The Invisible Woman in Marvel Rivals takes the role of healer into something new
The true test of how far a shooter hero is willing to go with his roster is how he handles his support role. Overwatch is proof that heroes like Mercy, and later Bridget, can control the pace of a match, and therefore the entire game, by disrupting metas and creating new ones. Marvel Rivals the first season continues to accelerate Overwatcha story of balance with the release of the Invisible Woman, a hero who seems designed to change what it means to play support.
It would be hard not to with the bucket of abilities she carries with her. Susan Storm can heal, damage, push, pull, slow, protect and, yes, turn invisible. Compare this to Mantis, a support who can heal, shoot, and sometimes immobilize enemies on the spot. Or Loki, a four-star hero with a misdirection focus. However, the Invisible Woman is a four-star difficulty hero who can just do it all.
The catch is that it’s really hard to play with. Her primary fire is a projectile that passes through enemies or allies and returns to her, dealing a second hit upon return. It sounds simple, but there’s more depth to it than you might first imagine, because where you aim determines how quickly it will ricochet. Bouncing your shots off the ground, near everyone’s feet, reduces the lag between two hits and allows her to knock people down quickly (or get up quickly if you’re healing). But if you ever have an ally between you and an enemy, you need to line them up so you can hit them both at the same time. Something as simple as aiming depends on where you are, where your targets stand, and how much damage or healing you want in that situation.
In other words: The Invisible Woman is made specifically for people who feel limited by the relative simplicity of other support heroes. And even if someone else is fairly new to Marvel Rivals (with more than 3000 hours in Overwatch), it’s nice to have a hero who can solve problems that healing can’t solve. Her Psionic Vortex is a big annoying ball that stops enemies when they try to attack your team, and her Force Physics can pull enemies towards her or knock them off the map. These are the abilities that other heroes like Jeff Land Shark need to use their entire ult for. She can also cast a shield on allies that blocks damage, and her ultimate cloaks allies in a huge circle. You feel like you can do anything.
Playing the Invisible Woman makes me imagine what it’s like to be an airplane pilot and actually know what all the knobs on the control panel do. Overwatch The gamer in me winces at the incredible complexity of her set, even as someone who gravitates toward these kinds of heroes. Sure, it’s fun to kick Spider-Man off my team or to have my team’s Hulk disappear while he’s rampaging through a point, but I’m very curious if there will be supports like her in the future.
Overwatch heroes typically have multiple abilities and different ways to use them. Ana’s Healing Grenade heals her, boosts allies’ healing, and negates enemy healing. All this is packaged into one universal ability, which means that using it incorrectly can really cause harm. Skills in Overwatch It’s about how well you can harness those abilities and use them to compensate for your weaknesses. Marvel Rivals seems to be going in a different direction and giving the heroes so many abilities that they can sometimes be ignored. The Invisible Woman takes this to the extreme and becomes significantly more powerful than the other pillars because of it. It’s possible she’s just being retooled as one of the first new heroes added to the game, but I worry that’s a bar that future supports won’t be able to reach, especially as players improve over time.
Despite the differences, Marvel Rivals this is really fast running Overwatchtumultuous history of balance. Mister Fantastic, who joins the Invisible Woman’s lineup, is a tank disguised as a damage dealer. Overwatch he had a problem with Doomfist and later turned it into a tank. All it takes is a few more of these role-breaking heroes to threaten the dumb hero shooter atmosphere that Marvel Rivals presumably going.