Marvel Rivals launched last week, and as fans are flocking to the game in droves, they’re also figuring out who their favorite and least favorite characters are on the hero shooter’s roster. Right now, the game feels like it’s in the pre-patch state of just being a real chaotic shooter that hasn’t yet been sanded down by months of balance patches. Currently, few characters are as chaotic as Jeff the Land Shark, the strategist hero who is, at a glance, just a silly little guy. However, as Marvel Rivals players have learned, this happy dude is actually one of the biggest menaces in the game, and god, I hope NetEase keeps him like this forever.
Jeff is a “strategist,” the Marvel Rivals equivalent of a support hero. Most of the time he sprays water from his mouth to patch up teammates and leaves healing-infused bubbles around the battlefield for players to walk through and recover some of their HP. However, it’s his ultimate that has become the bane of most players’ existence. “It’s Jeff!” creates a sizable whirlpool on the battlefield, which Jeff circles before devouring any player inside the area of effect. From here, he can do one of a few things. He can chew on them as he swims around, doing small damage over time. He can spit them out, displacing them. Or, he can do what most players have learned to do and send them off the side of the map.
At first, my experience with hungry Jeffs was that players would swallow several opponents and then spit them off the map and into a chasm. As a Star-Lord main, this was usually not that big of a deal, as I could just fly right back to safety. However, as more players have used this strategy, Jeff players have wised up and realized that they’ll get more value diving off the side of the map themselves while their foes are still trapped than they will by just spitting them out and risking them returning to safety. It has become such a foolproof strategy that seemingly every Jeff player is utilizing it, and everyone else wants the land shark’s blood.
While that’s the most common strategy now, sometimes there isn’t a hole nearby, and some players are using Jeff’s ultimate as a way to throw a team off an objective or to set up other more devastating attacks, like grouping together several foes to toss them into Scarlet Witch’s explosive ultimate. Whatever strategy Jeff players are using, the character’s destructive power contrasted with his cute, unassuming demeanor has made him the center of so many jokes in the game’s community just days after launch.
We still don’t know how NetEase will balance Marvel Rivals in the future, but there’s part of me that hopes it stays this messy, unpolished hero shooter and “unfair,” “toxic” nonsense like Jeff’s ultimate stays in the game. Ultimately, it’ll hinge on what the studio wants for the game. Does it want Marvel Rivals to become a big esports sensation or does it want to keep appealing to the casual player who isn’t getting sweaty and just wants to slam their superhero toys against each other? The latter is preferable to me at this point, and the chaos of Jeff the Land Shark is one of the best examples of it.
