🍪 Marvel Rivals Brought 50 Heroes. Where Was the Power Fantasy?

Hello there, Avengers assemblers, health-bar watchers, and healers trying to keep the entire movie cast alive.

Early reactions to Marvel Rivals’ new Thanos mode include complaints about sponge-like enemies, unclear deaths and limited reasons to replay. Other players enjoyed the scale, team-up moments or a single run through the spectacle. Mixed community impressions

Path to Doomsday – Avengers: Endgame began its playable sessions on October 24 UTC, following the October 22 event update. It brings up to 50 players into the encounter, with limited play windows rather than a continuously available queue. Official patch notes · Encounter overview

The discussions below are an early qualitative sample, not a measurement of the whole community’s opinion.

Players describe damage without impact

Reddit user TempoBlues20XX reports that both Thanos and ordinary enemies barely react to attacks. Their complaint combines high durability with weak feedback and the feeling that certain heroes contribute much less than others. First-match impressions

In a separate thread, This_Ferret_8108 identifies missing feedback as their main frustration. Other participants describe firing, dying and repeating without feeling that their individual decisions substantially change the fight. Those accounts concern the experience of fighting the enemies; they do not establish a technical diagnosis of the AI. Player discussion

🦊 Kiki’s Take: I’m disappointed because the idea sounds amazing. Fifty heroes against Thanos and his army should be the kind of ridiculous cooperative battle that makes me call friends. Instead, these complaints describe exactly what I dread: enemies absorbing punishment while the player struggles to feel powerful or useful. Thanos can take a beating. Fine. But the surrounding fight needs reactions, changing priorities and moments where a good decision visibly helps somebody. Give me a reason to feel like a superhero beyond the character model. The Avengers assembled; apparently the satisfying part of the combat missed the portal.

🍪 Chip checks the arrivals board and leaves a small chair empty.

Players report confusion despite existing mechanics

The encounter has four phases, including sword attacks, Infinity Stone abilities, teleportation, fleet bombardment and a timed final damage check before the Snap. Red warning areas indicate incoming attacks. Thanos becomes stationary during that final check, rather than throughout the entire encounter. Mechanics guide

Players in the session-two discussion nevertheless report difficulty seeing ground hazards and identifying damage sources. Another thread’s author says they repeatedly died without understanding what killed them. Session feedback · Firsthand criticism

Hero selection also features in the discussion. Beebom’s Ajith Kumar favors aerial options, healing and ricochet abilities in his hands-on guide, while describing difficulties for melee-focused Vanguards. His recommendations are an individual assessment rather than official balance data. Hands-on hero guide

🦊 Kiki: This is where I start wondering whether some hero-shooter developers understand the appeal of PvE beyond giving us AI targets. A hero kit needs a useful job in the encounter. A tank should have something worth protecting; a close-range fighter should have a reason to get close. And when I die, I want to recognize the mistake and try a better response. Having mechanics on the design sheet is a start. Having players understand and enjoy dealing with them is the part I’m paying attention to. Fifty sets of particle effects cannot do that job for you.

🍪 Chip raises a tiny shield over the warning sign before the next shower of confetti.

Earlier PvE modes feature in the criticism

Endgame follows several earlier experiments. Marvel Zombies launched on October 23, 2025. The vampire-focused Blood Hunt followed on April 23, 2026, and Avengers: Age of Ultron arrived on July 30. Marvel Zombies launch · Blood Hunt launch · Age of Ultron launch

In a thread asking NetEase to learn from the backlash, PixelArtAddicted praises aspects of Zombies’ progression and Blood Hunt’s gear system while criticizing repetition and increasing enemy health. The same author describes Ultron as close to the experience they wanted, but asks for an additional arena challenge. These are their comparisons between the modes, rather than a community-wide ranking. Constructive feedback

The restricted Endgame sessions have drawn separate complaints. Some players report conflicts with work or frustration at having to arrange their day around the event. The official opening-day schedule listed three two-hour sessions. Scheduling complaints · Official schedule

🦊 Kiki: NetEase has Zombies, Blood Hunt and Age of Ultron behind it. I thought Ultron was not that bad, which makes this more frustrating: there were ideas worth building on. A year of released PvE experiments is enough for me to expect more polish and a clearer sense of what makes cooperation satisfying. I am tired of enormous health pools doing so much of the work. The limited play windows make the disappointment worse; asking me to rearrange my evening raises expectations. Maybe a Marvel crossover calendar adds production pressure, but that is a possibility, not something our reporting has established. Whatever the schedule, the player still has to enjoy the fight.

🍪 Chip closes his calendar and pushes a mountain of unused health-bar stickers aside.

Some players enjoyed the scale and still want more PvE

The response includes positive experiences. Wiinterfang enjoys the scale and Peni’s team-up with Ultron, while still wanting more strategy. PacDanSki considers the mode acceptable as a one-off. Mixed impressions

PixelArtAddicted also reports some enjoyment in punching and slashing through the horde, despite complaints about clutter and survivability. Their request is to improve PvE rather than abandon it. Replies propose more objective-based encounters and stronger reasons to use different characters. Requests for future PvE

🦊 Kiki: That is what I want too: a reason to come back because the fight delivered. Think about a Destiny raid finally coming together, surviving a difficult Gears Horde wave, or getting your squad and loot out of ARC Raiders. ARC includes hostile players as well as machines; I’m comparing the payoff, not calling these identical genres. Those successes can leave you remembering the decision, the save or the risk that paid off. I do not need Rivals to copy their difficulty or demand an entire evening. I want its own version of that satisfaction. Keep the huge battle. Give us a victory worth talking about beyond how long Thanos took to run out of health.

🍪 Chip sets the stopwatch down and raises a battered victory flag.

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⚙️ Stay alert for the warning beneath the fireworks.

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⚙️ And remember: saving the universe should leave you with a story about something you did.