Marvel Rivals began its ninth season, The Mystery of Thebes, on July 10, 2026 at 09:00 UTC after roughly two hours of maintenance, NetEase said in a Steam announcement. The season adds a new hero, rebuilds the game's Team-Up system and introduces a new class of health.
Jubilee joins the roster as the season's new hero. NetEase paired her arrival with two story additions, a serial called The Mystery of Thebes and a Jubilee origin piece titled Rise and Fall. The season's framing has Apocalypse assassinated at the climax of his cosmic ascension, with the heroes drawn to Thebes to investigate and trapped there by an energy barrier.
Team-Ups, Black Widow and Regenerative Shields
The Team-Up system received what NetEase described as a ground-up revamp, adding a set of new Team-Up abilities along with new Team-Up voice lines and banter. Black Widow was reworked in the same update, with NetEase saying it had made significant adjustments to her abilities and overall gameplay loop and directing players to its website for the full breakdown.
The accompanying balance post introduced Regenerative Shields, a new health type that behaves like base health for the purposes of percentage-based healing and damage, but which begins to restore automatically once a player has avoided damage for five seconds.
NetEase also cut ultimate ability generation across the board to match the season's gameplay changes, reducing damage-to-energy conversion for Vanguards and Duelists from 70% to 55%, and cutting Strategist conversion from 75% to 60% for healing and from 75% to 55% for damage.
A hotfix one day later
That Strategist change did not survive the week. In a second balance post published the following day, NetEase said Strategists had been absorbing more pressure than ever and that the change had suppressed their efficiency in gaining ultimate energy. The healing-to-energy conversion was partially reverted, from 60% back up to 70%.
The same hotfix restored damage to Cyclops and Phoenix, whose performance NetEase said had fallen below expectations after the removal of Team-Up Anchors, and buffed Black Widow again on the grounds that her win rate was trending upward but that she was still finding her footing. Psylocke was cut in the other direction, losing base damage on her Psionic Crossbow and range on its falloff.
NetEase said further recalibrations would follow as the season settled, and the game has continued to receive balance passes since.
Join the conversation — sign in to comment.
Sign in
