Whatever works.
The game plan is gobble gobble. One of Marvel Rivals’ most lovable heroes is a support named Jeff the Land Shark, an apparent fixture of the West Coast Avengers who, in Rivals, spends his days spitting healing waters at his friends and lobbing the occasional water bullet at a baddie. On paper he’s the closest thing Rivals has to a pacifist—a Mercy analog for Overwatch fans—but it turns out his ultimate is packing some serious multi-kill potential that’s only now being realized.
“Jeff’s Sacrifice,” reads a post from Reddit user EndergirlQueen, who last night shared one of the first documented Jeff the Shark team wipes. Jeff’s ultimate is the affectionately named It’s Jeff!: an AoE crowd control move that gobbles up all players (enemies and allies) in a 10-meter radius and temporarily traps them in Jeff’s belly.
The default use of It’s Jeff! (the exclamation is important) is to momentarily take troublesome pieces off the board—occupants of Jeff’s innards just have to wait around and take chip damage during the ride. But some players, eager to get the most out of Jeff’s gut prison, are setting self-preservation aside and hurling him off the nearest cliff, killing himself and 5-6 enemies in the process.
This is objectively the funniest way to get a kill in a videogame. The “I’m going down and you’re coming with me” maneuver has existed in every era of multiplayer gaming—climbing in the driver seat of an enemy warthog and gunning for a cliff in Halo, getting stuck with a semtex and running toward its thrower in Call of Duty, dive-bombing a doomed jet in Battlefield—but I reckon the Jeff “giga gulp” is closest in form to Donkey Kong’s grab in Super Smash Brothers. When you find yourself sharing controllers with people who don’t know how to wiggle out of his grasp, it’s really easy to press Z to hoist Link over Donkey Kong’s head and jump off the nearest ledge.
If you’re really good, you can even toss enemies off the map without dying yourself, which some Marvel Rival players are finding is also possible with Jeff:
GIGA GULP from r/marvelrivals
I mean, that’s just beautiful. It might be the case that there’s a way to wriggle out of Jeff’s intestines and I (as well as everyone in these matches) just don’t know it yet, but it’s also possible that Jeff is simply a fish to fear when a ledge is near.
I hope NetEase doesn’t change this one. It’s probably frustrating as hell to be successfully capturing a contested point one second and be inside a shark the next, but I’d say it’s about as balanced as anything else I’ve seen in Marvel Rivals so far. If you gotta die, at least you’re dying nestled next to your friends in a warm (wet) belly.
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