u/sloogz

The roster parity discourse fundamentally misunderstands what Marvel Rivals is adapting. Marvel wasn't created around three hero-shooter roles. Most Marvel characters punch, shoot, stab or blast people; far fewer naturally fit dedicated tank or support fantasies. Of course faithfully adapting Marvel produces more Duelists.

That launch discrepancy also isn't getting "fixed." NetEase has moved to roughly 1-1-1 releases going forward, so all three roles grow equally while the original gap remains. That's fine. Why do three numbers on the character select screen need to match?

And roster size isn't roster depth. Having 20+ Duelists doesn't mean 20+ are competitively viable, nor does having fewer Vanguards or Strategists make those roles weaker. Number of heroes ≠ number of viable heroes ≠ role popularity ≠ role power.

The obsession with parity creates backwards character design. Instead of asking "What role best expresses this character?" people ask "How can we justify putting them in the role with fewer heroes?" That's how you get Healcrawler or Vanguard Cyclops.

Gambit being a Strategist isn't justification for jamming anyone into Strategist. Gambit works because NetEase found canonical support abilities while still making him feel like Gambit. That's the standard: does playing the hero optimally make you behave like that character?

Nightcrawler is a teleporting, acrobatic melee swordsman. A relatively recent sword that can heal shouldn't override 50 years of combat identity because Strategist has fewer portraits.

Perfect roster parity won't make role popularity equal anyway. People who enjoy DPS aren't becoming tank/support mains because the roster says 30/30/30.

Don't fucking mutilate established characters to make three numbers match. The numbers don't need to match. The characters need to feel right.

TL:DR: Role parity is not inherently a design objective, especially in a licensed game where the source material itself doesn't contain equal numbers of natural tanks, damage dealers and supports.

Before you comment, if your response falls into any of the following buckets:

• Strategist has fewer heroes.
• Strategist needs more players.
• Nightcrawler is popular, so he'll attract players.
• People are tired of filling.
• Duelist already has popular characters.
• Hopesword technically heals

Anything except starting with Nightcrawler...

Just don't.

As someone who is super into metaphysical/folkloric stuff like this and would absolutely be the guy in the occult store going “you should probably respect ancient wish-granting forest magic,” I’ve been thinking a lot about what the One Wish Willow actually IS beneath the surface level plot.

My interpretation is that the Willow is not witchcraft in the normal sense, and it’s not demonic possession either. It feels much older and more structural than that, more like an ancient metaphysical system humanity discovered a very long time ago and slowly learned how to interact with. The Willow does not behave like somebody “casting a spell.” It behaves more like reality itself accepting and enforcing a condition. That’s why the FAQ fascinated me so much. “One wish per life.” “No resurrection.” “No immortality.” “Irreversible outcomes.” Those don’t feel like arbitrary magical rules, they feel like system constraints, like humanity is interfacing with some preexisting causal architecture with hard limits built into it.

The company representative knowing Bear’s wish, knowing Nikki’s state, and literally being able to play her screams through the phone completely changed how I viewed the cosmology too. At that point it stopped feeling like a cursed object and started feeling like active wishes remain connected to the larger system after they’re made, like the Willow is continuously maintaining certain reality conditions in real time.

My main theory is that the Willow is sustained by human desire itself. Ancient humans discovered this tree/system and realized it could bridge the gap between what exists and what human beings desperately want to exist. Over centuries people kept feeding wishes into it: grief, longing, obsession, love, desperation, hope, ambition...and the accumulated metaphysical “weight” of those wishes slowly made the system more powerful over time.

I also think that’s why there’s only one wish per person. When somebody makes a wish, part of their metaphysical “essence” becomes permanently linked to the system through their declaration, desire and intent. Not soul-stealing in a demonic sense, but more like a causal imprint. That’s why Bear physically cannot snap another branch later. The exchange has already been accepted. The Willow is metabolizing human longing itself into altered reality, and the “one wish” rule is what keeps the system metabolically stable, almost like a folkloric version of equivalent exchange.

Also, I think the fact that wishes dissipate upon the wisher's death supports my theory; it implies the wish is not a permanently self-sustaining spell. It’s an active relational structure continuously anchored through the existence of the wisher. It’s less of a one-time spellcast more like an ongoing metaphysical contract continuously metabolizing the existential/emotional essence of the person who made it.

That would also explain why emotionally intense wishes become unstable. Ian’s billion-dollar wish is simple, material and finite. Reality stabilizes quickly. Bear’s wish is completely different. He doesn’t wish for Nikki to date him or sleep with him, he wishes for her to “love him more than anyone in the world.” That is an unbelievably broad and ancient invocation. He’s not just invoking romance there, he’s invoking attachment itself at its deepest symbolic level. And importantly, he never specifies romantic love.

That’s why the Hansel and Gretel stuff matters so much to me. The movie keeps invoking old fairy tale attachment logic that goes way beyond modern romance: sibling devotion, inseparability, dependency, “you are my whole world,” wandering the woods together forever. It feels less like modern dating and more like ancient folkloric ideas about soul-binding and total emotional centrality.

That’s also why Wish Nikki is so emotionally confusing. She is terrifying, yes, but she is also weirdly sincere and almost endearing at times. The “BEAAAAAR! I’M SO GLAD YOU’RE HOME!” scene is creepy, but there’s also something emotionally pure about it. It feels like watching an ancient metaphysical intelligence trying to instantiate perfect devotion through a human being and not fully understanding healthy human boundaries or individuality.

The bleed-through moments are extremely important too. “IT’S NOT ME.” Nikki begging Bear to kill her. The lucid moments where the real Nikki surfaces underneath the wish-state. To me that suggests the Willow cannot fully rewrite a human consciousness. The wish behaves more like an unstable overlay continuously trying to maintain a reality condition against a real human psyche fighting back underneath it.

The more I think about it, the more the Willow feels less like evil magic and more like an ancient natural law humanity was never really supposed to interact with casually. Not satanic, demonic or malicious, just really, really old. A primordial system built around the idea that human longing has literal causal force if enough emotional/metaphysical pressure is behind it.

TL;DR: I think the One Wish Willow is an ancient metaphysical system fueled by human longing itself, where wishes permanently bind part of a person’s existential “essence” into a reality-altering network that can enforce desires. Ancient societies, maybe somewhere in medieval Europe/modern day Bohemian Forest, were aware of it and as time went on, its "stewards" modernized, packaged, and commercialized it to continue the process