Marvel Rivals players are complaining that nobody is playing healer, and the grizzled Overwatch vets knowingly nod in solidarity

pcgamer.com:

You know NetEase has managed to make a competent hero shooter in Marvel Rivals when the number one complaint among players feels like a repeat of 2016 Overwatch discourse: Not enough players are picking healers, and teams are suffering for it.

Less than a day after launch, the Marvel Rivals subreddit is abuzz with discussion about the Strategist role, Rivals' closest equivalent of Overwatch's Support role. This is where all the healers are, like Jeff the Land Shark, Rocket Racoon, and Adam Warlock, but as numerous memes are calling attention to, most folks are gravitating toward Duelists (raw damage dealers) and Vanguards (tankier damage dealers).

I can back that up, at least anecdotally, with my first night of Marvel Rivals and past alpha sessions. If I jump into a match and do my usual thing of watching everybody else pick their heroes and then filling in what gaps are left, 99% of the time that gap is a healer. I've been playing a lot of Rocket Racoon so far, who despite being a healer, has a cool minigun that can melt through any hero in seconds.

Besides maybe Jeff the Shark—a hero clearly meant to avoid fights and focus on heals—Marvel Rivals' support heroes are generally pretty good at killing. NetEase might be following the same philosophy that Blizzard has slowly adopted with Overwatch 2 to make support heroes more attractive by giving them more traditional damage dealer abilities. So far that hasn't made the difference in the popularity of Strategists, as the class also shares some inherent weaknesses of Overwatch supports, like the tendency to get absolutely curbstomped in the backline by enemy duelists with superior mobility or damage output.

«Friendly reminder, the team with healers wins more often than the one without,» wrote Reddit user LlamaManLuke in a top-upvoted post. «Not saying you have to play a healer. But occasionally turning around and making sure the guy keeping you alive isn't getting battered by Spidey, Thor AND Venom while you're mag