Annihilation Marauder PVP + PVE Beginner Guide (SWTOR Patch 7.5)
A Beginner Guide to the Annihilation Marauder Combat Style for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Including the best gear, stats & builds for PVP and PVE, as well as gameplay tips and tricks.
This is up-to-date for Patch 7.5
The video version of this guide is available on my YouTube channel here:
About this Guide
Here it is: My much-requested and long-awaited Annihilation Marauder Guide. (Hi, Kaythic!) If you have been following my channel for a while, you will know that I don’t rate this spec very highly for PVP, and so I hadn’t really played it in over a year. But you asked for a guide, so I spent some time re-learning it and got some decent results with the build I am going to show today. While I am in no way the best Annihilation player in the world, I am sure both beginner and experienced Marauder players can learn something from it.
Similar to my Concealment guide, I will not only focus on PVP, but try to explain how the class works in general, and how you can play it in PVE as well.
About the class
Annihilation is a melee damage-over-time (DoT) dps class that offers something unique in that it can heal the whole group while doing damage with its DoTs. Being a Marauder combat style, Annihilation has access to some of the most powerful defensive cooldowns in the game, in addition to very good sustained dps.
Latest Balance Changes/Meta ranking
Marauder was one of the classes hit the hardest by the ability pruning of Legacy of the Sith. It lost most of its utility (Obfuscate & Intimidating Roar) and needs to choose between Mad Dash, Force Choke hard stun, and the 99% damage reduction cooldown Undying Rage, whereas previously it had access to all these abilities.
The last time it got real balance changes was patch 7.2, where Bioware made Rage management easier and buffed the damage of many abilities in compensation for nerfing the Draining Center mod.
Being a true melee class, Annihilation needs to be in 4m range to do any meaningful damage. And this is the first reason, why I rate it below the other two Marauder specs for PVP. To make matters worse, it neither has the extra movement speed of Carnage nor the second leap of Fury, so it can get kited. Anni also doesn’t have any meaningful burst (and no, 30k rend hits do NOT count as burst) and as opposed to Fury or Carnage it does not have any rotational Crowd Control immunity.
In PVE, however, Annihilation is an absolute powerhouse, because there is less movement needed, bosses will not cleanse your DoTs as often as players, and the passive group healing and strong raid buffs it provides means that any operation group typically wants to bring an Annihilation Marauder.
Key Abilities
Annihilation has 6 abilities you need to understand as a beginner. The first three are your DoT abilities with Rupture being the first. It does some initial white damage and then a 9-second internal bleed. Like with most of your abilities, you need to be within 4m of your target to use Rupture. It costs 2 Rage (your primary resource) and can be spammed and spread to other targets by using Smash because of the level 23 Hemorrhaging Smash passive.
Your second DoT is called Force Rend. It builds 4 Rage and has a 10m range, which makes it quite useful. With the gear that we are going to talk about in a second, it has a cooldown of 11,1 seconds. Similar to Rupture, it lasts for 9 seconds, but it does exclusively yellow internal damage, which means you will rarely ever miss it and it will do more damage to tanks and other high armor targets. Same as Rupture, it can also be spread via Smash.
Your third DoT is called Deadly Saber. It works a bit differently compared to the other two in that it buffs your next 3 melee attacks to apply a stacking bleed effect on your target of choice. This one does a lot of damage, but it is unique, meaning you can only stack it on one target. It costs 3 Rage and has the same cooldown as Force Rend.
Next, we have Fury - your secondary resource. You can build it before entering combat by using your regeneration ability or by activating Frenzy.
In combat, you will constantly build fury stacks, up to a maximum of 30 at which point you can use those stacks to activate either Berserk or your Raidbuff Bloodthirst.
Berserk will make your next 6 DoTs auto-crit and heal your group for 1% of their max health. While that might not seem like much, it can make the difference between surviving and wiping in longer fights.
The final key ability I want to highlight is Annihilate, which is a 4m range melee attack that costs 4 Rage to use and does decent damage. But the special thing about it is that its cooldown will become shorter as you use it more often, which gives Annihilation that ramping, sustained damage feeling, meaning your dps will go up the longer you manage to stay in combat without interruption.
Tactical
Whether you play PVP or PVE, the best Tactical is Spiteful Saber. Because not only does it buff Rupture’s damage, but it also makes it so you will only need to use it once as long as you stay on the same target, because Vicious Slash, Vicious Throw, and Dual Saber Throw will refresh its duration and tick its damage.
For science, I have tried out Malmourral Mask, which turns Annihilate into an AoE. But I wasn’t too impressed with it since Annihilate’s cooldown is still quite lengthy and it is white damage, so it will miss quite often. There are better ways of doing AoE damage, which we talk about later.
Legendary Implants
The best legendary implant is Dispatcher. It will make any crit with a weapon attack generate 1 Rage and that means you hardly ever run out, which makes the spec just that much easier to play. Additionally, it will give you an autocrit on your execute Vicious Throw or on Vicious Slash, after activating Dual Saber Throw, which boosts your dps. But the main reason you want this is the extra Rage, which makes it so you can spam your abilities much more than you could otherwise.
The second implant that you should use for either PVP or PVE is Berserker’s Call. Not be confused with Berserker’s Package, this one reduces the cooldown of Frenzy and buffs all your damage by 5% for 10 seconds after activating Berserk.
Gear & Stats
PVP
For PVP, you can either use the Thyrsian PVP gear which goes up to item level 336, or any higher item level PVE gear such as the modded 336 item level gear from Hyde & Zeek or the Rakata 344 gear. They will all give you almost the same stats as soon as you enter a Warzone or Arena.
Critical: 4100
Alacrity: 2154
Accuracy: 1100
For stats, you want to get your alacrity rating to around 2150. That will allow you to get your global cooldown to 1,4 seconds. To get to that rating you can use one alacrity piece and three superior (golden) alacrity augments on top of your legendary implants. If you don’t have the gold augments, you can also do what I did here and use three alacrity pieces and your dispatcher implant, which will get you to about 2300 alacrity rating. A bit more than needed, but honestly it will not change your dps all that much.
Since about 50% of your damage comes from white hits and can miss, you need 5% accuracy in PVP. To get there, use one accuracy piece, the Advanced Kyrprax Proficient Stim, and two golden accuracy augments.
Once you have that, you want to get your critical rating to around 4000. More is better if you have the augments for it. But in my case, I am running 3 pieces with crit, plus the earpiece, Berserker’s Call implant, and 11 critical augments.
The best relics for PVP are the Thyrsian Relics of Serendipitous Assault and Focused Retribution.
PVE
Critical: 3765
Alacrity: 2128
Accuracy: 2704
The main difference when gearing for PVE is that you need 10% accuracy because operation bosses in Hardmodes and above will have 10% defense chance and can avoid both your white and yellow hits. So the #1 priority is to reach more than 2694 accuracy rating. However, you want to stay as close as possible to this number and don’t go much above it, as that would waste stats which you could put into crit otherwise.
With the best available gear currently in the game (Rakata 344) you need 3 armor pieces with accuracy, the Advanced Kyrprax Proficient Stim, and 4 gold accuracy augments.
For Alacrity, the goal will be the same, around 2150 will be fine. With Rakata gear, that means you need two pieces with alacrity, your two fully upgraded legendary implants, and 2 gold alacrity augments.
The rest of your stats should go into crit.
For relics, you want to run the Rakata 344 Relics of Focused Retribution and Serendipitous Assault. Or if you drop it first, use the Rakata Relic of Devastating Vengeance. The difference in dps is very small.
Builds
Warzone PVP Build
Level 23: I run Juyo Rend. The 10 fury on using Force Rend makes it so you have Berserk up faster, which means more crits, more heals, more rage generation, and a higher uptime on the buff from your Berserker’s Call. Draining Center does more dps in a perfect world, but PVP is rarely a perfect world and often you would need to delay your Force Rend until you have Berserk ready, which makes the extra damage you get from Draining less attractive.
Level 27: Predation is one of the best abilities in the game. It breaks roots and buffs your whole group with 80% movement speed (!) and 10% melee/ranged defense chance. You are trolling if you’re not running this.
Level 39: Rupturing Rage. The 20% trauma healing debuff can go a long way in finishing off a target, especially a healer.
Level 43: Bleeding Center makes Berserk generate 4 Rage. Great synergy with Juyo rend. It also makes your bleed crits generate Fury, which means even more Berserk. What’s not to like?
Level 51: Interloper is required, as otherwise anyone you leap to can just force speed away. Next to Predation, this is your best way to catch up to ranged players, of which there are plenty in the warzones today, so take this.
Level 64: Blood Ward gives you Crowd Control immunity, in this case, 6 seconds of immunity to stuns, sleeps, lifts, and incapacitating effects. Must-have for PVP.
Level 68: I like Mad Dash, because it can be used both offensively (chasing after ranged players) or defensively (running away or avoiding incoming damage during the dash). Undying Rage is powerful too, but is only a defensive tool and since Annihilation can get kited easily, I prefer Mad Dash.
Level 73: I tried all three options here but none are great. Thirst for Rage gives you some extra Rage once every 5 minutes, which you don’t really need. The heal sounds good on paper, but in PVP you will receive less incoming heal because of the trauma debuff. Interceptor gives you a 50% slow on Force Charge and Force Rend, which can be nice. But most classes that you want to slow have an immunity or slow breaker and it only lasts for 6 seconds so meh. I finally ended up running Brazen, because 2% damage reduction is better than nothing and the added Fury when attacked means more damage and more heals overall.
Arena PVP Build
This class sucks ass in Arena, but if you must play it, I would run Undying Rage instead of Mad Dash because dying in Arena sucks more than in a Warzone.
PVE Build
For PVE, you will have better uptime compared to PVP, so you can run Draining Center at level 23. However, Juyo Rend is still easier to use and will do more than enough dps, or maybe even more if you are new to the game because it makes resource management that much easier.
Other than that, I recommend picking up Blood Wave at level 39. The other two options are useless in PVE and Blood Wave lets you do some nice AoE damage to adds in Operations or otherwise.
At level 51, you don’t need the second leap in PVE, so the AoE damage reduction from Steel Self is nice since a lot of the damage you take in PVE will be coded as AoE.
At level 73, run Thirst for Rage for even more self-healing.
How to Do Damage
PVP
The combo below is how you usually want to start a fight. Of course, you cannot always follow this “rotation” because PVP is dynamic, people kite, they use defensives, etc. so you will need to react and change your combo to counter your opponents.
Make sure to build 30 stacks of Fury before the fight starts.
Use Force Charge to leap to an enemy and build some Rage
Pop Deadly Saber just before Battering Assault.
Next, Rupture.
Then pop Berserk and Force Rend.
Now you can either use Smash to spread your dots if there are multiple targets in 5m range or use Annihilate if there is only one target.
Once this combo is done you have to decide whether you can stay on the same target or you need to switch because they used a defensive or started kiting. If you want to stay on the same target, follow up with Dual Saber Throw and spam Vicious Slash until Deadly Saber and Force Rend come off cooldown. Then you repeat this combo.
PVE Rotation
For the PVE Rotation you can remember 6 rules:
Use Deadly Saber on cooldown.
Always combine Berserk and Force Rend (to make use of Draining Center). If you have perfect uptime, Berserk should be available shortly after Force Rend comes off cooldown.
Use Annihilate on cooldown.
Use Dual Saber Throw only with the Pulverize proc.
Ravage / Battering Assault can be used as fillers to manage Rage
Vicious Throw replaces Vicious Slash after Dual Saber Throw if you target is below 30%. (to make use of the autocrit from Dispatcher’s Package)
This is how two blocks of the rotation look. (read from left to right, starting in the first row) The PVE rotation uses the same opener as the PVP combo. So after you apply all you DoTs to the target, follow up with Annihilate, Dual Saber Throw and then Spam Vicious Slash until Deadly Saber comes off cooldown. Spam some more Vicious Slash until Berserk + Rend combo is up again. Rinse and repeat.
Defensive Cooldowns
Predation gives you and your group movement speed and defense chance for 10 seconds and only has a 30-second cooldown so you can use it quite liberally. The only reason I would not use this to start a fight is because I anticipate that I am going to need to root break soon, for example when fighting a Sorcerer or Sniper.
Predation Tooltip Cloak of pain reduces all damage taken by 20%, reflects some damage back at your attacker and refreshes its duration to a maximum of 30 seconds. If you took Steel Self for PVE, this will also give you 30% AoE damage reduction. Since it has a short cooldown of 1 minute, I typically use this second.
Cloak of Pain Tooltip If you took Undying Rage, I would typically use it third. It lasts only for 6 seconds but reduces 99% of incoming damage. So, dying through this is a special achievement. If you manage to do it, please send me a video!
Undying Rage Tooltip Saber Ward buffs your defense chance, yellow damage reduction, and makes you immune to Crowd Control. Unfortunately, it has a very long cooldown of 3 minutes, so make sure you don’t waste it.
Saber Ward Tooltip Force Camouflage is like all your other cooldowns combined. It buffs movement speed, removes all cleansable effects, grants you cc immunity, and reduces damage taken by 50%. The only thing it does not do is increase your defense chance and that’s only because it turns you invisible which would make defense chance. Camouflage is one of the best defensives in the game and only has a 45-second cooldown. But still, don’t be a noob and use it as soon as something hits you! Instead, use it strategically to avoid a PowerTech or Engineering Sniper bursting you or a boss in PVE casting a big raid-wide hit. In PVP, I usually use this last when my HP is running low, run away from the fight, so my healers can do their job, before re-engaging the fight.
Gameplay Tips
Use Smash or Sweeping Slash during downtime to build Fury while moving.
Many people don’t know how Blood Wave works. So when you use Rupture it will send out a wave around your primary target and if those secondary targets have DoTs on them, it will trigger additional damage for each dot. Some people assume it will tick the dots, but it does not. It simply does extra damage that will show up under Rupture in the combat log. So to maximize this, apply your dots to the primary target, spread them to the additional targets and then spam rupture on the target the center. In PVP, this is hard to use since people are usually not standing still. So you are better off just using your Single Target rotation and adding in Smash to spread your dots. But in PVE this can do around 40-50k dps, which is not good enough to compete with the top dogs, but if you need to clear some adds, it can be good to know.
Easy classes to face
As long as you save your breaker for Electro Net, Mercenaries cannot really kite you. You don’t have the damage to kill them fast, but neither do they. So this will be a longer sustained fight, which is what Annihilation wants.
Vengeance Juggernauts can obliterate your whole team if you are not careful, but they are great targets to spread your DoTs off, since they like to be in the middle of the fight. Also, your group healing can help healers keep up with Vengeance’ insane AoE dps.
Hard classes to face
Advanced Prototype PowerTechs are a bad matchup in PVP because they outrange you and can one-shot you before you have even fully stacked your Deadly Saber.
The same goes for Engineering Snipers. They will one-shot you from 50% HP and if you ever get close to them through Plasma Probe, Knockback root, and three rolls, they still have Hololocate and a passive that heals them for 6k hps while they are in cover.
Synergies
Annihilation goes well with other Marauders because being able to chain two Predations together means, you are way harder to kite or chase down.
Annihilation also goes well with tanks, who can turn the game into an AoE sustain battle and keep you from getting one-shot.
That’s all for this guide. Have a question? Let me know in the comments below!