After 2 years, Marvel Rivals finally made one of its worst characters one of its best

Marvel Rivals‘ Black Widow rework is here — finally. The erstwhile spy’s been in an odd, controversial place since the hero shooter launched in December 2024, occupying a role that barely fit her background in Marvel comics and added little to the Rivals roster. However, season 9, which started on July 10 and added Jubilee to the mix, included a major rework for Black Widow, and she’s a blast to play now.

As far as reworks go, this one is pretty major. NetEase removed Black Widow’s aim-down-sights sniper mode from her regular kit and made it her ultimate with a few upgrades. It still can’t take an enemy out with one hit, even if that hit is a headshot, but scoped shots deal more damage and are easier to land, as scoped shots have larger hit boxes now and pierce enemies. Her former ultimate, a charged pulse shot, is part of her regular kit. Black Widow’s sprinting stamina meter is gone, so you can dash around and do those empowered leaps as much as you want, and NetEase added an ability that works with that jump. While airborne, you can activate Black Widow’s special gauntlets to perform a slam attack that deals AoE damage when she lands. Her kick is the same, and her primary attack now has a faster rate-of-fire.

The idea is that she’s now an agile burst attacker, rather than a sneaky sniper. Black Widow plays like a flanker and excels in her new role. Removing sprint stamina lets you quickly reposition if an enemy approaches or get in place to take out a weak enemy who’s trying to flee, so knowing the map layout well and prioritizing good angles is essential now. But after playing a bunch of matches, I’m also having fun treating her like a dive-adjacent hero. Black Widow’s new ground smash makes it easy to leap into the air, dive to the back of the enemy’s formation, take out supports or weaker DPS, then run away. It’s risky and ridiculously fun when it works. Her faster rate of fire also lets you pressure enemies, but still requires good accuracy, and if you set up your shots right, the piercing scoped attack can tear through an entire team before they know what’s happened.

On a practical level, all these changes increase Black Widow’s damage output, too. In the matches I played after the update went live, she’s averaging total damage similar to a good Iron Fist or Mr. Fantastic, capable of hitting 8k and 10k in a short escort match and pushing 15k in a two-round control match. That’s with uh, fairly rubbish accuracy of 40-50% (look, I’m still getting used to her new primary fire) so someone more practiced and with better aim could easily get higher damage out of her now.

This rework makes so much more sense with Black Widow’s history in Marvel, too. Various writers have depicted her as a spy, a femme fatale, a brawler, someone adept with multiple weapons and special gadgets, a world-renowned gymnast — plus a controversial women’s liberation figure, though that’s less relevant for Marvel Rivals. Her Widow’s Bite gauntlets were almost always her defining feature, not a sniper rifle, which made her kit in Rivals all the more confusing to me. Slotting her in an Overwatch-like Widowmaker role just seemed like… well, doing it because Blizzard did it and it was popular.

NetEase said the team considers one-shot kills too challenging to handle for players on the receiving end, and that philosophy hasn’t changed with the rework, hence Black Widow’s ultimate still only wounding. A sniper who can’t one-shot isn’t a very good sniper. Playing Black Widow before the rework was fun, and you could pull off some good combos. But even good Widow players struggled to match the damage output and elimination rate of almost every other Duelist and weak scoped shots weren’t the only reason. Her unscoped primary fire and her melee attacks were both too slow and the spin kick’s cooldown too long to make her useful. All around, this is a much better arrangement. For the first time in two years, I’m actually looking forward to regularly playing Black Widow.