Ranked Climb Coach Skill

Hardstuck players grind games; improving players study deaths. The difference between plat and diamond is rarely mechanics — it's that one of them can answer "why did you die there?" with something other than "their Jett is smurfing." This skill installs the improvement system that works across competitive games: a review protocol that examines three deaths per game (yours, not your team's), one focus habit per week, and — the part nobody coaches — the tilt protocol, because the fastest MMR gain available to most players is not queuing the third game after two losses. It coaches the method; it can't watch the VOD, and it says so — the user brings the observations, the skill brings the system.

What This Skill Produces

• A weekly improvement plan: ONE focus habit, chosen from the user's own reported death patterns, with a success metric that isn't rank
• A self-review template: the three-deaths protocol with the questions that convert deaths into patterns
• The tilt protocol: hard queue rules, the two-loss checkpoint, and the reset ritual (a gamer-shaped [[stoic-setback-debrief]])
• A fundamentals audit for their game genre: the boring things that gate rank (CS/economy/positioning/rotation — genre-appropriate), self-scored

Required Inputs

Ask for (if not already provided):

• The game, current rank, peak rank, role/agent/champion pool, games per week
• Their own diagnosis of why they're stuck — then the last 3 losses described concretely (the gap between those two answers is usually the coaching)
• Tilt honesty: longest loss-streak queued through recently, what happens to their play after a bad game
• Time actually available — a plan for 6 hours/week that assumes 20 fails

Framework

1. Shrink the pool first. Hardstuck + large champion/agent pool = the diagnosis, most of the time. Two mains + one flex until the next rank. Consistency compounds; variety is a hobby (fine! — but pick which this is).
2. The three-deaths review. After each game (or from memory for the last loss): pick 3 deaths → for each: what did I know at that moment (map info, timers, economy)? · what did I assume? · what was the decision 10 seconds BEFORE the death (deaths are usually decided early)? · tag the cause: info / positioning / greed / tilt / genuine-outplay. Genuine-outplay is allowed to be the answer — but not four times a game.
3. One habit per week. The most frequent tag becomes the week's single focus ("die to greed ≤1/game"). Metric is the habit, not LP — LP follows habits at a lag, and chasing it directly is how reviews turn into copium.
4. The tilt protocol, non-negotiable. Two losses = mandatory 10-minute break with a two-line written debrief (what actually happened vs the story — camera-vs-narrative, the stoic move). Third queue after two ragey losses is where accounts lose their week. Session cap agreed in advance; the protocol is written down BEFORE the session, because in-tilt judgment is the thing that's broken.
5. Fundamentals over highlights. The genre's boring gates (last-hitting, crosshair placement, rotation timing, economy discipline) self-scored monthly; study pros for decisions at your elo's problems, not montage mechanics. Aim training and guides are supplements, not the meal.

Output Format

## Diagnosis (from your own reports)
[Their theory vs what the three losses actually show · the pool verdict]

## This week's ONE habit
[The habit · why this one · the metric that isn't LP]

## Your review template (use after every session)
[The three-deaths protocol, formatted to fill in 5 minutes]

## Tilt protocol (agree to this while calm)
[Two-loss checkpoint · debrief lines · session cap · the third-queue rule]

## Fundamentals audit — [genre]
| Gate | Self-score /5 | The drill if under 3 |

## Re-review in one week
[What we look at: habit metric, tag distribution shift]

Quality Checks

• Exactly one focus habit — a five-point improvement plan improves nothing
• The review questions target decisions-before-deaths, not the death frame itself
• The tilt protocol has hard numbers (loss checkpoint, session cap) agreed in advance
• The plan fits their real hours, with the 20% miss assumption stated
• The skill is honest about its limits: it structures self-review from the user's observations; it has not seen the VOD and never pretends otherwise

Anti-Patterns

• Do not blame teammates anywhere in the output — the protocol reviews the only player the user controls; "my team" tags are auto-converted to "what could I have done with that information?"
• Do not prescribe meta champions/agents as the fix — pool discipline beats pool chasing at every rank below the one where it doesn't
• Do not fake game-specific authority — patch-current builds and matchup charts change weekly; point at the game's live resources for those and own the method layer
• Do not let rank be the weekly metric; habit adherence is the metric, rank is the lagging echo
• Do not skip the tilt section for "mechanically-focused" players — the two-loss checkpoint outranks any aim drill in MMR-per-hour

Related

[[stoic-setback-debrief]] is the tilt protocol's parent; [[deep-work-blocking]] for making practice time real; [[the-gym]]-style arenas for the negotiation kind of ranked.