.~* Marksman Guide *~.


First of all, this guide is intended to guide you, it’s not a definite structure that you should stick to at any cost, what follows are mere guidelines. Also, among a few things you’ll need to understand that this is not the only viable marksman build (but, in my opinion it’s the best all-round build there is), there are also striker, sniper, grenadier and various other builds around, this is a run and gun build. Also, this guide does not teach you how to level your marksman, this is meant to guide you trough the endgame content FSS offers you at the moment, and to help you maximise your marksman’s efficiency. Finally, this guide is meant for PvE, I know jack about PvP (and who does, the system will most likely be completely different from the PvP we know today once the PvP 2.1 patch is released).

This guide offers you detailed comparison and guidance when choosing between different weapons, mods, armours and builds. That’s all there is to it. Enjoy.

Table of contents:

1) Why should I play a marksman?
* Pro’s/con’s.
* Why play the kind of marksman you propose?

2) Ok, so how do I build my marksman?
* Skills.
* Stats.
* Expertises.
* Items.
* Armor.
* Weapons.
* Mods.
* Conclusion/goals.

3) How do I play my marksman?
* General strategy tips.
* Potential problems and how to counter them.

4) Advanced
* Caste modding and maths.
* General maths.
* Critical damage and elemental damage mechanics.

Abbreviations:
*MM - Marksman
*AA - + All attributes
*MS – Multishot
*Hu’s – Hu’s hypershot
*Lee’s – Lee’s lightlance
*critdmg – critical damage %
*critchance – critical chance %


.~* 1) Why should I play a marksman?

Well, first of all, a marksman is a very good solo play character, and while online group play sure is a lot of fun, you will spend a lot of time by yourself. Farming, xp-ing, soloing cool stuff other classes can just dream about. That’s right; the marksman is the soloer’s dream, capable of killing everything at an incredible pace. The marksman arguably has the highest damage output of all classes, and while survivability may not be quite that of a guardian's, the marksman has a couple of tricks up his sleeve to avoid getting killed. Let’s break it down:

Pros:
• Extremely high damage.
• Very long range, 25-40 (or even 60) meters.

Those are the main pros of a marksman; sure, there are others, such as intense, fast game play a health injector-chugging blade master can only dream about, well, at the moment. In short, a marksman is an unstoppable machine of long range high damage, the only thing a marksman stops to do is looting. So, what are the drawbacks?

Cons:
• Relatively low survivability
• Low fuckup tolerance
• Relatively expensive gear

Yes, for first timers, you probably won’t like the cost of some of the gear I will be proposing. Marksmen are very popular to play, and while there sure are a lot of gear options, the more popular ones will cost you. More on that later. Also, since a marksman rather squishy; you will have relatively low damage reduction, hp, and special effects defence ratings, you will die a lot if you don’t play your cards right. Fortunately, playing your cards right isn’t all that hard. More on that in section 3.

.~* 2) Ok, so how do I build my marksman?

First of all, there are skills; there are various opinions on how your 49 skill points should be distributed. Since this is not a grenadier, striker or sniper guide, I will not walk you trough the skills that could be interesting for such builds. You’ll just have to do with what’s offered here; a detailed description of the skills that are/could be interesting for a run’n’gun build. Down to buissiness.

Skills:

Munitions skills; Rebounder rounds, ravager rounds and concussion rounds.
Rebounder rounds seem to work a bit differently then what’s stated in the tool tip, they don’t seem to ricochet of surfaces if they hit it at an angle over 45°, or at least the chance to ricochet seems to be a lot higher if you shoot it at a favourable angle. You can easily test this yourself with a sniper rifle against the floor, try shooting the floor at different angles and see if the shot reflects onto the wall, you’ll see that I’m right. This might be a graphic bug, but it seems that is not the case, don’t quote me on this though. Either way, rebounder rounds are not as useful as they once where, the times when they combined with rapid fire and multishot filled an entire room with death are over. Still, it’s nice to have maybe a few points in it for the ability to sometimes reflect on thin air (!), effectively increasing the range of your weapon. If you shoot a bullet, hitting a “target at a 0° angle, it will not avert from its projectile path, right? People who have played marksmen a lot have probably noticed that they can shoot at targets that are further away then their max range, and still hit, without letting it bounce there on surfaces. It doesn’t seem to double your range though, the ricocheted projectiles range seems to be cut in about half, leaving a gun with 20m range a chance equal to the chance to ricochet to shoot the projectile about 30 meters. Again, don’t quote me on this, this is my own experience (and I have a lot) with the marksman’s abilities, and is in no way an absolute truth.
Second, we have ravager rounds. These are just awesome, and unlike the rebounders they seem to “reflect” at any angle. This skill is a must have, max it.
Concussive rounds are sort of useless. In theory, they could be good to stop hordes of demons from approaching your relatively unprotected body, but then again, so could a stun gun, and with much greater efficiency. Don’t put any points here.

Dead eye:
This is a must have skill, no marksman could ever be without it. You’ll understand just how imperative this is when we go on comparing different weapons with different critchances, and see the final damage output. Max this.

Weapon master:
This is a heavily undervalued skill, in fact, it will increase your damage by a ton, and is nearly as important for this build as dead eye, you will max this to, of course.

Multishot:
The core of marksman burst damage. Facing a boss? A pack of rare monsters, or anything else that has a lot of hp? You need to take it down quickly, or maybe you just want to show off your insane damage capacity when taking out a group of zombies, well, this is one of the most important skills in a marksman’s arsenal. What it does is this; it makes every shot you fire split into three shots, the additional two taking slightly averted paths from the first (but not anywhere near the missile spread your cursor aim seems to state). Basically, you deal triple damage for 13 seconds, on a 30 second cooldown. How cool is that? Max it of course.

Rapid fire tree; rapid fire, heightened senses and controlled burst.
This used to be a very cool tree, giving you a tool for dishing out massive bursts of damage. However, as it no longer stacks with multishot, the cons outweigh the pros. Also, its highly unsuitable for a run’n’gun build, as being rooted for three seconds rhymes poorly with the goal to keep moving forward constantly. Anyway, what the tree offers if maxed out is this; 235% higher rate of fire (slightly higher damage output then multishot), the ability to use rapid fire whenever you want, and 90% increased damage per shot. While this may sound great, in my opinion, it really isn’t. The 90% damage increase counts as any damage multiplier, meaning its additive with your critical damage multipliers, in short, this skill does not increase your damage by 90%. The real number with decent gear is probably closer to 15%, I’ve done a series of calculations on this with different crit/critdmg ratios, but I won’t bother presenting them here and now, you’ll have to trust me on this one. The two real cons are the rooting, and the amount of skill points you have to invest to reach desirable results. To get the 235% rate of fire boost, you need 10 skill points, then an additional 10 to increase damage, and at least 5-6 to be able to use it at any time. At the least we are looking at 10 skill points for this skill to be worth our while. The problem is we don’t have 10 skill points. Don’t put any points here, it might be tempting to get rapid fire when lvling, but you will regret that later on, trust me.

Stances; Tactical stance, overshield and elemental vision.
Tactical stance is a very nice skill, it decreases missile spread, good for weapons such as Nikola’s polyphase rifle, Hu’s hypershot and many others. It increases missile velocity, utterly useful as the weapons we’ll be using if following this guide are not firing projectiles in that sense. The extra range is always welcome, and so is the increased weapon accuracy. So, why is this skill, and subsequent skills, utter crap? Well, first of all, the payoff per point is horrible, tactical stance gives you 5% increased damage per point invested, as it’s yet another multiplier among multipliers, it’s additive, and thus a lot less efficient as your critchances goes up (and it will go way up).
Overshield offers a shield boost, but then again, a marksman shouldn’t get hit, if he gets hit a lot he’s done something wrong. This is an incentive to play your cards wrong, believe me, you’re not John Rambo, if you take a few bullets or demon claws punched trough your eye sockets, you will die. With or without the potential 4130 extra shields you get from it.
Elemental vision may look tempting, but this build is not about special effects. This build is about raw damage, and while special effects might be a nice bonus, it’s not something you should sink six points in required skills just to get. If you want to use this skill efficiently you’d need to max it, leaving you with a bill of 16 skill points. As in the case of the rapid fire tree, these are not 16 skill points you’ve got to waste. Do not spend any points here, after all, you get a point in tactical stance for free. Be happy with that instead of grieving over trashed skill points later on.

Phase grenade:
Yes, I said we wouldn’t talk about grenades here, but this is the one grenade you should at least consider. Personally, I find it rather nice. It’s like a one point multi beacon with a lower cooldown, lower power cost and that also deals damage. Did I mention it also debilitates your enemies, making them deal half their normal damage?
Beacons and phase effects are not like regular damage multipliers, as they don’t multiply the damage you deal, but the damage the target receives. With just one point you will have a grenade that sticks to whatever monster or surface you hit with it, and detonates with a phase strength of 2106 after one second. Also, it deals roughly the damage of a mid-level sniper rifle, probably killing low health monsters such as zombies or fellborns. A one point wonder, if you can handle the extra power drain while using this a lot (not very hard, bring power packs, should cover all your power needs), I’d say go for it. An important note, however, is that for this to work the way it should, you need to have at least some shield penetration on your armour. The special effect phase will not apply if you don’t deal damage to a monsters hit points, and monsters with heavy shields will thus nullify the most important effect of this wonderful pocket-size bomb. Shield penetration on your weapon, or mods, will not work.

Escape and escape artist.
Escape is another one point wonder, it will get you out of tricky situations when you need it the most, just make sure you’re not electrified. Escape artist is not worth sinking points into. The only use I had from it when I got it from a weapon was the extra run speed when transporting myself over large instances. Funky, but not worth any points. However, spending one point in escape is absolutely imperative for your survivability. Sometimes there’s no way of escaping rough situations trough careful planning and a good sense of impending risk, such as being surrounded by freshly spawned fellbores, or how about some plague heralds surrounding you? Simple, press your escape hotkey and get some distance, fire up multishot and take out the bastards. This one point will save you more often then health injectors.

Beacons; Beacon, elemental beacon and multi beacon.
Beacon, mm. Beacon is good, it increases the damage a target takes by 84% when maxed, it is usable almost instantly after you placed one, and it’s power cost is very humane. There are no real drawbacks, except that it can be tedious to beacon every target you see. The solution is simple; don’t. Use beacon where it’s needed, I mean, there’s no need to place a beacon on a fellbore that’s bound to die in 0.5 seconds anyway, put it on the archfiend instead, don’t worry yourself to much about low health un-beaconed targets.
Elemental beacon could be nice, but then again, we are not in this for the special effects. They are a bonus, that’s all.
Multi beacon – this is where views part. Some consider multi beacon a great skill, after all, it makes those pesky zombies die twice as fast, others claim it’s a waste of power, time, and if your computer is over a year old, your cpu. It sure has potential, but then there are the problems with points again. Let’s compare it to beacon. It has a 12 second cool down, compared to beacon’s two. It costs twice as much power, and it’s only 60% increased damage when maxed, compared to 84% from beacon. Also, points, points and points. You could max both, but that’d cost you 23 points. You could max only multi beacon, but even so it would cost you 15 points since three elemental beacon and two beacon are required to even get that first point of multi beacon. Points are not something we got extras of, so let’s forget about multi beacon. If you want a “beacon” for crowds, try reading my notes on phase grenade again.
Max beacon, forget about the others.

Well, that should cover the skills. Seems like we’ll end up with something like this:
http://hellgate.ingame.de/charplanner/marksman/?l=50&aa=0&a=00000000&s=0003a010701a00070000000a000

What we have here is a rather solid run’n’gun build. It will deal massive damage just from pointing your crosshair in the targets direction and clicking that left mouse-button of yours, and if that’s not enough, you could always pop multishot and give the annoying foe a nice beacon to seal it’s funeral.

Stats:
Well, as you know, there are four stats. Accuracy, strength, stamina and willpower. For a marksman like this, we are going to aim for the highest possible damage. For that, accuracy is our best friend, every point in accuracy increases critical damage by 2%, so we want a lot of accuracy.
Strength is nice for being able to wear heavier armour, further protecting our oh so fragile bodies, but don’t stress yourself about it putting points here. You’ll get most of the strength you need from +AA stats on gear. If you need more, you need to find lighter armour.
Stamina is always a nice bonus, but the best defence is a good offence, at least in the case of marksmen. More hp is nice, but consider it a bonus rather than a goal. This is a matter of preference though.
Willpower is something you only place points in to meet the feed requirements that should be rather low. Most your willpower feed will come from gear, the mods in your weapons should mainly be accuracy based, we’ll talk more about that later.

As for my build, I got feeds like this:
260 accuracy
105 strength
210 stamina
155 willpower

While there’s going to be a stat refund vendor in the next patch, I would be very careful about investing heavily in willpower. You have no idea how much it will cost you to make up for that when your gear evolves into a more crit/critdmg focused setup.

Expertises:

This is an new area, and there are many ideas on what’s optimal for a marksman. Again, it’s mostly a matter of preference. We can rule out a few though:

Tranquillity: 480+ power regeneration/minute - well, power is NOT an issue for marksmen, if we need extra power we can just chug a power pack. I have a stack of power packs packed in my inventory for every trip, but more out of habit then need, I rarely use them.

Impunity: Shield regeneration. I don’t even know the max of this stat, but it seems so ridiculously useless from the base numbers of it, that it shouldn’t even be considered. When in the heat of battle, shield regeneration pauses whenever you take damage anyway, and even if you shouldn’t take heavy damage, you will take some minor hits now and then, preventing your shield from regenerating. A +150% (I don’t know the numbers, but whatever) improvement of 0 is still a final 0 shield regeneration. The only thing this could possibly do is cutting your downtime between fights, if you’re the type that don’t want to run in without full shield and hp. Don’t forget, we are supposed to be never-stopping killing machines, not some wimpy safety-first kind of marksman. This is not the expertise for you.

Leadership: 14% minion damage – Simple, we don’t have minions.

Affliction: Elemental attack strengths, 38% is it? Well, either way, I repeat, this build is not about effects, if it was, this could be nice.

Vigour: Increases use-rate of sprint. Lol.

Regeneration: It will take a lot more then 480+ health/minute to save our skin, for a guardian with 90% damage reduction it might do a lot, but for us, having a hard time reaching 70%, no. Just no.

Arcane resolve: While we are indeed vulnerable to special damage effects, there’s so many really juicy expertises out there, we can’t sacrifice points here. Also, in 2.0 or 2.1, elemental effects will most likely be nerfed beyond recognition.

This is where certainty ends, at least on the negative side. Let’s look on what expertises are absolute must-haves instead.

Surgical precision: 6% critchance when maxed, this is absolutely imperative to a marksman. Our damage comes first and foremost from critical hits, and another 6% is a god given gift. This is the first thing you max, no matter what.

Well, that’s all the must-have expertises. The list is surprisingly short, but don’t fear, we have 40 points left to spend, and seven juicy expertises left to choose from. Let’s have a look at them to:

Enhanced accuracy, strength, stamina and willpower.
Pretty self explanatory, these increase your respective stats by up to 38 when maxed out. Accuracy is my favourite here, as I really, really, like high critdmg%. I’m a damage junkie.

Fortune: Increases your luck by up to 168 (there’s a string error here, showing it as 1680, but that’s a fallacy, don’t believe it). Also pretty self explanatory. While people are really split when it comes to luck, I like luck. This depends a lot on your play style of course, are you the kind that grinds for a lot of items, perfecting your char in that way, making lots of money, buying/finding gear? Well, this is the expertise for you, luck does work, people who claims otherwise are impatient or greedy, or simply a bunch of whiners since they have yet to find that 3slot Hu’s or hikida. Ignore them.

Toughness: Up to 140 armor on top of what you already have. This could be great, or, if your gear is already very heavy on armor, not so great. The amount of armor needed to increase your damage reduction increases exponentially, there’s a nice list of percentages and armor needed in the guardian section of the official forums. I’ll add a link if I find it again. In short, 140 armor might increase your reduction by 5%, or it might just add 1%. While it’s obvious that a monster dealing 100 base damage, then applying 50% reduction deals 50 damage, the effects of higher reduction and reduction increase might not be so obvious. Don’t be fooled however. If someone increases their reduction from 50% to 55%, their overall damage taken will be reduced by 10% from their prevorious armor-value. If you increase from 60% to 64%, you will also increase the efficiency by 10%, depending on how you look at it. Either way, higher damage reduction is always better damage reduction, whatever way you look at it. Toughness is good.

Cruelty: At the moment, this expertise is useless. It’s a damage multiplier, and is thus bunched in with the other damage multipliers as an additive. Utter crap in it’s current state, but 2.0 hints of changes. Looking at the massive overhaul of some expertises function, we might get a refund on our spent points, but for those of you that are a bit sceptical when it comes to FSS skill/attribute/expertise-refunding generosity, this is an expertise to spend points in – for future usefulness.

Personally, I’m going for something like this. Still have some way to go tho, as rank 50 needs around 800 million experience.

4/4 Surgical Precision – 10 points
4/4 Enhanced Accuracy – 10 points
4/4 Toughness – 10 points
4/4 Cruelty (if it’s changed and we get a refund) – 10 points
4/4 Enhanced Willpower (leaving me with more points to put in accuracy! Damage!) – 10 points

Again, the 800 million xp might be a bit of an obstacle, so above you can clearly see what I consider the most important.

Well, seems we covered skills, stats and expertises. How about we move on?

Continued in next post..

..Continued


Gear:

Well, the big question. How do I achieve the stats above? They are needed to dish out high damage with the skill and expertise build I have picked, and getting to the point where it’s getting really funky isn’t as easy as it sounds. Lets start by looking at the given gear first. Keep in mind that this is aimed at subscribers, as some of it is not available for non-subs. Simply replace subscriber gear with items with similar stats to the other stuff that’s proposed.

Helm: Eyes of the maverick. Hands down, this is the very best you can get, 3% crit, some damage, lots of accuracy. This is your dream. It also comes with three free slots for augmentation, what you want from those is stats, preferably AA of course. More accuracy, strength or willpower for feeds. Don’t worry if you fail with some augmentations, but be sure to have a spare clean one to equip if the feeds exceed the stats you have available.

Dyekit: Black knight or Cold steel, armor or AA. These are expensive, and they are not imperative. Get something cheaper if you can’t afford these or don’t have the patience to farm for them.

Shoulders: SuE Steadiers. These come with 3-4% crit, try to get 4% if possible. Remember, high critchance is one of our goals here. They also have some handy armor, weapon accuracy improvement and extra accuracy. With only one slot for augmentation, and a hefty price to say the least, you might want to be careful with that. If you still want to augment them I recommend nanoforging them to their max itemlevel before giving the augmentrix a shot. Higher itemlevel = higher quality augmentations. Maybe you’re as lucky as I, giving them a nice +11 AA? Note that the base of SuE can come with extra runspeed and evasion. This is nice, but will boost the price tag a lot.

Gloves: Duellos of the Duelist. These come with hidden +3% crit, you can see it in your statscreen. One free augmentation slot, once again, try to get with stats of some kind. Feeds will be your primary problem. You could also try to get TPJ’s, but I really prefer the extra crit from duellos.

Boots/Legs/Belt/Torso: In these slots you want to get armor with shield penetration. The most appealing type is Overlord or Zirconium titanium type armor. It’s quartermaster stuff that makes you look a bit like one of those engineers hiding behind their metal constructs, it will also give you a slight boost to the minions you don’t have, but don’t worry yourself with that. It’s the shield penetration you’re after. Primarily though, you’re looking for certain stats. Shield penetration is a bonus, but you will need at least one piece of armor with penetration. The stats you are looking for are these:
+AA – Seriously, don’t wear any armor without this
+Accuracy
+Willpower/strength
+Stamina
+Armor

+% armor might seem nice, but it’s gonna give you one hell of a feed cost compared to what you get. This stat is aimed towards classes with more base armor, and more use out of strength; guardians and blademasters. Special effects defenses are near useless, you will get phased, shocked, poisoned and stunned anyway, so don’t bother. Try not to get hit instead, and mitigating the damage by some armor. Sprint and movement speed might be nice on boots, but don’t set that as a requirement for equipping yourself.

Aim for atleast 350 total accuracy, giving you a total of 700% extra critdmg, and try sticking to just meeting the feed requirements of your gear with the rest of your stats. I currently have 398 accuracy on my marksman, and my damage is just out of other classes comprehensive ability.

As for weapons, I could write a guide that only revolved around MM weaponry, but I condensed it into a brief walktrough on the most popular weapons, and how to mod them. Lets have a look at the more popular options, they are popular for good reasons.

Lee’s lightlance.
Comes with 4-6 modslots, the number of slots being what sets the price. Can be augmented twice, but that’s not necessary to reach high damage with a lee’s.
Pros:
• Relatively cheap, unless you want 6 slots badly.
• High shield penetration, leaving you with a lot more options on what armor to use.
• Rather high damage and firing accuracy.
Cons:
• Could have more damage
• Mods are rather expensive, as fuels/relics are popular. Supply and demand.

Dunbars Disruptor:
Comes with 4 modslots. Lower damage then lee’s, two augmentation slots. Deals all kinds of elemental damage, great for applying special effects. Also has high chances of shooting pretty coloured novas and lightningorbs on hit/kill.
Pros:
• Nice for special effects, even if that’s not what we are looking for primarily.
• All kinds of damage = minigame winner.
• Novas dealing with low hp monsters such as zombies and fellbores.
Cons:
• Expensive.
• Low number of modslots.
• No shield penetration without a lucky augmentation.
• Max itemlevel 50, limiting you from using high level mods.
• Low damage.

Voodoo Rifle:
Sniper rifle with high stun/phase/ignite attack strength. It doesn’t deal any firedmg, so to add ignite you have to mod it for that. Always comes with high shield penetration and 5 modslots. Some splash damage.
Pros:
• Nice range.
• Decent damage. High single shot dmg, one-shot capability.
• Splash.
• High stun attack strength.
• Dirt cheap.
Cons:
• 5 modslots is not a lot for a sniper rifle.
• Slow rate of fire makes it perform poorly vs crowds.

Hu’s Hypershot:
The king of guns. The damage of a Lee’s, but onehanded. Two of these makes you king of the hill. Physical damage allows for stunning. It’s just beautiful, a must have.
Pros:
• Highest damage per second on a weapon.
• Decent range and missile spread.
• 2 free augmentations on a onehander.
• 3 free modslots on a onehander.
• Increases userate of some skills, like escape!
Cons:
• Expensive. This will dig a big hole into your pockets.
• FPS. This gun is a monster when it comes to impact particle effects.
• Expensive.

The fragger:
Hu’s little brother, same damage, but fires half the amount of shots.
Pros:
• cheap compared to Hu’s.
Cons:
• Low damage compared to Hu’s.
• High missile spread.

Well, personally I use Hu’s for allround, but I have been lucky with crit and penetration augmentations. For people with limited funds, a Lee’s will work wonders, produce less lag and overall make your ears ring less from the sound. A Voodoo is a nice option when nothing else seem to work, but the shaking and limited ability to handle crowds make it a situational gun. The fragger and dunbar I consider inferior, but a dunbar has it’s uses when it comes to minigames and fellbore killing. Try to get a Lee, if you can’t afford 6 slots, 5slots are dirt cheap.

Mods:

So, you got your fancy iron, what to put in it? Well, as I’ve said a million times before; special effects is not what we are looking for. Some people like to pack their Lee’s full of ignite mods, reaching a very nice ignite strength over 1.2k, but at ridiculous willpower feed costs. Also, ignite doesen’t kill nearly as fast as raw damage does, it’s just an illusion. More on specialised bosskilling in the advanced section. Stuff your lee’s with crit relics instead, and critdmg% fuels. That should do the trick. Same goes for Hu’s, or any other weapon. Crit% where it’s possible (techs, relics) and critdmg% or possibly shield penetration if possible/needed in other slots.

Conclusion and goals:

Well, to conclude, we got a very accuracy, crit and critdmg-heavy build. You should aim for 25% critchance, this is easily achievable with the basic stuff;
1% Base crit
8% Dead Eye.
6% Surgical Precision.
4% SuE Steadiers
3% Eyes of the Maverick.
3% Duellos of the Duelist
= 25% total. Anything above that is good, as you will see in the maths section under advanced. Most of your damage will come from critical hits.

You should aim for 1000% critical damage. This is easier then it might first seem to achieve.
50% base
325 Accuracy giving 650%
210% Weapon Master
90% From random mod
=1000% Total.

What could stop you is if you invested to heavily into willpower to meet feed requirements, that’s why you should think twice before doing that.

.~* 3) So how should I play my marksman?

Woah, easy one. You stack up on a few health injectors, just in case, and go out there, wherever you want go. Aim, click, loot. With this build it shouldn’t be much harder then that. What you want to do however, is optimising your killing speed. Keep moving, keep shooting, be very liberal with adrenaline pills, MS use and beacons. There’s no need to wait for that heavy monster to appear before using MS. Remember, it’s only a 30 second cooldown. If you party with an engineer with maxed hastebot, you’ll be able to use MS every 22 seconds, great huh? Toss a phase greande, pop escape if needed. It’s all pretty self explanatory, and you’ll get the hang of it soon enough. Just remember what I said about cooldowns. Don’t be afraid to use em, it’s not like guardians great defender, or summoners reaper, that you have to save and use at the right time for it to be useful. Your cooldowns are a lot shorter, so use them whenever you feel like it.

Most problems, well, most of the times you die, is when you are afflicted with a special effect. You can’t heal if poisoned, you can’t escape if you’re electrified, you take a ton of extra damage when phased and if you’re stunned, well, you can’t do anything except pop a gyro stabilizer. The good news is that there’s a cure for all this. Always bring special effects consumables, use them pre-emptively and you should find yourself dying a lot less. Everything gets easier with the consumables the game offers, so why not use a few inventory slots to save you the trouble of running all the way back?

.~*4) Advanced

Caste modding:

First of all, I want to present to you here that on paper, caste specific modding is far far more efficient, whatever way you put it. That is a fact.

For those of you not familiar with the concept of caste-specific weapon modding, I'll explain it shortly. You simply modify your weapons to deal damage against a specific type of monster (demon/necro/beast/spectral) and switch between weapons when a new enemy makes his entry. The obvious downside of this is ofcourse PvP, but not all of us are that interested in PvP, and even so you can have a PvP specific battleset.

The most efficient way to mod against a caste is to abuse the critmechanics. There's no cap on how high your critchance can get, and with the new surgical expertise, it's relatively easy to reach say 25% critchance. If you have 25% critchance and mod your weapon with +300% critical chance multiplier towards a certain caste, lets say demons, you will have 100% chance to score a critical hit against demons with that weapon. Amazing, huh? But thats not all.

As of current, critical hits are calculated with the critical damage modifier being an additive to +%dmg from skills, divine mods, weapon modifiers increasing "damage" etc, not as a multiplicative. In short, if your weapon deals 100 dmg, and you have a 20% divine mod in it with a critical damage bonus of 500%, your critical hits will deal 620 damage, not 600x1,2=720 dmg as some may think, significantly reducing the effectiveness of divine mods, beacon and whatever +x%dmg modifiers you can get your hands on, with a caste-modded build. Instead, +%critical damage, which is usually higher numbers, will add more to your final damage. Also, +x% elemental damage modifiers are a multiplicative, *after* critdamage is accounted for, making even a small ammount of elemental damage quite a large boost to your total damage. More on this later.

As an example, we'll compare a divine modded 6slot Lee's with 20% firedmg with a demonmodded one. In the divine we use 6x20% divine mods, 3 fuels 3 relics. In the demonmodded one we use 1x3% critrelic, 2x200% demon critical dmg multiplier relics and 3x100% demon critical chance multiplier fuels. We have 4/4 surgical precision, 7/7 dead eye and we wear SuE's and Mavericks. With this we should reach 22% crit.

(In this example we are not going to add the +%dmg on maverick, just to get clean numbers)

8% dead eye
6% surgical precision
4% SuE
3% Maverick
3% Duellos
1% Base crit
25% total

A fictive critdamage multiplier in this scenario is 500%, whish is well within peoples reach. You can achieve a *lot* more, I currently have 2401% critdmg vs demons on my lee's with 100% critchance, further boosting the usefulness of it.

The base dmg of a lee's is 12-22 when fully nanoed, giving us an average of 17 damage per hit, at 600 shots per minute.

[In the examples below I added +1 to the damage modifiers (the first one shown) since thats how the game calculates it, I don't know how to add it in in a more correct way, not that it really matters]

With the 6xdivine mods the lee's will get damage like this:
17(2,2(120%dmg relics/fuels))(1,2(20%firedmg on Lee's))
(37,4)(1,2)
44,88

With crits it will look like this:
17(2,2+5(500% critdmg))(1,2)
17(7,2)(1,2)
(122,4)(1,2)
146,88

So, with a regular 6slot lee's with 6x20% divine mods we got a normal damage of 44,88, and a critical of 146,88. Calculating the average isnt very hard, as we already have the critchance %.

22% critchance
22(146,88)=3231,36
78(44,88)=3500,64
3500,64+3231,36=6732
6732/100=67,32

This means we got an average damage of 67,32 per shot, giving us 673,2 damage per second with Lee's fireing rate.

With the demonmodded gun:

Critical hits(not bothering with noncrits as we know it has 100% critchance with the 25%crit+300% critmultiplier):

17(6(500% critdmg)+4(400%critdmg vs demons))(1,2)
17(10)(1,2)
(170)(1,2)
204

with 204 average dmg vs demons, the demonmodded lee's deals just over 300% more damage per second than a divinemodded one. Demons just disappear whenever you look at em, moloch dies on second multishot taking more dmg then priests can heal him when soloing etc.

So, to the question:

Is it worth the fuss of modding your weapons like this, it has obvious advantages:

1) Being able to kill packs of monsters like imps, orbiles, tormenters, zombies etc extremely fast.
2) Allowing you to solo the deepest wild with *ease*.

So the disadvantages (compared to a divine modded weapon):

1) Low flexibility, mixed packs pose a challenge. You still deal damage but not as much as against the one you modded for.
2) Quite an effort required to achieve 100% critchance and 900% critdmg vs it against all 4 castes, you will most likely need 3-4 different weapons.
3) Lots of weaponswitching.

The conclusion we can draw from this is ofcourse, everyone should aim to have a weapon modded for each caste, on top of their overall weaponset. Bosses go down a million times faster then you could ever dream of with caste-specific mods. That alone is reason enough to save and use those mods.

Maths on crits vs %dmg:

Here follows a simple explanation of why you should go for high critdmg and crit% instead of high +% dmg.

Sample gun has 100 dmg per shot.

Example 1, 5x20% divine mods, 1000% critical damage, 25% critical chance.
Example 2, 5x3% critical chance mods, 1000% critical damage, total of 40% critical chance.

1:
Hit: 200
Crit: 1200
Avg: 450

2:
Hit: 100
Crit: 1100
Avg: 500

We are looking at a rather high increase in dmg, imagine if you also went on improving critdmg. The thing is, criticals and stat distribution go hand in hand. Crit/critdmg mods feed accuracy, dmg% increase feeds willpower. Higher accuracy = higher critdmg. Double efficiency.

In my mind there’s no doubt about how you should build a marksman for maximised efficiency, ofcourse, there are other opinions, and other people focus on other aspects of the game, where survivability might be more crucial. To me, however, this is the very best marksman build as it has the highest damage output, and all the utility of any other marksman.

//Blodulf

amazing work,nice guide.

You did that ?

will defenetively make me change some shits on my mm ^^

Yep, it's written by me.. Everybody may not agree with some of the stuff, but this is what I feel works best for me.

GODLY Guide dude, GFG! I was making a MM, he's still low lvl, and I will follow your guide from now on!
I say sticky this for sure should help new players a ton!
GG man, congrats

nice man! i just got the game, and the Marksman grabbed my attention. i had no idea how the hell i was gonna play it tho (skills, attributes, ect). but this helped alot! thanks!

Thanks, when I have time I'll clean it up and add numbers with comparisions between plausible sets of armor for different levels of play, with different weapons.

naice

Im definitely using this as a guide for my marksman



How do you think this char will be if I am dirt poor? lol.

Thanks for the guide.

If you're dirt poor you might have to sacrafice SuE's, and settle for a 5slot lee's, it will still work just fine.