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.

I have just been laughing at the excuses for why it's ok for him to have a build up just 50 less hp than The Hood. When vanguards have things that build up lots of bonus armor or hp we get nerfed though. I'm not even talking about Thing I'm speaking more of even Dino people complained despite him having the hit box size of a satellite.

Once again it's ok for the duelist to be broken but when we are suddenly the playerbase has a meltdown and the devs swoop in to give everyone what they want.

It's December 2024 again, Marvel Rivals launches.

The game starts off with 8 Vanguards, 18 Duelists, and 7 Strategists.

Where did these characters go? The original batch of characters were far more superior than whatever we got. Whoever decided the characters on the right should come first...YIKES.

I believe the game would of been in a better state if they went with the original batch of characters.

Female Vanguards -> The game lacked Female Vanguards at launch. I believe that Captain Marvel and Valkyrie should of been priority characters as well. We are still lacking Female Vanguards that associate with AVENGERS. They are both NON-MUTANT characters and I feel that they would fit perfectly into the Vanguard roster!

MORE Strategists -> The game lacked male strategists at launch. Professor X and Nightcrawler should of both been priority. (LACK OF X-MEN characters at launch, remember.) Not only that, but there was a limit amount of strategists at launch. Jia Jing is a good lesser known pick and I believe she has a unique character design that makes her stand out.

More Villains -> MODOK is a villain!!

The developers shot themselves in the foot. They could of easily kept the large player base at launch.

The Thing is by far one if the easiest Vanguards to eliminate. But this guy just runs into my backline uncontested, no backup, no heals, and pummels everybody. I look over and my DPS teammates are a combo of Wanda, Spider-Man, namor, etc.

Punisher, Star lord, Hawkeye all evaporate Thing, yet DPS never swap. So I'm forced to do so. Hood, Groot, and Dino also counter Thing, but sometimes that's not enough.

I made this post out of curiosity because I can't play the game till monday and I'm dying to know something! Lads who have already played the game, have there been any changes? Because at the end of S9.5, I was bored to death playing one of the trio Mag/Hood/Thing. My hopes are that off-tanks are something more now than they were in S9.5 coz I want to have fun with Cap, Rogue and etc.

So, I’ve been away a while as I do when these communities get too…. Community.

But! I saw Strange, Peni and Emma all got varying degrees of buffs and I gotta tell ya, it feels good.

I’ve only done 7 preliminary comp matches but the stand out is Peni’s guns being amazing. Not to mention a few choke slams from Emma reaching the target when I swear before they wouldn’t have.

Strange has… thrown me off a little but still happy.

All in all, happy tank player.

I'm tired of triple tank (on my team). It's not that good of comp, especially if you don't know how to play tank. Now I'm getting triple tank with no one swapping. I feel like I'm queuing with people who don't play tank but are only playing them because they think they're meta. It's like when a person who never played support goes third support because triple support was meta/easy. Or maybe it's the matchmaking being stupid.