Do three Duelists lose you the game? What 150,000+ Marvel Rivals matches say about line-ups

Marvel Rivals has never had a role queue. Asked about it by Metro, director Guangyun Chen said the decision comes down to balance:

On the record

what we want to offer is more line-up or more team comp possibilities through our hero design and our team-up mechanic.

Players mostly take that variety as a risk. "Everybody wants 2/2/2, but nobody wants role queue?" had 452 upvotes on r/marvelrivals on October 19, and the team-comp tables people quote put triple support near 10 points under 2-2-2.

Across 150,000+ Season 10 matches with all twelve heroes recorded, the line-up a team starts with mattered less than that. The line-up it ends with mostly records who was losing. The numbers below are Competitive unless they say otherwise, and a line-up is written Vanguards, Duelists, Strategists, so 1-3-2 is one Vanguard, three Duelists and two Strategists.

Each team's line-up is taken 75 seconds in, after the spawn-room changes. Against a 2-2-2, a team on one Vanguard and three Duelists won 49.1% of the time, over 14,374 matches. It isn't one season's balance: Seasons 9 and 8, each counted on its own, gave 47.6% in both. The chart puts the Season 10 numbers next to the same line-ups judged by how the match ended.

The second Vanguard was the cheapest seat to give up, at under a point. Moving a Duelist to a third Strategist cost a few points (46.6%), and so did a third Vanguard (45.8%). The expensive one is the second Strategist: 2-3-1 won 43.3%, and four Duelists with one Strategist won 38.4%. Both are rare starts (540 and 159 matches), so read those two loosely.

By the end of a match a third of the teams were on something other than 2-2-2, and triple Strategist was on twice as many teams as at the start. On r/RivalsCollege a third Strategist is already called "a desperation swap", and the swaps show how far that goes.

A team where nobody changed role won 69.4%, and 69.2% and 70.5% in the two seasons before. That is not a case against swapping. Teams change role when the fights are going badly, and the kill score at the first role change shows it.

It also explains the team-comp tables players quote. RivalsTracker and RivalsMeta put 1-3-2 at 45.85% and both triple Strategist line-ups under 40%. For the five common line-ups their numbers sit within two points of this sample judged by the line-up a team ended on, and well away from the line-up it started on. Neither site says which line-up it counts.

The 49.1% hides a split. In close matches, where the two teams died within five times of each other, three Duelists won 43.0% of 1,682. In uneven matches they won 49.9%. A second Vanguard seems to matter most when the fights are even and the objective decides it.

Three Duelists stay within three points of even from Bronze to Grandmaster. Three Strategists trail at every rank, most in Bronze (42.6%, 188 matches) and least in Platinum (48.0%).

Celestial and above is left out because there is too little of it: 429 Competitive matches this season, and only 45 where a 1-3-2 started against a 2-2-2. Even the last three seasons together give 535, well under the 1,000 matches the charts here treat as the floor.

If a teammate wants the third Duelist, the second Strategist is the seat to keep. And when the end screen shows a line-up that lost, look at when it showed up.