Playstyle & Rotation Mara Fellowship Hero Guide

Playstyle Overview

Mara is a melee DPS who utilizes powerful combo point builder/spender abilities to deal massive damage. The goal is to generate Energy through her poisons, build combo points with that Energy, and then spend the combo points to deal damage. When played well Mara deals huge AoE damage and extremely high burst on single target, and to help achieve this we want to follow a few rules as much as we can:

1. Keep important abilities on cooldown. There are maintenance-type debuffs that you should be trying to maximize, whilst using your cooldowns often.
2. Avoid overcapping resources. Combo points, Energy, and even charges of certain abilities should always be kept in mind and overcapping any of these can typically be fairly wasteful.

Energy and Combo Points

Mara utilizes two key resources: Energy and combo points. Her Energy has a cap of 200, while her combo points cap at 6. Energy is consumed to activate all of her damaging abilities, both builders and spenders. The combo points accumulated through Backstab, Widow's Bite and Skittering Blades before being spent on her finishing abilities: Queen's Fang, Hemorrhaging Strike and Arachnid Assault.

Energy is generated when Mara uses Widow's Bite and through her active debuffs on enemies with our talents. She can take this further with her cooldowns as well as her stealth.

Rotation

With energy and combo points generation being so important, we want to make sure we’re not only talenting into things that assist with that, but also using our cooldowns that give us those resources. This includes our stealth ability Brooding Shadows. Ensure you’re re-stealthing in between pulls to avoid wasting a charge of this, and try to never let this sit on max charges.

What spells we cast differ depending on target counts, and what cooldowns we have available. You essentially want to use cooldowns on cooldown. The only exception to this is holding Maiden Of Death for your ultimate to combine them. We also have a simple priority revolving around maintaining our debuffs on enemies. Below I’ll list this priority and both single target and AoE rotations.

Mara Priority List:

• Maintain Hemorrhaging Strike and Brooding Shadows Seething Poison
• Brooding Shadows Skittering Blades or Backstab depending on target count
• Use Maiden Of Death
• Consume Deadly Scheme with the correct AOE or ST finisher
• Avoid overcapping Malevolence stacks
• Build combo points with Skittering Blades or Backstab based on target count
• Widow's Bite to generate combo points and energy if below 50% energy.

Using Widow's Bite while stealthed applies a poison DoT called Seething Poison. This massively increases our energy regeneration and is important to have up at all times. Only 1 can be active at any time so you just need to apply this on pull, and reapply it when it’s expiring. Hemorrhaging Strike’s bleed also generates 3 energy per tick of damage on enemies. Another important debuff to maintain on a minimum of 1 target. And lastly Maiden Of Death increases your energy regen by 20% for its 10 second duration.

Using Brooding Shadows and Skittering Blades will apply a debuff called Volatile Poison. When it expires it erupts to do damage. It doesn’t stack so avoid using this back to back, but it’s your primary way of utilizing Brooding Shadows re-stealth on AoE. On single target you’ll simply Backstab. You only do this assuming Seething Poison is already applied and not expiring.

Single Target Rotation (pre-Malevolence):

1. Pre-Brooding Shadows
2. Widow's Bite
3. Hemorrhaging Strike
4. Maiden Of Death
5. Backstab -> Queen's Fang spam
6. Widow's Bite when you need Energy
7. Brooding Shadows
8. Backstab
9. Queen's Fang

AoE Rotation (pre-Malevolence):

1. Pre-Brooding Shadows
2. Widow's Bite
3. Hemorrhaging Strike
4. Maiden Of Death
5. Skittering Blades -> Arachnid Assault spam
6. Widow's Bite when you need energy
7. Brooding Shadows
8. Skittering Blades
9. Arachnid Assault

The goal inside your Maiden Of Death is to use as many finishers as possible. Just don’t forget to maintain your debuffs and you’ll be grand. Your gameplay slows down significantly if you ever let Seething Poison or Hemorrhaging Strike fall off.

Another thing to note is Final Stratagem. This cooldown instantly refills your energy and combo points and resets all of your abilities. Ideally used after both Brooding Shadows charges and Maiden Of Death are on cooldown.

How we use our finishers changes significantly once we unlock the Malevolence talent. With this talent you get buffs for Arachnid Assault and Queen's Fang whenever you use the other ability. The idea is to get 2 stacks of the buff you want to use, and then alternate which allows you to ensure you’re proccing Deadly Scheme with the cast you want while fully benefitting from Malevolence buffs. On top of that, to benefit from our Feed The Queen talent, inside Maiden Of Death we want to use Skittering Blades even on single target. This looks something like:

Single target rotation (Malevolence):

1. Pre-Brooding Shadows
2. Widow's Bite
3. Hemorrhaging Strike
4. Maiden Of Death
5. Skittering Blades -> Arachnid Assault
6. Skittering Blades -> Arachnid Assault
7. Skittering Blades -> Queen's Fang
8. Skittering Blades -> Arachnid Assault
9. Skittering Blades -> Queen's Fang
10. Skittering Blades -> Arachnid Assault
11. Brooding Shadows
12. Backstab
13. Queen's Fang to consume Deadly Scheme
14. Widow's Bite when you need energy
15. Backstab to build combo points
16. Continue to alternate finishers

AoE rotation (Malevolence):

1. Pre-Brooding Shadows
2. Widow's Bite
3. Hemorrhaging Strike
4. Maiden Of Death
5. Skittering Blades -> Queen's Fang prio target
6. Skittering Blades -> Queen's Fang prio target
7. Skittering Blades -> Arachnid Assault
8. Skittering Blades -> Queen's Fang prio target
9. Skittering Blades -> Arachnid Assault
10. Skittering Blades -> Queen's Fang prio target
11. Brooding Shadows
12. Skittering Blades
13. Arachnid Assault to consume Deadly Scheme
14. Widow's Bite when you need energy
15. Skittering Blades to build combo points
16. Continue to alternate finishers

It may seem a little odd and counter-intuitive to be using our AOE spenders on single target and vice versa, but it’s worthwhile to play around the Malevolence buff.

Your Ultimate: Matriarch Macabre is an interesting one. For 20 seconds it causes your Queen's Fang and Arachnid Assault to summon shadow clones that imitate the attacks for 100% of the damage each. You also get 30% haste for 20 seconds. You want to line this up with Maiden Of Death every time to maximize the benefit of the buffed finishers. You’ll want to make sure any debuff maintenance is taken care of before entering your ultimate so you’re not having to reapply things when you’d rather be spamming finishers as much as possible.

Utility and Defensives

Outside of your damaging abilities you have a few very useful Utility and Defensive abilities.

Stalker Step - Instantly teleport behind the targeted enemy or player, getting increased move speed by 50% for 4 seconds. This does not break stealth.

Shadow Protection - A simple 40% damage reduction for 4 seconds on a 30 second cooldown.

Enveloping Web - A 4 second instant stun on a 30 second cooldown. Useful to be used as a second interrupt on stunnable targets.