Why You Suck at Ranked

hey guys it's bedum and today in this video I want to talk to you about six things that you can do in Brawl star to improve your ranked gameplay this is stuff that I don't really see people talking about that much the thing is when you ask people who are good at brawl Stars how you can improve you'll usually get some vague general advice like oh you should learn to draft you should know your matchups you should know the meta and which brothers are strong watch my tier list by the way like and that kind

of advice might help you but it isn't that specific and abusing a broken brawler to get really high ELO won't really it's not going to necessarily make you a better player it's just going to make you a player who's in an ELO that you're going to struggle to fit in with once your brawler gets nerfed and there are some things that I think people could start doing right now to improve their gameplay by a lot and nobody's talking about it so what we're going to do in this video is talk about exactly that six things

that you can do right now to help you improve and they're going to be specific and they're going to be actionable so if you enjoy these tips and you want to see more be sure to like subscribe these tips are mostly going to be catered For brawl star organized from easiest to hardest but I'm going to be honest the last technique in this video is actually going to be applicable to other PVP games and maybe even in life in general so make sure you stick around for that as a short disclaimer I've been playing brawl

since 2017 I have thousands of hours in this game majority of it spent in 3v3 I'm not a pro player but I always get Masters and ranked and I don't even have the last tip mastered yet personally you know even if you're better than me in the game that's okay still watch it I think you're going to get something out of it so without further Ado let's jump right into the first one starting with the easiest this is more aim towards beginners and that's ammo counting in Brawl star most characters have three ammo and it's

hard once you're at zero ammo to get back to three ammo quickly ammo counting is more important if you're playing an aggro brawler um and you won't need to like jump in and try and kill a squishy Target the thing is if you just jump in without counting your opponent's ammo they're going to mag dump you like as soon as you go in they're just them and maybe their teammates are just going to blow you up fill you with holes and do unspeakable things to said holes but if you count your Target's ammo Dodge a

few shots and then jump in you're going to win way more interactions that way and that's what separates a diamond Edgar player from M from a Masters Edgar player even though it's like a no skill brawler just being able to time your jump for when they have no ammo that's super important and most of you might already know this like obviously yeah you don't want to just jump in when your opponent when the enemy Brock has three shots you don't want to just jump in like that if you can die in three shots but you

might not know that ammo counting can actually be useful to know in range duels too you get a sense of how many shots your opponent is sent out and you know they're only on one ammo left which they're just spamming as soon as they get it you can start to predict when they'll start peeking Corners it's when their ammo is recharged cuz people do this habit of just shooting hiding and then peeking to shoot right as their ammo recharges so if you get the hang of it you can predict the timing of your next shot

to hit them as soon as they peek a corner and some of you might even realize you're already unconsciously doing this but it's one of those little things that you only get from playing a lot of 3v3 games which is why if you're a beginner you probably shouldn't play too much Showdown it's fine but you want to get if you want to get good at ranked you want to play more 3b3 to get these little skills that you just won't get from playing a 10man mode another simple tip that's also for beginners pinching if you're

having a stalemate With the Enemy team look for a pinch with your teammate to bring one person down in Brawl star a 2v3 is almost unwinable if you lose one teammate you've lost 33% of the strength of your team so once a team gets one kill usually the pressure they can assert lets them just take complete control over the map which lets you spawn camp in Bounty for more kills grab gems and Gem grab charge the pad and Zone just sit in the middle you know and do what you got to do to win the

game pinching is a great way to just make things happen the next tip for beginners this is just more general account strategy um and that's to pick a few Brawlers to focus upgrade in Brawl star power level matters a lot more because they made a change where stat difference between levels are now 10% instead of 5% so you're really going to feel it if you're only Power 11 or you're only Power 10 going against Power 11 11s I have a friend who's been playing the game since 2018 he doesn't play that much but his brawler

economy is trash like completely garbage he upgrades all of his Brawlers at once across the board and so because of that he barely has any power 11s but if you compare that to my freet to-play ALT account epic fart where I have almost every brawler and a bunch of hypercharge ones too you know you can if you just focus on upgrading one brawler at a time and channel your resources into getting hypercharge Brawlers you're going to have a way better time in ranked and it's going to be easier to to compete with other players focusing

a few Brawlers also has the added benefit of letting you get more experienced at playing just those Brawlers which can help you win those 1 V one Lanes almost every brawler has a lot of brawler specific tips and tricks to know and it's hard to learn those for every brawler in the game so try to just focus on a few and upgrade Brawlers one at a time maybe get power seven for quests or something but yeah okay and the next tip is going to be Lane switching now I don't know what it is I thought

this was a pretty simple thing to learn but even for people who reach Masters I've seen so many people just not understand Lane switching but it's super simple and once you do get the hang of it it's extremely powerful now what is Lane switching braw star maps are usually sorted into three lanes and Lane switching is just when you and your teammates switch one of those Lanes usually to get a more favorable matchup it also Al Works in two lane Maps too I cannot understate how important this skill is games will literally be won or

Lost based on whether you can properly identify your good matchups and bad matchups and switch lanes with your teammates if your brawler has a good matchup into one of the Brawlers on the enemy team look at the loading screen and walk to that side at the beginning of the match people instinctively already understand that grouping up in Brawl star is usually pretty bad because it it allows the enemy to pinch into one lane a lot easier Splash multiple people with their attacks and take control of the map way easier so if you walk into a

lane that your teammate is going into even if they don't know about Lane switching most of the time their monkey brain is just going to kick in they're going to automatically walk to whichever Lane isn't taken it's really that easy and then if the enemy team ever decides to Lane switch on you keep an eye out for it and then switch with them or at the very least switch on your next resawn so you don't fall behind and get by a bad matchup the reason why Lane switching is so important is that brawl star matches

are short you only need to lose your lane a few times and the 3-minute game is already over if you're playing an aggressive brawler and you let yourself walk into a tank counter over and over again when there's a sniper or thrower dominating one of your other teammates in a different Lane your lack of awareness is essentially choosing to lose the game on purpose you are literally throwing and the thing is Lane switching is so good you can use it everywhere if you're losing the game try switching lanes lose the first round round switch lanes

getting outplayed switch lanes walking into a losing Lane over and over again expecting different results is the definition of being a dumb okay switch things up move people around maybe you can save your teammates from going 0 and five by taking their negative match up away from them if you want to win switch lanes as long as your team can do at least okay into the other enemies you'll win a lot more games this way now how can you make sure that every brawler on your team has at least a decent match up into the

opponents that's going to be done through drafting but don't worry I won't feed you vague schlop I'll try to make the advice specific and actionable now when you play rank games you might honestly spend around a third to half of the time just in the draft screen which sounds crazy but in a way it's totally fair because I think drafting is equally important to whatever the you actually do in the game itself even a team of Masters players if they have a losing team comp they're going to struggle to win against Diamond players team comp

is so important it's why if you've ever watched bra Stars competitive you'll see mechanically insane Pros just getting completely steamrolled just cuz they messed up their draft people think your rank only represents how good you are at the game but in my opinion there's actually two different things being measured with your rank there's your in-game skill so your positioning aiming game sense right being able to pinch Lane switch things like that and then there's your drafting skill which is totally separate from your in-game skill and that's just going to be how you pick and ban

Brawlers the thing is trying to verbally teach you all the intricacies around drafting is going to be mostly a waste of time they get really good at drafting you need to know two things which is which Brawlers are strong right now the meta and knowing every single brawler interaction so you can counter your enemies without getting countered but there are almost like a what a 100 Brawlers in the game even if I took the time to go into all that in this video you're not not going to meaningfully learn anything from that since information is

just not effectively retained that way over time and that's why I think tier lists are actually a bad way to learn drafting tier list might be a good starting or reference point for which Brawlers to keep an eye out for but the truth is that you could have just learned that by playing one or two games anyways and you'll remember it way better too by feeling it out that way right you don't need some guy to tell you that Frank is overpowered if you go in blind the enemy team picks Frank and they completely stomp

you you're going to remember that Frank is overpowered it's way more effective for learning the game just by playing rather than trying to keep aware of like 10 different broken Brawlers all at once from a tier list you watch in a random YouTube video if you pick a broken brawler you saw on a tier list and then dominate with it the next time you're on a draft screen you're not going to remember that kyo's time said in his tier list that the brawler was broken you're going to remember how it felt to dominate with the

brawler and that's how you know it's broken also metas sometimes are different depending on your skill level sure Pro those are going to say Edgar sucks but that's not going to be reflected in your diamond level games where Edgar gets picked a lot more so knowing that Edgar is a c tier or whatever brawler and then basing your picks on the fact that a smart person won't pick Edgar doesn't really help you if the enemy team picks Edgar anyways tier lless can also be misleading sometimes because depending on the map the mode the draft order

and the enemy drafts a c tier brawler might actually become like an A or an S tier and vice versa for example Edgar on pit stop is notoriously strong but it's potentially a terrible first pick because if you first pick Edgar and the enemy team takes cordelius and Rico then you're probably going to lose that game but if you if you ban cordelius and Rico then maybe Edgar becomes a lot stronger of a pick if the enemy already has picked a thrower Eder is going to be a way stronger pick now brawler rankings are super

variable depending on the context and the only way to really know when a brawler is good is to just experience it in your game play so if you want to learn drafting what do you need to do I think you need to just focus on three things one don't pick an easily counterable brawler early in the draft if your brawler can be easily countered don't pick it first okay cuz then second and third pick you're going to get probably usually Brawlers that are broken are broken because they have very few counters right now in The

Meta so you can go one of those first I think right now Frank Lily Piper Rico these are like pretty safe first picks in most cases but again it's going to depend on the map and mode if you go like dynamite first pick or mortise or tick you are basically doing the video game equivalent of spreading your ass cheeks apart and asking to get don't do that okay because if they go Mo onto your Dynamite first pick or if they go like a Shelly into your mortise you're going to be kind of useless the entire

game and then when you lose it's going to be your fault second thing ban whatever you don't like playing against usually these are going to be the strongest Brawlers in the game but sometimes depending on the map and mode maybe you have some experience that says oh tick here is just insufferable and gets picked a lot so I'm going to ban it or maybe you have some Brawlers upgraded and all the broken ones aren't and so then you can't even pick the broken Brawlers anyways so you kind of have to change your your Banning strategy

based on that too when you're in doubt go with your gut rather than some general tier list that you saw that can't take into account the map in the mode you're playing or the rank you're in or whether or not you have first pick just ban whatever you don't like playing against that's my general rule and then the third thing is just play the game drafting kind of comes down to your experience you want to get a lot of it if you're new to it when you lose try and just think about how your team

comp and the enemy team comp could have been changed in the draft screen to have turned that loss into a win because there almost always was something you could have done differently to change the outcome of that match and this kind of ties a lot into my next tip which is to watch your replays okay if you want to improve watch your replays trust me reflecting after a match is probably one of the most powerful ways of learning when you're focused on playing your game it's hard to actually know why you lost in the moment

but if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture you're going to start to see a lot of things you missed in the game you might even be surprised like oh wow I shouldn't have wasted my super there or wow my teammates didn't actually play that bad they just up against a bad matchup I should have switched Lanes with them way sooner or wow if I hit that shot there we could have scored if I pinch with my teammates we could have broken out of the spawn trap wow my teammates actually played

really bad and there was not much I could have done there right there's a lot of things you'll only see in a replay and I get it watching your own gameplay isn't necessarily the most fun thing to do but since brawl star games are short it doesn't actually take that long to just watch a replay and if you start doing this and critically thinking about what you could have done to win you're going to get way better at the game the nice thing is that once you start doing this this enough times where you watch

your own replays you're going to start to be able to reflect during the game itself recognizing way more situations where you need to switch lanes seeing way more opportunities for you to improve your positioning so you don't lose if you can see your mistake from a replay and then recognize it when you're actually about to make it in the game and then avoid making it then reviewing your games might have just given you that insight to win that game right when I'm reviewing I I kind of find that it's actually better if I don't lock

onto my own character cuz then I start re like rethinking in that same mindset that I was when I was playing the game but what you actually want to do is you want to try to look at your gameplay from an outsider's perspective and try to pretend that whatever you're like the person you're spectating which is you isn't actually you so you can get a better sense of seeing through the bias and seeing your own gameplay for what it actually is and when you're reviewing the game you want to just focus on ways that you

can improve personally as a player cuz you could have basically have always played better and for my last tip it has to do with your mentality the mentality that you want to strive for is one where you basically just blame everything that happens on yourself and completely ignore your teammates in my opinion this mentality is the most powerful technique you'll ever learn maybe even in your life which is the keep your mind focused on yourself this is based on my personal experience there are some people who claim that they play better when they get more

Angry that's complete cope okay Sigman Freud in his theory of mapping out the human mind identified 10 defense mechanisms that our mind uses to try and reduce painful emotions when we lose games the implication that our mind makes is that we suck at the game which feels bad and so to protect us we project our perceived lack of skill onto our teammates right my teammates suck there was nothing I could do the issue comes from this is that in order to fix anything you need to First identify the problem correctly right if you ever go

to a doctor and you have an illness the first step in treating an illness is to diagnose it properly you need to identify your problem to fix the problem if your problem is that you generally are bad at the game when you by incorrectly blaming others for your loss that's only going to take away from your ability to identif ify how you can improve your gameplay so rather than falling into the Trap of letting a defense mechanism block you from getting better what we need to do is lean into the truth even if it hurts

to do so okay the truth is I suck at the game or maybe a little healthier way of phrasing that I could have played better and just think about it even Pro players after every match they're able to identify ways that they could have played better you are obviously worse than a pro player so how could it possibly be the case that you made no mistakes really did you really make no mistakes even in games you win you've made mistakes if you didn't hit every shot you could have played that game better right you can

always play it better and the thing is it feels good to blame your teammates for your losses but you can't play your teammates games for them right in the end the only thing you can control is your own gameplay so focusing on how others are playing is actually just a waste of your effort even worse than that when you get stressed and angry you actually start to perform worse which is a phenomenon called the yery dots in- law if you get so stressed out and angry because you're raging at your teammates and you're bming you're

not going to you're actually just going to play worse if you're struggling to get into the habit of embodying like a mentality of blaming yourself what helped for me is to try and imagine that my teammates aren't real humans you're like you're playing a single player game and your teammates aren't real if you've ever played a game with Bots it's kind of hard to get angry at your Bot teammates cuz like they're not even humans right they don't know any better they're just doing what their programming says if you try and take that mindset and

put that into games even with real players on your team if you just treat them like more advanced Bots that can take ball passes and know how to BM that might actually help you it helped me removing that angry and blaming part from my mindset as I play ranked games and as you switch away from blaming others to blaming yourself you're actually going to see way more results in your games right don't be overly negative about it but just be honest like just in identifying and reflecting like oh I missed a shot here that I

could have hit if I hit that maybe I would have killed him by now or damn I miss blade here I could have done this differently and we would have won the game if you let your personal actions become your focus you're going to find yourself winning more games another way to think about this too is that if you get pissed at your teammates and you spam shots at them and then you sp Spin and you spam sprays and you BM that's actually objectively detrimental to your ability to play the game well not only are

you wasting time and getting distracted you also might not have the ammo to kill your opponent when you reenter your lane if you die because you wasted three shots on your teammate and then you lose your lane and then you lose the game you essentially just let your emotions lose you the game your choices made you lose that game right it wasn't your teammate that's on you your mindset and by extension your emotions to some degree are within your control your teammate skill is not focus on what's in your control and ignore everything that's out

of it this is one of the hardest things to do but if you do it'll actually help you not just in Brawl star but in every multiplayer game and even in life okay placing your life in your own hands rather than blaming external things in your life is called having an internal locus of control and studies done on this topic consistently show that having an internal locus of control correlates with increased happiness increased subjective well-being increase creativity basically you just become a better person okay by being kinder to others by being less hateful we just

become happier people and live better lives and when games and brawl Stars if you're still watching at this point just want you to know that your hair looks fabulous today smooch is all around but yeah that's going to be it for me for this video If you learned something or found this to be a good refresher be sure to like And subscribe as I climb back to Masters this season I'm planning on making videos analyzing in depth what players in each rank gets wrong so subscribe if you don't want to miss it but that's going

to be it from me I love you bye to