Defensive Positioning on Tracer, an analysis of SBB, Striker and Bunny
Hey there!
James here. I’m one of the founders of Pursuit and a GM Tracer in S9 (4011 Peak). We are starting an educational series to help you better understand your stats on Pursuit and use them to improve.
To kick it off, I’m doing an analysis for Tracer where I compare my own game at 3700 with 3 games from Saebyeolbe, Striker and Bunny that I processed with Pursuit. Here are the match statistics compiled into one table. Raw stats and vods are at the bottom of the post.
The biggest problems that I have are low damage done and high deaths. Because Tracer is a high mobility hero with a low health pool, this means that I’m probably poorly positioned and out of the fights too frequently. To find out what I can do better, I recorded the pro players’ positioning between every team fight.
As you can see in the image, on defense, the pros were always defending from the same angles. On the first point in Volskaya, they defended from the mini on the left and the mini next to point. On the second point in Volksaya, they were defending from the room above the mega on the right and the lift on the left.
This is an important takeaway because most solo queue Tracers don’t give much thought to their defensive positioning. Pro tracers defend from areas that allow them to contest enemy flankers, harass the enemy back line, and easily retreat to a health pack or an escape route. To confirm this wasn’t just on 1 map, I checked this finding in Anubis vods by the same players and observed the exact same pattern.
So, the main takeaway here is that the defensive positioning you take while waiting for the next fight can be the deciding factor on your impact in the game. Bad positioning means that you have to commit resources to get to a good position when the fight begins. Without your resources as Tracer, your effectiveness decreases significantly.
However, this doesn’t mean you should just camp at one area and not move. Once your team starts fighting, you should move to the enemy back line. The good news is that if you are positioned correctly, this should be very easy as you will already be behind them.
In summary, you should ask yourself these 3 questions to evaluate your defensive positioning.
1. Will the enemy flankers come through this angle to harass my team? (answer should be yes)
2. Can I access the enemy back line from this angle without using too many cool downs?
3. Can I easily retreat to a health pack or a safe escape route back to my team?
Thanks for reading! If you have any suggestions for what you want to see in the product or what you want to see us analyze next, comment below or join our Discord at https://discord.gg/GABKCVZ.
Good luck on climbing!
James Sun (Cahoodle)
