The first major update for Marvel Rivals has addressed an issue where Doctor Strange could get free ult charge by killing teammates, but the fix comes at a cost for now.
Marvel Rivals has a diverse roster of characters plucked straight from the pages of Marvel Comics, and fans have waited no time in figuring out the meta heroes and villains. While characters, such as Jeff the Land Shark and Venom have abilities that are extremely powerful, Vanguard Doctor Strange has been broken since launch.
Shortly after the servers went live, players discovered an exploit where the Sorcerer Supreme could get free ult charge by killing teammates. He could use his portal ability to send his squad flying off the map, which would then rapidly charge up his Ultimate meter and let him use Eye of Agamoto more often.
A character’s ult meter is only supposed to increase when damaging enemies or healing allies, so being able to get Doctor Strange’s most powerful ability by killing off teammates was causing huge problems in matches.
The devs offered a fix to this issue in the December 10 update, but it was more of a temporary fix than a long-term solution.
“When Doctor Strange’s portals triggered terrain KOs, they would mistakenly restore Doctor Strange’s Ultimate energy,” said the patch notes. “For now, we have disabled the portals’ terrain KO attribution to temporarily fix this issue (i.e., terrain KOs will not count toward Doctor Strange’s own KOs).”
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This means that, for the time being, using Doctor Strange’s portals to get kills, even if they’re on enemies, will no longer count toward his ult meter. While this removes the team-kill exploit, it also means you won’t be rewarded for tricking enemies into jumping through a portal and falling off the map.
However, the devs have confirmed that terrain KOs will be reenabled in the future: “Rest assured, this bug will be resolved in a future update, at which time we will restore the portals’ KO attribution.”
They didn’t offer a timeline of when this update would go live, but fans of Doctor Strange will be hoping it’s sooner rather than later. In the meantime, there are plenty of other Vanguards you can switch to, such as Peni Parker or Hulk.
