Marvel Rivals developer NetEase is a competent video game maker. It says all the right things in interviews, makes clever decisions when it comes to monetizating the game, and actually does listen to its own community, which is a very rare thing in the live service space. Then we get to the game's balance changes, and they start to make me question if NetEase actually knows what it's doing.
Over the past few weeks, we've seen a handful of baffling nerfs and buffs, most of which don't really address the problems that certain heroes have. Human Torch is still an unkillable gnat in the right hands, Luna Snow and Loki have dominated the game's support meta ever since it launched, and Jeff mains still haven't recovered from being taken around the back of the shed in Season 2.5.
Black Panther is another character that NetEase is clearly struggling to deal with, as it's seemingly tiptoeing around the issues that everyone has with him, which is his ludicrous TTK (time to kill). It's done everything to try and address the issue, such as making his footsteps louder and increasing his cooldowns, but neither have made much of a difference.
In its...
