When MultiVersus, Warner Bros. crossover brawler, was in beta, Scooby-Doo’s Velma was arguably the best fighter on the roster. Two years later, the game is officially out and Jinkies, the queen has lost her crown and become one of the worst characters in the game. The fall from grace has been so severe that stat-tracking sites like Tracker Network report Velma is now the least-picked character in MultiVersus. But how did she get here, and what do fans think can be done to fix the situation?
Players have reported on sites like the MultiVersus subreddit that they’ve seen very little of Velma since the game launched in 1.0. While the game arguably has bigger problems than one fighter’s balance after its rough relaunch, the stark drop from the top tier to the bottom of the ranking is cause for concern. Fans are saying Velma’s kit feels like it lacks the same impact it once had, with her long-range attacks being cited as the greatest victims of her nerfs.
“She needs the fucking megaphone back and her lightbulb has been fucked into the floorboards,” Sticky_Pwnz wrote on Reddit. “Side attack also feels bad. They did her bad bros.”
Her megaphone changes have been a particular pain point. In the beta, this ranged attack would fire immediately, then gain power overtime. In 1.0, Velma has to charge up the attack before it fires, and its range has been shortened.
“It’s weird being a projectile character when all of your projectiles are melee range,” MikeRockstheBoat wrote on Reddit. “The speech bubbles still go a ways, but good luck getting those to work when you can’t paint them with the megaphone first.”
While Velma’s supremacy made her a force to be reckoned with in the beta, fans feel developer Player First Games overcorrected in trying to balance her.
“There needs to be a balance when nerfing a character,” Reddit user Wanderwut wrote. “To make Velma go from one of the best units in the game to one of the worst units, to the point that you don’t even see her anymore is overboard.”
As of this writing, Velma has a paltry 0.3% pick rate for 1v1 matches on Tracker Nation, with her team match pick rate being only slightly higher at 0.6%. While that is pulling from only a slice of data, it does seem to be a strong indication of what players are experiencing. If you look at replies to official MultiVersus accounts, you’ll find fans begging for buffs. Hopefully she gets them, because it’s a bummer that she’s fallen so far given how powerful she was. In a detail that was eventually patched out, the queen once called the cops as one of her attacks. Now no one’s even using her enough to call the Mystery Machine.
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