Marvel Rivals Strategist Tier List (Season 9.5)

The Strategist Job Description in Season 9.5

Strategist is the support role. Twelve of the 53 heroes on the Season 9.5 roster sit in it, alongside 14 Vanguards and 26 Duelists, plus Deadpool, who is classed as multi-role and can flex into a support slot when a lobby is short one. Most six-player comps run two Strategists, and the ones that do not usually have a specific, rehearsed reason.

The common misread is that a Strategist's job is healing. Healing is the mechanism, not the job. The job is extending the window in which your Vanguards can stand on contested ground and your Duelists can commit to an angle. A support who pumps enormous numbers into a tank who was never going to die has produced a big scoreboard and no map control. A support who lands a smaller heal at the exact moment a diver commits has bought a whole fight.

That framing is why the ranking below is not a healing leaderboard. Two heroes with similar throughput can sit two tiers apart because one of them can escape a dive and the other cannot, or because one of them denies a chokepoint outright while the other only patches damage after it lands.

The Five Things I Grade a Support On

Every placement here is a rough weighting of five things. First, sustain under pressure, which is not the same as sustain on paper: a hero whose healing needs a long line of sight loses value the second a fight collapses into a scrum. Second, self-preservation, because dead supports heal nothing, and the ability to disengage or become untargetable is worth more than raw output at almost every rank. Third, peel and disruption, meaning the tools that punish a diver who jumped your backline. Fourth, team-wide utility beyond healing, such as shields, damage buffs, revives and space control. Fifth, ultimate swing, or how much a single ultimate can flip a fight you had already lost.

A hero that is excellent at three of those and helpless at one usually lands in A rather than S, because in ranked play opponents find the helpless axis and press it repeatedly.

One more caveat before the tiers. This is approximate community consensus for Season 9.5, which launched on August 7, 2026 on top of Season 9's July 10 update, and support balance is the most patch-sensitive part of this game. A five percent healing tuning or a single cooldown change can move a hero a full tier. Read this as a starting map, not a law, and re-check it after every balance pass.

S-Tier: The Supports That Solve Their Own Weakness (Gambit, Invisible Woman, Rocket Raccoon)

S-Tier: Gambit, Invisible Woman, Rocket Raccoon. What these three share is that they answer the support role's biggest structural weakness, which is that supports are the easiest targets on the map.

Invisible Woman is the most complete of the three and the safest to first-pick. Turning invisible solves self-preservation outright, which is the axis most supports fail on, and her shields and force fields let her control space rather than merely react to damage. She can wall off the approach a dive was going to use, which converts healing into denial. A support who prevents damage instead of repairing it is doing strictly more work for the same resources, and that is what puts her at the top for most players.

Rocket Raccoon is the hardest support in the game to punish. He is a mobile healer, so the standard answer to a support, which is to jump on it, tends to just get the diver stranded out of position. His healing orbs keep throughput up while he moves, and the revive beacon is among the highest-leverage ultimates on this list because it does not just win a fight, it undoes the loss of one. A team that loses two players and gets them back has effectively erased the enemy's whole setup.

Gambit is the outlier, and his S placement carries a condition. He is a complex support who manages card types to both heal and disrupt, and the skill ceiling on juggling those correctly is the highest in the role. In the hands of a player who has genuinely learned him, he does two jobs at once and warps how the enemy is allowed to approach. In the hands of someone who picked him because he is on a tier list, he is a B-tier hero with extra steps. Rank him S for what he can do, not for what he will do on your first ten games.

A-Tier: Strong Picks With One Condition Each (Cloak & Dagger, Jeff the Land Shark, Jubilee, Mantis, White Fox)

A-Tier: Cloak & Dagger, Jeff the Land Shark, Jubilee, Mantis, White Fox. This is the largest group and the most useful one, because every hero here is a genuine ranked pick that happens to have one clear condition attached.

Cloak & Dagger is the best entry point into the role and the reason a lot of players stay in it. The dual-support design lets you swap between healing light and damaging dark, so you are never fully useless in either phase of a fight, and the whole kit is beginner friendly. The condition is predictability: because the swap pattern is legible, experienced opponents time their commit around it. Reliable floor, capped ceiling.

Jeff the Land Shark is carried by one of the most fight-ending ultimates in the game, since swallowing enemies removes them from the fight rather than just damaging them. Between ults he is a slippery healer whose ability to hide keeps him alive through dives that would kill a stationary support. He sits in A rather than S because the moment-to-moment throughput is modest, and a Jeff who has used his ultimate is a much quieter hero for the next minute.

Mantis is the strongest pure enabler here. She heals, she sleeps enemies, and she buffs allied damage, which means she raises your Duelists' output at the same time as she keeps them upright. Sleep is arguably the highest-value control tool any support has, because it removes a diver mid-commit. Her condition is that nothing in her kit reads as an escape, so she lives entirely on positioning. Put her in a comp with a Vanguard who peels and she plays like S-tier; leave her alone on a flank and she is a free kill.

White Fox is the aggressive extreme of the role. She teleports to allies and brawls in fox form, so she can insert herself into a fight that is going badly and physically contest the person killing your carry. That aggression is also the condition: the same teleport that saves a teammate can drop you into a crossfire, and a White Fox who dies pushing forward has cost the team more than the peel was worth. High agency, high variance.

Jubilee is the newest name on this list and gets her own section below, because her placement is the least settled of the twelve.

B-Tier: Conditional Rather Than Weak (Adam Warlock, Loki, Luna Snow, Ultron)

B-Tier: Adam Warlock, Loki, Luna Snow, Ultron. Read B here as conditional rather than weak. Every one of these four has won me games in Season 9.5, and every one of them asks the rest of the team to cooperate in a way the tiers above do not.

Adam Warlock is the clearest example of ultimate-dependence. Reviving the team is an enormous swing, and there are fights that simply cannot be lost while it is up. The problem is the ninety seconds either side of it: his baseline is healing plus poking with soul bolts, and against a comp that pressures him constantly he does not generate enough sustain to hold a contested point alone.

Loki has the highest trickery ceiling in the role. Cloning himself splits the enemy's attention and copying enemy ultimates can hand you a win condition you did not draft. But both of those are conditional. Clones fool uncoordinated teams and fool nobody in a stack on voice, and his healing between plays is not enough to carry a comp that is just taking steady chip damage.

Luna Snow is a rhythm support who heals, deals damage, and then buffs the team, and the buff phase is genuinely strong. The catch is a cash-in problem: the payoff needs your team alive and grouped at the moment it lands, so she rewards coordinated play and punishes the scattered soloing that defines most of the ranked ladder.

Ultron is the most divisive of the four. Flying while beaming damage and letting drones handle healing and shields is a lovely idea, and passive drone throughput means he contributes while doing something else. Flight is also the problem, because being in the air makes him the most visible support on the field and easy to focus, and drone healing responds poorly to burst damage that needs an answer inside a single second.

Jubilee Is Still Finding Her Floor and Her Ceiling

Jubilee arrived with Season 9 on July 10, 2026 and Season 9.5 is her first full balance cycle, so treat her A-tier placement as the most provisional call on this page.

Mechanically she is unusual for a support. She is mobile, she heals with energy-firework plasmoids, and her core loop is applying Sparkle Marks to targets and then detonating them for an attack-speed buff that raises both damage and healing. That last detail is what makes her interesting: the buff feeds her own output as well as the team's, so playing forward and hitting marks is rewarded rather than punished. Her ultimate, Firework Finale, is area healing, which gives her a reset button for a team that is grouped and losing.

That aggressive loop is also why the community has not settled on her. Players who land the mark-and-detonate rhythm consistently report she plays like a top-tier support, because the buff compounds. Players who treat her like a conventional back-line healer get a hero with average throughput and unnecessary exposure. New heroes almost always drift a tier in either direction across their first two or three patches, and I would expect Jubilee to be re-slotted at least once before Season 10.

Pairing Two Supports So the Duo Covers Its Own Gaps

Because most comps run two Strategists, the more useful question is rarely which support is best in isolation. It is which pair leaves the fewest holes.

The pattern that works is one space-controller plus one throughput healer. Invisible Woman with Rocket Raccoon is close to the default in Season 9.5: she denies the approach with force fields, he keeps the numbers up while staying mobile, and the revive beacon covers the one thing shields cannot, which is a teammate who already died. Mantis with Cloak & Dagger is the equivalent budget version, since Mantis supplies sleep and a damage buff while Cloak & Dagger supplies the steady, forgiving output.

The pairing to avoid is two aggressive supports. White Fox with Jubilee looks fun on paper, and both of them want to be forward, which means there is often nobody holding the back half of the fight when a diver arrives. It can work if your Vanguards are the peeling type, but it is a comp you should choose deliberately rather than stumble into. And if a lobby genuinely ends up short a support, Deadpool's multi-role flexibility means someone can fill the slot rather than running a single Strategist by accident.

Healing Per Minute Is the Most Overrated Support Stat

The habit that keeps good support players stuck is grading themselves on the end-of-match healing column. In my Season 9.5 log the correlation between finishing first in healing and actually winning was close to noise, and it is easy to see why. Healing done into a Vanguard who was in no danger is a large number that changed nothing. Healing done into a teammate at 15 percent while a Duelist is committed to killing them is a small number that decided the round.

A better self-check after a fight is a single question: did anyone on my team die during a fight that I survived? If yes, the follow-up is whether the tool that would have prevented it was on cooldown or in your hand unused. Most support deaths I reviewed were not throughput failures at all. They were a cleanse, a sleep, a shield or a teleport still sitting available when the teammate went down.

This is also the honest reason tier placements move so much between players. The distance between an average and a strong Mantis is not healing volume, it is one correctly-timed sleep per fight. Any tier list, including this one, describes a hero's ceiling and floor, and where you personally land inside that band is decided by timing, not tier.

Rolling Random Supports to Widen a Thin Hero Pool

Most players who main Strategist end up with a pool of two, and both of them are usually from the same half of this list. That is a real ranked liability, because supports get counter-picked and banned more predictably than any other role, and a one-trick who loses their hero has nothing left.

The cheapest fix is to stop choosing. Our fan-made hero randomizer at marvel rivals hero randomizer has a role filter, so you can set it to Strategist and let it hand you one of the twelve at random before a Quick Play game. Do that for a week and you will have played Loki's clones, Ultron's drones and White Fox's teleport at least once each, which is enough to know what they do to you when they are on the other team. Understanding a hero from the receiving end is most of what counter-play is.

It also makes this page far more useful. Reading that Gambit has a high skill ceiling is abstract. Getting handed Gambit, fumbling the card management for two rounds and then landing it in the third is how the placement stops being someone else's opinion and starts being something you can check.