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Marathon Season 2 is almost here, bringing about the game's first seasonal reset but also adding two new weapons, a new Runner Shell, and plenty more. 'Nightfall', as it's appropriately called, will also introduce Marathon's first new-ish map, Night Marsh, as well as a selection of night-vision and illumination-based equipment to counter the shadows. Those are just some of the headline additions too, so if you want a thorough rundown of everything you need to know about Marathon Season 2, I've got you covered.
UPDATE - June 2: The patch notes for Season 2 are live now, detailing all the changes in the latest update.
Marathon Season 2 start time
Season 2 of Marathon begins at 5pm UTC on June 2, which works out as the following times in different regions:
- US Pacific: 10am PDT on June 2
- US Eastern: 1pm EDT on June 2
- UK: 6pm BST on June 2
- Central Europe: 7pm CEST on June 2
- Eastern Australia: 3am AEST on June 3
Not long afterwards, the Marathon free week will also begin, letting anyone join the fray for free until June 9. Running at the same time is a new experimental mode called Sponsored Survival, which sees a single team of runners occupy Night Marsh to fight the UESC. There are no exfils besides the final exfil, and the run timer is reduced to 18-minutes to amp up the pressure. Runners will face plenty of UESC forces and anomaly horrors but Rook scavengers will eventually be able backfill.
Remember, the start of Season 2 also marks a near-full reset with the end of Season 1. Things like your Runner Level, Faction Levels, Faction Upgrades, Faction Contracts (except for liaison contracts), Credits, and your entire inventory and vault will be reset to zero – you can read the full list of reset items here.
After the Marathon Season 2 release date, Cryo Archive will make its return on June 11, giving you just over a week to rank up those factions and gather the best gear possible to take on the Compiler boss. After that, Ranked will return on June 14.
Marathon Season 2 Sentinel Runner Shell
Sentinel is the first new Marathon Runner Shell, with a more defensive, trap-focused kit designed to counter aggressive chargers, be they Runners or UESC:
- Prime ability – Defender System: A deployable device that destroys incoming enemy grenades and projectiles, but it has limited charges to do so. Crewmates near the device also gain improvements to weapon handling.
- Tactical ability – Snare Mine: A throwable, sticky, proximity mine that fires out slowing goo projectiles when triggered.
- Trait 1 – Castle Doctrine: After taking explosive damage, gain increased resistances. When surrounded by enemies, close-range small arms weapons gain increased ready and reload speeds.
- Trait 2 – Prey Tracker: Activate a short-range motion tracker on your HUD that reveals moving enemies.
Marathon Season 2 Night Marsh map
Marathon is also getting its first new map with Season 2 – kind of. Dire Marsh (Night) is, as it sounds, a new version of the utterly inhospitable Dire Marsh map set in almost total darkness. You also need to watch out for the Anomaly as it's more active, causing monstrous combatants to emerge and audiovisual hallucinations.
To deal with this, all players are given a toggleable flashlight that will help with navigating the dark of Night Marsh specifically, but the sandbox is also being expanded with several new items focused on revealing what lurks in the dark – I've explained these in the next section! The map also features a smaller player count, so the chances of running into fellow Runners are slimmer.
While the layout of Night Marsh seems largely unchanged from regular Dire Marsh, one addition is the newly accessible upper floor of Complex. Taking cues from the Outpost Marathon map, this high-tier loot area can only be unlocked by gathering encryption certificates from UESC forces. You can use these encryption certs to hack Network Towers, which unlock gear stockpiles, and unlock exfil beacons.
Bungie has stated that, after the first week of Season 2, Dire Marsh and Night Marsh will rotate every 90 minutes rather than both being available at the same time. Conveniently, you'll be able to complete most Dire Marsh-specific Priority Contracts on Night Marsh too, with some exceptions, and there will also be Night Marsh-exclusive contracts.
Marathon Season 2 weapons
Season 2 of Marathon introduces a whole host of sandbox changes and new gear, with two new close-range Marathon weapons being the focus:
- New weapons:
- KKV-9SD: A rapid-fire (1200RPM) SMG with an integrated suppressor. Can be equipped with the Folding Stock mod mentioned below!
- D54 Battle Pistol: A full-auto, burst-fire pistol with an integrated red-dot optic.
- Additionally, weapon drop rates are being adjusted, so you may find that weapons that were common in Season 1 are now harder to come by in Season 2.
- New equipment:
- Frost Mine: Deployable mine similar to a claymore that detonates with a spherical blast that deals moderate damage and spreads the Frost debuff to enemies hit by it.
- Vector Grenade: A grenade that creates a lingering lidar pulse that highlights objects and enemies in its radius, making it great for mapping out dark areas.
- Signal Flare: Toss one out to light up the area. These flares come in red, green, and blue colors and each have a unique lens flare shape to help you tell them apart.
- New weapon mods:
- Folding Stock: Fold it to improve your hip-firing at the cost of penalties to aiming with your sights or unfold it to improve your ADS and sacrifice those hip-fire boosts.
- Darksight Scopes: A new type of full-screen optic with a night-vision mode toggle that can reveal objects and enemies in the dark.
- Vector Rounds: These are more of an additional perk for existing magazine mods rather than a new mod by themselves. One Superior-rarity magazine mod in every family will come with Vector Rounds by default, which causes the next shot fired after briefly aiming down sights to create a revealing pulse like a Vector Grenade or Darksight Scope where it impacts.
- New weapon chips:
- Brain Freeze: Precision downs and kills create a small Frost explosion.
- Alarmist: After ADS-ing for a brief period, bullet impacts make a proximity drone alert noise.
- Scrapyard: Enemies killed with this weapon have a chance to spawn depleted healing items or standard materials.
Implants are also being re-worked quite substantially with the emphasis now on the perks they provide rather than the stats. They're still limited to head, torso, and leg slots but now each Implant is named after the perk and comes with a fixed array of stats that scale with rarity.
There are many other balance changes for the sandbox, but I think you'll be most pleased to hear that vault space is being increased, with a fully upgraded vault now containing 512 slots. There's also going to be a batch selection feature, which may help you with the new Cradle system.
Marathon Season 2 The Cradle
Faction Upgrades that provide stat boosts will be replaced with a new system known as the Cradle. In the Cradle menu, all Runner Shell stats are divided into six categories that you can allocate points to, increasing the relevant stats and even unlocking additional benefits at certain thresholds:
- Strength: Melee Damage and Finisher Siphon
- Recharge: Prime Recovery and Tactical Recovery
- Dexterity: Agility and Loot Speed
- Endurance: Heat Capacity and Fall Resistance
- Support: Revive Speed and Ping-Duration
- Resistance: Self-Repair, Hardware, and Firewall
To get more points to allocate you need to increase your Cradle Level, which is done by converting unwanted gear into Cradle XP – here’s where you can use that batch selection feature! All Cradle progression is shared across every Runner Shell and you can freely re-allocate your points as much as you want to suit your ideal build, but it also resets at the end of every season.
There are loads of other changes and quality-of-life improvements coming to Marathon in Season 2, which you can read about in this article from Bungie. To give you some quick highlights, Marathon Factions will be easier to rank up in terms of reputation, and their upgrades will be less material-intensive to unlock; Priority Contracts will feature fewer "in a single run" requirements to make them a bit easier; and a Duos queue with a daily map rotation will be added too!
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