Expertly wielding a full arsenal of futuristic weapons, Frank Castle is a formidable one-man army. With a steadfast resolve to deliver justice to his enemies, The Punisher won't cease in his mission until every last round is fired!
Official description
The Punisher is a Duelist hero in Marvel Rivals, and is the 17th hero introduced to the game's roster.
He has team-up abilities that work in conjunction with Rocket Raccoon and Winter Soldier.
Overview[]
Strengths[]
- A fairly simplistic but very powerful and resilient living arsenal, specialized at dealing damage at any range by swapping between his weapons while on the move.
- Has higher maximum health compared to other Duelists.
- His passive, Warrior's Gaze, briefly grants the Punisher vision of enemies who disappear out of his line of sight for 3 seconds.
- This means that players using the Punisher will still see the highlighted silhouette of opponents even if they are behind walls and obstacles.
- Punisher is able to switch between two primary fire weaponry at will:
- Adjucation is a long-range automatic rifle that deals consistent rapid-fire damage at a long range.
- Deliverance is a mid-to-short-range shotgun that packs incredible power at closer targets.
- It deals higher damage the closer the Punisher is to his targets, and can reliably one or two-shot most standard-health enemies if all shots deal critical hits.
- His secondary fire, Scourge Grenade, has the Punisher lobbing a smoke grenade that deals a small amount of damage on impact but creates a large smoke cloud that obscures enemy vision.
- The Punisher leaps backwards when throwing the grenade, making it an effective dodging or spacing tool to widen the gap between him and his opponents, as well as to temporarily disorient them.
- Combined with his passive, this gives the Punisher a combat advantage as he can still see his enemies even while they are obscured by the smoke screen.
- The Punisher leaps backwards when throwing the grenade, making it an effective dodging or spacing tool to widen the gap between him and his opponents, as well as to temporarily disorient them.
- Culling Turret deploys a stationary armored skull-shaped turret that causes the player to enter first-person view. The turret allows the Punisher to rapidly fire explosive bullets that both deal direct damage as well as explosive damage in a small radius.
- The bullets fired by the turret are not affected by damage falloff, meaning they will deal full damage no matter how far the Punisher is from his targets.
- The turret has no duration, and the Punisher will remain on it until the ability is canceled, upon running out of bullets (200 in total), or if the turret is destroyed.
- The turret has 600 health and effectively counts as a second healthbar for the Punisher; even if the turret is attacked and destroyed by the enemy team, he will not be taken down.
- The Punisher can still be healed while mounted on the turret.
- While mounted on the turret, the Punisher becomes unstoppable and completely immune to all forms of crowd control. This also applies during the transformation.
- This even includes certain displacement Ultimates, most notably Jeff the Land Shark's It's Jeff!
- Vantage Connection launches a hook with a cable that can attach to any surface, enabling the Punisher to move rapidly through it like a zipline.
- This ability provides the Punisher with incredible flexibility. It can be used to gain terrain advantage and high ground over his opponents, as well as to perform evasive maneuvers to reposition in combat.
- The cable persists after fired, allowing players to use it again freely.
- By manually exiting the zipline earlier by pressing the jump button, players can keep the Punisher's momentum and be slingshot forward and high in the air, granting him excellent mobility to travel very long distances.
- His Ultimate, Final Judgement, temporarily equips the Punisher with two massive Gatling guns and a shoulder-mounted missile launcher, both with infinite ammo.
- The gatling gun have one of the highest rate-of-fire in the game, after Star-Lord's Element Guns.
- The missiles automatically lock onto the nearest characters, up to three at once.
- While under the effects of Final Judgement, Punisher becomes unstoppable, completely immune to all forms of crowd control. This also applies during the transformation.
- This even includes certain displacement Ultimates, most notably Jeff the Land Shark's It's Jeff!
- Rocket Raccoon can use Ammo Overload when paired with the Punisher, providing him with Infinite Punishment, a temporary effect that grants both his Adjucation and Deliverance with infinite ammo and 67% increased rate of fire.
Weaknesses[]
- Despite his higher health, he is still significantly frail, being susceptible to dives and flanking.
- Vulnerable if both his Scourge Grenade and Vantage Connection are on cooldown.
- Punisher cannot enter and exit his Culling Turret at will; if the player exits the turret by pressing the assigned button, the turret will disappear and trigger its cooldown.
- Punisher moves 20% slower (40% while shooting) during Final Judgement.
- Punisher has no control over his team-up with Rocket Raccoon; the player controlling Rocket has to manually place the Ammo Overload device on the ground.
- The device has a limited radius and short duration.
- It cannot affect the ammo of the Culling Turret.
Cosmetics[]
See: List of Costumes
Abilities[]
Normal Attack
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ADJUDICATION |
Fire at enemies with Adjudication, his Automatic Rifle. ABILITY TYPE - Rapid-fire projectile DAMAGE - 18 AMMO - 30 RELOAD TIME - 1 second FIRE RATE - 10 rounds per second CRITICAL HIT - Yes DAMAGE FALLOFF - Falloff begins at 20m, decreasing to 70% at 40m | ||
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DELIVERANCE |
Fire at enemies with Deliverance, his Shotgun. ABILITY TYPE - Shotgun projectiles that hit instantly DAMAGE - 10 AMMO - 8 RELOAD TIME - 2.5 seconds FIRE RATE - 1.43 rounds per second CRITICAL HIT - Yes DAMAGE FALLOFF - Falloff begins at 8m, decreasing to 40% at 15m | ||
Abilities
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Q | ![]() |
FINAL JUDGEMENT |
Unleash two Gatling guns and missiles to attack enemies. ABILITY TYPE - Rapid-fire projectiles that hit instantly and have a tracking trajectory DURATION - 10s SLOW RATE WHILE IDLING - -20% SLOW RATE WHILE SHOOTING - -40% CRITICAL HIT - Yes ENERGY COST - 3400 *GATLING GUN* | ||
SHIFT | ![]() |
VANTAGE CONNECTION |
Launch a hook to generate a cable that enables the Punisher to move rapidly by pressing F. ABILITY TYPE - Dash CABLE LENGTH = 5m-35m CABLE ATTACHMENT ANGLE = 20° - 160° COOLDOWN - 20s DASH SPEED - 25 m/s | ||
E | ![]() |
CULLING TURRET |
Deploy a Culling Turret that grounds Punisher and blocks damage from the front while dealing massive damage. ABILITY TYPE - Rapid-fire projectiles that create a spell field upon impact DAMAGE - 12 EXPLOSION DAMAGE - 12 AMMO - 200 TURRET HEALTH - 600 COOLDOWN - 20s FIRE RATE - 12.5 rounds per second EXPLOSION RANGE - 3m spherical radius | ||
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SCOURGE GRENADE |
Throw a smoke grenade forward to obscure enemy vision and leap backward. ABILITY TYPE - Projectile with an arced trajectory DAMAGE - 45 COOLDOWN - 8s RANGE - 5m spherical radius BACKWARD JUMP DISTANCE - 9m PROJECTILE SPEED - 40 m/s | ||
PASSIVE | ![]() |
WARRIOR'S GAZE |
Retain vision of enemies that disappear from view for a short duration. DURATION - 3s RANGE - 30m spherical radius | ||
SPECIAL EFFECT Retain vision of enemies that disappear from view for a short duration. | ||
Team-Up Abilities
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INFINITE PUNISHMENT | |
Rocket Raccoon throws an Ammo Overload device in the target direction. Upon entering the device's range, the Punisher and Winter Soldier receive the buffs of Infinite Ammo and Faster Firing. ABILITY TYPE - Single-cast spell field that surrounds the caster ADJUDICATION FIRE RATE - 67% DELIVERANCE FIRE RATE - 67% |
Strategy[]
- Punisher serves as the game's premier starter damage dealer, with all of his weapons and abilities being very simple but effective. He is a great character for anyone familiar with conventional shooter games like Call of Duty or Counter Strike.
- Due to his lack of on-demand mobility, Punisher is best played near his team, sticking close to his Vanguards and Strategists so he can lay down continuous damage while staying nice and protected.
- Adjudication serves as Punisher's primary means of damage. It is a simple but effective assault rifle, being useful at basically any range for getting in damage, however it shines at mid-range.
- When at a close distance or against a large target, his Deliverance shotgun is often a better choice. As with any shotgun, it excels at shredding up-close enemies, and it especially shines against Vanguards, as their large hitboxes will guarantee that most, if not all, of the gun's pellets will connect.
- While the gun has a standard reload if done from an empty chamber, it can also individually reload shells if there are still shots left. In prolonged combat with the weapon, try to reload in between shots in order to minimize downtime.
- Scourge Grenade serves as Punisher's primary "get-off-me" tool. Not only does it fire a smoke bomb that briefly obscures enemy vision, but it also causes Punisher to leap backwards, putting some distance between him and the target. This is a great tool for disorienting enemy flankers and taking their favorable engage away from them.
- If need be, it can also serve as a ranged finisher against an injured target when Punisher is out of ammo, the enemy is behind cover, or if he is otherwise unable to hit them with other means.
- Culling Turret offers Punisher even more firepower to work with. After a brief set-up animation, Punisher will man a powerful HMG emplacement that fires explosive rounds, giving him incredible DPS and AoE crowd control. While in the turret, he is completely immobile, but is also immune to all CC effects such as stuns, knockbacks, or seizes, and can block up to 600 damage from the front. The turret will disappear if Punisher either manually exits it, expends all of its ammo, sustains too much frontal damage, stays in it for 20 seconds, or is killed.
- This ability is best used as either a deterrent for a push or as a way to punish a team who has committed to a fight. When trying to position the turret, avoid constantly using the same spot over and over. Instead, constantly reposition between vantage points to keep opponents guessing from exactly where the turret's fire will be coming from
- While the turret can block all means of damage from the front, Punisher is still completely vulnerable to attacks from behind, making him easy pickings for a flanker when in this state. If the enemy has flankers, make sure to keep an eye and ear open for them.
- Vantage Connection is Punisher's primary means of mobility. He will fire a grapple line that he can zip along at breakneck speeds to quickly reach alternate positions. After exiting the grapple, Punisher will always leap vertically, allowing him to clear any ledges.
- Due to its long cooldown and slow start-up, it is unreliable as an on-demand escape option. However, setting up near a grapple can allow you to use it as a quick escape.
- This ability can only be used when grounded.
- Setting up grapples near spawn is also a solid choice, as it can allow you to quickly return to a fight after respawning.
- Punisher's Ultimate, Final Judgement, has him pull out two powerful gatling guns and a set of shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, turning himself into a one-man army. In this form, he has one of the highest damage outputs in the game, shredding through tank and squishy alike, however he cannot use any of his abilities and can instead only move and shoot.
- It is best to think of this ultimate as a stronger Culling Turret, punishing an enemy team for committing to a push by bombarding them with relentless damage.
- Keep in mind that Punisher himself does not become any more durable in this form, so be wary of activating this when out in the open, and if he is killed, the effect ends prematurely.
- Punisher's team-up with Rocket, Infinite Grit, gives Punisher one of the highest non-ultimate damage outputs in the game, allowing him to turn any sightline into a hailstorm of death. Coordinate with your team's Rocket to punish an enemy team for attempting to push through a sightline without a plan.
Lore[]

Caught in the crossfire of a mob hit that killed his family, Frank Castle clung to life through sheer force of will and his unquenchable thirst for vengeance. Unwilling to let more innocents suffer at the hands of criminals, Castle took the law into his own hands as the Punisher.
Thanks to an experimental serum that vastly extended his lifespan, the Punisher's war has continued into the far-flung future. As a member of the New Marvel Knights, his impressive arsenal has become a vital part of Black Widow's crusade against Doom 2099.
— Biography
Initiation Ceremony[]
After their little disagreement in Tokyo, Frank Castle figured he'd never hear from Natasha and her worldwide squad of Red Room spies. But lo and behold, it wasn't even a few weeks after the sky fell apart that she found him in an open-air noodle shop nestled among Shanghai warehouses down by the flood-control walls along the Huangpu River. The towers gleamed in the night sky, their upper floors hidden by clouds. It had just started raining. "Your kind of neighborhood," she commented as she took a seat opposite him.
"Honest working people." Frank said. "Food ain't half bad either. I had better noodles on Canal Street, though. You stop by to tell me I'm wanted in Shanghai too?"
Natasha shook her head. "Haven't checked. I found you because I need a word."
Frank slurped his noodle broth.
"We saw what happened in Tokyo. Maybe we should be working together," she spoke bluntly, causing Frank to crack a smile, just long enough to let her see it.
"I was kidding."
"I'm not."
He looked at her while recalling what he saw in the sky just a few minutes after he took out some rogue androids, apparently blowing up her mission. It looked like some so-called super villain did something to the sky. Like the old days in New York City when something crazy happened every other hour. Then the sky over Tokyo was different, and Frank couldn't kid himself. A lot of other things were different too.
"So what have you been doing since Tokyo?" she asked.
Her tone told Frank that she already knew, so he played it straight. "Went back home for a bit. Cleaned up some criminal scum. Then I thought maybe I could help them more by getting after Doom again. I kidnapped one of his engineers, tried to find out what he's working on in Doomstadt. Learned enough to know that I had to come to Shanghai."
"And do what?"
Frank pressed his thumb on a reader set into the noodle shop's counter. It chirped. He stood and turned his collar up against the rain. "Come on," he said.
By the time they got up on the flood wall, the rain was coming down in sheets. He couldn't see across the river to the old International Concession. "Been here before?" he asked Natasha.
"I've been just about everywhere," she said. "First time I came to Shanghai was back in the 1980s. It's changed a lot."
Frank nodded. Shanghai changed fast, and the 1980s were a long time ago. "I mostly stayed in the States after I got home. But once I got the treatment, life got a lot longer. Thought I had more ... scope, I guess ... to take on some bigger problems, 'cause the more things changed, the more I realized that the world was staying the same...unless I changed it." He stood listening to the rain, thinking about it. He knew Natasha had undergone the same life-extension treatments he had, but in the moment, it didn't seem to bind them together. She'd used her extra decades to retake control of the Red Room and become the leader of an international spy network. Talk about healing childhood trauma. On the other hand, Frank had used his time to escalate his war on criminal scum from street-level punks and neighborhood gangsters to international traffickers. He tracked them patiently, over years, and when he had the right situation, he made them pay. "Sometimes I think maybe I should have stayed in New York."
"They do have good noodles." Natasha joked dryly. "Why are we here, Frank?"
Frank pointed at a row of piers across the Huangpu River, barely visible through the heavy rain and the mist coming up off the river. "Blue hull, single stack, no containers on the deck but it's riding real low. See it?" Natasha nodded. "That ship flies a Madripoor flag, but it's running cargo for Doom. Special cargo this time. It's headed out to the Philippine Sea. When it gets into international waters and it's far enough to avoid anti-missile defense systems, it's going to launch a satellite. Something about locking down any space transport coming from Earth, if the engineer was telling me the truth." Frank chuckled. "Which I think he was."
"More than that, Frank. I think it has something to do with what happened in Tokyo," Natasha added.
"Most likely," Frank knew it wasn't in his best interest to think too hard about the weirder things. Crime was crime, and he gravitated towards problems with permanent solutions.
"Nice work, Frank," Natasha said, a bit grudgingly. "We had the ship pegged, but we didn't know what it was carrying."
"Well, Widow, I might spend most of my time getting rid of criminal scum, but I'm not too shabby at paying attention and gathering intel. I don't always go around indulging my trigger-happy vigilante impulses."
He was giving her a hard time because she'd called him a loose cannon in Tokyo and he was still mad about it. She didn't take the bait. "So sink it," she said instead. "I'm sure you've got a stash of goodies somewhere that'll do the trick."
"Not at the pier. People work there. If I sink a ship at the port, it'll be weeks until they can work." He could see on her face that she hadn't thought about this. "Yeah," he said. "You've got to think about the regular person, the little person. Law-abiding, trying to get through the day. In the Red Room, those people are all just collateral damage, am I right?"
"Maybe in the old days. Now, we're all collateral damage in somebody's plan, Frank," she said, looking him dead in the eye. But he thought he'd made his point.
"Anyway, yeah," he said. "Sinking it is the plan. Just not right here in the port. The other thing is, unless we blow it sky-high, Doom can just salvage the satellite and put it on another boat."
"Noted. So what's your plan?"
"You serious?"
"Yeah," she said. "We'll do it your way. Then I want you to hear me out."
She stuck out a hand. He shook it and she said, "Now can we get out of the rain?"
Visibility in the Huangpu approached zero even in daylight, and at night it was like being in a sensory deprivation tank. Frank couldn't risk garnering attention, so no lights. Instead he used passive sonar. The river bottom was a junkyard, sunken boats and other lost industrial relics stuck in the silt. Frank's scuba suit sported an advanced rebreather instead of an old-fashioned oxygen tank, so he didn't give off bubbles and didn't have to worry about getting air hoses tangled up. The bulk of the ship loomed overhead, drawing maybe twelve meters of water. That didn't leave much space under the keel for Frank to work his way in and set the charges, but he was able to lay twelve of them, six on either side of the keel, and then a bonus thirteenth at the very stern, near the rudder. Each was a kilo of his own explosive concoction shaped to punch inward. One perk of being at perpetual war for decades: you learned a lot about making your own ordnance. Widow had done some advanced surveillance, and the hull wasn't armored. The charges would each rip a hole the size of Frank's van in the ship's hull.
Frogman work wasn't really his style. He'd done it a few times but he wasn't a fan. About a hundred years ago he'd seen a guy eaten by a shark. The guy was murdering scum and deserved it, but that didn't make Frank love being underwater.
After a careful swim back downriver and across to the industrial flats, he stripped off the scuba suit. Natasha helped him stash it near the seawall inside an abandoned car. "Everything go okay?" she asked.
"Yeah," Frank said. "Don't need a bath now."
They didn't want to draw attention to themselves, so they stayed perched atop a Red Room safe house in the old French Concession. Natasha piloted an infra-detector drone that stayed a few kilometers above and behind the old container ship as it wallowed through the Philippine Sea toward international waters. "There it is," Frank said as the ship's deck slid open, revealing a launch gantry that lifted toward vertical. The rocket was small, and Frank snorted when he saw the painted Latverian flag on its nose cone.
"He's got an ego, doesn't he?" Black Widow observed. She held the drone control out to Frank. "You want to do the honors?"
He took the control and patched the visual feed into a visor lens he'd been wearing for hours. The detector's view appeared before him like he was looking down from above and behind it.
Smoke spurted from the inside of the ship as the rocket's engines began their pre-ignition sequence. "Doom, you scum, I hope you're watching," Frank said, and triggered the detonator.
The ocean around the ship heaved and the launch gantry tipped to a twenty-degree angle. A moment later a huge belch of fire blasted upward from inside the ship. The rocket's engine ignited, but before it could lift off the gantry swung again, smashing into the ship's superstructure. Flaming wreckage from a second series of explosions arced into the sky and fell into the sea in blasts of steam. The ship itself was settling fast, heeling over to port as its stern disappeared. The rocket stayed in the gantry, thruster sputtering. Not five minutes after the charges detonated, the freighter and rocket were gone as if they had never existed.
"What's the depth here?" Frank wondered.
"Seven thousand meters, give or take," Natasha said. "That satellite's not coming back up. Doom's going to be furious."
"Better than him being happy." Frank set down the drone control and took off the visor.
"Wait," Natasha said. She picked the control up again and watched the monitor. The water was still churning where the ship had sunk, but now as they watched the ocean's surface really started to boil.
Through the swirling foam, the rocket, and its satellite payload, rose slowly into the air.
"You gotta be kidding me," Frank said.
Wobbling to stay vertical, the rocket cleared the surface. Its thrusters flared brighter and it accelerated upward.
Natasha touched a fast series of commands on the infra-detector's control. The drone ascended in parallel with the rocket. "You planning to crash it?" Frank asked. "That rocket's gonna be way too fast in a minute."
"Yeah," she said. "But I don't need that long."
She stood up from her controls, reaching into her gear with focused swiftness. Within moments, she lifted a massive weapon to her shoulder and took aim as the firearm announced "ELECTROPLASM RIFLE CHARGED."
"Electroplasm rifle?" Partly Frank was wondering why she hadn't mentioned the drone was a flying target, and partly he was wondering where he could get an electroplasm rifle of his own.
"My little failsafe," Natasha said. She breathed deeply and fired the shot.
On the screen, the discharge of the electroplasm rifle whited out the screen as it annihilated the rocket, and the drone with it. From their perch, Frank watched fragments of the rocket spiral out of the sky, below a massive fireball that dissipated into tendrils of smoke. Gobs of electroplasma fell along with the wreckage, crackling as they hit the surface of the ocean.
"A shame to lose the infra-detector," Natasha said, "But a small price to pay to finish the job."
"You didn't trust me to get it done?" Frank said.
"Of course I trusted you, Frank. You said you were going to blow up the ship, and you did." As she spoke, Natasha commanded the agents at the closest Red Room safe house to mobilize. Her spy network would make it disappear. "But I also know we're dealing with Doom here, and if there's one thing we all need to know, it's that when you go up against Doom, you need a backup plan. So." She shrugged. "That's what I did."
He understood, even if he still felt like she should have told him she was doing it. "Guess we ended up working together after all."
"Yeah," Natasha said. "We should do it again."
"Maybe," he said. "If this op is any indication, we got some kinks to iron out. Also, I want an electroplasm rifle."
She gave him a sideways smile, revealing nothing. "I'm putting together a team, you know. A few people who aren't afraid of unconventional methods. Maybe they've got what you might call a checkered past. But now they're trying to do what's right for the little guy. Like those dockworkers back in Shanghai. They'll be able to go to work tomorrow."
"So, doing good, sticking up for the downtrodden? What are we, knights?"
"Beats being driven by revenge and a death wish," Natasha said.
Frank considered this. He'd forgotten what it had been like to not be on the warpath solo. And if the sky was falling, maybe he did need a hand. "If you say so. Yeah. Okay. I'm in."
My Friend is a Criminal[]
A Detonated Fizzle[]
Achievements[]
Icon | Name | Description | |
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Vengeance & Glory | As the Punisher, partner with Captain America to land 1 KO. | ![]() 5 |
Smoke Screen | As the Punisher, land 3 KOs amidst the smoke of Scourge Grenade in a single game. | ![]() 10 |
Quotes[]
See: The Punisher/Quotes
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
- The Punisher's logo in Marvel Rivals seems to take inspiration from the "demon skull" logo used in The Punisher (2022-2023) while Frank Castle leads The Hand
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