In Pokémon UNITE, like any MOBA, moving up the ranks can be a difficult, yet rewarding experience. Let’s take a look at some of the lessons I learned during my own experience climbing up to Master rank, so that hopefully they can help you as well!
When devoting serious time to ranking up in any game, there are always certain general steps you can take to improve your consistency and mental state throughout your games. For example, playing an unranked game as a warm-up before you begin your ranked session for the day can help you prime your senses for the real deal. Additionally, taking a five-minute breather after a tough loss can help you relax and calm down to reset your emotions, rather than just spiraling down into a rabbit hole of rage. Such advice is generally useful to players of any competitive game, but there are also plenty of more specific practices that come in very handy for MOBAs, or even for Pokémon UNITE specifically. These can range from in-game antics to outside preparation, and each can level up your play in different ways.
While I certainly can’t guarantee that these concepts alone will get you to Master, taking note of even the simplest or most cliché of good habits can have a serious impact on your rank and winrate.
For starters, when it comes to MOBAs everyone has their preferences. Whether it’s a specific character or a specific role, a great many players have playstyles and areas of expertise that they prefer to stick to when playing with their rank on the line. Comfort matters and sticking to it when selecting your Pokémon certainly has its benefits, but make sure you don’t get tunnel-visioned. If you only play a few different Pokémon in ranked, then you’ll run into a lot of problems when your teammates lock in those few Pokémon before you get the chance. Being forced to play characters you’re out of practice on can result in an increased number of unforced errors and lower your win rate as a result.
In addition, forming a team composition that’s competitively viable is vital in ranked gameplay. Looking to prioritize playing a Pokémon that you prefer is understandable, but it can be problematic if your team composition suffers as a result. For example, if your team lacks any Defenders or Supporters, then it can be detrimental to lock in a Speedster when your team already has two of them. Learning multiple new characters and playstyles can seem incredibly tedious, however having at least one or two characters you can play in every role will greatly improve your chances of forming an ideal team composition, which in turn puts your entire team in a much better position to win the game. If you notice that your team is lacking certain characters or synergies, then be flexible and try to fill the gaps if you can!
It can be easy to forget this during the heat of the moment, but Pokémon UNITE is a team game. Even if one player is carrying the team, everyone is important to the success of the group. It may seem beneficial in the short term to hoard resources such as points and resources for yourself so that you may become more powerful more quickly, but at times this approach can severely hinder your teammates. For example, if you are playing as a Pokémon that does not evolve in a lane, and your lane partner can evolve but needs experience to do so, then consider allowing them to last-hit the lane’s wild Pokémon so that they may hit their power spike.
Another common example of this concept regards scoring goals. For example, imagine an enemy goal zone has twenty points remaining before it breaks. You have twenty points but an ally has fifteen. Consider allowing them to score before you instead of just breaking the zone yourself. That way, your team can score the additional points, and your teammate can gain some experience as well. These are just a couple of examples, but what’s important to remember is that taking resources for yourself is a careful balancing act. You must make sure to stay on top of your own progression so that you do not fall behind, but you must also take care to ensure that you do not indirectly damage your teammates in the process.
Speaking of team coordination, a key way to avoid such friction between allies is establishing good communication. Of course, being able to directly speak with friends or family members that you deliberately queue up for games with is one thing, but you’ll need to be able to communicate with random players as well—ones you can’t simply talk to. This is where you must make use of what the game has in place for communication among teammates. Pokémon UNITE gives players access to a wide variety of “Quick Chat” options for use both during the pregame character selections screen as well as during the game itself.
Prior to the game starting, players can declare the desire to fill a certain role or go to a certain lane or area, as a way of filling out the team composition and avoiding overlap between members. Oftentimes you’ll have multiple people who want to go to the central area, so using these Quick Chat options (along with some good old human courtesy) can often help ensure that two people aren’t butting heads in the same jungle too often.
As for in-game communication, UNITE has a variety of pings and phrases one can utilize to get messages across to their teammates. Aside from the simple “Gather here!”, “Keep the pressure on!”, and “Retreat!” messages that come standard, there are also many other options one can employ, such as instructing everyone to meet at a specific location (or even a specific objective), making note of chances to score, or pointing out that specific teammates need help across the map. Some of these pings can be more useful than others, but all have their purpose, and learning to announce your actions and intentions through them is a great way to maintain at least a small level of coordination. Just remember that not everyone will always follow your instructions, so don’t get frustrated if people have other ideas!
Continuing with the trend of communication, one of by far the most pivotal concepts to learn in a team game such as UNITE is objective control. Learning to properly set up and secure an objective with as little risk as possible is crucial to gaining momentum in the game, whether it’s a simple early push or a coordinated strike on Zapdos. For starters, take advantage of the fact that the game’s mini-map will inform all players when Rotom, Drednaw, and Zapdos are about to spawn. Even beyond that, however, learning the objective timers themselves will allow you to plan out your strategy that much more leading up to the climactic moments. For example, Rotom and Drednaw will both spawn simultaneously at the seven-minute mark of the game and will each respawn exactly two minutes after their respective defeats. Zapdos, meanwhile, always spawns exactly once, precisely at the two-minute mark of the contest.
Even beyond these, however, every single wild Pokémon in the game has specific points in the game that they appear and reappear. Learning to take advantage of these timers is a fantastic way to get an edge in experience over your opponents while never missing any of the action.
While gaining a feel for objective timers is simply a matter of study and memorization, securing the objectives themselves is a far more difficult prospect. Setup is largely key here; establishing your team’s presence in a given location is vital to your success. Most objectives will be surrounded by various patches of brush, which can provide concealment for flanks, engages, and tactical retreats in the moments leading up to the objectives spawning. If you have tanky Defenders and/or Supporters on your team, position them between the objective and the enemy team; these members would do less damage to the objective anyway, and often have very useful crowd control abilities such as stuns and shoves to quell potential steal attempts. In the meantime, your damage dealers can make quick work of the objective itself, hopefully uncontested if the front line can hold its position well enough.
Just be aware that this is incredibly difficult to do around Zapdos without considerable setup beforehand. More commonly, the team that is able to take Zapdos is the team who wins a decisive fight around the objective, so drawing up the battle lines ahead of time is crucial to ensuring your team gets the last laugh.
This may sound cliché, but even if your team loses a decisive teamfight or has an objective stolen, actively choosing the surrender option is the only sure-fire way to lose a game. Sure, if your team has been losing for the entire game and then the enemies secure Zapdos, then one can understand the desire to save time by ending the game early. However, it is my firm belief that you should never surrender in a ranked game, ESPECIALLY before Zapdos spawns.
Zapdos is an incredibly powerful buff that can allow the team that secures it to score up to five hundred points in the game’s final minutes. In addition, since anyone is capable of stealing Zapdos with enough timing and luck, there is always a chance that you may manage to do so, potentially stealing away the victory in the end as well. Stay patient while keeping a level head, and don’t let your teammates surrender, even if the game at hand seems dire.
Along the vein of keeping a level head, there are few additional points that can be rather difficult even for the most skilled of players. One that I myself admittedly struggle with is the concept of “being a lemming”. To elaborate on the analogy, a lemming is a small rodent that is the center of a metaphor for human behavior; there is a popular myth about the creature that details large numbers of them sprinting blindly off of cliffs to their demise one after another out of simple “follow the leader” mentality. This of course is not accurate to the animals’ actual behavior, but alas, referring to someone as a lemming has come to mean that such a person is liable to follow others blindly—regardless of the consequences at hand.
All of this long-winded metaphorical speech is to express that while team coordination and communication are extremely important in Pokémon UNITE, it is the inevitable fate of the team game that the player will often make mistakes. When they do, their teammates have a choice to make: do they follow the mistaken player to maintain coordination, or do they leave him or her to their demise while pursuing more acceptable actions? This is an incredibly difficult tightrope to balance, and even the best of players struggle to draw the fine line between “I can salvage the play!” and “Yeah, I’m not following that.” Going into great detail about how to identify in the heat of battle which plays are favorable and which are not is an entirely different topic for another day.
However, a good point of emphasis for in-game decision making is training oneself to show restraint when a nearby ally makes an egregious mistake. If one of your teammates dashes into five enemies to try and make the grandest of unlikely outplays, it may not always be the best idea to jump in and forfeit even more resources to try to save them. Two wrongs don’t make a right, after all. Just make sure not to disregard your teammates altogether, even if one makes a questionable decision here or there.
Finally, this one is a nod to good-old mental stability and confidence. By “have a bad short-term memory”, I don’t mean literally forget everything that happens, but that’s surprisingly close to the actual message. In high-octane games like Pokémon UNITE, action, reaction, and consequence all can occur frighteningly fast, and it’s very easy to take the results of the previous play as a mental blueprint for the rest of the game.
For example, if you’re playing Absol and manage to take down the enemy Charmander three times, it would be pretty easy to feel like you’ll be able to keep doing that for the rest of the game. Sure, you may have gained a multiple-level lead in the process of all those little victories, but that doesn’t change the fact that Charizard is far more powerful later in the game than earlier. Eventually level advantages can balance out, and you might be surprised by the difficulty that repeated plays can ramp up to. All of this is to say that both on the victorious side and on the defeated side, don’t concern yourself too much with the results of previous plays. Every mistake, every success, and every game as a whole that you’ve played is in the past, so expecting the same things to happen every time will get you into trouble quickly as the situations change.
Whenever you end a game, whether it was a victory or a defeat, don’t get too fixated on the trends that the game followed. If you won, don’t get cocky. If you lost, don’t lose faith. It’s certainly easier said than done but try to enter every single game you play with the same level of confidence in your own abilities and those of your teammates. Just because your allied Dragonite was completely unkillable last game doesn’t mean that the one you have on your team this time will be just as skilled. By the same token, if you found yourself consistently able to best (or prone to being bested by) a particular enemy Pokémon, try to refrain from expecting the same result to happen the next time you see that Pokémon on the other team. All players have different skill sets, reaction times, and decisions that they tend to make. Everyone is unique, which by extension means that each and every game you play will always be a unique situation to overcome. Gaining confidence and wisdom from past games is important, certainly, but try not to get too caught up in the flow; you’re liable to get a rude awakening otherwise.
All in all, there are a bevy of skills and concepts that determine one’s capabilities in games such as Pokémon UNITE. Whether it’s keeping a level head, interacting with teammates in meaningful ways, or simply memorizing information in the game, all of these good habits can be hard to recognize in your overall win rate, but getting the hang of them will certainly have a significant impact on your performance. Unfortunately, as previously mentioned good habits alone can’t win games—one must have a certain level of skill with the controller in their hands, after all. As you continue to play and gain new experiences, however, keep in mind that these concepts, no matter how simple they may be, can all bring you that much closer to that prestigious Master rank.
