Marvel Rivals tier list explained: ranking heroes by win rate

A Marvel Rivals tier list ages fast. The order on opening day of a season can look nothing like the order by week five, which is worth keeping in mind before you trust any ranking, ours included. The numbers underneath ours are shrunk win rates, and a few things about how they are built change how you should read them.

What the tiers measure

The Marvel Rivals tier list sorts every hero S through F by shrunk win rate, computed across community-tracked matches at the mode, rank, and game type you pick. Shrunk, not raw. The three roles are Vanguard, Duelist, and Strategist, and a hero's placement is relative to their role: an S-tier Vanguard is beating the 50% baseline by a wide margin with enough matches to trust it, not the strongest hero in the game outright.

Most of the roster lives in the middle tiers. That is what a roster this wide gives you, since you rarely find a hero who cannot reach somewhere near 50% in the right hands. Most of what the list buys you is at the edges: what to avoid, and which few heroes are genuinely over-performing right now.

What shrinkage does

Raw win rates break on small samples. A hero with ten matches at 100% looks unbeatable right up until the eleventh game. Shrinkage fixes that by blending each hero's raw rate with a neutral 50% baseline, weighted by how many matches sit behind it. We add 400 imaginary coin-flip matches to every hero's record before the displayed rate is computed:

shrunk = (rawWinRate × matches + 0.5 × 400) / (matches + 400)

• 10 games at 100% raw becomes (10 × 1.0 + 400 × 0.5) / (10 + 400), which is 51.2%. Barely above baseline. Fluke-proof.
• 8,000 games at 54% raw becomes (8,000 × 0.54 + 400 × 0.5) / 8,400, which is 53.8%. Barely moves. Real signal survives.

A hero at 60% over 20 matches reads like a 50.9% hero after shrinkage. To land S-tier you need a strong raw rate and enough data to trust it.

The team-up wrinkle

Marvel Rivals has a mechanic Overwatch does not. When certain pairs or trios share a lineup, they unlock team-up bonuses that change how the heroes play. A hero with their team-up active is effectively a different hero, sometimes a much stronger one, than the same hero on a lineup that does not run the partner. The tier list aggregates across every lineup state, which is the right call for how strong a hero is overall but hides the team-up signal. If you are deciding whether to main someone, the synergies tab on their hero page shows which partners lift their win rate and which drag it down. The tier list answers who is strong in general; the synergies tab answers who to queue them with.

Sample sizes and season resets

Ranked resets bite harder in Marvel Rivals than in Overwatch. Seasons are shorter, the reset cadence is aggressive, and new heroes arrive every season. Early-season tier lists are noisier than mid or late ones, because the sample is still building and a freshly released hero has almost no history. Shrinkage covers you there too: a hero who launches mid-season on a 60-match hot streak gets pulled back toward 50% until the data fills in, and by around week four most heroes sit within a couple of points of their raw number. Every hero page shows the match count behind the placement, so check it before you trust a ranking. Tens of thousands of matches means confident; a few hundred means provisional, especially for a hero who is new or just reworked.

Per-rank filtering matters more here

The Marvel Rivals meta at Bronze barely resembles the meta at Eternity. Execution and coordination ceilings are high across the roster, so heroes that need precise mechanics or tight positioning look weak in low lobbies and dominant up top, and the chaos-friendly heroes do the reverse. The rank filter on the tier list runs from All through each division, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Grandmaster, Celestial, Eternity, plus a Celestial+ composite of the top two. The All view averages across every skill level, which is fine for a quick read, but if you are climbing a specific rank, filter to it.

Using it to climb

A tier list is a starting point, not a script. Every row is an average across every map, every lineup, every team-up combination. It does not know what your team locked, what the enemy locked, or which hero you have 300 hours on, and those three drive your real win rate more than a one-tier gap does. So do not drop a hero you have mastered for a one-tier bump. Click into the hero page for the counters, synergies, and per-map numbers that actually decide a match. Cross-check the best one tricks page when you are picking a main, since it weighs consistency and sample size alongside raw win rate. And mid-match, the Counterwatch app overlay scores your hero against the enemy lineup live as picks lock, so you are not digging through filters in the spawn room.