Throw out everything you thought you knew about Overwatch's chaotic mess with the Marvel Rivals meta, because a stat geek just explained it to you.
Every one of my shooting sessions seems plagued with tanks like Hulk, Groot, and too many Iron Fists for staying alive to be an option for long, but according to a data-picking fan on Reddit, these heroes don't even make it. . the S level. Agggagating_Job9976 rankings are based on the TOP500 player ranking. “I didn't just record the hero stats that a given player has,” they explain. “I also included statistics for all heroes with more than 3 hours of play (in some cases, if a player did not have 3 hours with any hero, I recorded data for heroes with more than 2 hours of play).
“This way, I collected almost 600 rows of data in my spreadsheet (unfortunately, 136 players had their career profile and stats set to private).” That's a lot of data that I wouldn't have the time or skill to make sense of on my own, so thank goodness for the handy tier list:
The main contributing factors you considered when creating the tier list? Pick rate and average earnings. This has Doctor Strange, Hela, Psylocke, Mantis, and Luna Snow leading the charge at S rank, leaving the others behind them – even, to my surprise, the downright unpleasant likes of Iron Fist weighing in at a modest B rank.
“If you took win rate alone into account, you could easily place heroes like Hulk, Wolverine, or Peni Parker in the S tier,” Aggragating_Job9976 explains. “However, I value Dr. Strange's 64.6% win rate, calculated over 2,900 games, much more than Peni Parker's 70.5% win rate, which is based on around 400 games.
“In my opinion, the pick rate is essential because it shows which heroes top players pick most often; it reflects the hero's potential that may be achievable for a lower-ranked player.” This makes The Punisher's A rank make a lot more sense to me, as both he and Rocket Raccoon are my top picks as a relatively new player. “Of course, there are some top Wolverine players who achieve great results with it, but that doesn't mean an average lower-ranked player would achieve the same thing.”
It's an impressively detailed tier list, with Agragating_Job9976's careful calculations resulting in some marked deviations from the Marvel Rivals hero meta (via Rivals Codex) to provide a more realistic interpretation of user data. It all goes to demonstrate the psychology and numbers behind online multiplayer games, and how even when things seem pretty simple, there can still be some surprises. Like, for example, Scarlet Witch being D-level. As??
Do you still understand NetEase's new shooter hero? Take a look at our Marvel Rivals Ranks and Competitive Mode guide for a breakdown.