The State of Game Balance Now, and in the Future.

Currently, Marvel Rivals is pretty well balanced. There are heroes that are better than others, but that is to be expected and as it stands most heroes have at least a niche reason to pick them. The game is very healthy right now. But I see the start of cracks forming, with two major issues that need to be addressed by the devs and i would like to discus them. The two big issues is the imbalance between the number of duelists and vanguard/strategist, and the state of many strategist's ultimates.

The first issue is the simpler one so I will address it first. There are simply not enough vanguards/strategists. Having more would incentivize people to play them more, and help prevent tank/support players from getting burned out on their role. Overwatch had this problem too. With season one Netease is releasing 1 strategist, 1 vanguard and 2 duelists. If this pace keeps up we will see an even heavier imbalance between the roles.

The second issue is how many of the support ultimates work. Between Mantis, Luna Snow, Invisible Woman and Cloak and Dagger, these ultimates are all variations on "My team cannot die within this AoE for a certain amount of time." Having one or two of these is fine but recently I have noticed teams stacking some variation of these four to stall fights out for a ridiculous time. This is a meta defining play. The only real counter is incredibly hard hitting ults such as Iron man or Scarlet Witch. Luna's is the least offensive in my opinion, because she is locked in place and still vulnerable to getting one shot, but every other character has full access to their kit after popping ult. I believe Mantis, Invisible Woman, and Cloak & Dagger's ults should be modified to not have this effect.

Just some thoughts I had about the ultimates: Invisible Woman's forcefield should not heal, but instead do damage to enemies inside. That way it encourages the enemy team to stay out and be hindered by the invisibility. Mantis's ult could give a damage and lifesteal effect for allies in its radius, cementing her role as an offensive support and giving an obvious counter to the healing (shields). I honestly don't know what they could do with C&D. It could go unchanged if they changed Mantis and IW honestly.