It’s been a week since Marvel Rivals’ new event, Blood Hunt, dropped, and I gotta say, I’m having a blast. If you haven’t started yet and/or are just about to get into it, here’s a guide on how the game mode works.
For starters, let me explain what Blood Hunt is. Blood Hunt is Marvel Rivals’ new PvE mode, which works similarly to the prior event Marvel Zombies, which some of you might have enjoyed. This time, instead of facing off against zombies and zombie variants, you’re facing off against vampires as Dracula tries to reclaim New York.
With that said, let’s dive into the details. By the way, expect some light spoilers.
Objectives And Difficulties
In Blood Hunt, there are 4 main difficulties; Normal, Hard, Extreme, and Nightmare. At Nightmare, you can increase each Nightmare difficulty upon clearing every 5th level.
For Normal through Extreme, you’ll have to battle your way across New York by slaying hordes of vampires, or survive until the timer runs out. At the end, you’ll then have to do a Boss fight. However, for Extreme difficulty, players are also tasked with the additional objective of earning golden keys. Earning all golden keys will unlock the hidden Boss level.
At Nightmare and higher levels, you have to survive 4 rounds of either horde slaying or time trials, before doing battle with the Boss(es). That’s right, plural. As to whom the boss may be, it can be any of the four bosses mentioned below, including a combination or doubles of the same boss.
Enemies And Bosses
The enemies from Blood Hunt are similar to (if not a total re-skin of) the zombies from the Marvel Zombies gamemode, only this time they’re vampires. You have the standard enemies – crawlers, ranged, big guys, and the exploding ones, each with their own variants. This time, we also have flying enemies to add to the mix. Here are some of the newer enemies:
- Sky Stalker – Aerial enemy that dives on players to damage them.
- Airborne Alchemist – Aerial enemies that hurl fire-flasks at you.
- Darkhold Cultists – Slows you down whilst lifestealing from you and buffing other enemies. They teleport and gain temporary health when taking heavy damage.
- Bloodwing Hunter – An aerial enemy that deals a flurry of physical attacks. It can teleport to look for openings.
As for bosses, Blood Hunt features Cap Wolf, Ratatoskr and Dracula.
The boss battles increases from Normal to Extreme, meaning you only fight Cap Wolf at the end of Normal, with the Ratatoskr and Dracula being added in Hard and Extreme, respectively. As mentioned above, the Hidden Boss is first fought in Extreme, but can also be fought in Nightmare.
Gameplay And Progression
Similar to Marvel Zombies, each of the playable characters have reworked abilities tailored for the event. This time, the playable characters are Blade, Jeff, Moon Knight, Punisher, Squirrel, and Thor. As before, there is no restriction on having multiple of the same character.
Unlike Marvel Zombies, levelling up and progression is character-specific. Meaning, you can’t play just 1 hero to level up the others. Here are my characters and their levels for reference.
Unlike before where you pick Arcanas to determine your playstyle and build, instead you get points which you can assign to determine your build and playstyle as you level up. The Gold and Blue lines are build specific whereas the Purple line is global. The Arcanas only affect global stats.
New Mechanics – Gear, Smelting And Forging
Something new that Blood Hunt added is gearing. In Blood Hunt, the enemies drop gear which you can then equip to your characters to boost their damage and survivability. Like most games, the higher the difficulty, the higher the chance for rarer gear to drop. The rarity of the gears in ascending order are: White, Green, Blue, Purple, and Gold.
The gamemode encourages smelting and forging. You get a lot of gear each session, most of which you don’t really need as you only need the best one for each gear slot. What you can do with the unused gear is to scrap them into Uru-metal, and then forge them into another piece of gear for any of the gear slots you want.
By the way, sometimes you get legendary drops at higher levels that aren’t gear. They’re actually crafting materials used to craft the limited time accessory.
That should be about all you need to know about getting started in Marvel Rivals: Blood Hunt. It feels like a lot, but trust me, it’s really simple once you play few rounds. With all that said, it’s time for me to hunt some vampires!
