In a couple of days, Marvel Rivals will launch its fifth season, bringing with it the Marvel Universe’s most beloved Cajun, Remy LeBeau, better known to his friends and enemies as Gambit of the X-Men. But! Before all you Rivals mains drop your Moon Knights, your Daredevils, your Blades, or whatever other duelist you love to terrorize matches with, I come with a request: can all of us support players who’ve waited months and months for a new strategist to come along get a chance to play the shiny new thing first?
The fact that Gambit—a character who is best known for having an accent, being a wife guy, and making playing cards violently explode, in that order—was revealed this week as a strategist (the class in Rivals‘ role triangle, alongside tanky vanguards and damage-dealing duelists, that primarily focuses on team support through healing, crowd control, and providing other buffs and debuffs) was already a surprise. But now that we’ve seen even more of him in action ahead of him joining the game at the end of the week, Remy is looking like quite the tasty addition to Rivals‘ roster.
From what we’ve seen, Gambit has a very mobile playstyle that can quickly adjust between close and long ranges, as well as a toolkit that equally balances both defensive capabilities—most of Remy’s abilities by default do some level of healing, and he can either prioritize individual targets or provide area-of-effect healing, on top of cleansing status effects—and the ability to be more aggressive—like an alternate set of cards that swaps his burst healing for knockback and anti-heal (the ability to suppress or diminish a foe’s ability to be healed). Combined with an ultimate that skews away from the traditional healing zone of other strategists in favor of a more aggressive speed and damage boost aura, not only does Remy look like a powerful disruptor to Rivals‘ roster… he kind of looks like a support character made for people who don’t traditionally like playing support characters.
Rivals already tried that when Ultron was added as a surprise addition to the strategist role back in May this year—the last time NetEase actually added a strategist to the game, and the first it had added since Sue Storm, the Invisible Woman, launched in January. But Ultron leaned way more into damage over healing compared to Gambit’s toolkit and created a kind of problem that I fear is going to be even worse with Gambit: players who usually played damage-focused characters like duelists immediately locking in as the new support character and then not really fulfilling their support role, either just because there’s a shiny new addition to the game or because they want to play them primarily as damage dealers first and supporting characters second.
Rivals already has enough of a problem with encouraging its player base to more equitably spread itself out across the role triangle. Strategist mains are already a less-represented slice of the community and have spent parts of this year engaging in a back-and-forth over balance changes that have had the group go from being meta power players to fodder for eager duelists who just want to head-empty dive into a team’s backline and wreak havoc among the healers. Combined with the fact that Remy is just the third strategist added to the game in its first year (compared to five duelists and three vanguards) to bring the group up to 10 of 44 characters so far, Gambit included, getting a new character to try out has been a rare opportunity.
So I, a hapless Sue Storm main who has spent the last year healing you from afar (stand near the forcefield, please; it’s there to help you) before being pounced on by everyone and their uncle, am asking you, my brave frontline duelist mains, to just… let me and my fellow support players try out our shiny new thing for a bit so we can see how he works. I get that it sucks if a character from the comics or movies you really liked gets added to the game and they end up being a role you’re not used to playing or they have a toolkit that you don’t click with—as an X-Men fan I’ve been waiting ages for a mutant strategist, even if I was not expecting the first one to be Remy. But I’m sure we can all have a fun start to the new season and get some wins in if we’re not all rushing to try and play the hot new thing and not balancing our teams in the process. We strategists can use this cool-looking new character to keep you alive, and you can charge into the enemy team with reckless, bloodthirsty abandon.
And hey, if you do try out Gambit and find him fun to play as a support, even if it’s not what you expected, welcome to the strategist family. We will be glad to have you instead of another Spider-Man main any day of the week.
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