You know NetEase has managed to make a competent hero shooter in Marvel Rivals when the number one complaint among players feels like a repeat of 2016 Overwatch discourse: Not enough players are picking healers, and teams are suffering for it.
Less than a day after launch, the Marvel Rivals subreddit is abuzz with discussion about the Strategist role, Rivals’ closest equivalent of Overwatch’s Support role. This is where all the healers are, like Jeff the Land Shark, Rocket Racoon, and Adam Warlock, but as numerous memes are calling attention to, most folks are gravitating toward Duelists (raw damage dealers) and Vanguards (tankier damage dealers).
I can back that up, at least anecdotally, with my first night of Marvel Rivals and past alpha sessions. If I jump into a match and do my usual thing of watching everybody else pick their heroes and then filling in what gaps are left, 99% of the time that gap is a healer. I’ve been playing a lot of Rocket Racoon so far, who despite being a healer, has a cool minigun that can melt through any hero in seconds.
At least I played a lot of Luna and Rocket during the Alpha and Beta. from r/marvelrivals
Besides maybe Jeff the Shark—a hero clearly meant to avoid fights and focus on heals—Marvel Rivals’ support heroes are generally pretty good at killing. NetEase might be following the same philosophy that Blizzard has slowly adopted with Overwatch 2 to make support heroes more attractive by giving them more traditional damage dealer abilities. So far that hasn’t made the difference in the popularity of Strategists, as the class also shares some inherent weaknesses of Overwatch supports, like the tendency to get absolutely curbstomped in the backline by enemy duelists with superior mobility or damage output.
“Friendly reminder, the team with healers wins more often than the one without,” wrote Reddit user LlamaManLuke in a top-upvoted post. “Not saying you have to play a healer. But occasionally turning around and making sure the guy keeping you alive isn’t getting battered by Spidey, Thor AND Venom while you’re mag dumping Dr. Strange’s shield is a good idea.”
Oh, the healer woes. It’s like stepping into a portal to 2016 and watching our three tanks flip out in chat that we need more healers, but definitely aren’t planning to make the switch themselves.
The tension between picking the hero you want vs. what the team currently needs was a constant presence in Overwatch matches for years, and it got so bad that Blizzard first tried to address it with an opt-in, role-based LFG party system that allowed you to pick a preferred role and match into a squad that needs it. Nobody really used that useful feature, so eventually Blizzard chose the nuclear option of forced role queue—since 2019, the game has enforced an even balance between roles, ensuring that teams always have two supports no matter what.
Mfw the other 5 of my teammates pick Duelist right after I picked Moon Knight (I’ve been the only Strategist in the past 4 games) from r/marvelrivals
Some Marvel Rivals fans have argued the game needs a role queue since alpha tests, but for now, NetEase hopes players won’t take team comp all that seriously in Rivals. An on-screen message during hero selection warns when a team is imbalanced, but it doesn’t force anyone to switch, and like pre-role queue Overwatch, it’s not like imbalanced teams lose 100% of the time.
Like so many debates in multiplayer shooters, this topic ultimately comes down to how competitive you believe Marvel Rivals should be. If the new shooter is on an Overwatch trajectory, we’ll see NetEase tweak its design in the direction of balanced play above all else, potentially smoothing over aspects of Rivals’ chaotic fights that casual players like. Or maybe NetEase will insist, in so many words, that people get over it and not worry too much about team comp. After all, there are plenty of other things to blame losing on, like some of those absurd team-up abilities that reward specific matchups by raising their max health.
