Season 2 Combat Tuning Preview

Today, we wanted to give you a clearer look at the kind of work taking shape for Season 2’s combat sandbox. Learn more about Season 2, including Night Marsh, the new Runner shell Sentinel, and the Cradle here.

Season 2 gives us a chance to keep building on the parts of Marathon that players are already connecting with, while also making the overall combat experience clearer, more expressive, and more rewarding to learn over time.

The new season gives us a chance to take a holistic look at everything in the game beyond isolated changes. It’s about how fights come together as a whole. How your weapons feel in their intended role. How your build changes the decisions you make. How new tools can help you survive when things get hectic. And how your Runner shell's kit can embody more identity from one encounter to the next.

We’re focusing on weapons, mods, buildcrafting, equipment, survival, Runner shells, implants, and the sandbox as a whole in Season 2. Across all of these areas, the goal is the same: We want your choices to feel more intentional, we want to make engaging with our deep systems easier, and we want more parts of your loadout to feel like they truly matter once you're Tau Ceti-side.

Let’s get into it.

Let’s start with the loud part.

For the launch of Season 2, we are focusing on making weapons easier to use and reinforcing their intended roles. We want weapons to be clearer in their purpose and more distinct from one another when you're both using them and fighting against them.

That work includes broader updates to ammo economy, time to kill, and range identities so that close-range tools stay dangerous up close, mid-range options better hold their ground, and weapon roles are easier to understand from one fight to the next.

Season 2 also brings a couple of new weapons into that conversation:

Some longtime, keen-eyed Marathon fans may have noticed one of our new weapons might be a little familiar. Coming in Season 2, the KKV-9SD is pistol frame SMG with an integrated suppressor and is a perfect companion for fighting the terrors on Night Marsh. This means it takes pistol optic and pistol magazine mods, as well as chips. It is the fastest fire rate we've ever shipped on a weapon and excels at close range combat, specifically mowing down eager shotgun rushers. Its Prestige mod, Flechette Drum, adds sustainability by healing you when breaking a hostile's shield.

Our second weapon for Season 2 is the D54 Battle Pistol which is a fully automatic, 3-round burst handgun. The Battle Pistol is designed to flex between Pistol and Magnum archetypes and to have advantage in 1v1 duels. It is an excellent companion when used with other hard-hitting archetypes—don't waste time reloading your sniper or shotgun, swap to the D54 Battle Pistol and you're good to go. Its Prestige mod, the Daredevil Stock, takes advantage of the new folding stock mod archetype: while folded, enemy defeats builds up to 2 stacks, and when unfolded, the D54 Battle Pistol's fire is converted into a super burst of 9 rounds, which can be fired as many times as you have stacks. More on the new folding stock below.

The broader hope here is simple. We want weapon choices to feel more deliberate, and we want you to be able to feel what makes a weapon special in a way that breaks down friction and lets you dive into the fight you most want to take.

So while we won’t go through every weapon change here (look out for the full patch notes on release), let’s start with the monster in the room: Misriah 2442. While it’s easy to say the Misriah rose up in the wake of the WSTR changes, the truth is it was always a strong and popular option, and it ended up on our radar long before its continued dominance.

The biggest change we’re making here isn’t to the Misriah itself; rather, we are removing the rate of fire bonuses from Slick Mag magazine mods altogether. While it was an interesting experiment since the Misriah is the only weapon to take those mods, it isn’t sustainable. The idea was Misriah’s main weakness was its slow rate of fire, allowing players to counter Misriah by correctly spacing and attacking in between shots. Slick Mag presented an opportunity to shore up that weakness, but it’s clear it was pushing the weapon and its Prestige mod too far out of band.

So to that end, we’ve made the following suite of changes:

Misriah 2442

• Increased pellet spread in hip fire by 10%.

• Increased pellet spread while aiming down sights by 5%.

• Increased base rate of fire from 58RPM to 72RPM.

  • This is to compensate for the removal of increased fire rate stats previously granted by Slick Mag magazine mod family.

• Rebased magazine stat so now every mag will result in at least +1 round in the magazine.

• Base magazine size remains at 4 and max magazine size remains 10.

• Reduced base damage falloff start from 11 meters to 10 meters.

• Increased max damage falloff start from 15 meters to 16 meter

Full-Auto Selector Prestige Mod

This mod had static gameplay and buildcrafting experiences, so to improve these we've made the following changes:

• Rate of fire increase granted from Full-Auto Selector reduced from 150RPM to 90RPM.

• Added +50 ADS Speed and +50 ADS Accuracy.

• While firing from the hip, Misriah will fire full auto, have an additional 10% pellet spread increase, and massively increased Stability.

• While aiming down sights, Misriah has massively increased range and much tighter pellet spread but does not fire full auto.

We believe these changes allow for more interesting spatial plays with the Prestige Mod, utilizing the different firing modes based on proximity to enemies while also tying in more buildcrafting potential—you can focus on increasing the potency of either the hip fire mode or the ADS mode.

Let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum. While the Misriah is a popular weapon, the Overrun and the CE Tactical Sidearm were less popular options.

First up on the Overrun, we wanted to keep it simple to start because this weapon is only a couple of value changes away from > running over the other rifles. But we agree it still needs a little bit of juice. So for Season 2’s launch we made the following changes:

• Overrun

  • Reduced horizontal and vertical recoil for base weapon, resulting in more control at lower rarity tiers:

    • Horizontal recoil reduced by ~50%.

    • Vertical recoil reduced by ~12%.

The high-level Superior Overrun is still performing pretty admirably against other rifles, so our focus was to make running a lower-tier Overrun in a budget build or in a Sponsored Kit less painful. Go ahead, enjoy those CyAc Sponsored Kits.

For the CE Tactical Sidearm, this weapon was always tuned in a way that if you built into it, and were hitting headshots you’d find plenty of success—but it’s clear we weren’t hitting that mark. Even at fully buildcrafted, the CE Tactical Sidearm is just not attractive enough to secure a warm seat in your Vault. In Season 2 you can expect the following changes:

• CE Tactical Sidearm

  • Increased the speed at which the weapon's recoil settles when firing by 15%.

  • Reduced ADS accuracy error multiplier by ~50%.

  • Rebased aim assist and magnetism min and max falloff distances:

    • Aim Assist

      • Minimum distance increased from 11 meters to 14 meters at base range stat and from 14 meters to 22 meters at maximum range stat.

      • Maximum distance increased from 22 meters to 25 meters at base range stat and from 21 meters to 29 meters at maximum range stat.

    • Magnetism

      • Minimum distance increased from 15 meters to 18 meters at base range stat and from 18.6 meters to 29.6 meters at maximum range stat.

      • Maximum distance increased from 25 meters to 26.2 meters at base range stat and from 24.8 meters to 39 meters at maximum range stat.

  • Rebased aim assist cone size stats:

    • Increased aim assist cone size at base aim assist stat by 33%.

    • Increased aim assist cone size at max aim assist stat by 16%.

    • Rebased hip fire and ADS projectile accuracy stats to compensate.

      • In general, this means an increase in projectile error all up to account for the increased aim assist cone size.

  • Reduced crouch accuracy bonus at max crouch accuracy stat by 117%.

  • Reduced moving accuracy bonus at minimum moving accuracy stat by 22%.

  • Increased moving accuracy bonus at maximum moving accuracy stat by 50%.

There’s a handful of more weapon-specific tunings happening at the launch of Season 2, but these are some of the big headliners. Expect more changes in the full patches on June 2!

A lot of combat starts before the first shot. Careful preparation and buildcrafting are key to survival on Tau Ceti IV. Season 2 was a chance to reflect on a lot of the mod stories for weapons and think about how we can make choices more meaningful and how mods can do more than just push stats up or down.

For Season 2, we're investing heavily in a few key areas for mods. First, we're adding two new families of mods and eight new families of chips. We also took heavy balance passes on every magazine and every optic mod. There's a lot to dive into; far more than we could detail in this article, so look for the full scope of every change coming to mods in the full patch notes.

Let's talk about the two new mod families. First up we have Folding Stocks:

Folding stocks are a new mod family that will first be present on the new KKV and D54 Battle Pistol weapons. They are similar to Shield Mods for the LMGs in that they provide a unique gameplay altering action.

When equipped, folding stocks are initially collapsed, and in this mode, they provide boosts to stats like hip fire accuracy and movement speed with that weapon. You can then press your alternate weapon action input to unfold the stock, trading the hip fire focused bonuses for boosts to ADS accuracy and range. We really love how these mods provide options for different playstyles on a single weapon and the ability to change strategies on the fly during combat.

Second, we're adding an entirely new archetype of optics mods, the Darksight Scopes. Naturally, with the debut of Night Marsh, we want to make sure you have all the tools necessary for precision execution in a dark and dangerous place.

Every archetype of weapon will receive their own Darksight Scope, and they come in two different rarities: Deluxe and Superior. All Darksight scopes will operate similarly. They all are a full screen vignette when aiming down sights—similar to how sniper thermal optics already work—but for every weapon. Secondly, while ADS, you can press the toggle optic input to activate the night vision effect and light up the world around them. The night vision effect is wider and covers more distance with the Superior version. Our goal is for their unique gameplay to be helpful not only on Night Marsh, but across the rest of the game as well.

Weapon chips are the backbone of weapon buildcrafting. They are the software upgrades that make your weapon do things that seem almost impossible. And on the topic of chips, we do have to do a bit of housekeeping to do. With Season 2, we are looking to rotate out a couple of chip families that were not meeting the bar for quality and performance—on both ends of the spectrum:

• Stack Overflow

  • Rotated all rarities out of the loot pool for Season 2.

• Optimal Prime

  • Rotated all rarities out of the loot pool for Season 2.

Stack Overflow was overperforming on certain weapons and in other cases was performing wildly below the bar. So we’re taking this one back to the lab for now. Optimal Prime, while potentially interesting from a buildcrafting standpoint, just did not find the niche we were hoping for, so that too will take a seat on the bench.

But fear not, eight new chip families are rotating in for their time in the sun. We won’t spoil everything here but here’s a couple of highlights:

• Alarmist (all rarities)

  • After aiming down sights for a brief duration, projectile impacts create a terrifying scan drone alert.

    • We heard you liked Ornithologist but we agree it’s weird to hear birds on Cryo. Maybe this will help?

• Scrapyard (all rarities)

  • Defeating hostiles with this weapon has a chance to spawn depleted health items or standard materials.

• Brain Freeze (Superior rarity only)

  • Precision downs or kills with this weapon create a small explosion that spreads Frost to nearby hostiles.

But already existing chips also had some changes too. Again, there’s too many to go through here but here’s a couple of previews:

• Bounty Hunter

  • Increased the amount of credits rewarded per UESC kill:

    • Standard: 10 credits increased to 25 credits.

    • Enhanced: 15 credits increased to 50 credits.

    • Deluxe: 20 credits increased to 75 credits.

    • Superior: 25 credits increased to 100 credits.

  • Fixed an issue where Bounty Hunter wasn't awarding credits upon killing UESC scan drones.

• Cloudborn

  • Redesigned perk benefits entirely:

    • While in smoke, this weapon passively has increased stability, accuracy, handling, and movement speed.

      • Previously the benefit was overflowing the magazine on reloading while in smoke.

Lastly for mods, we wanted to touch on optics and magazine mods. Every optic and magazine mod in the game had a full stat balance pass. These changes were largely to sand down some outliers while also trying to make more interesting choices for all the weapons that use any given family of optic or magazine. But there are a couple of big, important changes to note:

• Starting in Season 2, there will be no thermal optic option for snipers only.

  • Even as we brought in their range, snipers with thermals were just overperforming. We don’t view this as a permanent benching, but we are taking the time to cook on some longer gestating changes for how thermals work all up and until that time, we decided it was better to pull this ripcord now.

• Starting in Season 2, one Superior magazine mod in every family will come with the new Vector Rounds perk on it by default.

  • Vector Rounds is a new perk designed as an information tool that can help you mark space, track enemy movement, and create visibility in dark corners.

  • After aiming down sights for a short duration, the next projectile impact will create a revealing pulse, similar to the Darksight effect. Enemies caught in this detonation will be highlighted for a brief duration.

We’re extremely eager to see how buildcrafting is shaken up in Season 2. For the complete breakdown, the full patch notes will have you covered.

Weapons aren't the only tools at your disposal to survive out there during a run. Equipment plays a vital role in the combat sandbox and is often what players use to turn the tide of a fight.

... though perhaps some equipment items were a little too strong in Season 1. Before we get into the three new pieces of equipment you can expect to unleash next season, we want to take the opportunity to outline a few changes coming to equipment at the start of Season 2.

• Grenade ready animations extended by 0.2 seconds

The ready animation plays when a grenade is pulled out and primed. The throw (after the button has been released) is unchanged. We feel this change preserves the responsiveness and joy of throwing a grenade, but has a measurable effect on how many grenades can be thrown in rapid succession. The extra time also allowed us to polish the ready animations and make them a little more expressive.

• Frag Grenade

  • Reduced max damage by 15% (135 → 115).

• Heat Grenade

  • Reduced damage by 50% (40 → 20).

•  Signal Jammer

  • Visual and detection jamming will temporarily flicker off when a player performs actions, uses abilities, shoots their weapon, or takes damage.

  • No longer blocks detection by Early Warning System (Prestige Recon Core).

  • No longer blocks detection by Vital Intel (Stryder M1T Prestige Optic Mod).

Signal Jammers in Season 1 felt like a default requirement for any engagement because they offered a flat, guaranteed advantage whether you were repositioning for an ambush or sprinting directly into combat. We hope this change will make Signal Jammers reward tactical movement and stealth while being less effective during a firefight.

With that housekeeping out of the way, let’s talk about the new stuff.

First up, we have the Frost Mine. The Frost Mine is a placeable piece of equipment, similar to a Claymore. It detonates when an enemy is nearby and instead of a high damage conical blast like the Claymore, it explodes in a spherical blast dealing moderate damage but also spreading the Frost debuff to any enemy caught in it. Stay warm out there.

Second, we have the Vector Grenade. This grenade’s primary purpose is not damage, but rather information. When a Vector Grenade detonates, it creates a field of revealing pulses that linger in the world for a short time, highlighting spaces in a large area and any enemies inside its radius. This grenade is an essential companion in Night Marsh and in other hard-to-see places.

Lastly, we’re adding Signal Flares in three colors. Signal flares come in red, green, and blue varieties, and they each have a different lens flare shape. These don’t focus on damage but linger in the world providing some amount of light. We view these as communication tools for non-verbal Runners. Maybe in the heat of a fight, green flares are thrown and a new alliance is formed? Maybe you come across a blue flare that marks a piece of loot on the ground left by a benevolent Runner? The choice is in your hands.

Your biosynthetic shell is the foundation that defines your playstyle. In Season 2, we’re taking the first step of expanding our roster to give you more ways to explore and experience our perilous, alien world.

Meet Sentinel. This shell is a defensive specialist, made for carving out pockets of space within the battlefield and securing them with clever traps... and lethal force.

Sentinel’s kit is built around area control and adaptability under pressure. It brings a few fresh new tools to the battlefield:

• Defender System (Prime Ability):

  • Deploy a defensive platform that harmlessly neutralizes incoming explosives. You and your allies also gain increased weapon stability and reload speed when standing near the device. And as always, bear in mind that it’s got a limited number of projectiles to fire! Be sure to keep a steady eye out.

• Snare Mine (Tactical Ability):

  • Toss a proximity-triggered mine which detonates into several Immobilizing submunitions when enemies get too close.

• Prey Tracker (Trait Ability):

  • Activate motion tracking systems in your HUD that allow you to see moving enemies on radar within a conical zone in front of you.

• Castle Doctrine (Passive):

  • You ready and reload SMGs, Pistols, and Shotguns more quickly based on the number of nearby hostiles. When you take splash damage, your Hardware, Firewall, and Self-Repair Speed are increased for a short time.

Use your Prey Tracker to gather real-time information about enemy positions as they move, allowing you to set up the perfect ambush or hunt down a fleeing Assassin. Use your Snare Mines to stop a shotgun-rushing Destroyer in their tracks, or toss one under a UESC dropship for some immediate crowd control. When things get ugly, bunker down by deploying a Defender System to neutralize an incoming Rocket Drone missile barrage and whip out your KKV or Misriah to give a warm welcome to any unwanted visitors.

We’re also adding a full suite of 10 Sentinel-specific Runner cores across the various rarity tiers. Here’s a small taste:

• Reversal (Enhanced): Defeating an Immobilized target heals you over time.

  • Great for adding some sustain to your loadout if you’re low on medical consumables and don’t have a Triage in your crew.

• Wellness Beacon (Deluxe): While standing near your Defender System, you and your allies use medical items more quickly.

  • Useful for more support-focused playstyles where you want to keep your allies in the fight longer.

• Eminent Domain (Prestige): Runner grenades neutralized by your Defender System fall to the floor and become lootable.

  • The ultimate tool for countering throwable spam–literally throw your opponent’s grenades back at them.

We can’t wait to see how Sentinel shakes up the meta and what kinds of devious (or hilarious) plays you get up to.

Now let’s talk about implants.

Initially, our plan was to give cores and implants unique identities by focusing cores on powerful Runner-specific perks and implants on interesting packages of stat buffs. Our early playtesting led us to add random perks to implants in addition to the stats to help create more variety in the buildcrafting game. These proved very effective at expanding the depth of different playstyles available and quickly became the primary element driving choice around implants.

However, our implementation in Season 1 led to a number of problems. The system is challenging to use because the item names reflect the stat package and not what an implant’s perk is, information about what that perk does is buried in the tooltip, and you can’t look at an item in a container or on the floor and intuitively understand what exactly it does.

In Season 2, we’re taking significant steps to address these issues by reworking how implants are structured. Implants will be primarily focused on perks, with Runner stats being a secondary element. Every implant now grants a single fixed perk, which is reflected directly in the item name, and has a fixed stat package. As an example, you’ll be able to loot a Tox Injectors head implant which will give bonuses to your Firewall, Heat Capacity and Fall Resistance, or a Triage Cloaking Device torso implant which grants Revive Speed, Tactical Recovery, and Hardware.

With this rework, you’ll be able to collect all the same perks you could in Season 1 (even the unique perks from Prestige-tier implants, if you’re lucky!) plus eight brand-new ones we’ve added in Season 2, such as Going Dark which makes you invisible while using healing consumables. Certain implants will only drop at higher rarities, which you’ll need to delve into more challenging zones to find... or you can just acquire them from your fellow Runners.

One last note is that this is not the final form of implants. At-a-glance readability of the implant icons themselves the next thing on our radar, and  we’re cooking up some more changes here that we’re excited to roll out in the future.

Finally, we wanted to touch briefly on the rest of our changes for Runner shells.

Our focus this season has largely been on bugfixing and quality-of-life updates, such as improvements to the mantle system to make climbing up rough terrain more consistent, making movement smoother and reducing instances of desync, and addressing deathbox spawning to prevent them from ending up in inaccessible areas. One notable tuning change is that we’re reducing how much the Prime and Tactical Recovery stats accelerate the cooldowns of runner abilities at 100 stat, to make sure that we’re preserving opportunities for counterplay in high-level engagements.

Be on the lookout for our full patch notes page for the complete details on the changes and additional developer notes.

That’s a quick rundown of what’s to come with Season 2, so you can be better prepared dive right in on June 2nd. Reminder that there’s an Open Play Week from June 2 to June 9, where the full game will be available on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

Some of it is about refining the sandbox. Some of it is about adding new gear and new options. Some of it is about making the dark more playable while keeping its danger alive and well. And, some of it is about making sure that when you open your loadout, the choices in front of you feel thoughtful, useful, and worth exploring.

Our hope is that these changes make combat feel sharper, build choices feel more expressive, and every run feels like it gives you a little more room to learn, adapt, and find a style that clicks for you.

As these changes get into your hands, your feedback is going to matter a lot. We’ll be paying close attention to the places you already talk to us—especially our official Discord, Steam discussions, Reddit, and our MarathonDevTeam social channels on Twitter and Bluesky. We want to hear what is landing, what might feel off, what surprises you, and what is not doing the job it should.

Happy hunting.