Goin’ up? A friendly Marauder guide to T1.

All you need to know to kick-start your Marauding career.

So you like runing around half-naked with an odd looking limb and a big bad ugly mace? Like having all those Bright wizards and Archmagi focusing on you when they see you charge through their ranks while praying that your healbots can keep up? Or you simply like making everyone that rolled Black Orc regret their decision?

If you said yes, then this little badass puppy is for you. and I’m going to show you - to the best of my knowledge and experience, how to make the best of this brute.

Enough with the generic guide introductions for now, I’m gonna try making this as simple as possible, using bullet points if I have to :)

What you have going for you:

• High DPS.
• Adaptability, you can swap mutations based on the situation you find yourself in.
• Good AoE  with Demolition.

What you wish you had:

• More armor, durability.

Of course there are more things to consider but that is what you should keep in mind for this part of your career.

What makes the Marauder stand out from the crowd are his mutations and these are:

• Gift of Savagery: Acquired at rank 1. Gives you Improved Weapon skill and initiative, this increases your chance to parry attacks as well as reducing your opponent’s armor effectiveness, also increases your chance to evade ranged attacks and defend against critical hits.
• Gift of Brutality: More Strength and Initiative, meaning more damage and makes it harder for opponents to block or parry your attacks.
• Gift of Monstrosity: Improves your toughness, resulting in more damage reduction and less damage from wounding attacks.

Mind you in order to be able to use your gifts, your shield hand must be empty.

With the gifts settled, let’s now move onto the array of abilities you have at your disposal, before we proceed. A note on Marauder abilities: some abilities require a certain mutation/gift to be active for in order to be available. You can now begin to see all the strategic options that can open up during a fight:

• Flail: Acquired at Rank 1. This is your bread and butter ability, 2 hits are always better than 1, does not require any specific Gift.
• Rend: At Rank 2. This is a DoT requiring Savagery or Brutality, I usually avoid using this because as with any DoT, to gain the most of it you need to use it as a opener, sure it can stack 3 times, but as a Marauder I preffer opening up with other abilities. Logic would tell us to use against tanks, wear them down in time, but tanks have a high score of toughness, so I would not advise that, a situation where this might prove useful is on a fleeing squishie, but even still you have better options for when a squishy has his back turned to you and fleeing.
• Debilitate: Acquired at Rank 3. This is what I prefer using as an opener in RvR, the natural reaction of a squishy is to run back when you charge them, make sure this is active on them for the whole duration of the fight, works on any gift so you can spam this no matter what mutation you have active. Strategic uses: use on an enemy to stop them chasing your healers, or to slow down anyone chasing you.
• Corruption: Acquired at Rank 4. Less toughness = more damage taken, make sure this is the first thing to use on anything you fight, in RvR, this would be one of the 2 abilities I use first, with Debilitate. makes those tanks go down a bit faster.
• Impale: You get this at Rank 5. Earlier I hinted out that you should be chasing after squishies, and that squishies would be running away from, if the above 2 situations = True, then change into Gift of Brutality, smack a Debilitate and start spamming this to finish them off.
• Convulsive Slashing: At Rank 6, I’m not really a big fan of this, it implies having to stand in one place for it to not break, I wouldn’t recommend staying in one place during an RvR, unless the odds are already in your favor.
• Demolition: At Rank 7, AoE ability, cheap at 25 AP, low CD, spammable, good for finishing off groups of mobs in PvE, lmited use in RvR.
• Mouth of Tzeentch: At Rank 8, requires Monstrosity or Savagery, always cast that when charging towards a group of bright wizards or other casters.
• Touch of Rot:You get this at Rank 9. Great skill for fighting any other melee class, requires Monstrosity or Savagery.
• CHARGE!!!!: Acquired at Rank 10. Ahhhhhh what is a Marauder without the ability to charge into the thick of battle? Use this to quickly close the distance between you and your target, smack a Debilitate and a Corruption and start dealing the DPS before they figure out where you came from, use this to chase and flee as well. Has the same CD as Flee.
• Wave of Horror: At Rank 10.  One of the only sources of Damage reduction you have at this stage, cast this whenever you are getting zerged, or AoE grinding for some brief respite.

This early in your career you also gain one Moral ability and one Tactic:

• Warped flesh: your other source of damage mitigation, procs pretty often too, you get this at Rank 11.
• Sever Nerve: instant 400 damage at Rank 11, make sure to always use it whenever you have the moral, also cast a Corruption for slightly more ooomph, you first get this at Rank 8.

Well there it is fellas, I hope this will make things easier for anyone wishing to start a Marauder.

Happy killing.

Tags: El G, guides, Marauder, RvR