Marvel Rivals Blood Hunt Tier List: Every Hero Ranked for Nightmare 100+
Blood Hunt doesn't care about your feelings, and neither does Nightmare difficulty.
Season 7.5 dropped a vampire-infested city on top of the Marvel Rivals community, handed everyone six heroes to work with, and said good luck. At lower difficulties, most of the roster can muddle through. Push into Nightmare 100+ territory, and the gap between a great pick and a frustrating one opens up fast. The wrong hero doesn't just slow you down. It actively costs runs.
I've dug through leaderboard data, community build analysis, and enough Dracula boss footage to last me several lifetimes, so here's where every character actually lands.
The Full Tier List at a Glance
Before getting into the detail, here's the quick overview. Every hero is technically completable, but some require significantly more investment to get there.
One thing worth flagging before going further: the leaderboard picture has shifted significantly even within the first 48 hours of the mode going live. Early data had Moon Knight as the dominant pick on nearly every top team, with Squirrel Girl right behind him. Blade was barely showing up in top clears at launch, which sent a lot of people sleeping on him. That's starting to correct itself as people push the min-maxed builds further. Take any "definitive" ranking with a small grain of salt because this mode is still being solved in real time.
S+ Tier: Squirrel Girl
Why She's the Easy Answer
Squirrel Girl is the safest investment in Blood Hunt, and the leaderboard backs that up. After the first 24 hours of Nightmare clears, she was on 10 of the top 10 teams, never doubled up, which tells you something important: one is essential, two is redundant, and there's a reason every squad wants her.
The core strength isn't raw damage, it's how she handles the mode's biggest problem. Nightmare difficulty's density of vampire swarms is what kills most runs. Squirrel Girl floods the screen with summons that soak aggression and pull enemy targeting away from the team, functioning almost like passive crowd control that requires zero coordination to benefit from. That alone is worth its weight.
Best Build: Acorn Feast (with Rodent Commander hybrid)
The leaderboard data is pretty clear on this one. Every top-clearing Squirrel Girl ran Acorn Feast, with a lot of hybrid points going into Rodent Commander. Pure Acorn Feast works, but the hybrid approach adds enough summon volume to make the passive tanking effect significantly more reliable at higher wave counts.
For the Dracula encounter specifically, Nutty Barrage is your tool of choice for clearing Blood Pillars fast. That's not a nice-to-have, it's the difference between the fight feeling controlled and feeling like a scramble.
S Tier: Moon Knight
The High Ceiling Pick
Moon Knight is on every serious Nightmare team for a reason, and for the first 24 hours he was actually ahead of Squirrel Girl in raw leaderboard representation, appearing on 9 of 10 top clears. After builds started getting optimized, the gap tightened, but he's never dropped off.
The Phases of the Moon Ankh build is what makes him work at the highest levels. Attaching Ankhs to bosses and letting the burst damage stack up while you stay at a safe distance is exactly how you want to play Nightmare 100+, where Capwolf and Kingpin can one-shot you if you get greedy with positioning. His mobility (the jump and flight options) gives him enough escape tools that good positioning is actually achievable rather than aspirational.
Best Build: Phases of the Moon (Ankh focused)
The Lethal Strike Arcana is the priority investment to amplify his burst ceiling. The melee Fist of the Moon God build has its fans, and some top clears have run it, but the consensus from optimized play is that the ranged Ankh build is safer and more consistent against the specific threats Nightmare throws at you. The melee build stops being reliable when one mistake puts you in one-shot range.
S Tier: Blade
The One That Surprised Me
Here's where it gets interesting. A lot of early tier lists, including content I've seen circulating around, had Blade sitting mid or even low tier based on the first wave of leaderboard data. He barely showed up in top clears at launch. The thing is, that initial leaderboard was mostly people one-tricking whichever hero they'd already leveled to 70, not necessarily the heroes that were actually strongest.
As the builds get more optimized, Blade is being reassessed. His lifesteal mechanic makes him genuinely unique in the roster because it lets him ignore a lot of the chip damage that slowly kills other Duelists in Nightmare. When the rest of your team is down and you're holding a wave solo, Blade is arguably the best hero in the mode for that scenario.
Best Build: Silver Soulbreaker with Attack Speed and Crit stacking
The goal is constant lifesteal uptime. Stack Attack Speed and Critical Chance to keep health flowing, and use Bloodline Awakening on minibosses and bosses where armor becomes a real issue. If you go melee-heavy, you're going to have a rough time at higher difficulties. The sustain only works if you're actually landing hits consistently, and that's much harder to guarantee up close when the one-shot mechanics are active.
He's still the least represented hero in confirmed Nightmare 100+ clears, but I'd bet that's a recency problem more than a viability one.
A Tier: Jeff the Land Shark
Reliable Support with a High Investment Cost
Jeff's value in Nightmare is less about personal damage output and more about what he provides the team. Bubble Prison is legitimately clutch in later phases of the Hellfire Gala map, where trapping elite vampires gives your squad time to regroup without it costing a death or a cooldown from someone else.
The surprise from leaderboard analysis is which build top players are actually running. The community consensus early on pointed toward Overflowing Waters (the spray build), but 8 of the 10 top-clearing Jeff players were running Riding the Rapids (the swimming build). Not a single spray Jeff appeared in top clears. That's a meaningful signal, and it's one worth listening to if you're investing in him seriously.
Best Build: Riding the Rapids
Stack Cooldown Reduction as a priority so Healing Spit stays available as often as possible. That's your main survivability contribution, and if it's on cooldown when your team needs it, Jeff's value proposition collapses fast.
A Tier: Thor
The Dependable Anchor
Thor is never going to be the flashiest pick in the lobby, and honestly that's fine because that's not what he's there for. High health pool, solid stun lock capabilities, and the ability to keep enemy swarms and bosses away from teammates who have less room for error: that's the job, and he does it reliably.
The leaderboard had him on 3 of 10 top clears initially, with representation holding steady after builds started getting optimized. Teams generally want one Thor maximum. Two is redundant, and the team comp that replaces a second Thor with almost anything else is usually better for it.
Best Build: Rune Awakening
Every top-clearing Thor ran this. No variation. It maximizes his health and durability, which is the entire point of running him. Don't overthink it.
B Tier: The Punisher
A Specialist With a Hard Limitation
The Punisher has a clear use case: boss encounters where single-target damage is the priority. In that specific context, he's excellent. The problem is that Blood Hunt isn't mostly boss encounters. The vampire swarms that make up the bulk of every round are where he falls apart, and at Nightmare 100+ those swarms are not forgiving about it.
Running him solo isn't viable. He needs a team with crowd control coverage already handled, usually Squirrel Girl or Moon Knight, to function properly. When that coverage is in place, a Punisher focused on boss-killing can contribute meaningfully. Without it, you're just hoping the swarms ignore you long enough to matter.
Sweeper (shotgun) was the more popular build in top clears, with a few Barrager (assault rifle) runs mixed in. Neither build solves the wave-clear problem, so pick whichever one you're more comfortable with and accept the limitation.
Best Team Comp for Nightmare 100+
If you're putting together a four-player squad specifically for the highest difficulty, the composition with the highest floor is:
Squirrel Girl / Moon Knight / Jeff the Land Shark / Thor
Squirrel Girl handles wave clear, Moon Knight handles burst boss damage, Jeff provides sustain and crowd control utility, and Thor anchors the team and buys time when things go sideways. It covers every threat type the mode throws at you and has enough redundancy that losing one player doesn't immediately collapse the run.
Blade fits into this comp as a Squirrel Girl or Moon Knight replacement if you've invested in him and prefer the sustain playstyle. Punisher can replace Thor as a dedicated boss-killer if the rest of the team already has wave clear locked down, though it's the riskier swap.
Best Arcana Cards
Build path matters as much as hero choice in Nightmare. These three Arcana cards are worth prioritizing regardless of which hero you're running:
Scroll of Blessing boosts all incoming healing, making it effectively mandatory in the later phases where chip damage accumulates faster than most builds can naturally recover from.
Chain Lightning gives heroes with weaker AoE (Moon Knight especially) the coverage they need to keep up with wave density as the round count climbs.
Resurrection Runic is a self-revive. In Nightmare 100+ runs where the one-death-no-title rule for "Bane of all Evil" is in play, having a safety net isn't a luxury.
All Blood Hunt Rewards
Here's what's available for the season if you're working toward specific milestones:
The "Bane of all Evil" title is the real carrot here. Zero deaths across a full Nightmare 100+ run is a brutal ask, which is exactly why the team comp and build choices above aren't just optimization for their own sake. They're the difference between a clean run and watching that title requirement disappear on the death screen.
