Originally Posted by
Karshtakavaar
Signed up to post a reply here. Been reading these forums for a long time, never felt the need to post anything though.
As to the issue with the Marauder, I'm currently playing one as a main, and I'm at level 37 at the moment. I actually found soloing content to be fairly easy until I finished on Balmorra. My biggest gripe has to be with the healing companion. He doesn't seem to want to heal all the time, even if I turn off his other abilities (they tend to turn themselves back on all the time when he disappears due to me mounting my speeder) and setting him on med watch. The biggest thing I've noticed to cause this is if you jump into a group at max range, and move closer in, he does not want to move within your range so he can heal you, instead, he will just sit back and fire at the enemy mobs with his pistol.
Personally, though, I think the best way to bring the Marauder class on par with other advanced classes would be to change on of the two dps trees to a more tanking viable tree (since no offhands, would have to be parry focused tanking) or to give them an actual viable CC ability. As it is, we can only disable droids, and that is rarely any use.
I should mention, I am playing as annihilation spec in Ataru Form (the stance that is specific to that spec and required for most of the abilities). I tried the rage spec which improves abilities based on being in Shi-Cho Form, but it felt very wonky and uncomfortable. However, as someone mentioned earlier in this thread, changing specs could solve the problem people are having soloing content, but I must respectfully disagree. In a pure dps class, all three dps specs should be equally viable for soloing PvE content. If one or two of the trees are just not working for anyone on strong mobs that are in groups with other mobs (normal, strong, or otherwise) then there is an obvious tuning issue with how that class works. If they were specs based on utility such as healing or tanking, then that would be a different story.