Since the release of Rivals, it became apparent pretty early on that Storm’s kit fell short when compared to other duellists. She feels very mismatched, counter-intuitive and lacks a certain finesse and sense of enjoyment that other characters bring to the table. Locking in Storm yields an extremely underwhelming and frustrating experience as you struggle to deal damage and get targeted first every fight.
In terms of lore, storm is an omega level mutant and one of the most powerful mutants in Marvel yet she feels extremely weak in Rivals. Obviously I understand that not every character can be stupidly overpowered. However, it’s plain to see how Storm has struggled season after season yet her base kit has seen hardly any changes with Rivals choosing instead to temporarily paste over the problem with gimmicky teamups.
Storm’s Lack Of Cosmetics
Storm receives minimal love in the cosmetics department, which makes little sense as there are endless creative possiblities and themes that the Goddess of Thunder could rock. Aside from her huge cape that inspires innovative creations, there is extensive source material containing captivating outfits that already exist from across Marvel media to draw from. Her current skins fail to hit the mark, they aren’t very impressive or make you say ‘Wow!’ like some other skins in the game. Storm is one of the more popular names in Marvel, yet lesser known characters like Luna Snow already have double her skins. It feels like wasted potential.
Storm only has 1 legendary skin and 5 epic skins, few of them push many creative boundaries. See all of her current Rival Skins here.
Tornado Form is Counter-intuitive
Storm is basically a big dangly moth flopping about in the sky. She’s usually the first target that enemies lock on to since her hitbox is so bloated yet she’s blessed with the lowest health pool possible, weighing in at a whopping 250 health. Rivals did give her a buff in Season 6.5 that allows her to gain bonus health when dealing damage in Tornado Weather Form. She can gain a maximum of 75 bonus health which takes her to 325 health. In theory, this is a pretty good buff, but it only has a damage conversion of 25%, meaning that several hits are required to fully stack the bonus health. Whereas other characters receive bonus health by simply using an ability, such as Winter Soldier and Elsa Bloodstone.
Her Goddess Boosted Tornado Form grants her and her allies a movement speed boost while simultaneously slowing enemies in its radius, which can be really useful in certain situations but also massively lowers her damage output.
Her second Weather Form, Thunder, is usually the better active stance as it bestows a huge damage boost that has incredible value in comparison to Tornado. Storm feels like a pea shooter without it. It grants Storm 25% and her teammates 15%, enemies within the radius around Storm are also hit with a small amount of tick damage. However, Storm has to be extremely close to enemies for a considerable amount of time and close to the ground to catch enemies in the aura. This gameplay style is incredibly high risk leading to Storm being punished frequently for her aggressive positioning with little movement speed to dodge enemy attacks, as she loses speed when Tornado form isn’t active.
Slow Ultimate Charge
The cherry on top of cake is that her ultimate charges insanely slowly. However, Storm does generate ultimate charge reasonably fast when damaging enemies with her Goddess Boost tick damage. Circling back to the previous point, Storm is once again incentivised to play excessively risky if she actually wants the enemies to feel her wrath. Playing overly ambitious with a low health pool and a snail-paced flying speed feels … very weird.
Storm Never Gets Healed
Due to the nature of flying characters, Storm is often hard to heal as Strategists have to look up into the sky to find her which isn’t always practical and wastes precious time. Consequently, Storm has to play close to the ground to actually get healed, and even then it’s a struggle. Most Strategists pretend she doesn’t exist! If your Strategists aren’t playing Cloak and Dagger or utilising Luna Snow’s snowflake on her, then Storm will usually never receive consistent healing, which really sucks. Her kit simply doesn’t have a lot of synergy, expecting a slow squishy character to stay in close to enemies in order to achieve her full damage potential doesn’t result in a cohesive character design.
Her Ultimate is Easily Countered
At surface level, Storm has a cool ultimate that packs a real punch. But in practice, it’s actually pretty weak, simply because it’s so easily countered. Enemies can instantly split up when they hear her loud ultimate voiceline, ensuring that Storm only ever gets the chance to pick off one enemy. A more popular strategy adopted against Storm is the stockpiling of Strategist ultimates for her, rendering her useless and very frustrating to play.
Baiting out Strategist ultimates can be extremely useful, especially in higher elo matches where players sport a natural instinct to take advantage. However, at a majority of skill levels, Storm simply gives up her carry potential as her allies lack the game knowledge to capitalise off of her value. Since her ultimate takes a considerable amount of time to charge, Strategists will recharge their ultimates faster than her which means that she can rarely take advantage of the baited defensive abilities herself.
Underwhelming Primary Attacks
Why can’t Storm headshot with her primary fire? She’s literally one of the only ranged characters in the game who isn’t allowed to critical strike, which instantly lowers her skill expression. Furthermore, the Goddess of THUNDER has to reload her wind blades. If Namor doesn’t have to reload his tridents, then why does Storm have to reload her pea shooter? Her primary fire cannot headshot, boasts a tiny damage value compared to other Duellists in the game AND she has to reload a literal element. Her primary fire is also harder to land at long range since the wind blades have a slower travel rate when compared to characters like Hela and The Punisher.
However, her attacks do have a piercing effect, meaning that they can hit multiple enemies stood behind one another which is handy for choke points. But alas, this small positive does not weigh up to the pile of negative.
Gimmicky Teamups
Storm is often allocated teamup abilities that make her relevant again, but they’ve been super overpowered! Jeff-Nado and her teamup with Human Torch, were both super effective and stupidly broken. So predictably, Storm was banned for an extensive amount of time and not even because of how strong she innately was, but because of other characters. Storm has never been that strong by her own merits, which definitely sucks!
There are so many Duellist characters who have dominated the battlefield since the release of the game without needing any teamups or additional help, like Hela, Punisher and Namor. Storm has sadly never been presented with this opportunity. I feel that Marvel Rivals uses Storm as a gimmicky character to throw in whenever they intend to create a weirdly broken ability to shock players. Her teamups are used to put her centre stage for a few weeks which conveniently glosses over the problems with her kit, only to throw her back to the trenches when players got frustrated with Jeff-Nado.
How Can Storm Be Fixed?
My suggestions for storm at this point is a full kit revamp; she feels so empty, almost like she’s missing an entire ability. Her auto attacks should travel faster, deal more damage and spread to other enemies like chain lightning instead of the underwhelming piercing effect that she currently has. I would love to see her throw an AoE spell that inflicts crowd control instead of having to activate her empowered movement speed stance to slow enemies down. Storm could easily create a raincloud that deals a small amount of dot damage.
Rivals needs to decide whether Storm is a Strategist or a Duellist. Whenever they touch Storm in balance patches, it’s usually to fiddle with the numbers on her ally damage boost and ally movement speed boost. Storm is never picked for her buffs! Rivals needs to either make her an all powerful Duellist on her own merits or make her into a buffing Strategist, she doesn’t need to be a weird mix of the two just to end up doing neither very effectively.
Storm NEEDS to have more survivability that’s easily accessible which doesn’t nerf her own damage to only heal 8 bonus health per wind blade. Whether this survivability takes form of a self heal ability with her empowered weather form or simply some built in lifesteal, she needs to not be entirely reliant on healers pocketing her. It would be lovely to see Storm granted the ability to teleport back to her original spot from where she casted her ultimate after it’s finished. In her current state, casting her ultimate usually ensures a guaranteed death and it feels like Storm is actually penalised for casting it.
Why is the Goddess of the Storm literally the slowest character in the game? Please give the goddess an actual passive, maybe one that increases her movement speed while she flies as that’s the least that she deserves.
To Conclude: Storm Needs Help!
From lack of cosmetics despite her potential to never being touched in patch notes, Storm’s kit boasts a severe lack of fluidity with little survivability and an ultimate that is easily countered. Storm needs a whole host of changes and quality of life updates if she’s actually going to keep up with the rest of the roster. As more heroes get released, she will inevitably fall further behind as abilities and gameplay mechanics become more complex while Storm remains incredibly vanilla as part of the original roster.
Rivals will need to do something about her soon.
