In a the expansive world of Marvel comics, seeing its iconic characters come together in a team or to fight big villains is one of its main draws. Just look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the best example. Similarly, Marvel Rivals was built on the concept of Team-Up Abilities, which are unique perks or abilities that characters get when paired up with certain other heroes. But for the first time, in season nine, they truly feel substantial thanks to a huge change. Screenshot by Destructoid The main tweak in the new season is that Team-Up Abilities now have a passive, base effect to go along with an “Enhanced” effect. This means that you don’t need to have the team-up hero active on your squad to gain benefits, and each hero has two base effects to choose from. For example, Storm’s Jaws of Fate team-up now gives her an always-read self-healing area-of-effect ability from Jeff the Land Shark, without needing the Strategist healer on the squad. That’s awesome enough on its own. But if Jeff joins her on her team in the match, she can then have the shark join her Omega Hurricane Ultimate ability for added damage. The new base effects for Team-Up Abilities range from powerful to straight up busted, leaving the game in a state of chaos for at least the next few days as all of the abilities are learned and everyone figures out what’s the most powerful. I expect balancing changes to come over the next weeks and months, but for now, it feels kind of like a new game in a lot of respects when it comes to learning the meta. Since every character has two abilities to choose from, players logging back in should enter into the hero gallery to decide which one to choose from, and swap accordingly. But because of how sweeping these changes are, season nine also contains the biggest list of balancing changes the game has ever seen, with 80 percent of the roster being changed to compensate for new powers. It feels like this update is aiming to capture or replicate some of what Overwatch’s large, annual updates the past two years have done. If that’s the case, I’m even happier because the inevitable competition between the two hero shooters and their dev teams is pushing them both to be better. Screenshot by Destructoid The patch notes for season nine are lengthy, and they also include a new mechanic in Regenerating Shields for a number of dive/mobile heroes who can regain some HP on their own by staying out of trouble for a while. The update genuinely feels transformative in a lot of ways. In my number of games this morning, Marvel Rivals really feels like it’s changed quite a bit…although I’m not sure just yet if it’s for the better, or worse. We’ll see in due time.0The post Marvel Rivals’ newest season genuinely transformed the game with a sweeping Team-Up overhaul appeared first on Destructoid.