5. The Rank-Up Guide

Find your rank. Read that section. Then read the one above it — that gap is your homework.

Copper through Emerald is comfortably solo queueable. Diamond is possible but difficult. Champion effectively requires a five stack.

No Rank to Gold — The Fundamentals

Everything from Copper to Gold comes down to three things: aim, movement mechanics, and being able to win a 1v1.

Below Level 50 Top Attackers Sledge, IQ, Buck

Top Defenders Rook, Kapkan, Bandit

• Do not barricade everything. Your team needs roamers.
• Aim at head height. Always.
• Learn not to tilt. Ranked is the game; everything else is practice.
• Learn map knowledge.
• Learn how to break barricades properly — from the side, so you are not standing exposed in the frame.
• Learn quick leaning.
• Work on reaction time and moving your mouse quickly. You want to be constantly checking the places people can appear from, with your crosshair on doorways and entry points rather than parked in the middle of a room.
• Practise moving your crosshair between the spots enemies can appear from.
• Learn how and when to drone.
• Use the right attachments and settings.
• Play every operator and get comfortable with each one the moment you buy them.

Copper / Level 50 Top Attackers Learn the hard breachers

Top Defenders Valkyrie, Mira, Maestro

• Play Ranked every day from the moment you unlock it.
• Map knowledge. This is the single most important thing at this stage.
• Aim at head height.
• Work on positioning, and on changing your position after the first encounter.

• Get familiar with all gadgets and utility, and learn how to place a proper claymore.
• Be aware of spawn peeks and pre-aim them.
• Understand how perspective changes how much of your body an enemy can see.
• Learn how every operator gadget works, and pick operators that benefit your team.
• Work on recoil control until you can shoot comfortably at any moment and manage the pattern without thinking about it.
• Learn which positions are bad to anchor in. For example, 3F Bar on Kafe exposes you to the skylight for a free kill.

Silver Silver is an awkward place to sit, and the fix is mostly mechanical: hone your aim until you leave. Consider running suppressors as long as your aim holds up — players in the middle of the ladder struggle with aim, so removing the hit direction indicator from their screen buys you time when your first shots do not land.

Gold Top Attackers Dokkaebi, Buck, Ram

Top Defenders Lesion, Doc, Melusi

• Keep working on aim.
• Start using your ears properly. Raise your volume until you can hear Caveira walking — test it in a Custom Game with a friend so you both learn what it sounds like and from where. It will be loud, but that is what you have to work with. Lower teammate volume to around 60 so that when a low lobby starts screaming you can stay focused.
• Communicate. Not wanting to talk is not an excuse — get a microphone.
• Know general map knowledge: every drone hole, hatch and window, and all the spawn peeks.
• Learn callouts.
• Crosshair placement, flicking, and reaction time.
• Learn every site setup.
• Learn how to roam and flank, and when flanking actually helps your team.
• Learn to change your head height mid-fight. Be a harder target and be in unexpected places.
• Learn to place drones at cutoff zones so a single drone covers a whole section of the map. It works like a flank cam but confirms far more — you know the moment a defender crosses, which makes pushing safe.
• Learn which doors and windows have lines of sight to where attackers like to hold. For example, Master Bedroom has an angle onto Study Balcony on Villa when attackers push Aviator.
• Learn the Bandit trick, the Kaid trick, the Mira trick, and the Tubarão-and-electricity interaction.

Plat to Diamond — Reading the Enemy

This is where the game stops being about mechanics and starts being about utility usage, mind games, and understanding what the other team is trying to do.

• Plat
• Knows how to set up every site.
• Knows the strategies and effectively everything about every operator and how to play them, including the tips that live on YouTube.
• Can visualise every map in three dimensions and knows every callout.
• Understands the reasoning: C4, plant denial, angles.
• Can pre-aim common angles.

Record and review your games. Rewatch yourself with the same eye you would use on someone else, and reference pro players to see what they do differently. Understand why you died or why you did well. It is the only honest way to know where you actually are as a player — and whether you deserve the rank you are sitting at.

Emerald Emerald is high-elo Plat by another name. That is why it feels like a wall. Keep putting in the work.

• Work on the basics: know your map, know when to flank, know intuitively where enemies are, know your angles, set up drone cams and keep them alive.
• Work on aim until there is genuinely nothing left to fix there.

• Diamond
• Good aim, and knowledge of every site setup, angle and strategy.
• Callouts. Communication carries more weight here than anywhere below.
• Awareness of the situation and of where you need to be to help your team.
• Willingness to fill whatever operator the team is missing to raise the win chance — without anyone having to ask.

Champion Get a stack. You are already at your solo ceiling and there is nothing left to coach mechanically. What is left is learning to work with a team, which is a different game from solo queue — you can start trusting your teammates to hold, and trusting that they will win their 1v1.

Play as though you are tethered to each other. Never be too far from a teammate. Communicate everything you do so someone can refrag you if you die. Your ego is never enough.

If You Are Solo Queuing

You cannot control what your randoms do, and you cannot control what your friends do either — especially if they are new enough that telling them in detail changes nothing. What you can control is getting kills yourself.

On attack, use the drone phase to find the weakness in the defenders’ setup and attack it as fast as possible, while they are still setting up and still expecting attackers to be far away. You catch people mid-placement, in the middle of an animation, assuming they are safe. Because you have already identified the gap, you can

simply walk in.

On defence, your job is to set up site as fast as possible and then take a position where you can identify where the attackers are coming from — somewhere they would have to go to real lengths to remove you, costing them time and space. Easy kills on defence come from roaming and catching solo attackers by flanking, running out, or sitting somewhere nobody clears.

On SiegeIQ

Related: why players get hardstuck at a rank.