This is a guide for Marauders. I am writting this because in my opinion a lot of people are complaining about a class that has SO many perks and powers I cannot believe that so many people complain.
Couple things up front, I have played all three specs in PvE and PvP. I am rank 60.5 in pvp atm and have cleared both raids completely post patch 1.1. I am sure I am not the best player by far nor the best in this class but based on what is being said in the forums some info is needed.
I am going to go over my spec: what/why/how.
I will talk about pvp and pve rotations and strategies. I will talk about specific skills. Marauders have really complex rotations, that is the nature of it because we have so many cds and situational tactics. I will be broad in my discussion.
I will talk about gear and what I found for optimization, in as far as one can without meters to really test this out.
I will throw a few miscellaneous point sin the end and I will try to answer questions later on.
IMPORTANT: This is my first class guide. Be kind.
PART 1: SPEC
RAGE: I am currently 5/5/31.
The only things I DO NOT HAVE in Rage tree are:
Unbreakable Rage: Unnecessary. In PvE it is not a problem and in PvP you will only get the first 2 ticks of ravage off anyway, which I will mention in the pvp section again.
Strangulate: PvE you simply do not need it. PvP it is fairly uncommon given all the circumstances you find yourself in that you are being hit while choking someone. Because of that, skip it.
Relentless Fury: Because it only gives 10 rage at the end, not really worth it. I find I do not have a hard time building fury, and in circumstances when you need it quickly having 10 of 30 simply doesn't matter enough. Skip it.
In the Carnage tree I DO HAVE:
Duel Wield Mastery 3/3: Because our offhand doesn't scale this is needed so that you can actually have noticeable offhand crits. I am sporting 37% crit chance with my melee attacks (43% with force abilities). When your offhand hits in all three strikes of Ravage you are doing another 1000-1500dmg on it. That matters. Basically start looking at the offhand numbers and you see that this helps.
Cloak of Carnage 2/2: You are commonly taking damage in PvE and PvP and as such this helps with rage generation which can occasionally be a problem in Rage if your rotation is sloppy or if you are in a fight long enough.
In the Annihilation tree I DO HAVE:
Quick Recovery 2/2: This is mandatory. Period. If your are rage spec, or almost any spec, and you do not get this your out of your mind, to put it kindly. You will be using smash on cd as Rage and having it cost 1 Rage is amazing. I do not find myself using sweeping strike often to be honest, I could use it more, but I don't.
Enraged Slash 3/3: This is questionable. There are times when I have an overabundance of rage build up and I can dump a chain of Vicious Slashes in. Mine crit for 2500 without counting offhand dmg. This is nothing to discount. Doing that much dmg every gcd is nice.
Minor alterations depending on preference could work. However the real important thing with Rage spec is you want BIG numbers. It is what this spec is all about. Your are not doting people or slowly chipping away. You are walking in and blowing them up all at once.
NOTES ON OTHER SPECS:
Why not Carnage: It does have a couple nice perks with the whole ravage holding people in place thing. That could be good in circumstances for PvP. The bottom line with Carnage is the damage sucks. It just plain sucks.
Extra strike for Ataru form do not hit often enough to add enough to your dps. The fact that you get a free crit scream means nothing because your force power crit chance should be close to 50% when you have some tier 3 gear. Massacre is does not do enough damage. All this while accounting for Gore being up, and having to always put it back up. Gore being on a 15 second cd and only lasting 6 seconds is just silly.
Even if it could keep up with Rage dps, and it cannot, you cannot touch Rage aoe dps. Carnage is out. If the Ataru strikes had no cd, or if Gore lasted longer, or if it made Ravage cast quicker and have a shorter cd..or many other things then it would be worth while. For movement it does win, for dps it loses.
Why not Annihilation: Same as above really with different complaints. Annihilation likely has same if not better dps on single target while berserk is up and you are critting every dot. This is on single targets only and it is questionable at best because my berserk makes me do 5k dmg every gcd with no rage cost. 5K dmg because I am doing 2.5k cleaves on 2 targets. This is all optimal of course, I do not crit every swing and all that, but bottom line is cleave > dots. Annihilation does nice damage. It is about 20-30% behind smash. Which blows my mind. I go on same types of targets with both abilities and cap out around 5-5.5k on annihilate and will get 6.5k on smash...and again, its aoe. I will dare say that rotation can be even more difficult to manage on Annihilation because of the need to keep the annihilate cd buff active or else you lose a ton of dps.
That is my opinion. I have not put as much time into other specs as rage but I have played all three and the numbers I am seeing and the speed things die at tell me a lot.
ROTATIONS AND STRATEGIES:
PvE: Standard Rotation: Charge-> Crush(Shockwave/Dominate up now) → Battering Assault → Smash → Scream → Ravage → Obliterate → Choke(Shockwave/Dominate up again) → Smash → Scream....
At this point you are optimizing cds so you can scream/smash/ravage and such whenever they come off cd. Very rarely you will smash without with shockwave or dominate on it to optimize the damage. If you have a moment, which at times you will, you can quickly back out and charge again to bring dominate up. If you do this with proper timing you will only lose about half a gcd worth of time to make smash autocrit which might be worth it. With a 40%+ crit chance its questionable and I am playing with that. It does give you more rage though.
You notice I did not include vicious strikes. I found that at max level play you really do not need them to fill in your rotation. You want to use force abilities as often as possible and with all the other cds you have you do not have to resort to rage dumping very often.
Berserk timing: I find in boss fights I will build enough fury to go Berserk and spam my 6 vicious strikes around when I am waiting on cds to come up and I can use this to effectively reset my whole rotation and max our my dps again. Which I can then use Frenzy to do a 2nd time if necessary. In most boss fights you will be moving around and not be standing still so much as for this to be a problem though.
Defensive cds: Obviously as an off tank you need to go into a fight with cloak up. This will help build rage and keep you alive longer. This ability really is amazing in that you can have it up 50% of the time, its like free rage and defense.
Use Saber Ward when you go into a pack, blow your first smash, and see a ton of red numbers start popping up. When I crit a pack that first time it is not too uncommon to pull most of them off the tank. As tanks get better geared this happens less and less but the moment you realize you have 2 or more on you blow this ability as well as cloak if its not up and you will survive until the tank taunts. If he doesn't taunt by the time this is down...get a new tank. LoL
Undying Rage: This seems a bit OP to me. Obviously you need to use this when you are as low as you can manage. I usually hit it if I go to about 2500hp or so. I have 15-16k hp depending on buffs. Remember to pop a medkit the moment after you hit this, it helps a lot. I usually call on vent when I blow my invulnerability. This single ability got me so many boss fights when we had just hit 50 and were doing hard modes and hitting enrage timers. Those few seconds to finish a boss make all the difference in the world.
Predation and Bloodthirst are all situational. Just know when a good time for your group to use this and call it. On Soa you wanna use Bloodthirst on phase 1 asap(when he is not invulnerable) because it will come up for phase 3 again.
Force Camo: Pulled agro early? Hit your vanish. Seriously, marauders getting vanish is so OP it makes me laugh. Can this class have any more amazing abilities?
PVP TIME!
Rotation is very similar except you are not standing still and blowing people up. You are going for a few big crits to instantly turn the fight in your favor and/or rotating cds so that you outlast people.
Charge → Crush → BA → Smash → Scream → Choke → Obliterate(If they break choke early obliterate immediately) → Smash → Scream.....they should be dead already.
On anything that isn't tanky as hell you will be in a huge lead by now. The first half of the rotation works because Crush allows you to stay on them via the snare. The smash will take a huge chunk of HP and Scream critting next will scare the hell out of them because the last tick of Crush will go at the same time and they see a string of large numbers. 90% of the time people turn to run, you choke the !@#$ out of them, obliterate(which hastes you so they cannot get away) and you smash/scream again.
If they do not blow cds to stay alive they should be dead or at like 10%. Either way, you get this rotation off and you win the fight. What is really awesome is even if they run half way through this your charge comes back up and you get another free crit smash.
On tanky targets you need to rotate big hits and your own cds to out last people.
Do your rotation until they break it, they almost always will with the Choke part. Go ahead and obliterate and smash/scream still. You wont do as much damage but what happens is most of the time they think they have the upper hand because you didn't stun them full duration. 90% of the time a Trooper will stand there after they broke your force choke and try to dps you or stun/dps you. In which case you break their stun and ravage them. If you start ravaging people when they start dpsing you they will not stop and run. Your ravage will simply out dps them because it hits like a truck. When that is done you should have enough dps cds up to rotate on them again.
All the while you are rotating your defensive cds. I will usually blow saber ward right before I ravage to tip that point in my favor. If at some point I mess up my smash setups I will use camo to position myself for a charge so I can setup another big hit.
If I am fighting people 2 or 3 on 1 I always look to the squishy target first, not the highest dps cause that is not always the same or easy to tell. If I see a robe or light armor, that is my target. Once my first rotation is done I will likely go berserk and start cleaving them. Realize when you are doing this you are allowing them to hit you for 6 gcd so you need to turn defensive at this point.
If they stun you and you are at 100% health let them hurt you a bit before breaking the stun, take advantage of Payback. Being a force ability it crits a lot. I get my 2.5k heal badge in pvp every match from these critting. But let them hurt you a bit so they have abilities on cd and you healed off the damage.
The overall strategy with Marauder Rage spec is you get on them, and you show off a big number immediately to throw them off. If they do not think they can do their normal rotation then you have them because it is HARD to get away from a marauder. If a class mezzes you and just runs off an you cannot break the 6+ sec mez then nothing to be done about that. If its 3 seconds or less then they will not get out of range of charge.
Optional, if you think someone will run from you then snare them. Our snare goes for 12 seconds and they are not getting away from that. As a marauder if you have your cds up then you should be able to solo any other class...ANY. From my experience if you rotate defenses properly you will never lose a 1v1 fight. The class that is the toughest: Trooper/BH. Tanky as hell and does good dps in the right spec. This can be problematic but not unbeatable.
TIME TO TALK STATS AND GEAR:
Rage spec is all about those free smash crits and using force powers. Some of your highest dps abilities that you use a lot: Smash, Crush, Scream, Choke, Vicious throw is energy damage.
You have +6% crit chance on force abilities which means you should be around 40%. Without meters this is theory but here we go.
If you are using artifice enhancements then go Adept. This is 18 Endurance/27 Power/39 Surge. This will maximize when you crit. I swapped from Crit/Surge to Power/Surge and saw most of my abilities jump a few hundred points. I lost a few percent to crit but it simply seems to work better.
Most of the time though you are going to be using level 56/58 enhancements from gear. These are usually crit/surge and 6 levels of stats are simply better I would say.
If you get gear with accuracy and you can change the slot..DO IT. I am sitting on 103.77% accuracy on force abilities and I would rather change that out if I could. Anyhow, you will likely get repeat gear pieces eventually and find yourself taking out the extra level 56/58 enhancements on some to put in others to maximize.
MISCELLANEOUS:
I would recommend artifice so you can make your own hilts/crystals/enhancements.
Until you can DE the level 56/58 and learn the recipes you won't use them long after hitting 50 but it works. Honestly the trade skills endgame are not all that exciting yet, I hope they will be, but I make a lot of money off artifice so it works for me.
Here is the bottom line with this class. You have to rotate your cds properly. You need to keep yourself active. You have a lot to offer in terms of dps and buffs for the group. There is no reason every raid shouldn't have a marauder in it.
I have full T2 gear, couple of T3 pieces, both pvp and pve. I am in the 500k dmg club. I have put a lot of time into my Marauder and love the class. I think we get so much to play with its ridiculous.
Can we get cc'd to hell and never actually reach our target? Yes, it can happen and does in PvP. It happens to everyone. Charge is the envy of almost every class that doesn't have it. The fact is that if we get surrounded we can blow cds and it will take all those people a lot longer to kill us than almost every other class.
Because of all the complaining about this class it just might get a buff...which would be ridiculous. I read that even Bioware has said ours is the hardest rotation to manage correctly. This means to me we are really powerful, just really hard to master.
Again, if you think I am wrong on any given point I would be happy to back and forth. But I hope this helps.
