Why You’re Not Getting Healed In Marvel Rivals: It’s Not Them, It’s You

When Marvel Rivals came out, I got hooked in a big way. It offered all the fun of old-school Overwatch along with all of the characters I grew up reading about, which was a real win/win. In fact, I loved this game so much I did something I almost never do in hero shooters: I mained a healer!

Playing as Rocket Raccoon made Marvel Rivals feel very immersive; soon, like the character himself, I found myself constantly cursing about my stupid flarkin’ teammates and their collective death wish. And every dead player wants to blame the healer when, nine times out of ten (if not 99 times out of 100), it’s their own fault. That’s when I decided to set things straight: once and for all, here are the reasons why you aren’t getting healed in Marvel Rivals!

Physician, Heal Thyself

You know those airplane warnings about how parents need to give themselves oxygen first before helping their children? It can seem a bit harsh at first, especially if you’re a helicopter parent like I was. But the warning makes sense once you internalize a simple truth: I can’t help anybody if I don’t keep myself from becoming incapacitated.

As you might expect, this logic applies to Marvel Rivals as well as airplanes. Why are you suddenly not getting healed in the middle of a firefight? More often than not, the enemy team has found your healer, and he is running away while frantically trying to heal himself. In a perfect world, the healer would be covered and have fire support from his team. In reality, most healers are on their own and will sometimes have to heal themselves instead of you; otherwise, they’ll just get killed, leaving you and the rest of the team in a lurch for far longer than it would have taken to just duck away a few seconds and heal.

With any luck, your healer will hop back in very soon. Worst case, he might get distracted by those new swimsuit skins.

Healers Can’t Keep Lone Wolves Alive

Marvel Rivals is a team game. As a healer, I’m responsible for keeping the entire team alive. The more everyone stays together, the more I can spread the love with my healing balls. The more everyone spreads out, though, the harder it is to keep everyone alive. And that brings me to the next major point: simply put, if you’re a lone wolf, your healer isn’t going to be able to keep you alive.

By definition, healers have to mostly stick with the group. Sure, it might just be a healer and a tank on occasion, but for the most part, healers hang with the rest of the team while attacking or defending. If you dramatically run ahead of the team, you’re not getting healed, and if you run away from the objective and try to become a one-man army, I’ll gladly let you die. 

It doesn’t get simpler: you can get healed while playing as part of a team, or you can die hard while trying to fight on your own!

Tanks Get Priority Healing

As every Team Fortress 2 veteran can tell you, tanks always get priority healing in a hero shooter. Once the fur starts flying onscreen, your healers won’t be able to focus on everyone at the same time. They’ll have to identify who needs help more than others and act accordingly. All things being equal, though, they will focus on the tanks who are busy drawing enemy fire and generally keeping your team alive.

In short, sometimes, you’re getting ignored by the healer because he is busy trying to keep your tank from getting his teeth kicked in. Your best bet is to communicate that you need healing and hope you get attention once the tank is taken care of, though.

But what if you’re the tank and you’re not getting healed? Usually, it’s because your healer is waiting for you to get to less than 10 percent health. Until then, trust in the beefiness of your body and know that we’re doing the best to keep the rest of the team at max health while pushing toward the objective!

The Payload Won’t Move Itself

Speaking of objectives, I’ve noticed a funny thing while healing in Marvel Rivals. More often than not, my team succumbs to a kind of collective anger. Like Wolverine experiencing a bout of berserker rage, my team will forge ahead, cutting down enemy foes and spawn camping to their heart’s content. And they leave me sitting like a schmuck on the payload, all by myself.

As a healer, this puts me in a weird position. I want to keep everyone alive, but the whole point of doing that is helping us win the game. Spawn camping and acting like a bunch of murder hobos in D&D is a fun way to drive up stats, but it doesn’t really get us any closer to victory. That’s why I just park my furry butt on the payload to keep it moving, letting the chips fall where they may with my soon-to-be-dying team.

Are you one of those berserker players? Try hanging back with the healer next time. You’re likelier to win, and your healer is now far likelier to keep your health topped off in the next firefight, no matter how strange your mission is.

I Just Died, Give Me a Break!

Part of what keeps Marvel Rivals balanced is the walk of shame. You know what I’m talking about: after you get killed, you have to make that long walk back to the objective. It’s particularly bad when you’re moving a payload; unless you’ve got a handy portal nearby, it can take a small eternity to make it from the spawn point to where the rest of your team is pushing the payload toward the enemy.

The walk of shame is annoying to most players, but it’s particularly heartbreaking to healers. What do I see the entire time I am walking back to the action? Constant requests for medical attention while I am too far away to do anything about it! So if you’re wondering why you aren’t getting healed at the moment, consider the most logical reason: your healer just got killed and he’s too busy schlepping from Point A to Point B to boost your health. And he’s going as fast as flarkin’ possible to get back into the action to save your sorry butts!

I’m Giving It All She’s Got, Captain!

There’s a weird phenomenon in Marvel Rivals that every healer soon notices. Take the meekest, most conservative player, and what happens when you start healing them? Simple: they suddenly charge at the enemy lines with dreams of single-handedly winning the objective. And after they get brutally gunned down, you better believe they hop on comms to complain that they had a bad healer.

While it’s not a very sexy sentiment, these players need to realize that the game boils down to simple mathematics. A healer can do wonders to keep you in the fight, but they can only heal so many points at a time. And if you’re taking more damage than I can heal (like having half the enemy team firing on you all at once), then you’ll end up just as dead as if I weren’t there at all. Once again, the trick is to work with your team instead of running off like a lone wolf and hoping a healer will somehow make you invincible.

Too Twitchy To Heal

If you ask non-gamers what they think of Marvel Rivals, they tend to describe the game as looking overly chaotic. And they’re not just talking about everybody’s colorful powers going off all at once; they’re also describing how players bob and weave during firefights. It may look crazy to outsiders, but as a player, you know that such frantic bobbing and weaving is a major part of staying alive because it’s harder for the enemy to hit a moving target.

However, there is such a thing as moving too much. For example, if you’re twitching around like a kid on a sugar high, Jeff the Shark might not be able to consistently heal you. And Rocket players like me have to be reactive, firing healing balls at where you are rather than where you’re going to be. Long story short? Save the crazy dodging for when you don’t have support; when you’re actively being healed, make sure you aren’t hiding behind walls, on roofs, or suddenly vaulting into the air where your healer can’t get to you.

Whiners Get Healed Last

When you feel let down by a healer in Marvel Rivals, you might think they have it out for you. Most of the time, you’d be wrong. But as someone who’s been playing for a long time, I’ll let you in on a little secret: the worst thing you can do is complain, either in the chat or in the mic. That’s because most healers have an unspoken rule that whiners get healed last.

When I’m healing my team, I always focus on high-priority targets like the tank, fellow medics, and players who are about to die. Once a battle begins, I have to constantly make snap decisions about who is getting healed and who I have to leave to their own devices. And if it comes down to someone who has been nonstop whining about the match versus someone who hasn’t said anything, I’ll heal the quiet stranger each time. 

Is it petty and spiteful? Sure. But more Marvel Rivals players would live longer if they didn’t go out of their way to piss off the very people keeping them alive!