The Ultimate Guide to Rumble

On my way to achieving top 500 Rumble ELO globally, I have learnt many vital lessons along the way. My aim in this guide is to share the most important of these tips to help you achieve victory and watch you ELO climb.

Although Rumble seems simple on the surface the factors at play to achieve consistent victory are vast. The very best players must, at all times, consider the general position of every enemy on the map, the spawns that are most likely to trigger, the super cooldowns of all players, when to take an engagement to minimise the change of death, all the ongoing engagements on the map and how to best take advantage of this. As overwhelming as this may initially sound by following a few basic rules and treating every engagement as a lesson you soon will be passively considering a few, many or all of these factors based on the level you wish to achieve and the work you put in.

The most important thing to rememver is that every Rumble game does not have to be a first place victory, expecially in the range of ELOs below 1450 you should not expect to get first place consistency. The key to Rumble is consistency, you can achieve conistency primarily by taking the engaments you have the best chance of winning, we will go over this more in later sections but in essence, don't be afraid to run away. You want to fight people that are weak from other engagements. You want to fight people in 1v1s that you have fought previously in the same game and won. If there is that one guy that seems to be the best player in the world, don't fight them, leave the area and have a general idea of where they are and stay away, go to the space with those players you can comfortable beat or have a far better change at beating. Overall, your job is to pick off the stragglers of the match and only take fights where you know you are likely to win.

For players in this bracket Rumble is a scary place, full of very sweaty players gaining every advantage over you that they can. However, do not fear by implementing a few basic strategies you can vastly improve your performance and every game you play you will improve. Your aim is definatly not to get first place, but to aim to achieve around fourth place.

- Do I have more health than the opponent. This is key as I see a lot of newer players going into engagements with half health and have no chance of winning it even if they are the better mechanically skilled player.

- Is the opponent not an absolute beat, you can see this easily by looking at factors like if they are using a fancy gilded flawless title and more generally if they are one of the players high on the scoreboard. You want to be fighting players that are at or below your skill level.

- Will my weapon be affective at this range. For instance, using a sidearm to fight a sniper 100m away is not optimal. An instinct for weapon range is quickly built up as you use each weapon type.

When all these factors are met fly on in and try to land as many shots as possible, accuracy and consistency come with time. This should lead to the best change of you winning that engagement.

The best way to achieve decent positioning is to use your radar to make sure you are not being pinched (attacked from two sides at once) having enemies on two sides of you at once means they can both fight you at the same time, we want to avoid this and always fight on one front. This can be done by avoiding central areas on the map (places where the B flag may be). For beginner players staying close to the edge of the map and taking fights one at a time through this positioning is the best way to improve and get results.

When considering what engagements to take listening for and recognising the other player's weapon can tell you their range capabilities. This can heavily affect whether or not you fight them, for example, hearing your enemy has a pulse rifle and you are using a higher rpm hand cannon will immediately tell you not to take engagements with them at anything above close to mid range.

If there is that one hunter that is giving you a really hard time, listening for their distinct hunter jump when moving in on an opponent can give you the signal to find another target where you have a greater change.

Every engagement you take, no matter the result you should try to familiarise yourself with the player you just engaged, look at their class, name and character appearances. Depending on the result of the fight you can better approximate whether you will win the next engagement with them, adding to the change that every fight you choose to enter will be a win.

Every Rumble game most players will have one super. Keeping tabs on the feed and looking at which players have used their super will give you huge incite into whether or not you need to be worried about if a guardian is going to super you when you approach, as to them you are a large threat as they would be able to recognise that you tend to win 1v1s with them.

We can start to move away from the ideas of only trying to position ourselves away from multiple players in specific instances when you can hear a fight going down. As long as you are not causing yourself to get pinched, or put wide in the open, going directly to the sound of other players engagements can be a great idea. When you arrive you will see one of two things,  either both players still alive and most likely weak, in which case you can pick both of them off one by one while the other is distracted with their initial engagement. Or you could arrive in the aftermath of the battle where all you find is a player on low health after winning their fight, this is easy pickings for you.

However, you must combine this with your player recognition as for example, if you were to arrive at a fight where a bottom tree sticker titan just won an engagement with a melee you can expect them to be full health and with a damage buff, not something you want to fight.

A very powerful tool to further assess the potential skill and weapons used by each player is to quickly inspect them as you are loading in. This allows you to gain insight into what each player's class, weapon and exotic armour piece are. This information can be invaluable when assessing if you should engage such player or not. Examples:

A player using unmasterworked blue gear is an extreme example of this as you can already start to build the image of that player potentially being new and not being the most skilled. This allows you to be far more confident off the bat when taking engagements with them instead of having to build up the confidence over multiple fights with them. 

After seeing a player with 15,000 kills on their primary weapon is using OEM you can immediately tell that they should be feared, especially after they get a kill, this combines with the kill feed tips of this section.

However, it is important to still take an engagement with these players at least once to back up your initial thoughts on their potential skill as there are always players that will both surprise you on how you underestimated or overestimated their ability.

For instance, say in the feed you see player A has killed player B with a pulse rife headshot. You hear the pulse rife shots as you have a central map position and then an invisibility effect. From player recognition you know player A is a middle tree Nightstalker so you can deduce that they have probably triggered flawless execution. A less informed player would run to the location to pick of the weak player only to get decimated by a player that is off radar, invisible and can see them through walls, but not you, you have developed the knowledge to avoid this engagement even though it may seem enticing.

Consider seeing a player you can comfortably beat get a kill in the feed, which you can hear the location of. You can now happily fly into their location knowing you can comfortably beat them in the 1v1 engagement, let alone when they are weak.

Your super is no longer just a defensive tool, in combination with all your new skills to identify player location, you should use your super as an offensive tool to achieve as many kills as possible with priority targets being those ahead of you or approaching your score. Because of this roaming supers take the limelight, allowing you to effectively target players in multiple locations.

It is now the time to build up to consistnetly getting first place in almost all of the games you play. Using the previous tips and improved mechanical skill we will change the game when it comes to how we approach matches at this level.

Statistically you should now be easily the best player in most of the games you play. So it is time to take advantage of this in order to achieve consistent and crushing victories. We can now reduce the engagement requirements down to simply if you have the health for it and if it is possible to for you to get within effective weapon range of your opponent. To get this far you have already easily developed the skills required to close the distance on any opponent you face, except in very specific circumstances where it is impossible to do so such as a scout user camping at the back of an open map. So you only need to consider if you have the health for an engagement, so if you have full health or more health than an enemy and you know they will not have any special buff due to your player recognition you can go in and take the kill. I would actually not recommend taking an engagement where both of you are low health as even a worse player with a 120 hand cannon can body shot you and cause a trade, so having more health or full is recommended.

You are now in a place to take almost any 1v1 engagement you come across, leading to you being able to take control over the whole map and control spawns as I'll cover in the next tip.

Rumble Spawns are in fixed locations. Through your journey to 1450+ ELO you should be familiar with a few of them. In Rumble spawns are chosen based on which spawn location is furthest from other players. Learning spawn locations can give you a huge advantage. Whenever you kill a player consider the area (or even better spawn location) furthest from all the action and start heading there in order to continue the spree, on your way you will be taking engagements and eventually you will start to control most spawns on the map running from spawn to spawn farming out the kills. We can further abuse this to force players to spawn in the same area. We will use Dead Cliffs as an example, as it has a very easy spawn trap near trucks and A flag.

Purple = Area to stand in order for enemy to spawn at red

Green = Possible enemy paths

Blue = Where to stand in order to hold all escape angles

Teal = Angles to lock down the enemy's escape

This simple spawn trap allows you to potentially (if left uninterrupted) gain all 20 kills required in an easy way. Simply wait for the sound cue of the enemy spawning and move to position to stop them from leaving, take them out and move back to the purple zone.

The key to this strategy is to not just use this one I have shown you, but form your own over time. By looking at spawn locations and occasionally catching an enemy just after they spawn you can create a spawn trapping system for almost any spawn in the game, look for the minimum distance from the spawn you need to be in order to allow the spawn to trigger and find an angle where you can hold all escape angles. Doing this in combination with all other tips can lead to true domination of the Rumble playlist.