Transcription
Star-Lord has silently been one of the strongest DPS carry characters in the game, probably because so many people think he is so much harder than his dualist counterparts. My name is p, an eternity player on the competitive ladder, and I'm going to tell you all of the things you need to know in order to pop off and carry as Star-Lord.
Starting things off, understand that Star-Lord has so many different identities in every game of Marvel Rivals. Sometimes he is a flanker that kills supports every game, while other games he can just Farm the tanks all game to charge his ultimate incredibly quickly and carry that way. The best way to get the most out of Star-Lord is to identify if there are any DPS flankers that you need to Mark, like black panther, a sniper, or a flyer, and then go from there. If they have a namore or a running supports like rocket and Jeff that don't have defensive support ultimates, playing to farm tanks for your ultimate as fast as possible until the turrets are dealt with is a great start. And if there is nothing else to worry about, farm that backline. We will talk about this more later in the guide, but let's move on to his kit first.
Let's talk about his Blaster pistols, named the element guns, that spray out a barrage of 40 bullets with a pretty fast fire rates. Each bullet does 6 and A half damage, with the whole mag to the body totaling 260 damage, and 520 to the Dome if you hit every single shot that way. You might be thinking this is overpowered, but it is balanced by the fact that his bullets have a fair amount of spread. It's not like a crazy amount, though, which will still make Star-Lord viable at short to medium ranges. After two consecutive shots (like barely anything holding on the trigger), the spread increases to a radius of .15 M, and then at five consecutive shots, it expands to its maximum of .24 M. This might seem like pretty meaningless information to you, but it actually tells you a lot about how you want to aim on the character. At the start of your spray, you want to aim at the target's head, but then you want to immediately pull down to their neck so that the spray hits more of their hit box. If you just aim at the head, you are actually going to be doing less damage because the spray will be larger than their head, especially at medium to long ranges.
Aside from the aiming strategy, though, you also run into fall off at 10 M away, nerfing your damage until 25 M away, where you do 60% less damage. It is pretty significant, but just because fall off is a thing doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about your positioning. It is totally fine to Pepper enemies from range to pressure people away and Mark enemies. Many players don't understand that all you really need to do to win games on dualists is to really just pressure out enemies. You don't really need to kill them every single fight. On Star-Lord, this could look like pressuring off a Hela or neore off of a really oppressive High ground, and then holding that High Ground yourself, slowly pushing the enemies into worse and worse positions until you eliminate them or find an opening against the rest of their team.
The play style against Flyers is very similar. Good players will not just let you eliminate them for free, even if you are countering them by playing Star-Lord. With that said, you still need to pressure them off of their angles in the sky, especially when playing against storm. Before you can just ban her in Diamond, she is your top priority to go up to, pressure her out of the fight, and then run back to a health pack or your team. If it ever feels too hard to close the distance on someone, though, and they are just always destroying you before you can get to them, sometimes it's just a bad map for Star-Lord, or you need to use the other abilities in your kits better to win Duss, which we will start getting into now.
Star-Lord's blasters can be pretty annoying to reload when taking Duss, which can result in you dying a ton, but you can start weaving in his barrel roll, the Stellar shift, and now he starts becoming a true Menace. Star-Lord gets two charges of these Dark Souls barrel rolls that instantly reload his blasters, giving him immortality during the roll and also propelling him a little bit in the direction that you are moving. Each rooll is on a 5-second cooldown, too, which means you can get these rolles pretty often, and they are super important for the kit. What a lot of newer Star-Lord players don't understand is that you live and die by how you roll around the fight. It's super important strictly because it is how you avoid really important damage.
First, you can use the roll to dodge certain ultimates. I'm talking about strange alts, mag alts, thing alts, Gro alts, and you name it, because it all comes down to the ey frames you get when you are rolling. So, learning the animations for each and every one of these abilities is important to learn, making it easier for you to dodge what they are throwing at you. The same goes for when you were dueling against targets that pressure you out really easily, like Hela and no more. Hela can easily twap you without timing your rolls, but getting the jump on her while also rolling around when once you start with a clip Up gives you the chance to win if she doesn't get healing. The same goes for playing against NE more, so long as you dodge his right click, the duel is far more winning than if you mtime your role and get hit by it.
Aside from Staying Alive, sometimes you just aren't getting looked at and need to farm some ultimate charge, or can just absolutely blast through a tank if you were given the opportunity to. Using the barrel roll to reload and farm is fine in these situations; you just have to be careful and make sure that you are actually going to secure that pick, because if you don't, your uptime in the fight is going to be significantly reduced, giving the enemy DPS time to find a pick without your pressure in the fight. The one mistake you want to avoid is using the roll strictly for movement. This is because the rest ofis kit is strictly meant for the purpose of getting from point A to point B, making that role much more useful for the other applications we just talked about.
So, let's talk about these movement options with his next ability, rocket propulsion. Star-Lord's rocket propulsion activates his boots to blast him upward and sore forward, moving twice as fast as when he is just walking around, but he can't shoot. There is a fuel gauge on his boots that depletes over time, and the fuel will slowly build back up while Star-Lord is not flying. It's pretty easy to understand how it works in all honesty. Even though the ability is simple, this is the easiest ability to mess up constantly. Just because you have a ton of fuel to burn through and you want to go super fast does not mean that you should burn through the fuel. You have to fly around at the right time and do so in the right way.
A simple way to use the fly is to just get to Your Flank faster. If you see a flanker on an important High Ground position, you can use the fly to get staged and then wait for someone else to dive in with you to engage, or wait for the fuel gauge to fill back up and then take your duel so you have fuel to leave the duel after if things go south, or if you just want to reposition. Another way to use the Glide is to dodge bullets. Since there is no cool down for how fast you can throw your character around, if if you were just trying to stall a point and live for your team to get back, or if you're just waiting for a support ultimate to run out so you can actually retaliate with your ultimate, you can just Spam a bunch of different directions and waste the enemy's time. This is something that could be used as a last resort, but is super annoying to deal with. I wouldn't really be doing this in the middle of the fight, though, if I'm trying to get picks.
You should always use your fuel to get to a safe and advantageous position before you use your ultimate in the sky as well, or whenever you decide to use it. While we haven't covered that ability quite yet, you can't fly around around super fast in his ultimate, so it's important to use your fuel with the rocket propulsion beforehand. It is a very small detail, but setting yourself up allows you to maximize your ultimate up time, which is the most important thing to get right about Star-Lord kit.
In order to avoid wasting fuel, there is a fun Tech that you can do to get a short boost of speed to get to specific High grounds quickly or swing and angle quickly as well. You can perform this by starting your fly and then immediately canceling it while pressing your movement in the direction you started in. This will blast you forward and conserve a ton of fuel if you can Master the spacing of jumping onto specific High grounds. On top of this, this will naturally make you play faster on starlord and give you more uptime since you will be avoiding unnecessary movement that would lock you in an animation where you cannot shoot. If you ever played OverWatch, this is pretty much the same idea as the echotech when she first came out, but I digress.
No matter what, when you have this much Mobility on Star-Lord, it is also really, really important that once you a fight that you are immediately using your speed to get set up or staged for the next fight. There is no excuse to fight in an uncomfortable position after a fight win on Star-Lord. Make it easier for yourself to perform by constantly thinking about what's next and being prepared.
Lastly, you can also use the Glide while using his next ability, the Blaster barrage, for a bit of extra movement, but you move super slowly that it isn't often used along with it unless it's a niche situation. So, let's talk about the other ways that you can can use the Blaster barrage.
Upon pressing the Blaster barrage cool down, Star-Lord starts spinning violently in a circle where he chips away at Targets that are 8 m around him for 3 seconds. The damage isn't that bad, but it isn't that great either, so it makes this ability more of a tool to finish off low targets rather than a tool to just do the bulk of your damage. Killing targets isn't the only thing that this is good for, though. It can also be great to force out invisibility, like psylock or Loki, for example, so they can't get away or get back to safety, or delete your backline with a perfectly set up flank.
The other use for this ability is that it is great to build ultimate charge with incredibly quickly. For example, if both teams traded Luna snow ultimates and you don't have your alt yet, you should always drop between both ultimates and subsequently both teams and just start spinning, dealing as much damage as possible. The only thing you need to look out for is getting eliminated while you are spinning, because you are not invincible and you will get shot a lot during this cool down. You can always Barrel roll out of the animation if you do finish someone off, or if you get into a sticky situation and want to move on to the rest of the engagement.
Star-Lord's barrage is also really great at splitting teams in half, especially if they are more stacked, like for example, against Doctor Strange compositions. This is really only doable, though, if your team walks up and supports you so that you can hide inside of the team, or if you get a bubble from your friendly Magneto, but it can allow you to do more damage and farm your ultimate faster, which is super important.
Another neat thing with this ability ability is that if a Target is blocking another one by standing in front of you, you will apply two times the damage to the Target that is in the front. So, if the enemies are lined up and you really want to fry someone down quick, all you have to do is press the cool down and watch them melt. It's pretty Niche, but it is a nice thing to know when you're playing as or against Star-Lord.
The biggest problem with this ability is that you are just so easy to eliminate during it. You can use it while gliding for a little bit of Mobility, but even then, it is just not enough to prevent you from dying. You'll need to get a little bit more creative with the movement in order to live. You can glide up and down periodically with space and control, and then strafe with your mouse, essentially by holding W. This helps make your movement look a little bit more unpredictable, but it uses a lot of fuel, so you're really committing yourself to this play if you pull it out. But if you can get good at using it safely to farm ultimate by using it in support ultimates or when you have a strange Shield or mag bubble, you can abuse the power of His ultimate in carry games.
Star-Lord's ultimate, Galactic Legend, propels Star-Lord into the air and gives the player Aimbot for 8 seconds. While in the ultimate, Star-Lord also moves slightly faster and reloads incredibly quickly. This is to compensate for the fact that you cannot use his boots to Glide around while in the ultimate, so it is important that you set up yourself before you pull the trigger on Galactic Legend. This looks like using most of your rocket fuel to get set up on a High ground to play off of it for cover, or to play above the enemy team and in the line of sight of your supports for maximum uptime and Effectiveness.
Since the ultimate is so strong, there are a couple couple things you need to think about. The first is that you will immediately become the Target by the enemy team when you use this ultimate; it is just that strong. This means that it is not on your supports if you do not get healed. You need to know where your supports are and think about how you are going to get the healing from them before you go in. Make it impossible for them to not heal you. Also, this means that you need to maximize the options you have when you start your ultimate. This could mean alting off to the side where there is cover lower to the ground, compared to just sending yourself as high as you possibly can in the Sky Box. This will depend on the DPS that the enemies have, though. For example, if the enemies have characters like magic and black panther that can't catch you in the sky, it is actually totally fine to not worry about cover at all. But most of the time, the enemies have characters like neore and Hela that will kill you if you even try to do this, so make sure you think about what the enemy has and what they're going to send your way.
You don't have to just play cover to avoid dying, though, because sometimes you're just not going to get any value that way. So instead, you can also set up your ultimate to Target your counters first right when you pull the trigger. If you know that the Hela is going to walk out on High Ground, you could just flank and then play to kill her first with your ultimate, so there's absolutely nothing to stop you from decimating the rest of the team thereafter. You won't always get that opportunity, but it sometimes comes up, and it's nice to think about.
Also, to maximize the value that you're actually going to be getting out of your ultimate, it is very, very important that you bring both both of your barrel roll cooldowns into the alt with you. Not only will this help you dodge the damage that will inevitably be thrown at you, it also helps you immediately reload, which is obviously super helpful and allows you to propel your damage even higher with the ultimate.
All right, but the other thing you need to think about is because your ultimate is super impactful, the enemy will hold their ultimates to counter yours. The most common includes support ultimates in Magneto's ultimate. Magneto's ultimate won't kill you most of the time, especially if you have the rolles ready, but it will stop you from getting a lot done with your ultimate. So, uh, good luck with that one, and and be ready to dodge if he does end up throwing the meteor at you.
Support ultimates aren't too bad, though. First of all, most of the time players aren't stacked right when the support ultimate comes online. This means you can usually have a 3-second window to eliminate a straggler. Then you just traded ultimates with a pick on your side, meaning you probably won the fight, so who cares? The other way you can counter support ultimates is simply by pressuring them out before the fight starts by taking an off angle and then using your ultimate after they are either dead or you force them to alt in order to live. This will almost always result in one of these two scenarios until you get to the higher ranks where the enemy supports actually start peeling for each other. It doesn't happen for quite some time, though, even in eternity people don't do that.
Outside of these scenarios, when in your ultimate, the damage you deal is body shot damage, not head shot damage. The range of the Aimbot is not infinite, meaning you do 260 damage a clip if you hit every single shot, enough to kill some squishies, but all the more reason to not not fly fully to the Sky Box and miss the first couple shots of your spray. If you want to make the ultimate more consistent, you will want to roll like we've already discussed, or receive damage boosts from mantis or rocket to bypass the inconsistency with the ultimate damage, especially since even if you do hit every single shot, the likelihood that your target receives healing is actually pretty high.
That's everything you need to know about the ultimate on Star-Lord, though. Set up, Force out ultimates or key targets, and then carry with the ulti while remaining in the line of sight of your team to receive healing and continue fragging out. And for all of my Star-Lord Mains out there, just like me in season zero, they did take away the ultimate Tech that allowed you to cancel the beginning of the ultimate animation, so now it is even more important to set yourself up in Alt from a safe place, just not right in front of the enemies. The ultimate does reload your blasters when you use it, though, which is pretty nice. It can help you with avoiding rolling before using it.
All right, but now that we have talked thoroughly about star-lords kits, we can now talk about and understand star-lords counters. My opinion Star-Lord really doesn't have any hardcore counters that make him completely unplayable. Instead, it forces him to play in different ways to get value. For example, there aren't really any tanks that necessarily hard counter Star-Lord. However, it will tell him whether or not he wants to play to pressure the backline or try to Mark a specific character and farm his ultimate in the meantime.
Take a strange and mag composition. In this, the enemies are looking to just take angles and overwhelm the enemy with damage, so Star-Lord will want to pressure the enemy backline, tightening the amount of time the strange mag cop has to actually do damage, as their backline will die if they don't win fast enough. On the flip side, against a dive composition like a Venom or something, unless you are also running a Venom with Star-Lord, marking a specific flanking DPS like a psylock or another enemy Star-Lord is so much more beneficial to just farming elims in the enemy backline, unless you have a Venom yourself. This can buy your team some time, especially if they are on the common strange compositions right now that likes to poke or brawl depending on the off tank. So, tanks can counter you if you don't react to what is needed of you. And if you have questions about this specific portion of the guide, please do let me know; I'll answer them in the comments down below. It is a little bit complicated.
DPS characters are a little different in the counters Department, because now you have to deal with no more from time to time, and sometimes the turrets are just impossible to deal with. If your team does help you out and shoots them for you, though, he actually isn't that much of a big deal. The only other dualist Star-Lord actually really struggles into is Hela, strictly because one head shot pretty much takes you out of the fight, since one more and you are dead. It isn't impossible to play into hel it just makes your job a lot harder as you have to pressure her out first, causing you to deal with a ton of extra steps.
Supports don't have any counters, unless you consider support ultimates as counters, but then supports counter everyone. So, let's move on to the synergies Star-Lord shares with other characters.
Star-Lord has innate Synergy with Adam Warlock, as it allows him to resurrect himself once every five minutes when he dies. It is super nice and is pretty popular and professional play right now actually. What's nice with this team up is that mantis also gets the same Synergy with Adam and she also can damage boost your ultimate to make it much more consistent in winning team fights. So sometimes Banning Luna snow and picking up this team up is the move in ranked to win by borderline default if the enemy doesn't run it too.
Venom is also really good with Star-Lord, as he can dive with you on any squishy you want to make the one cl so much easier, and also take the pressure off of you against targets like neore and Hela if it comes down to that. In ranked, I'm sure that Captain America would also feel pretty similar; I just haven't gotten a lot of practice with him yet, so take this advice with the grain of salt.
DPS is where things get really interesting with Star-Lord, though. psylock can be pretty strong with Star-Lord if you want to fully commit to the dive and absolutely decimate the backline together. However, you do run the risk of getting tapped by Hela all game on longer ranged Maps like the Black Panther maps for example. You can also run Hela alongside the star-lords so that you can worry less about the Hela or really play to eliminate theirs first and take the fight from there. If you have ever played Hela, you'll understand how much harder it is to win the duel when you have to worry about the Star-Lord coming out of nowhere and the enemy Hela doesn't have to worry at all. It is really nice.
Star-Lord also isn't the worst solo DPS if you are running the atam Synergy with three supports. Star-Lord is the most versatile DPS, and that is what makes him so nice, because he is almost always always playable. You just have to know what to do and when. Sometimes some characters are being a thorn in your side, though, and unlike the support guides in the past, you can actually pick DPS and tanks to specifically counter enemies on the other side of the matchup. So, let's talk about who Star-Lord actually counters himself.
Star-Lord is really good against anyone that can fly. I'm talking storm, Human Torch, Iron Man, you name it. Not only are you impossibly hard to hit on Star-Lord, you also have hit scan blasters that make quick work of Flyers that are out of position. This one's a no-brainer. Star-Lord is also insane at dueling a moonight for almost the exact same reason. You can fly around so his anks are completely useless against you, which absolutely destroys his will to live. All the other matchups are super winable for Star-Lord; they just aren't as easy as the ones we just mentioned for Star-Lord.
Now that we understand Star-Lord, his kit, and where he is applicable, let's take a look at a couple of odds to get an even better understanding of his confusingly adapt able kit.
All right, so for this first VOD, I actually picked from a pro scrim that we watched last week. We were watching Paradox the Luna snow. Now, I wanted to flip the side and watch the Star-Lord and show you how amadian goes about switching his play style based on the comp that he's on. So, the first one that we see here, it's more of a brawly composition. We have the thing, we have mag, and we also have magic. And the way that amadian is going to actually Farm his alt here when he doesn't have yet is what I want to focus on, not the mechanical little things that maybe he could have done a little bit better here.
So, right now, all we can see is that he's playing with his team because he's a broer core. He's not going for these crazy flanks against what they have; that's really hard anti-dive. It's going to be so hard to kill someone in the backline by himself. Instead, he opts into playing more of that that Star-Lord 76 play style that we talked about at the start of the video. So, right here, he's just trying to farm as much ALT as possible. He goes in like we said, and he immediately presses e. He knows he's safe, not because he has the mag bubble (because the mag bubble probably went to melophobia on the magic). Instead, he knew he could go in because he had the thing damage resistance ready for him on top of the supports while his team was walking in. This is what I'm talking about: you don't want to just press e if you don't think your team's going to come in with you, but if you know that you have them in your back pocket, it's fine to go for more damage. Because of that, we went from 77 just like 15 seconds ago to 98, almost having our ultimate online.
So now we have the Star-Lord ultimate, and right here, honestly, his team probably could have maybe Focus fired a little bit better, but Iron Fist is also incredibly difficult to deal with as Star-Lord to just hard kill. So, honestly, orbit did really well from LG there to stop him. But that's just a prime example of how you can play Star-Lord and get a lot of value out of your kit, even though it's not an orthodox way of what people would usually think. They do eventually get this Luna snow out, and then it goes on and on and on, but I just wanted to highlight the ultimate and how fast he charges it. I mean, look right here: 22%. He just used his ultimate, but the fact that he is spinning while the Luna snow is alting so that they can't even get any more alt charge either because merge is dead. I mean, this is the type of stuff that makes a good Star-Lord a great Star-Lord.
So, let's move on to the next VOD. This is actually on a team that I was playing for for the recent MRC tournament. I wanted to show you guys how now look what we have: we don't have a Broly composition. We have a much more dive Centric composition. We have a Venom, we have a Captain America in our backline is the Mantis and the Adam Warlock which allows Star-Lord to be a lot more aggressive and also himself if he so chooses to. Now, just understand the way that he stages amb FPS here. The way that he is going to Stage when he has a dive composition compared to a brawl composition is much different. Now, we weren't playing against crazy players by any means; I'm pretty sure these were like GMs and most of us are Celestial in eternity so I'm not trying to show specifically the mechanics here. I'm trying to show you guys the way that he stages and the way that he approaches a fight and the way that's different compared to what we just saw in the previous VOD.
So, right here, we see he's not really trying to farm the tanks; he's not trying to farm for his ultimate. He's waiting to see once these people come in, once the enemy team tries to push into him. Now, the Venom is trying to take space. He's going to try to surround them, kill the backline, take resources out, and then go from there. So now the venom goes in, and shortly thereafter, he's following up. He maybe didn't even need a spin here; it pretty much just worked because they were all already stacked. But what's fine is even if he just walks in there, he shoots his Clips down, he looks to barrel roll around and try to just Farm some some frags there. It just worked out that they were so stacked and the Venom did so much damage that he can just spin. Not only is he going to get a pretty decent amount of all charge for playing dive, but we just win the fight right then and there because he's already staged, ready to go. It's just a matter of, okay, when is the Venom going to go in as well? So, what's different here is he only has 41% alt charge. When you're playing dive, you're not going to have a lot of alt charge on Star-Lord, but you're going to win fights very fast. You're going to get a lot of picks, and that's when the scoreboard is going to look a lot nicer to you.
And for this last ofo example, I just wanted to show you guys how in this situation they have a Spider-Man, so I'm making it my whole goal to Mark the Spider-Man in this composition. Now, usually I'd be farming my the tanks in the meantime; that would be just the Penny Parker here since they have a triple DPS composition. So, it does change a little bit where I'm actually just hard focusing this Spider-Man a little bit more. But in this situation, as you can see, I immediately get the health pack here in the Penny Parker overextends. So, this is one of those situations where I can invest my roles to kill this person before she gets back to her team so that the supports don't get more alt charge. So, as you can see here, I'm just farming, I'm farming, I'm Farming, and she's dead. Now I have a lot of agency in this fight. I want to Al here because then I give the Invisible Woman a difficult decision: does she want to waste all on a fight that you're already down one, or does she want to wait it out and just lose the fight here and try to take another one after that?
So, right now, I'm thinking, okay, I want to all. I want to try to clear up the entire team. But as you can see, I only have one roll. So, what I'm going to do is I'm pretty much just going to hide. I'm not going to let the enemy know where I am at, and I'm going to wait for my roles to come back online. So, you can see here, I'm just poking. I'm not doing anything too crazy, just waiting. And now, immediately once the animation is done with my ALT, I have two rolls, and I'm in a perfect position with my healers right behind me to essentially just kill the entire team. So, I start with the storm because she's going to be the most annoying threat to the rest of my team. And then after that, it's pretty much just a one fight cuz we already found two, and it's just about cleaning people up. If I didn't have both of these rolls, I probably just die in the air here, and I'm not as much of a threat, or I just don't kill their Invisible Woman, and they have a chance of turning it. So then Adam Warlock is next. I thought the Punisher was still there for some reason; I don't know, at this point, I've been playing for 3 hours, I was tired. But then that's going to end up in a 5k. I mean, again, not like the craziest players of all time, but this is the kind of stuff that's going to help you Propel your value that much further aside from just aiming better.
And that closes out today's guide for Star-Lord in Marvel Rivals. If you have any questions, make sure to send them in the comments down below, as well as asking me live right now here on YouTube or on Twitch at twitch.tv/ Swagger. I stream every single day that I upload, so be sure to check me out to learn more about everything I talked about today. Thank you guys all so much for watching, but until next time, I've got a peace out and pass out. I'll see you in the next one.