Marathon Night Marsh Map Guide

Marathon Night Marsh Map Guide Quick Summary:

• Night Marsh turns Dire Marsh into a darker, slower, more dangerous map where sound, lighting tools, and careful movement are extremely important.
• UESC Certs are the key resource because they are tied to extraction, Complex access, network towers, and high-value loot routes.
• The Complex room is the main map objective, but it takes planning, getting UESC Certs, an Observation Labs key, and a tough Frost Warden fight.
• Close-range weapons, suppressed guns, Sentinel, Recon, Thief, and Assassin all fit the map’s low-visibility combat much better than loud run-and-gun play.

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Night Marsh Overview

Night Marsh is season’s 2 new map mode that raises the stakes. Dire Marsh is known for its low visibility due to fog clouds, as this map is, well, a marsh. With Night mode, this is taken even further. You have to rely on your other senses as much as you would on your vision. There are no safe exfils, so you’ll have to take a risk every time. The Night Marsh modifier is available the whole first week of season 2, and after that, it’ll rotate between normal Dire Marsh and the night version every 90 minutes. Here are all the main features the Night Marsh brings:

• Low Visibility: Can’t go far without a flashlight, and even with it, you still don’t see much, but you become very visible from a distance.
• Emphasis on Sound and Tools: Your hearing is your everything on this map, and lighting tools like Vector rounds and grenades are extremely useful.
• Risky Extractions: Just like on Outpost and Cryo, you won’t be able to just exfil. You’ll either have to fight your way through the enemies or use UESC Certs, which are a new drop available on this map only. More on them later.

The Night Marsh is how the night maps in extraction shooters should be done. People tend to compare the extraction genre to horror games, but the night version makes you feel it even further. If you feel that you’re ready for it, unlock it by reaching Runner level 3 and extracting from Dire Marsh at least once. After that, you’ll be able to play with no problem. If you wanna see more info on Night Marsh, check out these dev tips.

How to Play on Night Marsh

Night Marsh doesn’t favor the run-and-gun approach that you’d normally take on other maps, slowing things down to a crawl, but it somehow doesn’t feel boring. One might say that this makes this map a rat den, but there are a few ways you can fight them:

• Flashlight: The most basic tool. Actually hurts you more than it helps, never turn it on while on the outside, unless you really need to.
• Vector Rounds and Grenades: These items are priceless on Night Marsh. Both of them work similarly. Vector rounds create light pools after you hit an enemy with them, and grenades create the light pools on explosion. It’s also good to put psychological pressure on your opponent cause now they can’t fight you and have to rotate in order not to get killed.
• Darskight Scopes: A LiDAR scope that lets you see the enemy more easily. It’s not an infrared scope as many believed it would be, but instead more like a radar. If you don’t want to give away your location with a flashlight, this is the best option, especially when outside.
• Flares: You know how they work from virtually every FPS ever. Throw it like a grenade and watch it highlight the surroundings with its bright light. Cheap version of Vector grenades.

During each encounter, always try to utilize one of these tools. It’s always ideal to use Vector items, but if you don’t have access to them, the Darksight scope or flares work well enough. The flashlight should be used as a last resort only. Here are some tips and mistakes to avoid to play well on Night Marsh:

• Don’t Make Noise: Before entering a POI, listen carefully and make sure that you’re the only one there.
• Don’t Rush: Not only does it make a lot of noise, but you can easily hit an environmental hazard on the way.
• Farm UESC Certs: These are the lifeblood of this map. You can’t get anywhere without them. You can’t even exfil if you don’t have those. I recommend farming them on the edges of the map first.
• Target Complex If Geared: The night version locks it behind UESC Certs and an Observation Labs priority item. You’ll find prestige loot in this POI if you manage to complete a few events.
• Use Lighting Tools: For your own sake, throw in a flare or a Vector when you go into the room first.

For the last tip, I want to emphasize that you need to track your Certs before exfilling. Nothing is more disheartening than realizing you don’t have enough Certs to call in an extraction. Now let’s talk about how you can open the Complex room and get all the juicy prestige loot from it.

Night Marsh Complex Room Guide

The main appeal of this map is going into the Complex building to find some nice loot. It's sort of reminiscent of Outpost cause everyone on the map will try to gather the Certs as fast as possible and then push the Complex. Expect heavy gunfights there. In this section, I provide a detailed Night Marsh Complex room guide.

1. Find 3 UESC Certs that drop from every enemy that drops a box from them. Once you have three of them, activate the network towers. One network tower takes 3 Certs to use. Every big POI has them.
2. Activating a network tower spawns a cache somewhere around the map, and you need to go and loot it. You're looking for Observation Labs priority item drop. 
3. Alternatively, you can interact with red chests around the map during the Warden event, and you can find an Observation Labs key there. Unfortunately, the Warden event usually starts at the end of the round, so there's a high probability that you won't have enough time to loot the Complex room, or that it will already be looted.
4. You need to go to Complex's upper floors and use it there to activate an encounter. Before you go, find 7 UESC Certs to open any of the garage doors on Complex.
5. Fight bots, go up the elevator, and look around. At the end of the room, you'll find a Door Controls stand that you need to interact with. This will open up the colored security boxes with an arrow up symbol, like the ones you need to shoot to open the doors in the West Gate on Dire Marsh.
6. Breaking the boxes will open the doors they correspond to. Once you open all doors and get to the middle room, you'll see a big control panel that will prompt you to use the Observation Labs key. 
7. Use it, and it will spawn lots of UESC enemies, along with a new Frost Warden. Fight the boss as you usually do. During the encounter, you need to look at the object at the center of the room. When it turns red, look around the room and break the boxes just like you did before. The image on the wall will tell you how many boxes you need to break to continue the event.

After you finish the encounter, go to the room opposite the one where you fight the boss, and inside it, you'll find Prestige loot. This room is very lucrative and regularly drops high-end loot, so try to go for it every time.

 

 

Best Runner Shells for Night Marsh

Though there are no shells that won’t be useful on this map, there are a few that will definitely be more useful than the others. Season 2 adds a new Sentinel Shell, which is a defensive specialist. His abilities are made for indoor encounters, and this is the best Runner Shell for Night Dire Marsh easily. Here are some other Shell recommendations:

• Sentinel: New Shell’s ability to catch grenades with its Prime and scan the enemy position with its Trait 1 is amazing. My top pick for this map.
• Recon: With the rework, her abilities are a huge threat, and they make any problems with low visibility redundant.
• Thief: Good for scanning with a drone, and thanks to the darkness, you can do it basically anywhere now without worrying about being found.
• Assassin: Might be a little of an overkill, but this Shell basically makes you unseen at all times. Even if someone opens fire on you, just pop invisibility and rotate.

Destroyer and Triage are decently good on this map, but I don’t recommend using Vandal at all. Her strength is in mobility, and what good does it do if you can’t run around?

 

 

Best Weapons for Night Marsh

While most weapons here would work fine, this is primarily a close-encounter map due to the short sightlines. The developers have added two new weapons: a KKV-9SD, which is a suppressed SMG that will work wonderfully on Night Dire Marsh, and a D54 Battle Pistol, which is a three-round burst sidearm. Out of the two, I’ve only tried a D54, and it shreds. Was able to take down a blue shield in 4 bursts or so. I wouldn’t say that there are specific weapon models that I recommend, but instead I’ll tell you which weapon types will work in certain scenarios:

• Use Supressed weapons to deal with UESC quietly. If possible, kill them with a knife.
• SMGs and Pistols are the main bread and butter of this map, especially in rooms.
• ARs, LMGs, and Snipers all work pretty badly here. The only way to use them is outside with a thermal optic. If you have one, then by all means.
• Shotguns are a coin toss here. They might work when you already know the position of a person, but in total darkness, one mistake quickly leads to your death.

As for the railguns or exotic weaponry, I wouldn’t take them. While a Railgun can really help against a Frost Warden in the Complex room, I’d rather keep it stashed for Cryo. For the first few raids, try to take at least one gun that you shoot well with for the panic fights, and trust me, there will be lots of them.

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