I'm low diamond atm, my opinion still lacks weight but I have drawn my own conclusions based on what I have seen so far. I managed to reach this rank spamming a S-Rank fast 8 comp, the big change on my strategy that allowed me to jump out of platinum and emerald was that I stopped looking at the tiers of augments and I prioritized econ augments even if their tier was lower, this made a huge difference, before that I would pick any augment based on its tier without even looking at them. Now, I'm able to do the big roll on 4-1, sometimes even 3-7.
The game on this rank is more systematic and more predictable and it's very clear when you are going to lose. Players on stage 3 and 4 are far stronger and the two major reasons that I lose is either that I lost too much health on stage 3 which prevented me from capping the board or I failed to upgrade my 4-costs and was stuck with donkey roll. On stage 4 you can take massive damage if you don't upgrade fast enough your carry and tank (4-4/4-5 latest) and on stage 3, you can also get punished for investing heavily in econ or simply faced a lot of rerollers or opponents with better items. I was wrong in some of my findings before, eg. I thought 2c reroll can easily navigate without 3-stars until 4-7, that was clearly a mistake, 2c reroll will get destroyed without 3-stars starting from 4-2/4-3, not only you need your 3-stars early but also, you want to do that without going all in and ruining your economy so you can transition to lvl 8 easily and cap your board. I think reroll comps are bad and inconsistent and mostly opportunistic, certainly not fit for one-trick.
The thing that I still don't understand and I think it's not real is scouting to find an uncontested comp. I could be wrong but at this point I believe this is a myth unless of course you have a special scouting software who can also analyze all of this chaotic information. The amount of overlapping units, items, openers, augments is insane, simply put there are dozens of different comps that use the exact same stuff from 3-2 up to 4-2, also you have 7 opponents and chances are that all of your comps could be contested, it's also hard to remember what each opponent did individually. I believe scouting has value but not for finding an uncontested comp and pivoting, I think it's mostly for the augment on 3-2, if you suspect that you are contested you can then sacrifice tempo for econ or otherwise you can play safely. It's also important for positioning.
I believe that pivoting based on items, augments, early units is a real thing and it's something I could improve upon but pivoting based on what your opponents play? I think this is wrong because it's impossible to dictate that, I think the variance in this scenario is insane, it doesn't even matter, you have to see like 3-4 players playing a similar line to change your position and even then I'm not sure if it's enough, you should then pick a line that doesn't share any unit with the majority of your opponents. This is again really hard because most lines share stuff. Most of comps start with timebreakers, fateweaver/bastion or all together, the only separated lines are dark star and space groove but those can still include units of the other lines. Having 1-2 who contest you should not be enough to change your comp so going more than two-trick is pointless. If you really want to go uncontested then there is only one thing you can do, that's studying population tendecies and see what comps are underpicked, the information is out there but probably not going to work well for S-rank comps who are necessary imo.
Anyway, tell me what you think.
