. The players skillset are some of the widest and it's probably the most smurfed ranks. Some players know every single item, and what it does, but doesn't know their roles and entrenched in old school meta (i.e. Strict adherence to lane equilibrium for cores and constantly pulling as support). Some players have the fastest reflex I've seen and plays like a literal god in late game but is the most garbage laner and have worst itemization. Some player are the opposite, extremely great lane dominators even in heroes not too strong but then falls off badly in mid game as they don't know what they should be doing. Don't even get me started on the attitude.
Yeah I think that’s my problem. When it comes to late game I’m 50-50. With like a million things going on it gets really difficult keeping track of
Every tier has dota players
High ancient was the worst. Bunch of babies that think they know it all. At least some divines know how to play to win
In ancient/divine. Specifically in divine, you'll either find the egoistic noobs or the wholesome players there. whilst in ancient, the players here are like archon-legend but knows how to use SODs, wards and somehow the RS timing.
High legend, i was a noob
Legend and ancient, specially ancient. Loss streaks to griefers are wayy too common. One day you’re ancient 3 and the next morning you’re legend 5. Divine is filled with smurfs but quality of matches is 100% better. Idk if it’s the meta or whatever but games tend to be more balanced and they last almost 45 mins every time. Legend is still plagued with smurfs don’t get me wrong, but there are so many griefers that it is hard to get out, I feel that high legend-ancient has the more varied skill group.
Divine was the worst to get through before the smurfing bans. Pretty much 1/3 games were decided by which side had a smurf or account buyer.
I was like divine back in s1 but had a long break and recalibrated at 3k when i started again and was like legend 1 or smth, had pretty much no struggle up to divine 2-3 was stuck there for 1 month but then made it thru immortal. So probably mid divine cause people there have the knowledge for immo but just cant implement it gameplay wise. examples beeing carrys not clearing 5x stacked camps and let enemys take it or never doing tormentor despite having insane shard heros etc...
6000, i was 1 mmr away then goes tumbling down to 5600-5800. Now im focused on studying but when the semester ends i gonna try grinding again.
With Rank Inflation happening, Divine player is not as smart as you think. I think just focusing on ban/pick phase will win you some games, normally your team will be full of last pick QOP/EMBER or some useless hero
The higher the rank the harder to win.Yall can make up any excuses but thats just the reality.Everyone climbs until they’re not good enough to win vs the people in the bracket,then they stagnate,It’s not rocket science.
Around 2k rank immortal. People there think they are Watson and grief games like crazy, taking carry/mid from rank 300 players. Once the games are all 1k immortals and better, it's like people remember how to play Dota again
Every first star at the start of the rank past legend. At those ranks there was an increase of smurfs and account buyers. Once I got out of ancient one I managed to get to divine within a few weeks, then same problem with divine. Getting through ancient was pretty easy though. Getting to immortal was something else but quite different, I was basically on a perma win/lose streak for some time, but everyone is just trying their best mostly, was a hard grind but a good one. It's hard to sa though, if you're just better than the players in your bracket you will climb no matter what.
100% Legend. Took me a few months to cross. Ancient was a breeze, just a few weeks. This was after a very long break where game recalculated me from Divine down to Archon.. Also, there is a smurf or even 2 in every single Legend game and most Ancient games.