Marvel Rivals’ 33 heroes each have a high-impact ultimate ability to wipe a team, save allies from near death, or power up your friends and tip the scales of a fight. One of the most important skills to learn is how to react when you hear one of these abilities coming, whether that’s running for cover when you hear Scarlet Witch screaming “Pure chaos!” as she floats into the battlefield with explosive intention, or throwing a shield up when Star-Lord starts raining down his autotargeting bullets on your squishy allies. But some heroes can just shut down several ultimates in the game; it’s just a matter of timing, precision, and situational awareness to ensure it’s worth the risk when you could, instead, just run away.
Fans have been trying out several of the game’s stun-based abilities against different ultimates, and discovered that several heroes on the roster can deny enemy players all that value with the press of a button. Some of them are pretty simple, such as Luna Snow freezing Scarlet Witch out of her Reality Erasure attack.
Others require much more precision and game sense, like using Cloak & Dagger’s Dark Teleportation ability to briefly make your team invulnerable right as noted menace Jeff the Land Shark tries to gobble them up and spit them off the map.
Timing really is everything with some of these strategies. Several heroes’ ultimate abilities have a brief startup animation before they get real crazy and can’t be stopped. Characters with crowd control abilities, like Wolverine and Peni Parker, can stop most ults if they strike just before the enemy executes the attack, and doing so will often come down to the stars aligning. The ability can’t be on cooldown, of course, and you have to have the perfect line of sight to strike. But if you’re going to play heroes who have that utility, it’s a good skill to have in your arsenal.
A lot of these shutdowns will become second nature as you memorize ultimate voice lines and are on the receiving end of every attack. Anticipating when your foe’s about to drop theirs is a big part of canceling a possible team wipe. This also comes with time, as you’ll get a sense of when enemies have likely racked up enough damage or healing to charge their ultimate. Then you’ll know what positioning to look for as enemies set up their attacks. You’ll see an Iron Man who tries to flank your team to surprise you with an Invincible Pulse Cannon, for instance, or Thor leaping into the air before he slams his hammer down. You can spend some time in the training range to see what abilities you can actually stop, but nothing will replace the practice of getting into casual matches and trying them out naturally. Then you’ll be ready to take those skills into competitive play.
For more on Marvel Rivals, check out Kotaku’s review.