Ultron Guide: Drones, Reload Cancel and Stark Protocol (Marvel Rivals)

🎯 The core idea

Ultron is an aggressive, momentum-fueled hybrid Strategist — his healing comes from two mobile drones rather than a beam, and he can't out-sustain a team that isn't pushing forward, so playing him passively is the fastest way to lose with him.

• free costs nothing
• cheap small cost
• setup needs preparation
• grind pays off slowly
• skip the thing to stop doing

Who is Ultron, and how does he play?

Ultron is a Strategist with 250 base Health, confirmed by the Marvel Rivals Wiki, and one of the game's Flying Heroes — he's locked into a constant hover rather than grounded movement. He recently received changes (the video calls them a "season 5.5" pass) that brought him back into relevance, most notably letting him run two healing drones simultaneously instead of one. This guide leans on in-game ability tooltips captured directly in the source video for exact numbers, since several of them turned out to disagree with the Marvel Rivals Wiki — flagged plainly wherever that happens. It's written as an advanced, kit-first breakdown rather than a beginner guide or a tier-list ranking — if you're brand new to Ultron, start with the reload cancel and primary fire sections below before layering in drone strategy.

Primary fire: Encephalo-Ray

The tooltip visible in the video lists Ultron's primary as a 6-round burst (0.5 seconds, 12 damage per hit) followed by a single 75-damage pulse — 147 damage for a full, uninterrupted beam, fired once every 1.58 seconds. Damage falloff starts at 20 m and drops to 75% by 30 m. Ultron cannot land critical hits, so the beam's own math does the work: the closing pulse deals more than half a full beam's damage on its own, which is why landing the tail end of the beam matters more than the opening hits.

The Marvel Rivals Wiki lists a flatter 150 total damage on a 1-shot-per-2-seconds cadence with no per-hit breakdown — close to the tooltip's 147, but the underlying rate and structure differ enough that the in-game tooltip (captured directly on screen) is treated as the more precise source here.

The reload cancel

Ultron's 6-round primary reloads on a timer like several other heroes, but it can be canceled early. Melee cancels it partway through, similar to Doctor Strange's reload cancel — but the video highlights a faster, Ultron-specific option: canceling the reload by casting a drone, which finishes noticeably quicker than either the melee cancel or waiting out the full animation. This is a small, easy piece of tech worth building into muscle memory early, since it's close to free tempo every time you need to fire again sooner.

Drones: Imperative: Patch

Ultron can run up to 2 drones at once, each assigned to an ally within 25 m. The tooltip confirms 35 healing/second to the drone's designated target and 30 healing/second to anyone else within the drone's 8 m radius. A drone tracks its target up to 30 m away and tolerates losing line of sight for up to 5 seconds before it self-destructs and recalls — which is the hard limit on how far Ultron can wander from his team and still heal.

The wiki lists a higher 45 healing/second to the designated ally instead of 35 — another case where the on-screen tooltip and the video's narration agree with each other but diverge from the wiki, so the 35/second figure is treated as current here.

Imperative: Firewall (the shield ability)

Firewall grants Ultron 60 bonus Health and nearby allies 50 bonus Health, decaying after 3 seconds, on a 10-second cooldown. If a drone target is also inside the radius when Firewall is cast, that one ally additionally gets a 20% movement speed and 10% damage boost — only one target can get that buff per cast. The point of this ability isn't to out-heal damage, it's to raise a target's effective health gate high enough to survive a burst combo that would otherwise be a kill.

1. Use Firewall to answer expected burst, not chip damage cheapA 250 HP ally who'd die outright to a burst combo can survive it if the bonus health lands first — sustained poke damage doesn't need this ability the same way. 6:37

Dynamic Flight: his escape tool

Dynamic Flight dashes Ultron 12 m in his aimed direction, grants 50 bonus Health instantly, and gives a 40% movement speed boost for 6 seconds. The catch: the 8-second cooldown doesn't start until that 6-second boost ends, so a full cycle is closer to 14 seconds between dashes, not 8. Ultron is not immune to crowd control while dashing, so using it into the wrong ability can still leave him stunned mid-air.

The wiki states an 8-second boost duration and a 10 m dash distance rather than the tooltip's 6 seconds and 12 m — again, the in-game tooltip is treated as the more current figure.

Ultimate: Rage of Ultron

Rage of Ultron summons combat bots that fire alongside Ultron for roughly 9 seconds (7 of which are usable, after a 2-second startup), dealing 8 damage and 25 healing per ray in a 3 m burst. The video's math works out to 200 damage and 625 healing per barrage, five barrages total, for 1,000 damage and 3,125 healing across the whole ultimate — plus 50 HP/second of self-healing for Ultron. While it's active, Ultron gains Dynamic Flight access and full CC immunity (Unstoppable), and the ultimate deals bonus damage against bonus health specifically.

1. Use the ultimate as emergency burst healing, not just damage grindBecause it heals allies in its radius as well as damaging enemies, it doubles as a panic button when your team is about to get burst down and your drones can't keep up. 9:50
2. Bait the enemy's ultimates with yours setupUltron's ultimate is a projectile with travel time and provokes a disproportionate response — the video describes routinely drawing 2-3 enemy ultimates off a single Ultron ultimate, which can open a window for a teammate to counter-ultimate safely. 19:27

The wiki's figures for the ultimate (40 damage / 125 healing per burst, 8-second duration, +25% damage to bonus health) differ from the video's breakdown in both scale and the size of the bonus-health damage bonus (the video says 125% more, not 25%) — given the pattern of tooltip-confirmed discrepancies elsewhere in this kit, the video's numbers are treated as more likely current, but this one specific figure (125% vs 25%) could plausibly be a narration slip, so treat it as the least certain number in this guide.

Nano Ray: the Stark Protocol team-up with Iron Man

When Ultron and Iron Man are on the same team, the Stark Protocol team-up unlocks Nano Ray: Ultron's primary becomes an infinite-range beam that pierces every ally and enemy in its path, healing the former and damaging the latter simultaneously for 8 seconds, on a 30-second cooldown. Per the video, it deals 70 damage and 85 healing per second, using the same 20 m/30 m falloff curve as his normal primary; unlike the ultimate, its duration only starts counting once the cast animation finishes, so there's no wasted time activating it.

The Marvel Rivals Wiki agrees on the 85 healing/second figure exactly but lists 50 damage/second rather than 70 — since this note was specifically flagged as needing an update for the Season 9 team-up rework, and the wiki's Nano Ray entry doesn't reference any post-launch changes, this is presented as the clearest single case in this guide where the wiki may simply be stale rather than wrong.

Drone strategy by team composition

The video's core strategic framework is running one "anchor" drone that stays fixed on a teammate you don't want to leave, and one "reposition" drone you constantly reassign. Which allies get which drone depends on the team composition:

1. Poke comp: anchor on supports, reposition between tanks setupStatic, reactive comps (Hela, Punisher, Magneto, Doctor Strange) are most likely to get dived on the support line, so keep your anchor there and shift the second drone to whichever tank is taking more damage. 16:16
2. Brawl comp: anchor on tanks, reposition between DPS and supports setupBrawl tanks (The Thing, Rogue, Hulk, Wolverine, Mr. Fantastic) need constant healing and move as a unit, so stick close and use the second drone for whichever support or DPS is under the most pressure. 16:38
3. Dive comp: anchor on your other support, reposition to your fastest diver grindHighly mobile divers (Cap, Angela, Spider-Man, Magik, Black Panther) will frequently outrun a drone's 30 m leash — in a successful dive, the video sometimes puts both drones on the divers to keep pace and pull attention away from the backline entirely. 18:03

Who Ultron struggles against

The video names two categories of hard counters: anyone who can consistently land shots on him (Punisher, Hela, Hawkeye and Phoenix are called the most lethal), and anyone faster than him in the air, like Angela and Spider-Man, who can chase him down directly. Reach-based divers such as Iron Fist, Magik, Scarlet Witch and Doctor Strange round out the list. Against sustained burst damage from heroes like Loki, Adam Warlock or Gambit, Ultron's healing simply can't keep pace — his kit is built to prevent deaths through bonus health and mobility, not to out-heal a dedicated burst comp indefinitely.

How this guide was fact-checked

Three separate in-game ability tooltips visible in the source video — Encephalo-Ray, Imperative: Patch and Dynamic Flight — gave exact numbers that matched the video's own narration but diverged from the Marvel Rivals Wiki (marvelrivals.wiki.gg, fetched 2026-08-23) on several figures: primary fire structure, drone healing rate, and dash distance/duration. Given that pattern repeating three times, the video's tooltip-confirmed numbers are treated as the more current source throughout this guide, with each specific discrepancy called out rather than silently resolved. The one exception is the ultimate's bonus-health damage multiplier (125% in the video vs. 25% on the wiki), which has no on-screen tooltip to confirm it and is flagged as the least certain number here. The wiki's Nano Ray entry likely predates the Season 9 Stark Protocol rework this row's Notion notes called out — its damage figure (50/second) doesn't match the video's 70/second, while both agree exactly on the 85 healing/second figure.

What this guide doesn't answer

This guide doesn't cover a specific crosshair setup for Ultron's beam-based primary fire, since the source video doesn't address it and that's a personal-preference topic on its own. It also can't fully confirm every ability number against a verified current patch — the video is from January 2026 and the wiki shows clear signs of being out of step with it on multiple abilities, so if a further balance patch has landed since, treat the numbers above as worth spot-checking against your own in-game tooltips.