Marvel Rivals Season 9.5 Hero Tier List: Best Heroes

🎯 The core idea

This single screenshot is the whole guide at a glance - every hero he discusses ends up somewhere on this board.

Flats built this Season 9.5 board live on stream, dragging every hero into a tier while chat argued in real time — it's a fast gut-check on what feels strong in pubs right now, not a lab-tested spreadsheet, so use it to prioritize what to try this week rather than as a permanent ranking.

• Free — pick blind, it just works
• Cheap — low effort for the payoff
• Setup — needs a coordinated team
• Grind — takes reps before it pays off
• Skip — probably a trap right now

How this board actually got built

He starts from an empty board and the full roster, which is why the order heroes get discussed is role by role rather than tier by tier.

Flats Two ran this as a live tier-list stream: hero portraits start unsorted at the bottom of the board, and each one gets dragged into a row while Flats and live chat debate the placement out loud. The rows run BIS (best in slot) → S → A → B → C → D, plus a joke bottom row Flats labelled "The New Symbol of Throwing" for the one pick he considers a griefy troll choice rather than a real tier.

Early placements are provisional - several heroes get moved again later once he sees how the rest of the board fills out.

Because the list is built live from feel and chat pressure rather than a script, exact placements shift as the conversation goes — a hero can get bumped a row up or down mid-stream. Watch the source video if you want the reasoning behind a specific hero; this guide focuses on the picks and patterns that were clear and stable enough to call with confidence.

BIS and S tier: the picks worth learning first

Magneto is the one tank he says you could lock every game and still find a way to win.

Elsa is his pick for the best anti-dive character in the game, ahead of Bucky, because of the Devil Dinosaur trap team-up.

1. Venom Free Landed in S tier. A dive-brawler vanguard that punishes teams without a real answer to sustained close-range pressure — safe to pick blind in most pub lobbies right now. 1:00:00
2. The Thing Grind Also placed in S tier. Rewards players who already understand frontline positioning and cooldown trading — less forgiving than Venom if you're new to tanking, but very strong once you've got reps on him. 1:00:00

Both best-in-slot Strategists are heroes he expects to be banned, so Cloak and Dagger and Luna Snow are the ones you will actually get to play.

He refuses to separate Punisher and Elsa and puts both in best-in-slot, which is the clearest signal of what to learn first.

BIS held a small handful of picks Flats considers a clear step above everything else — if a hero you play made that row, it's worth prioritizing over swapping to something new this patch.

The safe middle: A and B tier

The A and B rows are where most of the roster lands - these are situational picks rather than throws.

Most of the roster ended up in A and B tier, which is exactly what you'd expect from a healthy patch — it means there isn't one build-breaking pick forcing everyone into the same five heroes. Heroes here are generally described as solid, flexible, and matchup-dependent rather than auto-wins or auto-losses.

By the time supports are being sorted the middle of the board is dense, which is his point about how close most of these heroes are.

1. A-tier picks Cheap Treated as strong default choices — good into most compositions without needing a specific counter-pick read. 50:00
2. B-tier picks Setup Still viable, but Flats and chat generally agreed these want a specific team-up partner or matchup to really pop off, rather than working on their own. 50:00

Jeff and Rocket both fall to B for the same reason: every other support now has its own save button.

D tier and the joke pick nobody should copy

Only four heroes end up in D, and White Fox is the last one dropped in after the harshest rant of the stream.

Squirrel Girl does not get a tier at all - she gets her own joke row, which is the clearest do-not-copy marker on the board.

1. Namor Skip Placed in D tier on this board — considered one of the weaker picks in the current patch rather than a reliable pub-stomper. 1:00:00
2. Iron Man Skip Also D tier here. Grouped with the picks Flats feels are outclassed by other options doing a similar job better right now. 1:00:00
3. Scarlet Witch Skip Rounds out D tier on this board — treated as situational rather than a safe pick into an unknown lobby. 1:00:00
4. Squirrel Girl Skip The sole occupant of "The New Symbol of Throwing" — Flats' joke bottom row for the one pick he treats as actively griefing your own team rather than a real, if weak, option. 1:00:00

What live chat pushed back on while the list was being built

He admits on stream that chat is probably right about Human Torch but leaves him in B because of how many strong hitscans exist.

Part of what makes this stream useful is that Flats' calls didn't go unchallenged — chat argued back in real time, and some of that pushback is worth knowing before you take the board at face value.

The one chat argument he accepts is that you survive Spider-Man rather than kill him, which is why he does not go higher.

1. Strategist team-up value split opinion Grind One viewer called a support's team-up "buns" (bad) while others pushed back that the low floor is intentional — chat did not fully agree on how much a weak team-up should drag a healer's overall placement down. 5:00
2. Slow-resurrect healer complaint Skip Multiple chatters flagged that a resurrection-focused strategist feels noticeably slower than other healers this patch, with the resurrect ability called out as the only strong part of the kit — worth confirming yourself before building around that hero. 1:00:00

The Jubilee argument is the longest disagreement of the stream and shows how much of a low placement is about who is playing the hero.

Caveat: this stream had no captions or narrated transcript available, so quotes above come directly from the visible live chat log rather than Flats' spoken commentary — treat them as community sentiment alongside the board, not as Flats' own words.

How to actually use this list

His own instruction is that the board is meaningless without the reasoning, because several placements are rank dependent.

Don't treat any live-built chat tier list, including this one, as a patch-note-accurate ranking. Use it the way it was made: as a quick temperature check on what a large, engaged Marvel Rivals audience currently feels is strong, so you know which heroes are worth a few ranked games before you commit real practice time. If a hero you already enjoy landed in B or C tier, that's not a reason to drop them — team comp, rank, and your own mechanical comfort matter more than a single live-voted row.

Balance patches land often in this game — recheck a board like this after any patch that touches a hero you're relying on, since a single 9.5 hotfix can move a pick a full tier in either direction.

See also: Marvel Rivals Counter — meta & tier lists