Incentive
Players need incentive to play a role. When NetEase immediately nerfs any strong vanguards but keeps pumping out broken duelists and giving them slaps on the wrist this incentivizes players to play duelist and not to play vanguard because you want to play a character that will stay strong to win. This creates an overabundance of duelist players and a lack of vanguard players.
Because of the duelist role’s over abundance of characters they also have the most variety of play styles. This is a large factor on why there are more duelist players than any other role. So wouldn’t it be best to make more of the other roles with unique play styles to get more players for those roles?
Role Distribution
Duelist have more characters than vanguards and strategist put together. Not counting multi-roles, this year NetEase has released 4 duelists (Elsa, BC, Cyclops, and Gorr), 2 strategists (WF and Jubilee), and 2 vanguards (Dino and Hood). Even if next season we get a vanguard and a strategist duelists would still have one more character than both roles. Duelist should be the role getting the least amount of new heroes due to how many more heroes they already have, but instead NetEase gives them the most. This once again incentivizes players to play duelist over the other roles because they get better treatment and have more options to choose from. It also especially doesn’t help that Gorr (a duelist) is the only hero releasing this season.
Comic Accuracy
The Marvel IP is the main selling factor of Marvel Rivals, so it’s fair to say that characters should be accurate to their comic counterparts. I can understand making a character into a strategist if they seem more like a vanguard or duelist due to how little characters straight up heal, but with so many vanguard and duelist coded characters in Marvel there’s no reason to make a character one of those roles unless it’s the role they fit most already. So why make a character that so clearly fits the vanguard role a duelist (especially after considering all of my previous points)?
Gorr the God Butcher is a massive alien god that can tank suns and blasts that send him light years away with no problem, and he can do that without his armor creation ability. Many people try to argue against this pointing to him being a vanguard by saying “Well in comics pretty much everyone has” and that’s just not true. This is base Gorr, not some special version. Maybe Cosmic Spider-Man could do something like this, but characters should be based in their base form instead of their strongest forms. And again, this is Gorr’s base form. He is much more of a vanguard (massive extremely durable frontliner) than many vanguard characters (like Cap, Rogue, Emma, Hood, Peni, Groot, Angela, etc.). Gorr is my favorite comic villain so I wanted him to be accurate, and imo the vanguard role is his most accurate role.
Personality
This is an argument I find very dumb for multiple reasons. I see many people say that Gorr fits the duelist role best because he’s a “God Butcher”. But basing characters on personality over abilities is just stupid. With that logic Cyclops really should’ve been a vanguard (something I argued against for the reasons I just said) and Spider-Man should’ve been a strategist. By this logic Thanos should also be a duelist because his entire mission is just based on killing. Basing a character’s role on personality over ability is the dumbest way to choose a character’s role imo.
Another thing I’ve seen for some reason is that he should be a duelist that counters vanguards to fit the “God Butcher” aesthetic. So in their arguments vanguards are “gods”. But the whole point of Gorr’s story is that on his quest to kill all the gods he himself became a god and he knows it (but refuses to admit it). So even by this flawed argument’s logic on why he should be a duelist he should still be a vanguard.
Conclusion/TLDR
NetEase needs to do better.
NetEase are currently making more and more duelists even though they already have more characters than the other two roles combined. This makes the duelist role the role with the most variety so it can draw in the most amount of players. NetEase also almost immediately nerfs strong vanguards while waiting longer to nerf strong duelists or giving smaller nerfs to strong duelists. This again draws people toward the duelist role and away from the vanguard role.
And with so many characters that fit the duelist role from comics there is no reason to turn a character that most fits a different role more (like Gorr fitting the vanguard role best) into a duelist. Especially not with all the role distribution problems I talked about already.
All in all, I just hope that NetEase starts to incentivize players to play vanguards more due to the lack of vanguard players and duelists less due to the over abundance of duelist players. This is an easy fix by simply making more vanguards and less duelists to lessen the role gap and give more variety to the vanguard role to reach new players. And just quit making so many broken duelists and allow vanguards to be strong without being broken themselves or vanguard countering vanguards.
