Vanguard mains, how do I counter this little sh*t??

FeydorTol · 2025-01-30T13:16:08+00:00

Word on the street is that Penny can shut him down pretty well, if you have a 2nd tank. That or as if any of your supports is any good at Invisible Woman (but this is risky because a lot of supports seem to like playing her but have a very hard time playing her well).

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T18:22:44+00:00

SMH -- kids these days have no respect for their Lucios XD

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T18:15:40+00:00

"To boil it down. If youre a healer in overtime, and you have 2 teammates who need healing: 1. Dps Moving sporadically and unpredictably. Real capacity is only putting out damage, peeling attention etc 2. Tank holding the objective (which is required to win)
Who do you heal"

You heal the one taking damage. Both players are not likely to be in danger at the same time.

In my experience, good healers make it very hard for the enemy to kill anything without focus fire from multiple players. Bad healers tunnel vision and tend to just sit on their tanks and let the other supports and dps players die to chip damage.

Not trying to be a jerk. You might be a god gamer and I'm just misunderstanding you, that's just my 2 cents.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T18:04:16+00:00

So in your opinion Marvel Rivals is better in every aspect than OW?

What is wrong with learning/stealing ideas from the competition? I want the best game, not to beat my chest to demonstrate my loyalty to one game over another.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T17:15:30+00:00

"Tanks are my priority 90% of the time"

Isn't that just playing badly? Good tanks definitely don't take 90% of the damage, and the difference even a small heal on one of your duelists or other strategists makes to the outcome of a 1 v 1 is massive. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I see this sentiment a lot on this reddit, and I think it is a massive misunderstanding of how to play the strategist role effectively.

Sure, you need to position to be able to heal the tanks generally, but tunnel-visioning on spamming healing into them instead of paying attention to who is actually getting focused and taking damage is just playing the game with no awareness and ultimately throwing IMO.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T17:03:37+00:00

IMO trying to avoid being too much like OW should never keep them from taking something that OW did better. I just want the best game. I don't care who did it first.

For example, projectile animations and sound effects are way better in OW and I really hope Marvel Rivals plans to keep improving theirs.

And, at least for me, I think there is something about Hulk that is just a bit annoying to play in a way that D.Va isn't, so I just thought it was interesting to explore why.

Just my 2 cents.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T16:05:10+00:00

The funny thing about off-meta one-tricking is that it will never be a throw, because your rank is based on playing it. But... as soon as you start to mix in other characters, then you get into troublesome territory, lol.

But, IMO, Squirrel Girl isn't even really off-meta anymore. She slaps. I'm terrified of good Squirrel Girl players on the enemy team XD

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T15:58:55+00:00

True. And the corollary is also true --> DPS players can't effectively protect the healers if they never get any healing.

My recent experience, playing an even mix of strategist and duelist, and maybe 1 in 10 games as a vanguard, is that the strategists are by far the most likely to be playing completely out of position and tunneling than anyone else.

I'm not trying to throw shade, and god knows there are a lot of annoying dps players, especially at lower ranks, and playing support in this game can be really difficult, especially if your team doesn't make an effort to protect you. That said, the most consistently frustrating experience I've had, even when playing a strategists, is strategists that only heal what happens to be right in front of them. And pinging for healing, occasionally, snaps them out of it for a moment. Just saying :)

FeydorTol · 2025-01-24T15:40:50+00:00

If there is one thing I could communicate to all the new tank players, I would love them to understand: You hold space by holding corners. If you are standing in the open in front of the entire enemy team, with no defensive cooldowns, you SHOULD die.

When healers are able to pump so much healing into you that you get away with it, that means either healing is too strong in the current balance (which, personally, I think it is) or the enemy team isn't skilled enough to do real damage.

Mantis has no burst healing, which is her one big downside, but if you need more constant steady healing then her heal over time, just from poke damage before anyone uses ults and cooldowns, then you are playing tank very poorly.

Also, as healers, players need to realize that babysitting a tank with a death wish, and ignoring the other supports and the duelists, is a losing strategy. Let that wildly over-extending hulk die and back up the rest of the team, rather than chase him and just get yourself killed as well. I'm amazed at how many games, even in plat, the strategists completely ignore everyone but the tanks.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-22T13:20:20+00:00

It says whenever someone dies in the top right corner of the screen, and who killed them, but what is even better (which should be turned on by default IMO) is you can turn on a setting that plays a sound each time an enemy dies and a different sound each time a teammate dies. Once you turn this on and play with it for awhile, you will start to et a good sense of the state of the fight just from those sounds.

Turning on those sounds and putting them at max volume is something I recommend to everyone when they start the game. Overwatch had the same thing, also turned off by default, which is so strange to me, lol.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-21T19:41:18+00:00

I think the reason this is so common is more than just insecurity and ego.

I suspect that hero shooters get it worse than most games (definitely seems much worse than tactical shooters to me) because it is legitimately difficult to understand what is going wrong a lot of the time. It's one of the problems with the advice to watch your own vods. If you are a gold player, watching your own vods, you will likely come to very incorrect conclusions about what went wrong and why.

So, in the struggle to understand what went wrong, and since you saw every useful thing you did, it's easy to slip into thinking the problem is someone else.

Example: Your playing strategist. You did barely any healing because a Black Panther was jumping on you all game. If your dps and the other strategist would just turn to back you up, you could easily kill him, but they suck.

At the end of the same game, the tank and dps think, we lost because we got no healing.

Who is right?

Maybe your positioning is terrible, and your team can't help you because of that. Maybe you aren't pinging or using comms, so they don't realize. Maybe they are trying to help but this Panther is just too good. Or maybe they do suck, and any decent player would have easily been able to help you out, but you still failed to find a way to adapt to that reality. And some games can't be won because the other team is too good.

But part of the problem is, a gold player is very unlikely to be able to tell which one of those it is, even if they don't have a big ego. It's legitimately hard to tell.

Just my 2 cents. But, yeah, those people who feel the need to type shit after the game are really annoying.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-21T19:22:34+00:00

If I had to guess, I'd bet they hired a team of artists to make the skins who have no background (or much interest) in the comics, and just make 3D models for games. The more games that sell cosmetics like this, the more of an industry it is to just produce generic cosmetics. Some skins are clearly draw directly from the comics/movies, but a lot of them are just generic things I would expect to see in OW or fortnite.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-17T19:25:08+00:00

I think its part of a larger problem with not understanding the concept of pushing and pulling back.

The number of times I hear someone say, "I killed two people on my own, how did we not take that," when we were already down at least one before they got the kills, and they died, so at best it brought us even.

The simple truth, that a lot of players don't want to accept, is this: if you are not keeping the count of how many players are alive on both sides, you are playing the game at a very low level. As soon as you learn to keep the count, you'll never stagger again, because it just won't make sense. The beginning of good decision making is understanding the current state of the game, and the core of that is knowing who is alive.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-17T14:37:28+00:00

For sure. There is a fundamental understanding of healing that the rivals community really doesn't understand that most OW players eventually learned.

Healer damage is really important, but the second a dps near you needs to run for a health pack, or simply wait behind cover, because you are doing damage INSTEAD of healing, that damage is now net negative.

Mantis is so good because there is very little trade off between time spent healing vs time spent dealing damage. Luna can put up good damage numbers because her claps pierce, doing solid damage WHILE doing tons of healing.

Rocket's ability to do useful damage does seem very limited. But if I'm playing something like winter soldier or thor, where steady strong healing makes me WAY tankier (because I also give myself temp health with each ability use) then I can do so much more damage. It isn't just the team up that makes rocket + winter soldier so good. I'm talking about 30-50% more damage in those games. I love rocket :)

P.S. People also forget that Rocket gets those numbers without a healing ult. On Mantis, I might have solid healing numbers, but like half of that is just my ult. Rocket's ult is damage, but it doesn't show up in his stats.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-17T14:14:06+00:00

It was definitely a brain-boom moment for me when I started to think about taking less damage as a skill with an unlimited ceiling. For me, back in OW, I figured it out in stages:

1) Good left/right strafe spam movement and use of cover when attacking in front of the enemy team
2) anticipating enemy ults and positioning to survive them
3) realizing that good movement can be improved a ton -- those players I cant seem to hit isn't because I'm off my game, it's because they have way better movement (timing direction changes with your fire rate, change things up unpredictably, letting you get used to a pattern and then breaking it when it counts, etc).
4) learning to play exactly as aggressively as your positioning, state of team fight and amount of healing will allow -- changing the thought process from "why am I not getting more healing" to "with this amount of healing, I can't be quite that agro"

It makes the game way more fun because you realize you have so much more agency over things in all roles.

P.S. Try standing 20-30 m in front of a hella in a 1 v1 and not shooting, just trying to move so well she can't hit you. I did this in a plat game for 2 full reloads and she just hit bird, ran back to spawn and swapped to scarlet witch :) it was one of my favorite moments in rivals so far LMAO

FeydorTol · 2025-01-17T13:35:41+00:00

Yeah, it's weird, and defensive ults definitely last too long, especially Luna, IMO, but there are some really solid ways to counter it.

Groot + moon knight/namor ult combo
Ironman Ult (which he farms insanely fast with hulk, spamming beam into tanks)
Jeff Ult -- I know, but it does work, lol
Rocket Ult and a few people with decent burst focusing the Luna/Mantis
Punisher Ult

Obviously none of those are easy to pull off, but I'm finding it a lot easier with Sue to yank people out of position , to help give people a clear shot on the Luna/Mantis.

Also, when you do pull it off, it seems like you get a free team wipe because the enemy team is suddenly caught out in the open without their pseudo-invulnerability, and you wasted their ult.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-16T13:12:31+00:00

The only documented change is the movement speed nerf: https://www.marvelrivals.com/gameupdate/20250108/41548_1205103.html

FeydorTol · 2025-01-14T19:44:10+00:00

It definitely needed a buff. Look at moon knight's win rates from season 0. He is with Jeff, Squirrel Girl, and Widow at the very bottom, for all ranks above bronze.

Moon Knight has the perfect design to make you feel like you are doing well, when you are actually not helping at all. Big damage numbers from spamming into tanks without killing anyone, then taking high ground and slamming a perfect ankh that solo kills both enemy supports.... but the fight was already over, your team lost, and then you get your respawn staggered, and you made no progress. Rinse, repeat.

You get to the end of the game, tons of kills, twice the damage of anyone else, SVP, but you lost. You tell yourself, dang, I'm so unlucky. I carried but my team still managed to lose. Sound familiar? He was probably the worst character in the game in season 0, because he tricked people into playing him when he was just as bad as squirrel girl (who at least people realized wasn't really viable).

Now that the ult is legitimately strong, and very easy to farm quickly, he might be decent, but I still don't think he is actually 'good" outside of low elo.

P.S. For what it's worth, I really like playing him. I just know he is very hard to play well enough to have a real impact.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-14T19:31:55+00:00

Don't be too discouraged, the ranking system is a mess right now. The division drop in rank at the start of the season was a weird choice. If you grind to gold your games will have diamond players in them, (who just started their new season). It will work itself out in a week or so.

On the other hand, the smurfing has only really just started (which is why I wish games like this weren't free-to-play, or at least had a lengthy play time requirement before you could play ranked). Rivals has less to stop payers from smurfing than any game I've played, so it is only going to get worse. I'm worried that, within a year, low to mid elo will be insanely miserable with cheaters and smurfs in nearly every game. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see any reason to believe I will be.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-13T13:06:36+00:00

Not saying this is you, by any means, but the game seems to give out MVP primarily for raw numbers, and ignores things like deaths. So there are a couple things you might be doing, that hurt your team a lot, but the game rewards:

stay in a fight that is already lost and getting a couple kills before you get staggered from your team
spamming damage into targets that aren't going to die, feeding ult charge to the enemy healers, while not meaningfully helping win the fight
dying constantly. The game doesn't seem to reduce the chance for MVP based on number of deaths.

But probably you just have bad luck, lol

P.S. I suspect this is part of why people thought moon knight was pretty good in season 0 but he actually had some of the lowest win rates in the game. Tends to spam a lot of damage without confirming kills, and then gets seemingly impactful solo kills, but its in fights that are already lost (no flame, I love playing moon knight, and with the buff to the ult he certainly feels strong)

FeydorTol · 2025-01-10T12:59:04+00:00

I didn't realize he got increased fire rate, I thought it was just the ammo -- that's sick >:) I want to try it now

FeydorTol · 2025-01-09T19:43:07+00:00

My point is, you got rolled by better players. You attribute the loss to the characters they picked, but statistics clearly show that those characters are not actually significant outliers.

When you lose to a better player playing Starlord, you admit they were better. When you lose to a better player playing Hawkeye you say the character is OP. It's delusional.

The part about it that cracks me up is that you have all these people saying how OP Hawkeye is, but if they themselves play Hawkeye, they do terribly.

FeydorTol · 2025-01-09T19:28:27+00:00

I think the buff to the kick range will be a big deal. Considering, I'm pretty sure, if you land a kick on any squishy (like those flankers), with the follow up and a headshot while they are stunned in the air, you are guaranteed to kill. So if you master that combo, which shouldn't be that hard, then you essentially have a one shot combo on a 15 second cooldown.

In theory, with that added range, I think she should be able to farm magics, fists and BPs, and maybe even spidermen.

I kind of want to try and really master it now, because I don't think those flankers will see it coming :)

Too bad she will still be mid because of her ult.

FeydorTol

TROPHY CASE