Get out of 1500 PSR/MMR! | How to increase your MMR/PSR to 1600-1700 level

I hate playing 1500 games that's why I decided to write this post. This post is just a rough guide to get out of the so called black hole. Why black hole? There are a lot of noobs around in 1500 that are dragging you down baby! Hopefully, this article would help you get out of the black hole and play with better players in 1600 and 1700 psr.

Let's get started.

1. Check your ping. Typing the command '/ping' will show your ping. Why does this matter? Because your ping affects your game. If it's laggy, and you still insist to play the game, try picking heroes that are just support and not carries. Typing the command '/pa' will show everyone's ping. Make sure that you check this in every game especially in Match Making to ensure that you have a playable ping and of course so that you will enjoy playing the game smoothly.

2. Choose Wisely. Victory starts in picking your heroes right. In tournaments, even if the better team has a higher skill rating than the other team but if they were out picked by the opposing team, the outpicked team has a lower chance to win. It's the same in MMR and Public games, choose heroes wisely.

Some combo heroes/heroes that are really effective that has a high win rate:

Electrician + Swiftblade

Magmus + Pyromancer

Sandwraith + Thunderbringer

Devourer + Jereziah

Kraken + Soulstealer

Kraken + Flux + Bubbles + Dark Lady + Plague Rider

Anyway, these are just some examples that I've encountered. Feel free to comment below if you have better/greater ideas.

3. Warding and couriers. I know I've stressed out the importance of wards and couriers in my previous post.

4. Know your role. HoN for me is a role playing real time strategy game. Everyone has roles to play that they need to focus on while playing the game. Their items should also match the current need of the team complementing their roles. Here are some of the roles of the game. You may find yourself in one or two of these roles at the same time depending on the situation.

Pure support
Classic examples - Glacius, Demented Shaman

• Don’t compete with the Carry you are babysitting for creep and hero kills. The gold many carries lose to their support can often mean the difference between losing and winning games. There is nothing wrong with taking a creep kill here and there but you should absolutely not be “farming” during lane phase under any circumstances.
• Ward! I can’t stress enough how incredibly important this is. Your team needs map awareness to win. The earlier in your HoN career you can figure this out the better your win ratio is going to be, and in turn the better your MMR. No one else should be buying wards. It is your job. If the river isn’t warded nearly the entire game, most importantly after laning phase (when people start roaming) then chances are you will lose, assuming the other team is buying wards.
• Counter-ward! If you notice the other team escaping ganks often, you should probably consider counter warding. All you have to do is buy a Reveal Ward and place it in the typical warding locations, then place a normal ward (if one isn’t there already) to give you site. Then kill the enemy wards.
• Buy the courier and upgrade it! At the start of the game you should always be the one buying the courier as support. The alternative is to have a ganker or another support buy the courier and you buy wards, but you should be getting one of the two.
• To add up, warding is not just for map awareness. It also has a timing. It's mostly crucial in early game so that you will have control with the runes and avoid ganks in mid.
• Learn how to Creep Stack. If you don’t have a jungler you should be constantly stacking creeps for the Carry you are supporting. This means that at around the 40 or 45 second mark of every minute you should be attempting to go into the jungle and finding a creep spawn. Once you find the one you will stack you should throw an auto attack at one creep, between the 51 and 53 second mark, and pull the creeps out of their spawn until the fog of war covers their spawn. Drag the creeps behind you until the next creeps have spawned, and if you were successful you will now have two groups of creeps in that spawn. You can do this up to 3 times.
• Pull! When the creeps in your lane are pushed far away from your tower you should be pulling. This is pretty simple, all you have to do is as you see your own creep wave approaching the last tower in your lane, you should go to the closest creep spawn to your tower (you’ll be able to tell which one) and attack a creep to pull it into your lane. This will cause your creeps to attack the neutral creeps in the jungle and pull them out of your lane. As a result the enemy creeps will be pushed closer to your tower where you can soak up easy XP and last hits, plus benefit from tower protection.
• Stack and Pull! Trust me this is not a redundant bullet. The most successful way to pull is to first stack the pull creep spawn, then pull it into the lane. The reason for this is that many times with a single neutral spawn your creeps will simply kill the neutral creeps and then continue back into your lane severely diminishing the time you can spend under the protection of your tower. If you stack then pull the neutral creeps should be able to kill your entire creep wave, which will “reset” your lane so to speak. This will push the enemy creeps closer to your tower for a much longer period.
• Did I mention how important it was to buy wards?

Hard Carry
Hard Carries are super useless early game. Classic examples would be Magebane and Sandwraith.

• Learn how to Farm! This is the most important thing for a carry to do. Farm and don't get killed. Focus on getting last hits on creeps and heroes. Get a Loggers Hatchet to start out if you have trouble with last hits, or even consider installing a Creep Bar mod that will show you when you can last hit a creep.
• Get the kill for extra gold. Ignore other players complaining about kill stealing, because you are the carry, not them. You need the extra gold from kill shots and 99% of the time the hero that would have got the kill instead of you simply doesn’t.
• Stay alive no matter the cost! Don’t go off trying to save your support early game because it puts you in a very vulnerable situation. In Filipinos we say ikaw ang alay! The support will be the sacrifice for you. Unless you know for a fact that you can do so safely of course, but remember that one of the biggest reasons for having a low KDR as a carry is because of misjudging when you can and cannot win a fight.
• Avoid ganking as much as possible. If you want to kill the person in your lane, ask a support hero to help you out. You can start controling the map more once you have your core items.
• Encourage your support to pull and stack. Don’t scream or rage at them if they are not doing this or sound that you're just trolling. Just ask them nicely and in a very positive manner. Most of the time they will as long as you don’t tell them they suck at HoN 2 minutes into the game.

Semi-Carry
Semi carries are carries that can be gankers as well. Classic examples would be valkyrie and Wretched Hag

• Here simply combine what carries and gankers do. 
• If you're a tanky semi-carry. Let's say pestilence or hammer storm, you still need to farm and gank at the same time. The question is when! well you need more coordination with your support with that.

Ganker

• Dont kill-steal (ks) the carry! For example, if Chronos is one hit away from killing an enemy hero don't use Witch Slayers' Silver Bullet to kill it. This is a surefire way to lose games. The carry needs the gold to be successful, you don’t. You just need experience not gold.
• Always carry a Teleport Stone. This applies to every role, but is extremely important for a ganker.
• Shadow your carry. Sometimes witch slayer or glacius will just stick not far behind a carry who is farming. That's an antigank play. You keep your carry alive.
• Feed your carry if you can. Lets use the Witch slayer example again. If instead it was you who was close to killing the enemy hero and Chronos comes in and starts attacking that hero and will surely be able to kill them, then let Chronos have the kill, don’t use your ult to take it before he can. It doesn’t matter if you were the one who did all the work to kill the hero, the carry simply needs the gold to win.
• Don’t tower dive. Most cases of feeding on a team are due to either support, which is understandable because they need to protect their carry, or by gankers. If you can’t safely pull off your gank then abort the gank. Simple. It's all about wise judgement based on the burst damage that you can give.
• Map awareness. You should be helping the support ward and counter ward if possible to have better map awareness. This will greatly increase your chances of having a successful gank without dying.

Initiator

• Stay in the battle. With exception of the INT initiators like Tempest you should be staying in the battle always the reason for this is you should be the hardest hero on your team to kill. As the initiator the other team will target you first, so you need to be there to suck up some damage for your team while they focus down the other teams carry and win the battle. I hate it when a tree just farms in the neutrals and won't join team battles even if his ulti is up.
• Stay out of battle as an INT Initiator. If you are playing Tempest you should place your Ult just right to initiate, use your other spells, then get out of the middle of the battle.

Tanker

• Tankers are hereos that are meant to take damage while hitters are killing most of the team.
• Don't be afraid to die in the battle if it means winning the clash.
• Farm for early tanking items. Don't be ashamed to farm because you also need some cash.

5. Communication


HoN is a real time strategy game. Everyone needs to communicate with one another to reach the common goal - to win the game. Some ganks fail because of miscommunication. Some carries feed because no one advises if someone is missing. You might want to buy a headset for optimum game play. I've posted an article about it here.

6. Map Awareness

Most of the best carries that I know have this trait. They have some sort of 'spider sense' because they know where the enemies are. I think this is more of an experience thing. They already know the pattern on how most people play. But for very inexperienced players, you should simply ward to do this and become successful.

7. Jungling Strategy - I know I mentioned this in one of the roles of support heroes but I will write a more extensive post about this. Jungling strategy is all about:
-creep pulling
-creep stacking
-creep pulling and stacking
-picking jungling heroes

I think this is about it. If you have any suggestions or would want to contribute, feel free to do so.

Posted in: hon guides,HoN Tips