When it comes to competitive shooter titles, you can never guess as a developer what smallest of changes can ultimately end up altering the whole player meta. The best example of this is how Marvel Rivals modifies the abilities of one character and completely drops the pick rate of another hero.
This is not a new phenomenon. As earlier seen in Valorant, a buff or a nerf to one agent might not only affect its own but other agents’ pick rates as well. The same effect is now happening with Mantis, whose pick rate has dropped through the floor because of a recent change.
Marvel Rivals and its never-ending struggle of character balancing
There are three different roles in the game you can choose from. The Vanguards, or the heavy tank characters, tank most of the damage for the team and maintain space on the contested objective. The next are strategists, who are high-damage site entry characters, and lastly, strategists, who are mostly healers and are supposed to help the team from the sidelines.
Ever since the release of Marvel Rivals, Mantis has been a popular strategist and has been a go-to pick for many players. Something that changed as soon as Netease Games introduced a change that allowed Cloak & Dagger players to use their Eternal Bond (Dash) ability for the 4th time.
The pick rate for Mantis has dropped in real time ever since then, with players who are main strategists now going for better options such as Cloak & Dagger themselves or the recently introduced character of The Invisible Woman from the Fantastic Four.
Players react to Mantis’s pick rate dropping through the floor
A change in the meta is observed by every single player, especially those who log on to get their sweet EOMM hit of dopamine every single day. Discussing how fewer players have been playing Mantis in recent times and why that’s the case, users of the game’s subreddit reacted to the following post:
Don’t see anyone using Mantis anymore. What happened?
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A lot of the players talked over the many problems with her character, including how her critical/headshot damage is not worth it enough to take the risk, as well as how recent nerfs have further made her even less viable of a strategist for players to pick from.
If the studio wishes to revive her once again, they’d need to look at her from a player’s perspective and add in abilities and buffs that’d help her become a more effective agent. Till then, Marvel Rivals users are going to stick with Luna, Cloak & Dagger, and maybe not Adam Warlock because of this one big flaw.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
