Marvel Rivals players are getting invited to the shores of Krakoa for the start of season 2 on April 11. The game dropped the first trailer for the new season last week, giving us an official look at the new heroes, while a developer vision video dropped major news about the future of hero releases.
The trailer features Emma Frost, wearing slightly more clothes than usual, inviting people from across Rivals' various timelines to the mutant nation of Krakoa, where everyone gets dressed up for a fancy gala -- even Wolverine puts on a white tux. The event, however, is unceremoniously interrupted when Ultron shows up preaching extermination.
Ultron is coming in the season 2.5 update, which should be in late May.
Emma Frost's abilities and gameplay
Emma Frost joins the roster as a vanguard who can project a shield forward, give herself damage reduction by going into her diamond form and also choke-slam people while insulting them. We got a glimpse of her abilities in her hero trailer, and I played a few matches with the White Queen in an early access server to get a sense of how she plays.
Normal form abilities:
- Primary fire: Telepathic pulse
- Alternate fire: Mind's aegis (3s cooldown)
- Ability 1: Psychic spear (6s cooldown)
- Ability 2: Diamond form (8s duration, 15s cooldown)
- Ultimate: Psionic seduction
In Frost's default form, her primary fire is a short-range beam with damage that ramps up over time, while her alternate fire projects a barrier forward. In her normal form, Frost has a psychic spear ability that pulls an enemy's sentience into a crystal form, damaging them by attacking and shattering the crystal. Crystals created by psychic spear have HP proportionate to the heroes they're pulled from, meaning duelists' and strategists' crystals will shatter faster than vanguards'.
Diamond form abilities:
- Primary fire: Faceted fury
- Alternate fire: Crystal kick (3s cooldown)
- Ability 1: Carbon crush (5s cooldown)
- Ability 2: Cancel diamond form
However, all of these abilities change when Frost transforms into her diamond form, which gives her damage reduction and makes her unstoppable. In diamond form, her primary fire turns into a punch and her alt fire kicks enemies back, dealing extra damage if they hit a wall. Diamond-form Frost can no longer pull people's sentience, but can attack any sentience crystal she's already pulled or lunge forward to grab enemies and slam them into the ground.
Her ultimate has different effects. It damages and stuns enemies in range and locks them out of activating ultimate abilities. Additionally, enemies caught in the blast for long enough will be psychically compelled to move toward Frost, making it easier for her to grab, kick, slam, etc.
Emma Frost combos
Frost's diamond form has a 15-second cooldown, but it's also the easiest way to burst down squishy characters. A punch-slam-punch-kick combo will kill any 275 HP character if the kick knocks them into a wall, which deals additional damage.
Here it is in action.
A trickier combo that deals more burst damage is to open with psychic spear at close range, animation cancel into your diamond form, then punch, punch, kick. Because this combo relies on Frost's punches hitting both the crystal and the hero, it's only realistic against enemies who have been stunned or slept, but it's an effective way to eliminate them before the stun wears off.
Frost's chokeslam (officially "carbon crush") ability also counts as a stun, so you can use it to cancel ultimates like Scarlet Witch's reality erasure. (Remember that other ultimates, like Luna Snow's and, for some reason, Punisher's, make them immune to crowd control effects like this.)
Team-up changes and other season 2 balance adjustments
Some team-ups are changing in season 2, including three new team-up abilities that were previewed in the latest developer vision video.
- Emma Frost allows Magneto and Psylocke to create illusions of themselves that mirror your movement and basic abilities.
- Doctor Strange teams up with Scarlet Witch, allowing her to use small portals to rapidly shoot her alternate fire.
- Cap finally teams up with Bucky, allowing the Winter Soldier to leap to allies or clash with Cap to deal damage to nearby enemies.
Emma Frost's team-up adds some deception to allies' gameplay.
A few existing team-ups are getting adjustments, with Psylocke, Winter Soldier and Doctor Strange being removed from older team-ups in favor of new ones. Namor is moving from working with Luna's anchor to Hulk's to empower his squids with gamma energy. Two team-ups are being removed entirely: Magneto can no longer team up with Scarlet Witch, while Thor is no longer anchoring Cap and Storm.
Rivals announced the full list of season 2 balance changes, including buffs to Peni, Mister Fantastic and Moon Knight, with Strange losing some damage for more survivability (via his new anchor buff) and Rocket getting several adjustments, while Loki and Adam Warlock receive nerfs to their regeneration domain and soul bond abilities.
Future seasons will be shorter, which means more new heroes
One of the most surprising moments in the developer video was the announcement that beginning with season 3, seasons will be two months long instead of roughly three. There has been a lot of discussion online about whether Rivals' pace of new heroes (about eight per year based on three-month seasons) was sustainable. Well, apparently the Rivals devs took that personally and are cranking up that pace to a new hero every month, meaning 12 new heroes per year.
This feels borderline ludicrous compared with other hero shooters that average about three new heroes per year, or even MOBAs like League of Legends, which has averaged about four new champions per year in the past five years. Rivals benefits from having an overflowing stable of Marvel characters to pull from rather than inventing their own hero concepts, and compared with Overwatch, the developers seem less worried about mechanical overlap in their heroes, as seen with many support ultimates. Still, a new hero every month feels unheard of for a hero shooter.
Luna is among the heroes getting new skins for the Hellfire Gala.
New Krakoa map and competitive changes
Season 2 is adding two new maps, including a Krakoa-themed domination map at the season's start. Yggsgard: Royal Palace (domination) and Tokyo 2099: Shin-Shibuya (convergence) will rotate out of the map pool for ranked modes, though they'll still be available in quick play and custom games.
The threshold for competitive picks and bans, which currently only happen in diamond-ranked lobbies, will be lowered to gold 3. Players in Eternity or One Above All ranks will only be able to duo queue, instead of queuing with larger groups -- a measure that's likely intended to keep high-level teams from stomping lobbies.
Speaking of ranks, season 2 will drop everyone by nine divisions, which is equal to three ranks. That means players in Eternity will drop to diamond, and any players at platinum 3 or below will start their climb from bronze 3 again. (Again... again.)
Rivals developers also announced that individual player performance will be weighted higher when determining competitive progress after a match. If your stats outperform your team's, you'll earn more for winning and drop less for losing. This change can help elevate smurfs and other high-skill players in lower-ranked lobbies by getting them into their appropriate ranks faster. However, it can also lead to players stat-farming, instead of playing in a way that is most effective for winning games. Overall, given that Rivals doesn't use any sort of competitive placement matches, this should be a net positive for the game.
Other announcements
Rivals is adding new skin recolors to certain hero skins and (finally) giving players the option to gift costumes to their friends so they can surprise someone for their birthday, which you definitely did not forget about.
Missions are changing a bit, with the addition of weekly missions and a redistribution of where battle-pass-progressing chrono tokens are earned. The devs framed this as creating a "smoother expectation" of how to earn chrono tokens. Still, the surface-level description sounds like they're just making it harder to earn battle pass progress over the season by tucking away more progress under missions with shorter time limits.
The developer vision update also gave us our first look at the competitive distribution, showing how many Rivals players are in each tier as of season 1.5.
Based on this chart, the 50th percentile appears to be somewhere in high gold, with 48.3% of players in platinum or higher ranks.
The Hellfire Gala trailer says season 2 will start on April 11 UTC. While it doesn't give a specific start time, expect the between-seasons maintenance to finish sometime in the middle of the night in the US.
For more on Marvel Rivals, check out which heroes and roles you should play and how to get free skins.