The pugs you get are varied and each team you will have a new selection of holes that sink your boat. There's a 'meta' for getting the title/ranked qs (only blame anet) and it's entirely different than an AT (controlled 5/5 party)
If you want to solely do 'big damage' and roam you will be faced with unavoidable losses or really uphill battles where your win condition is playing the 'big damage roamer' role in a suboptimal way that skews your win con/MU -- This applies to every role but if you're playing to win ranked the best role to fill is a map bully class that snowballs and controls how 9 people play your game.
Yeah sidenode/support players are NPCs who need to take the training wheels off when it comes to any complaint they have about the state of ranked.