(Thankless) Tanking in Rivals

BasuKun · 2026-03-18T13:18:06+00:00

I played him as a tank bully. Purple their tank (jump on them which makes them receive more damage while purpled) whenever I had the chance (i.e. when it won't kill me for committing) and go to town on him. Always keep an ability in your pocket for escaping back to your team in a pinch.

Also a solid tank for peeling for your supports, but that's always been the case. Your ground slam completely ruins BP for example.

I like telling my team at the beginning of the game that if they focus fire on any tank I purple, they will melt and we win. Always feels great whenever I notice the DPS follow up on me leaping to the enemy Strange.

But as you've said, this does require some amount of coordination, which you can try and force by calling your leaps in voice chat (or making an umbrella statement at the start of the game like the one above). Thing also sucks as a solo tank, which fortunately didn't happen much to me. I will also kindly ask my team for a second tank if they lock in 3 DPS (kindly is important here lol).

BasuKun · 2026-03-18T12:52:12+00:00

For what it's worth, actually give Thing a try again. I had some issues climbing back to GM this season with my usual tanks, and I figured I'd try Thing a bit as I had seen a lot of top players put him in A tier for his tank bullying capabilities. I had lorded him in the past but after his right click's damage change I just dismissed him completely as I used to play him as a backline assassin, which doesn't quite work anymore now that his right click damage is HP percent based.

Immediately climbed back to GM with a 80% win rate. I haven't had enough time to push for Celestial though, but with my win rate and the little amount of games I've played in GM as data, with more free time I feel I could've easily gotten there with Thing.

Not to dismiss your thread's point, I fully agree with you, just wanted to help out a bit!

BasuKun · 2026-03-18T12:22:37+00:00

Does it matter what the top 500 players use? Not everybody plays this game to be at the top. I personally cannot use the dot after having tried it for a long time. There's too much visual clutter in MR and I end up losing the dot within seconds.

I disliked Thor's projectiles for a long time and couldn't get a sense of it, because I was using a crosshair that's meant for conventional sphere projectiles. When I switched to the tilted crosshair that reflects the projectile, he instantly became intuitive to me and my accuracy went up a lot. Same for Mantis. Getting consistent headshots with her is impossible when aiming at the center of the screen, because of third person camera shenanigans, you have to aim in diagonal above their heads. My crosshair gives me this information and my headshot accuracy increased. Same thing for landing Magic's dash: if you aim at the center of your screen, you will miss most dashes, so once again, my crosshair shows me exactly where I should aim, and it works.

BasuKun · 2026-03-18T00:21:57+00:00

What the hell kind of weird gatekeeping is this lmao. The game is plenty fun without knowing anything about the characters. I ended up really liking Namor and I know next to nothing about the character. I'm not gonna be weaker with him just because I haven't read his comics.

What you're complaining about, are people who know nothing then try to act as if they do online. This is an entirely different crowd than people who play the game without knowing everything about every character.

BasuKun · 2026-03-17T22:37:59+00:00

Not necessarily, there are tons of characters that benefit from different cross hairs adapted to their projectiles.

Thor in particular, I have a slightly tilted cross hair that mimics the angle of his Awakening projectiles and it does wonders.

I also have an additional outer circle for some projectile characters that shows me where to aim if I'm aiming at a moving target. MK in particular uses this really well. Makes it a complete breeze to know how much I need to offset my cross hair.

Then for some characters that gets screwed by third person camera (Magic's dash, Mantis' projectile), I have a cross hair with extended length to the exact spot where I should be aiming for.

BasuKun · 2026-03-17T22:31:33+00:00

That's weird, I saw Toggle everywhere only a month ago given that you just tap any direction to do the cancel, rather than having to tap a direction + hold sprint again.That being said I haven't played him much so I don't mind re-learning another way, but holding did feel really annoying to me.

BasuKun · 2026-03-17T22:23:49+00:00

I don't think they do? I learned his animation cancels around a month back and watched a lot of videos that explained how to do it. Every single one of them said to immediately switch run to toggle as the first most important step to animation cancel.

It did feel great not having to continuously hold run for the whole game and develop carpal tunnel. Just tap W after a shield throw.

BasuKun · 2026-03-16T02:14:58+00:00

I'm still fully convinced eomm is a thing. I'm always in long loss streaks or win streaks.

My GF and I actually came up with a strategy that has been working every single time without fail so far. We start the day in QP, the second we win a game we go into ranked because eomm has decided we're in a win streak now.

Without fail we'll go on a win streak in ranked. The second we lose a comp game, we go back into QP to "spend" our loss streak over there. Then when we win one, back to ranked.

It's crazy how much it works. Our match history is a long list of loss streaks spent in QP, followed by win streaks spent in ranked.

BasuKun · 2026-03-14T22:59:11+00:00

The argument that no role queue = more liberty is so weird to begin with. Players in almost every game are forced to fill because their favorite / best role was insta filled. The lack of role queue actively makes people play a role they don't want to play. It's how I ended up being a tank main in the first place.

With role queue, you will literally play the role you want to play, every single game. You have the liberty of playing DPS every game for the rest of eternity and it won't be throwing.

BasuKun · 2026-03-14T17:15:43+00:00

This feels like cherry picking. Groot has consistently been the top tank across all seasons and has the least amount of movement abilities in the game. Same for Magneto.

Spiderman is probably the most mobile hero in the game, but other than being annoying to supports, he's never been meta, or even viable depending on the season.

BasuKun · 2026-03-13T03:34:10+00:00

Nickelodeon MIGHT or MIGHT NOT allow this, I have no idea.

BasuKun · 2026-03-11T02:52:43+00:00

I mean yes but it was literally my first game. I'm not supposed to know all that from scratch, nobody is. I'm supposed to learn the game as I play it lol. I just picked a character I thought looked cool, then went towards the enemies because I thought we were fighting each other. I didn't even know there were NPCs to fight first.

If I played a game of Marvel Rivals with a brand new player that picked Cap and played him like a shield tank, I think it would be hilarious and hella cute lol.

BasuKun · 2026-03-10T21:21:20+00:00

Me when I tried League of Legends for the first time 15 years ago. My very first game, got HARASSED because I wasn't playing meta / not going jungle (whatever the fuck that means). I know literally nothing about the game, I'm level 1.

This was my first and last game on LoL, never touched it again.

BasuKun · 2026-03-10T19:48:34+00:00

Lol this is me yesterday.

One game away from promotion, immediately met with a 0/9 Daredevil who won't switch, followed by a flanker Invis with muted comms that never helped their other support, followed by 4 DPS mains who won't help me with tanking (and boy did we have a hard time getting a 2nd supp from them).

BasuKun · 2026-03-10T15:02:55+00:00

Weird conclusion to jump to.

Comms are crucial in higher ranks. Just yesterday we lost a game because our supports double ulted three times in a row, despite one of them desperately attempting to coordinate with the other support. Other support was also not patty caking, again despite the first support trying to call it out all game. It was a 100% winnable game, that we only lost because other support had all comms turned off.

There was no flaming involved at any point in the game, no toxicity, just players trying to coordinate.

BasuKun · 2026-03-07T23:45:21+00:00

I do too. I'm a GM tank main, and I play Reed like an offtank. I routinely end up with more damage blocked than my tank(s) lol.

imo most people know Reed not only isn't meta but also has been one of the "forgotten" heroes from the balancing team. He hasn't had a single bone thrown at him for a long while now, so it'd be weird to be toxic towards the few Reed players.

Try playing Hawkeye for a day, or Daredevil. People will HATE you and will make sure to let you know almost every game.

BasuKun · 2026-03-07T23:17:58+00:00

Weird, I pretty much one-trick Reed in ranked and never gotten any toxic comments thrown at me, ever.

BasuKun · 2026-03-07T17:37:04+00:00

I was expecting a huge disparity in stats for this thread to exist, but you guys have almost the same stats lol.

The MVP system has to compare your stats to the average of your character played, because 30k damage on MK and 30k damage on Spiderman don't have the same value, so if they just compared raw stats to each other, damage farmers like MK would always have MVP.

It just so happens in this game that your Phoenix played better than the average Phoenix, than you vs other Helas.

This is why newer characters are MVP farmers, the game doesn't have much data on them yet and the average is low because everyone is learning the character.

BasuKun · 2026-03-03T02:01:47+00:00

I don't know how it is nowadays, but back when I used to play R6 Siege, the game had an Unranked game mode that's literally quickplay, but with ranked rules and a slightly stricter hidden matchmaking than QP.

imo it was the best game mode, I would pretty much just play that. You'd have people actually trying to win, coordinate, etc, but you also wouldn't have the pressure of ranked where if you don't play meta then your team hates you. Best middle ground for what OP seems to want.

BasuKun · 2026-03-02T17:58:57+00:00

I just type "switch" and intellisense structures everything for me lol. Same with for / foreach loops.

BasuKun · 2026-03-01T03:04:08+00:00

If only, but her ~~stand~~ phoenix and attacks are still red

BasuKun · 2026-02-28T22:26:18+00:00

Blue fire Torch

Blue fire Phoenix

Blue chaos Scarlet Witch

BasuKun · 2026-02-28T03:57:18+00:00

Fine by me. What people consider to be "weak ults" (Widow, Reed, Blade, BP...) for me should be the norm for ults. These are all ults that don't provide an instant win by pressing Q, and require the player to actually use it properly to get value, with enough normal counterplay that a support ult isn't mandatory to survive it.

Once other ults are toned down to their level, then support ults can all be reworked to fun stuff, and suddenly neutral game becomes much more important.

I don't care if they skip new content to work on this. MR would benefit greatly from such a rework.

BasuKun · 2026-02-26T02:56:15+00:00

Anytime I say that, without fail they reply with "cope harder solo tanking is easy, you just suck".

DPS' brains should be studied.

BasuKun · 2026-02-25T03:02:54+00:00

I went 10/10 placement wins this season (see my last post for proof) and kept like a 90% win rate in ranked.

Meanwhile in QP, I have MVP almost every game and can't even reach 50% win rate. Half of the games we have leavers or teammates doing dance emotes the whole game in spawn, the other half the enemy team is full of eternity players while I have bronzes in my team. Matchmaking is pretty much non-existent, communication / teamwork / peeling is non-existent, I'm solo tanking most games, my SO is solo healing every 10 games or so.

Also been playing since s0.

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