I did it!

So I finally decided to get back on ranked and since I never qualified before I hit silver 5 woo! Now time to go for the gold? Anyone got any tips...?

Last season I was pretty lazy, lost a lot of qualifiers because my team had a player DC and ended up in bronze 1. To get to silver 1 I just played a few games and tried my best to carry in each respective position. Not going to lie, you'll make the biggest difference in mid, adc and jungle. Solo you can carry late game, but most games if you lose it will happen before you ever leave solo lane QQ. Support is a gamble, a good support can make a big difference, but you're still reliant on your ADC, jungle and mid to be at least as good as the enemy teams', which is often not the case (it can be very frustrating if you're playing straight fire but your team just won't take advantage of the support you're giving).

I do sincerely believe that this can change as you go up in ranked. Honestly when I play casuals, I often play with pretty high level people because I have a rather high (elo? mmr? whatever smite uses) and because they play on a higher level than the average Silver player, there's more you can do as a solo laner or support. Honestly I think the main reason I don't play ranked is because I know it's going to take 30+ matches to get into the same rank as people on my skill level of the game, and I can already do that in casuals (albeit the incentive to do ranked is picks and bans which make games much more fun imo).

This season, in joust, just using Artemis I was able to breeze my way through silver into gold, carrying almost every game, regardless of how well my teammates played.

You might find her (or another low division steamroller like x'balanque etc.) a good god for moving through silver division.

Just going to transfer some LoL advise into Smite advise.

As a support in the early game (or a jungler that's a warrior or more a supporty jungler) you need to recognize an "anchor". this anchor is the person (sometimes persons) that is carrying or the person with the best potential. Your goals is going to be to keep that person alive as best as possible so that you get carried (as that is what a support does most of the time. And for the support a way of carrying the game) to the win.

Takes a while to recognize the best anchors in your team. Because in Smite supports rotate more you can do it earlier then in LoL.

Another tip for any role is to have the right mindset. You need to think actively about your decisions (which sometimes needs te be tought about quickly). This is because it stops you from doing unnecesarry stuff or questionable stuff. It applies to pretty much anything from using or safing an ability to buying your items (especially here auto pilot is a problem for most people. Smite builds may be a bit stale for some roles however other roles require more thinking instead of gettign an bulwark first item against a chaac etc.)