Marksman

The Marksman class is one that should appeal to characters that don’t like getting their hands dirty. Although most classes can deal damage at a distance, the Marksman specializes in weapons-based damage and obtaining critical hits, and has a wide variety of skills that can back up his or her abilities in that manner.

Equipment

Obviously enough, your weapons are going to be of paramount importance to your Marksman. You want high damage, obviously, but you also want a variety of damage and firing types. As you proceed along your game, look for a few different kinds of weapons: one rapid-firing weapon, such as a Zeus Rifle, for crowd control; one high-damage sniper rifle for single-target sniping at long range; and one alternate weapon of a different damage type to supplement your main weapons.

In point of fact, most Marksmen will probably want to spend some time farming bosses in the teen levels and hoping to find a high-quality Zeus Rifle. The constant fire and target-linking capabilities of them make them excellent weapons, so try to find a good one; if properly upgraded, it’ll last you a very long time. (The Zeus Rifles have reportedly been nerfed a great deal in between the beta and retail releases, so this may no longer be the case!)

Skills

Marksmen usually want to have a specialty within their trees, revolving around either using Sniper mode to deal high damage, or relying on the Rapid Fire skills to dish out the pain to nearby foes.

Increasing the efficacy of Sniper mode will let you fire on enemies that are farther away, but increasing the points spent there won’t let you fire any more rapidly, which is the real weakness in Sniper mode. As such, Sniping is perhaps best used in multiplayer, where you can rely on a Guardian to get up close and hold the enemies at bay while you bust out your sniper rifle and go to town. However, even a single point in Sniper will be handy for any player; the double damage bonus will make it useful for any type of weapon, with Zeus Rifles becoming extremely deadly when you’re in Sniper mode.

Sniping can be handy with sniper rifles, but also with exceedingly fast weapons like Zeus Rifles.

Rapid Fire can make any quick weapon deadly at close range, but it does rapidly degrade the accuracy of your gun, so you can’t expect to use it for distant enemies. (The Zeus Rifle is mostly immune to this accuracy degradation effect, however.) The rate of fire increase will be entirely useless on many sniper rifles and rocket launchers, however, so be sure you have an appropriate weapon equipped when you use it.

There are plenty of other useful skills here. Beacon is especially important to have in multiplayer, where it can allow your party to take down boss-level characters much more quickly, but it can be just as handy for solo players. Escape will let you get out of a tough situation, or can be used to prevent you from taking damage while you wait for your timer to count down on your health injectors or Rapid Fire. The grenades and Napalm Strike trees are handy for dealing elemental damage to targets that are weak to them (or for afflicting enemies with Ignite), but be warned: it can be quite difficult to get these to land where you want them, especially in wide-open maps.

Engineer

Engineers are something of a hybrid rifleman/summoner class. While they can fire ranged weapons, most of their skills revolve around summoning bots and drones of various sorts that will help them in combat. It’s a somewhat passive class, without a huge number of different actions that you’ll be performing in combat; most of the time you’ll simply be firing your weapon while your bots and drones help distract or wear down your enemies. The helpers that you get here will help you take on crowds of enemies with ease, but boss monsters can be a bit harder to handle. Also note that the added graphical strain of a half-dozen pets with their own attacks can be somewhat rough on lower-end machines.

Equipment

You’ll need to graba few different weapons of various damage types here. Try to find something capable of igniting opponents, obviously, and bring along a rapid-fire weapon and a sniper rifle. You can’t obtain the Sniper skill, but the Tactical Stance skill will still let you extend the range of your sniper rifle’s fire a good deal.

As far as your armor goes, you’ll want to try and find stuff that boosts the stats of your minions. If you poke around long enough, you’ll come across items that add to the armor and health of your minions, and perhaps even attack damage. This stuff will be pretty handy, especially if you invest heavily into your drone’s abilities.

Skills

Tactical Stance, Beacon, and Rapid Fire will all be handy here, but you don’t need to invest in them a huge amount; a couple points each will unlock the skill’s functionality and make them usable, but the bulk of your points will be going towards bots and drones.

Drone Skills: Your drone is going to be your primary minion here: you can only have one of them out at a time, but they’ll eventually become quite powerful, and you’ll even be able to upgrade them with new guns, swords, and armor. They’ll probably be taking a lot of damage, since they tend to rush forward and engage your enemies, so you’ll want to invest heavily into the core Construct Drone skill, as well as Repair Drone when it becomes available. Just two or three points in Repair Drone will let you cut the cooldown timer on the skill by half, which will come in especially handy during tough boss fights.

Things can get pretty hectic on your screen if you’re an engineer, but it’s a fun class to play regardless.

Apart from that, most of the skills here are pretty self-evident. You can probably avoid the Medpak Retrofit and Shield Generator Retrofit abilities unless you play in groups quite a bit; they’re not really worthwhile for solo play. You’ll need to invest quite a bit of points into the Gun, Sword, and Armor Retrofit skills, as well as the Master Engineer skill, to ensure that your drone can wield competitive equipment and stay alive in combat.

Although it’s not exactly intuitive, in order to equip weapons and armor to your drone, you need to summon it, press the Alt key, move your mouse up to the upper left corner of the screen, right-click on the drone’s portrait, and select Inventory. Initially there won’t be any inventory slots for you to add anything to; they’ll be unlocked as you invest points in your skills.

Bot Skills: Unlike your drone, you can have multiple bots out at the same time, with one set of bots from each tree being available. (I.e. you can have inhibitor bots or haste bots out, but not both.) Bots are unkillable, but their effects are somewhat more muted than the drones.

You start off with three Inhibitor Bots, which are helpful in that they’ll point out the locations of nearby enemies and slow them a bit. It’s probably not worth increasing your investment there, though, although you may have to to move down the tree; instead, start building up your Rocket Bots. Rocket Bots will deal more damage and can eventually learn the Molotov Assault skill, which will be handy when going up against tougher enemies that you need to Ignite.