Marauder Start Area Feedback

The defensive track is fine, I think, although it is perhaps a little bit low on life in the Marauder area (not so much on the starting tracks, but in the lack of good life clusters nearby, such as how the Bloodless cluster took a hit. Marauders are instead being directed towards very high armour and max resists, which makes some sense.

The offensive track is terrible though, even for physical melee specialists - nobody wants 10% physical melee damage nodes, and the notables don't do anything special. Per node, the Templar physical melee start is just as bad, but at least it's over quickly and leads to a relatively good part of the tree (the one with Discipline and Training, Catalyse and Faith and Steel). The Marauder offensive tracks just go on and on with bad nodes, meaning that the only sensible way to escape from the Marauder start is to take the defensive track most if not all of the way out.


@idiocyincarnate: I think GGG has attempted to address how 'mandatory' US is by putting the Stun Mastery circle there as an alternative. Stun/block recovery is pretty good if you get a decent amount of it. You should also try to fit blind into your build somehow (e.g. Smoke Mines), as it's extremely powerful regardless of how much Evasion you have (assuming you don't use US). In fact I'd say the real cost of US for armour builds is that it shuts down the ability to take advantage of blind.

The way Marauders are supposed to take the hits is by having a good life pool and wearing really heavy armour, so the melee monsters have to hit incredibly hard to deal a noticeable amount of damage. Trash mobs should basically never deal enough damage to stun an armour build. Heavy-hitters can, but then they shouldn't be hitting you multiple times per second.