After hours of number-crunching, one Marvel Rivals player has laid out the true meta – and Iron Fist's ranking feels alarming

Throw out everything you thought you knew about the chaotic, Overwatch-shaped problem with the Marvel Rivals meta, because one statistical genius fan just spelled it out for you.

Each one of my shooter sessions seems plagued with the tanky likes of Hulk, Groot, and far too many Iron Fists to make staying alive an option for long, but according to one data-sifting aficionado on Reddit, these heroes don't even make the S tier. Aggragating_Job9976's rankings are based on the TOP500 players leaderboard. "I didn’t just record stats for the hero a given player mains," they explain. "I also included stats for all heroes with over 3 hours of playtime (in some cases, if a player didn’t have 3 hours on any hero, I recorded data for heroes with over 2 hours of playtime).

"This way, I compiled nearly 600 rows of data in my spreadsheet (136 players had their career profile and stats set to private, unfortunately)." That's a lot of data I'd have neither time or skill to make sense of on my own, so thank goodness for the handy tier list itself:

The main contributing factors they considered in creating the tier list? Pick rate and average wins. This has Doctor Strange, Hela, Psylocke, Mantis, and Luna Snow leading the charge at S rank, leaving the others trailing in their wake – even, to my surprise, the frankly nasty likes of Iron Fist weighing in at a modest B rank.

"If I considered only win rate, I could easily place heroes like Hulk, Wolverine, or Peni Parker in Tier S," explains Aggragating_Job9976. "However, I value Dr. Strange’s 64.6% win rate, calculated over 2,900 games, much more than Peni Parker’s 70.5% win rate, which is based on around 400 games.

"In my opinion, pick rate is critical because it shows which heroes top players most frequently choose — it reflects the hero’s potential which may be achievable for a lower-ranked player." This makes The Punisher's A-tier rank make a lot more sense to me, with both him and Rocket Raccoon being my mains-of-choice as a relatively fresh player. "Of course, there are some Wolverine mains who achieve excellent results with him, but that doesn’t mean an average lower-ranked player would achieve the same."

It's an impressively detailed tier list, with Aggragating_Job9976's careful calculations resulting in a few marked deviations from the Marvel Rivals hero meta (via Rivals Codex) to give a more realistic interpretation of user data. It all goes to prove the psychology and numbers behind online multiplayer games, and how even when things seem pretty cut-and-dry, a few surprises can still be had. Like, for example, Scarlet Witch being D tier. How??

Still making sense of NetEase's new hero shooter? Check out our Marvel Rivals ranks and competitive mode guide for a breakdown.