As season 12 continues, there’s no time like the present to grind the ranked ladder. The meta is large, healthy, and diverse at the moment, and there are plenty of choices when it comes to legend selection. Still, some combinations remain better than others, and the right team composition can make all the difference between losing a ton of RP or gaining it.
Whether you’re in Gold, Platinum, Diamond, or beyond, here are a few of the best team compositions that will make your climb easier.
Valkyrie, Gibraltar, Ash
This team composition has become common in the competitive meta for good reason. All three characters provide excellent utility on their own, while their abilities combine to create superior movement, survivability, and damage output.
To start, Gibraltar remains the best defensive character in the game, making him almost a mandatory pick if players want an easier time in ranked lobbies. He can poke for free with his passive, the Gun Shield, reducing the need for healing items and making it easier to level his Evo Shield. Gibraltar’s tactical, his Dome Shield, provides a full reset for a squad under pressure, allowing his team to fully heal or get a revive. It doubles as a repositioning tool when thrown and can instantaneously fix disastrous pushes or retreats. Finally, Gibraltar’s versatile ultimate can be used to defend from enemy pushes, as a finisher on weakened opponents, or as a zoning tool.
Valkyrie is the scout of this composition, used to gather information and make quick rotations. In a fight, her missiles can harass players behind cover, and her VTOL jets allow her to take advantage of angles most other legends can’t reach. That passive alone is better than the entire kit of some other legends. As a recon character, she also can scan beacons, revealing the next ring, which is incredibly valuable. But the strongest part of her kit for this composition is her ult. It works as a get-out-of-jail-free card in a variety of different scenarios. If an entrenched defensive position has become compromised, or if the squad is being kept from getting into the ring or through a narrow choke point on the map, a quick Valkyrie ult solves a problem that will often end the game for other squads. Once in the air, Valkyrie continues to gain information on the position of other squads, allowing the team to land in a safe place. Lastly, Gibraltar’s bubble combines perfectly with Valk’s ultimate, allowing teams to drop a bubble in the middle of an open field if they need to and safely leave an entire area of the map for a superior position.
Ash is a bit more difficult to play right now, but she is still incredibly strong in a wide variety of situations. Her passive can help locate enemy squads who’ve recently fought, picking up easy kill points. Her tactical, Arc Snare, is the weakest part of her kit, but it’s still fairly good. While it can be used to snag players and briefly immobilize them, doing a chunk of damage, it’s also useful as a scouting tool, to see if enemies are behind cover or in a building that looks unoccupied. In that way, it can almost work like a toned-down version of Seer’s tactical. Lastly, Ash’s ultimate is one of the best abilities in the game. It is nearly silent, instantaneous repositioning, superior to Wraith’s portal in nearly every way. In a ranked endgame, a team with Ash can easily exchange a weak position for a strong one. They can take high ground or even completely bamboozle other teams, who often can’t track where the Ash team has gone.
Revenant, Octane, Bloodhound
This setup is strong in ranked play if you’re looking for a more aggressive composition that can rack up kill points, rotate quickly, and overwhelm unsuspecting enemies. It may have gone out of fashion, but it still works well in your everyday lobbies, particularly in Gold or Platinum. While it may lack in survivability, it shines on offense.
The team composition is built around the controversial Revenant/Octane combination, commonly referred to as RevTane, where Revenant’s Death Totem ultimate is used in conjunction with Octane’s Jump Pad. Players activate Revenant’s ultimate and then immediately take Octane’s Jump Pad to push into a fight, typically looking for at least one quick knockdown on the opposing team or an easy third party. Revenant can also look to silence the abilities of the defenders with his tactical, leaving them unable to adequately reset defenses or escape.
If players are killed in their Shadow Form, they can get back into the fight almost immediately with Octane’s Jump Pad. Defenders, usually unprepared for the initial attack, have to survive two separate waves of pushes, often leading to a clean wipe for the attackers.
This strategy has had vocal detractors since the combination became popular. Many players believe it’s a cheap tactic, or that after Revenant’s ultimate was changed to be more obvious, it’s no longer effective. But Revenant pushes still work well in Platinum lobbies, and can easily overwhelm players in Gold.
Since this strategy is a bit of a niche and works on its own as a duo, several other legends can serve as a viable third character in this composition. It’s a matter of preference. A quick Wraith portal can make failed RevTane pushes safer from easy retaliation. Ash or Valkyrie can add even more aggression to the mix. Gibby adds a lot of defensive value to a composition that could use it. Even Lifeline’s tactical, her healing drone, can help RevTane teams heal up after being sent back to the Death Totem.
Bloodhound, Octane, Gibraltar
This is an effective and well-balanced team composition that’s proven itself time and again. Bloodhound offers scanning, Octane provides fast movement and rotations, and Gibraltar is the team’s defensive core. This combination can also be played with variations on the same idea. While Seer is no longer the powerhouse he was when the character was released, he’s still deadly in the hands of a decent player, and his scanning abilities make it easy for him to replace Bloodhound. Wraith’s portal provides a more deliberate, less aggressive alternative to Octane’s jump pad. Aggressive squads who feel comfortable without Gibraltar’s bubble shield can even work Caustic into this setup.
Octane’s Jump Pad got a small nerf recently, but his movement is still more forgiving than Wraith, whose less frequent portal ultimate requires a certain amount of finesse. Similarly, Bloodhound is easier to use than Seer right now, and Bloodhound’s scan combines more effectively with Octane’s Jump Pad. But variations on this theme will continue to perform well in lobbies. It’s a fundamentally sound team.
However you modify or substitute these compositions to suit your playstyle, if you want ranked lobbies to go well, it’s important that every squad has an escape—meaning at least one character who can safely move the team away from bad situations at short notice. It’s best to use Valkyrie for that, but others can serve in that role as well. Outside of that requirement, there are a lot of valuable picks well outside what is considered meta. Crypto’s recent changes make him a bit easier to play. Mad Maggie and Fuse are both fun and can be powerful.
Team compositions are ultimately a matter of preference for all but the most skilled players. If you’re grinding a lot, enjoying the games you play is probably more important than making sure your squad has the perfect synergy.
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