Marauder Improvements (Hopefully it actually works now!)

[Sedrahl]

A small addon buffing Marauders. Increases their starting HP by 10 and Life Rating by 2 in order to bring them more in line with other melee combat classes. Technique/Thuggery is changed to a Generic tree to reduce their Class point burden somewhat, and Technique/Bloodthirst is added (locked, 1.1 mastery.) as an option to bolster survivability and alleviate Stamina issues.

This addon works by overloading rogue.lua and technique.lua, and so will presumably have compatibility issues with addons that also do so. No bugs as far as I have seen, Thuggery appears to work as intended and interact with Mastery items and Skullcracker Multiplicators properly.

Concerns: The addon may do too much or too little, it's hard to say. I'm very inexperienced so doing more than shifting around talents and making small statistical adjustments is difficult. However, I am very pleased with Bloodthirst on Marauders, it has such high synergy with them that it even gives Battle Tactics a run for it's money, and makes Category and Class point investment more interesting. Thuggery being moved to Generic is nice because it makes the tree more accessible, however I'm concerned that the the 3rd and particularly 4th Thuggery talents are so fundamentally flawed that even as generics they won't be desirable.

UPDATE: Version 2 added, it allows dual wielding one-handed weapons on Skullcracker ALA Reaving Combat.

Opinions would be greatly appreciated.


Also, special thanks to StarKeep for pretty much teaching me the entire addon-making process.

[Sradac]

not sure why no one has commented on this yet, but this addon looks right up my alley. I normally find the Marauder to be boring as hell, its basically a gimped rogue. Time to check this out!

[Sradac]

I think the duel-wield one handed weapons might be a bit too much though. Flurry is going to get crazy

[Sedrahl]

It was an experimental addition on my part. I still doubt they'll come anywhere near AB or Reaver-tier melee damage even with dual one-handers, and this is the class that's supposed to exemplify dual weapon combat. I also wanted to open up some more stat flexibility for them by reducing DEX reliance (while still keeping it useful for talent scaling) however I'm not sure at which point balance becomes an issue, mainly because of the wild strength disparity between existing classes.

The more I think about it though, the more it seems fair to give them dual one-handers. Vanilla Marauders have neither the melee damage output of Reaver or AB, nor their ranged capabilities, nor the durability offered by Aegis/Conveyance/Bone. It takes some substantial changes to cover that kind of power gap.

That said, this is just observation on my part. Player opinions are necessary for me to get a better idea of how the class stands up and how critically it may affect them.

[Rufferto1]

Have just tried this with a couple of builds going currently to about L20. The change around of skills is great and the addition of bloodthirst is fun. The ability to use 2 1-handed weapons seemed a bit much. I tried one daggers and one 2 1-handers. I think that they have enough damage output already and as many skills are dex based, if you want the str version you will go for big armour and a 2-hander. If you want to promote more variety for their play you may want to consider something like letting them have access to exotic weapon mastery instead of the 2 1-handers. Still good fun with this and kudos to you for that.

[Sedrahl]

Thanks for the feedback. I would love for Exotic Weapon Mastery to be a possible choice for them, however I think Whips need a major overhaul before that can happen. Trying to make a melee character focused on a weapon category that ONLY consists of artifacts, many of which having modified stat scaling, is simply a hopeless endeavor. If we had randomly-generated Whips that would be a different story. I really hope 1.0.5 does something to this end.