The Party-friendly Marksman

Guide format stolen wholesale from Filorux' rainmaker guide. This guide is only based on playing the marksman up to level 22, so is subject to change after we get hands-on experience with the higher level skills.

The Spark

Some might consider marksman to be the solo player's character. While it's true that sniping from a distance with a sniper rifle isn't the best party support role, the well-equipped marksman has a lot to add to cooperative demonslaying, and this build is designed to maximize that.

Skill Choices

Key skills

• Beacon 5-10/10
  • Paint a single target for increased damage.

• Elemental Beacon 3-10/10
  • Paint a single target for increased vulnerability to elemental effects.

• Multi Beacon 5-10/10
  • Simultaneously paint several targets for increased damage.

These skills are your bread and butter. Count on spending around 20 points here, perhaps more for the truly dedicated. Multi Beacon should be spammed against groups to constantly increase damage for the whole group. Every boss, and rare/epic/named monster should be under the effects of beacon from the moment you see him, and additional beacons should be spent on the nastier of the usual monster types, such as bruisers.

Grenades

• Phase Grenade 1+/10
  • Your goal is to be group oriented, and what's more group oriented than a grenade which makes all monsters in an AoE take 50% extra damage? More points are good here if you want increased phase duration.

• Flashcrasher grenade 1+/10
  • If escape is your individual panic button, this is your group panic button. If your allies are getting overwhelmed, throw in a flashcrasher grenade for some breathing room.

Utility / Prerequisite Skills

• Escape 1/5 minimum
  • For emergencies. More points here give you more time to heal and reposition/get out of harms way, or movement speed with improved escape.

• Sniper stance 1/10
  • Sniper stance is such a one-point wonder that it would be crazy not to put a point here. On the other hand, more points do relatively little, and you shouldn't be spending enough time in sniper stance to justify them.

• Tactical stance 1/10 (starting point)
  • Crits are good. Then again, with max reflected shot and dead eye, you should be getting plenty of crits without resorting to a stance which removes your most valuable asset: mobility. Additionally, you don't have the points to get elemental visions, and overshield is almost useless at present. However, if you really want to get crits, you could stick a few extra points here.

• Rapid Fire / Multishot?
  • This depends a lot on weapon choice. If you're going with a rocket launcher or sniper rifle, rapid fire is not useful. If you're going with pistols or an automatic rifle of some kind, it can be very useful. Also, at present it is very effective with beam weapons as you get multiple streams with perfect accuracy. Multishot can also be quite powerful as it doubles damage while active, and also greatly increases your odds of getting a crit effect. On the other hand, it takes a lot of points to get more than a few seconds of multishot given the number of points in prereqs.

• It's worth pointing out that rapid fire and sniper stance alter not just firing speed but skill use rate as well, so if you use multishot (for example) while rapid firing, you can use it almost twice as often. On the other hand, using it in sniper stance will give it very slow cooldown. There's a good chance that this is a bug and will get fixed, but I imagine there are a lot of higher priority bugs at the moment.

Passives

• Dead Eye 7/7
  • While seven points here are not necessary for the build, it's a passive damage boosts - who's to object?

• Hollow Points 1/7
  • It's a passive damage boost, but probably not as effective as Dead Eye. Between weapon properties, mod sockets, and accuracy, you're probably already doing so much bonus critical damage that more points here aren't that useful.

• Reflected Shot 7/7
  • This skill is way too good not to max.

• Homing Shot */7
  • I hear tell that this doesn't interfere with reflected shot. If so, it may be worth putting some points here to take advantage of max crit.

Any skill not mentioned is skippable, but can still be taken with leftover points if desired.

Leveling

This build is very powerful from very early on. Your first key skill is beacon, which is available at level 5. You have the energy to use it a lot, so cast it on anything that doesn't go down instantly (of course, most things will). Try to find a group early on if you can, since they will also benefit from your beacons. Playing solo should not be a problem however, due to the ease of the early levels.

Weapons

Since the build is based off of skills which benefit any weapon, use whatever weapon types you are most comfortable with.

Variants

This build has a lot of flexibility: which stance do you go for, or do you grab rapid shot instead? Do you go for special damage effects and elemental beacon, or focus more on pure damage output? Do you spend a lot of points in grenades and air strikes, or concentrate more on passives to increase your main weapon damage? All of these add room for individual customization.

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