Marvel Rivals Strategist Guide: Best Healers and Support Rotations

Marvel Rivals calls its support role Strategist, and the job is easy to describe and hard to do well. You keep people alive, tack on extra value with buffs and crowd control, and try not to feed the enemy free kills. The healer roster has grown a lot since launch, so picking the right support and using the kit the way it was designed matters more than having fast aim. Below is how the strongest Strategists stack up against each other, where you should stand, how revives actually work, which team-ups are worth bending your draft around, and how to bail out a duelist who just got jumped.

Healing Output Versus Utility Tradeoffs

Not every Strategist heals the same way. Some pump out raw green numbers and let you brute-force a fight by simply outhealing the other side. Others heal a bit less but bring crowd control, damage boosts, or a save button that can flip a team fight on its own. Knowing which kind you picked changes how aggressive your team is allowed to be.

Raw healing kings

Luna Snow and Loki are the two you grab when you need a wall of healing. Luna's Fate of Both Worlds ult pumps out 250 healing per second to everyone nearby, and you can flip it to a 40 percent damage boost mid-cast if the fight turns in your favor. That swap is the whole reason she stays parked near the top of tier lists season after season. Loki plays it sneakier. His Regeneration Domain rune heals 100 health per second for 5 seconds and basically makes anyone standing on it unkillable for that window. Drop both his clones first, then the rune, and the healing zone covers a much bigger area, which is why a Loki sitting inside his own domain is one of the hardest targets in the game to finish off.

Either of them can keep a whole team topped up by themselves when played well. That matters more than people think, because your second support is often busy, distracted, or dead.

The utility-heavy supports

Mantis trades raw throughput for the best buff kit in the role. She runs on a resource called Life Orbs, and you spend them on a damage and speed boost for an ally, a heal over time for an ally, or a damage boost for yourself. Her passive also kicks in a movement speed and self-heal whenever she spends an orb and whenever she is not taking damage. On top of all that she has Spore Slumber, a sleep dart that knocks one enemy out for a few seconds. The sleep alone wins fights, since a slept tank or a mid-ult duelist is just a free kill waiting to happen. She will not outheal Luna, but a damage-boosted Hela or Punisher deletes people faster than any heal could ever save them. That trade is usually worth it.

Cloak and Dagger are the all-rounder. The Dagger side handles the healing with bouncing daggers and a healing field that also boosts how fast allies recover. The Cloak side brings a blind that narrows enemy vision and a teleport that phases your whole team, making them invisible and untargetable for a moment. Eternal Bond, the dash both halves share, slices through the fight healing allies and carving out a buff zone. You get a little of everything, which is why they are forgiving to learn and hard to drop once you have them.

Picking for your comp

The rough rule of thumb is this. If your team wants to brawl and outlast the enemy, grab Luna or Loki. If you have carry duelists who just need to be pointed at something to delete, grab Mantis and ride the damage boosts. Cloak and Dagger fit almost anywhere because they do a bit of both jobs. Two-support comps are the standard, so pairing a raw healer with a utility support, say Luna plus Mantis, usually covers more ground than doubling up on the same type.

Positioning Behind Your Vanguard Line

Where you stand is the single biggest thing separating a decent support from a dead one. Your Vanguards, the tanks, are your cover. They take the space and block the sightlines. You stay behind them, near natural cover, close enough to heal but far enough back that you are not standing in the splash zone of every enemy ult.

The rule of thumb

Picture a line drawn straight through your Vanguards. You want to sit just behind it, with a wall or a corner within a quick step. If a Magneto or a Groot is in front of you, he is doing his job. Your job is to not be standing where his job ends. Stay roughly in line with your other support too, so a flanker has to fully commit to one of you instead of getting both for free.

The common mistake is drifting forward when the fight is going well. You start chasing a heal onto a duelist who pushed too deep, and suddenly you are standing where the tank should be. That is how supports die. If an ally runs out of your range, let them go. A dead healer helps nobody, and a duelist who over-extended made their own bed.

Using high ground and corners

High ground is free value. Luna, Loki, and Adam Warlock all want height because their projectiles and rune placement reach further from up top, and they can duck behind the ledge when pressured. Corners work the same way. You peek out to land a heal, then step back behind the wall. Whoever has to chase you around that corner walks straight into your tank, which is a bad trade for them.

Rocket takes this idea further because he can crawl up walls and his Battle Rebirth beacon wants a protected home. Put the beacon somewhere your team naturally falls back to, not on the frontline where it gets shredded in two seconds.

When the line collapses

Your frontline will get pushed in sometimes, and that is normal. When it happens, do not panic-heal out in the open. Fall back to the next piece of cover, drag your Vanguards with you by healing them as they retreat, and reset the fight there. A team that kites backward while healing will very often beat a team that just charges forward and eats damage for free. The one time you push up out of position on purpose is for a revive, which is covered next.

Reviving Mechanics and Cooldown Timing

Revives are what make Strategists genuinely swing fights, and they are also the most misunderstood part of the role. There are only a couple of real revive tools in the game, and their cooldowns are long on purpose. Burn one at the wrong time and you hand the enemy a free fight.

Adam Warlock, the revive specialist

Adam Warlock is built around bringing people back from the dead. His ultimate, Karmic Revival, drops a conduit that revives any dead ally inside it at 30 percent health. It lasts 10 seconds, takes 3 seconds to set up, and can bring back each teammate only once. When you cast it, every ally who died recently pops back up at the conduit location. The catch is that the conduit is loud and obvious, and the enemy team will absolutely try to kill you during that 3 second setup window. If you die mid-cast, the whole ult cancels out.

His passive, Regenerative Cocoon, is his personal safety net. When Adam dies, his soul floats free for up to 12 seconds and you pick where to come back to life. It runs on a 105 second cooldown, and here is the part most people miss. That cooldown does not reset when you respawn. It just keeps ticking. So you cannot count on having it twice inside one short fight.

Then there is Soul Bond, which a lot of players think is a revive but really is not. It links nearby allies and spreads incoming damage evenly across all of them, plus it adds a trickle of healing at 15 health per second. It saves people from burst damage, but it does not bring anyone back from zero. Read it as a damage-share button, not a second revive, and you will use it at the right times.

Rocket's Battle Rebirth Beacon

Rocket's beacon, the B.R.B., is the other revive in the role, and it works completely differently. You drop a beacon with 150 durability. If an ally dies near it, they instantly come back at the beacon, and the beacon gets destroyed in the process. The cooldown is 45 seconds when the beacon gets blown up, whether that is from a revive or from the enemy shooting it down. If you destroy it yourself with the remote, it comes back in only 5 seconds, which is the trick to keeping it off cooldown between fights. The beacon also hands out bonus-health chips and a rocket-jump chip, so it is worth dropping even when nobody is dead yet.

Timing your revives

The golden rule is simple. Do not revive into a lost fight. If your team got wiped and the enemy is already sitting on the point, bringing one person back just feeds them another kill. Hold the ult or the beacon charge for a fight that is still up in the air. A revive at a fifty-fifty fight is worth a ton. A revive when your team is already losing is worth nothing.

Revives also pair with other ults for nasty combos. A common high-level play is to let Adam's team fight, take a death on purpose, then pop Karmic Revival so the whole squad comes back with ult charge loaded and crashes in a second time. That two-wave timing is how you break a stalemate on a choke point that neither team can push through.

Strategist Team-Ups Worth Building Around

Team-ups are passive bonuses and shared abilities that switch on when the right heroes share a roster. They rotate between seasons, so a combo that is broken one patch might be missing the next, and you should check what is live before you draft around one. A handful of them are strong enough to shape your whole team comp.

Vibrant Vitality, Mantis with Loki or Groot

This is the classic three-way value team-up. When Mantis and Loki, or Mantis and Groot, are together, Loki's Regeneration Domain runes get upgraded. They cover a bigger area and hand out a 25 percent damage boost on top of the healing they already do. Since those runes already make people nearly unkillable, stacking a damage boost on top turns your whole team into a firing squad standing inside an invincibility field. If your draft can fit Mantis plus Loki, you take it. This is also a big reason Mantis stays top-tier even though her raw healing is on the lower side. The team-up does half the work for her.

Planet X Pals, Groot with Rocket or Jeff

Groot plus a fellow Guardian lets Rocket hop up onto Groot's shoulders and ride him around. While riding, Rocket takes 35 percent less damage. That turns a squishy raccoon into a hard-to-kill turret that Groot drags across the map. It sounds silly, and it works, especially when you stack it with Rocket's C.Y.A. amplifier ult, which pumps a 25 percent damage boost and bonus health to everyone nearby. Groot walls off the enemy team, and Rocket shreds them from the safety of Groot's back. Kind of a pain for the other side to deal with.

Duality Dance, Adam Warlock with Luna Snow

This one hands Luna a new ability that tethers her to nearby enemies and heals her whenever they take damage. Pair that with her normal kit and she gets very sticky and hard to kill while still putting out huge healing. It is a natural fit because Adam and Luna already cover opposite ends of the support spectrum, raw revive power on one side and raw healing output on the other. Slotting both gives you a backline that can outsustain almost anything.

Team-ups as a draft priority

When you are picking heroes, glance at what team-ups are actually available to your comp. A team with one strong team-up usually beats a team of individually good heroes with no links, because the linked squad gets a free ability or stat the other team does not. Just do not tunnel-vision so hard on a combo that you leave your role balance broken. Two real healers and an actual tank still come first.

Peeling for Flanked Duelists

Peeling means turning your attention to a teammate who is getting attacked so they survive the moment. The name comes from peeling an enemy off them, like pulling a leech off someone's back. As a Strategist, you are the last line for your duelists when a flanker gets past the tanks. How you handle that split second decides whether your damage dealer lives to win the fight or dies alone in a hallway.

Spot the flank early

Most flank deaths are preventable if you see them coming. Listen for the audio cues, because the game gives you plenty of them. Spider-Man, Magik, Black Panther, and Iron Fist all have tells the second they go for a dive. Keep one eye on your backline and watch for a duelist suddenly taking burst damage from a direction the main fight is not coming from. The instant you see it, you start peeling. Waiting even one extra second usually means a dead teammate, full stop.

Your duelists are fragile by design. A duelist who has to one-on-one a flanker while also being dove is probably going to lose, because they are built to deal damage, not to survive getting jumped. Your job is to tilt that fight back toward even.

Tools each Strategist uses to peel

Different supports peel in different ways. Mantis has the cleanest answer of the bunch. Spore Slumber puts the flanker to sleep, and now your duelist gets a free kill on a target that cannot move. Luna Snow can freeze a single attacker with Absolute Zero for a few seconds, buying time for the duelist to reposition or for the tanks to turn around. Cloak and Dagger can phase the threatened ally with Dark Teleportation, making them invisible and untargetable so the flanker loses their target entirely. That one is huge against divers who rely on locking onto a squishy support or DPS.

Loki peels by swapping and healing. Drop a clone near the threatened ally, throw the healing rune on them, or use Deception to go invisible and drop aggro. His Regeneration Domain can literally save a doomed duelist by outhealing the dive for those 5 seconds. Adam Warlock's Soul Bond spreads the flanker's burst across the whole team, so a combo that would solo-kill a duelist instead chips everyone for a small amount instead. And any Strategist can just body-block or dump raw healing into the focused target and pray. The pattern is the same every time. Control the flanker if you can, with a sleep, a freeze, or a blind, and heal through it if you cannot.

Who to save and who to let go

You cannot save everyone, and trying to is how you end up dead too. If two duelists get hit at the same moment and you only have one cooldown, pick the one with ult charge ready or the one who is actually winning their fight. A duelist who already burned their escape ability and is sitting at 20 health is usually a lost cause, and throwing your sleep dart away to buy them one more second rarely pays off.

Peeling also means not over-committing yourself. If you chase a flanker into a side room to save a teammate, you can very easily trade one death for two. Peel from range whenever you can. Land the sleep from across the fight, drop the healing field on the ground, and stay somewhere your tank can still protect you. The best peels keep your duelist alive without turning you into the next target on the enemy's list.