In a 1v1, they’re pretty manageable as long as they aren’t lurking like the silent assassins they can be, but as soon as they mix in with a horde they become a nightmare since they prevent all cleave (even after their cleave mass reduction) and they’re unstaggerable. It makes it really noticeable when enemies clip inside of him and are able to get free swings from the safety of his groin until you’re able to kill him. This is worse when two or more of them stack on top of each other and they basically can become a single axe wielding helicopter.
So ideally, you would be able to kill them with a ranged character so you wouldn’t have to fight them in melee combat then, but with the overall power reduction they are really really tanky. At max hero power, on Legend:
- Kerillian’s longbow, with 18% power to chaos, still requires 3 body shots to drop them and does so little headshot damage to them it may as well heal them
-Sienna’s bolt staff requires two fully charged shots, and any other staff requires at least three, Pyromancer’s ult isn’t even able to one shot them in the head which leads me to believe that their head is copy and pasted from the Chaos Warrior’s
-Kruber’s longbow requires two body shots, and at least twice as many headshots, which is extremely frustrating since his talents are designed around rewarding the player for getting headshots with difficult to use weapons (and basically every trait in the game based on the headshot condition).
-Bardin’s Slayer requires several power attacks with dual axes to either the head or body, and his 2h hammer just doesn’t work since that weapon depends so heavily on bonus damage from headshot.
-Saltzpyre’s Bounty Hunter, with repeater pistol on blessed shot, is really the only weapon that can deal with them a timely manner.
Compare this to their skaven counterpart, the Stormvermin, which reward both melee and ranged players with a satisfying headshot for many weapons, from Executioner Sword, Glaive, Longbow, Flame Dagger, etc. This is positive feedback for a player, which is just thrown overboard when they find out that these casual looking mobs actually have a Chaos Warrior glued to their head. There is no way for a good player to use their skill to deal with them in a more efficient manner than just chugging out dps on their body. Otherwise they risk dealing with the helicopter in melee combat if the Marauder isn’t singled out. It isn’t necessarily gamebreaking, but it’s just downright unfun. And while the problem of enemy collision might be hard to fix, the Marauder issue can at least be toned down a bit by letting us reach a one shot headshot threshold on weapons like the executioner sword, glaive, longbow, and bolt staff.