The second season of Marvel Rivals arrived on April 11, introducing one new character, a new battle pass, and many new skins. 

The White Queen Appears – Emma Frost

This current character drop is Emma Frost, a Vanguard unit from the X-Men comics. She is a mutant with the power to turn into a crystal form. Frost’s voice lines depict her as a confident fighter and a strong female character.

Her moveset includes firing beams and diamonds that debuff the enemy, as well as a strong shield. Her final move has her turning into a diamond, where she can either grab or kick her opponents, leading to a large knockback radius.

Emma Frost is considered a serious problem in matches, which would be enough of a problem if not for an ongoing conflict between players online. 

Supports on Strike

Recently, players have noticed a shortage of healers in matches and an abundance of other roles being filled instead. Players linked this back to popular Rivals streamer\ Necros. On a Twitch stream, American streamer Necros said that “Support is the easiest role in the game.” 

His comments indicate that characters who heal and defend others are easy to play, while other roles like DPS take more skill. With 868k subscribers, his comments have split the playerbase, with many agreeing and others feeling disrespected for their role.

These support players have decided to create a “support strike,” which involves leaving those roles empty. This has the effect of forcing players who never play support to take on a support position, even if they don’t want to. The effectiveness of this strike is not clear, with many feeling resentment towards the players instead of changing sides.” The influence you have as a streamer, but playing a DPS with a relatively high skill ceiling will perpetuate and enable those bad apples.” Quad said. He is a TikTok influencer with 193k followers, and he refers to Necros and fellow streamers, allowing for the hate towards the support role to happen.

Another issue was that during ranked matches in a heavily competitive setting, Support players received few points gained from winning matches compared to other roles in the game. This was another factor for healers to quit the role and play another that benefits them way more.

The rivals’ devs heard wind of the commotion and brought notice to their next balance patch, which helps with these issues, such as ranked points not being based on a role’s performance but instead on the character. They also brought support characters’ damage up and nerfed Spider-Man. This may be random, but if you didn’t know before, it’s the character Necro plays the most. Players speculate that the devs are poking fun on this commotion due to Necros.

As a support main in this game, I felt super relieved about this movement of lack of healers. It brought attention to how valuable the role is, and I am happier about the fact that the developers of the game listen to their community. I can’t wait to see the future of this game thrive and succeed.

This was a highly anticipated season, as later on, when season 2.5 drops, a new support character, Ultron, will drop. Even players who don’t play support are excited for the character. “I probably got less than 3 hours on support, but the way my thumbs are going to have Ultron’s position memorized,” said BlanK, who is a rival’s content creator with 49k followers on TikTok. Ultron is highly expected because he’s a new support character, and he was leaked back in season 1 during January.