The marionette is really easy if your server accepts the 2nd rotation tactic. That’s done by allowing a fail on purpose on lanes 4 and 5.
This is how my server (Baruch Bay) killed the last 9 marionetters:
Lane 1 gets 23-27 players
Lane 2 gets 22-25 players.
Lane 3 gets 20-22 players.
Lane 4 gets 15-18 players.
Lane 5 gets 15-18 players.
We usa that strat because it’s unlikely that we’ll get 25 on all paths. You need 15 on each path to defend phase 1, however you need 25 to complete phase 2 easier. So… our server makes sure lines 1 and 2 are in a really good shape and this is what happens:
Line 1 kills their champs (Hit in the back while 1 person tanks. If enemy is chasing someone, don’t run, just stop while others kill it, they dont hit hard).
- Lines 2 kills their champ (They follow a random player, that player must move the champ to the mines. In order to do that easily, everyone stand behind a mine, that way if he decides to choose 1 of you, he’ll hit a mine before reaching you. Once stunned by mine, dps until they move again).
- Line 3 tries to kill their champ (big enemies, they do a spin attack that can instakill melee players, try to be at maximum range unless really need. This enemy can also drop some bombs that stay in the battleground for a few seconds before exploding).
- Line 4 fails their champ.
- Line 5 fails their champ.
They both try, of course, because a suceed there would be awesome, however be expected for the fail.
(Champ 4 are doggies that put a blue area that usually wipes groups. The orange area is a warning, the blue one is the one that wipes so much people there. They also put confussion and you need to cure it or don’t hit while it lasts)
(Champ 5 are humanoid mechanic enemies that split into 2 when they die and charge to enemies. One of the easier ways to deal with them is to stack them up with Guardians GreatSword skill 5 or any other skills that affect groups. Nevertheless, this is just a dps race and can be done by any group, no need zerkers but zerkers will do this phase really faster and easier than others).
Until now you have 3 chains broken and you have the cannon meter at 50% (assuming that defense in all paths has been done perfect), now is time to enter the second rotation.
Lane 1: they kill the 4th champ, the doggies.
Lane 2: they kill the 5th champ, the ones that split.
Optional fix (if lane 3 couldn’t kill their champ in the first rotation, that’s ok, you’ll enter 2nd rotation with only 2 chains broken. At that moment it’s encouraged to complete champs 3-4 with the lines 1-2 and then make 3 players from each of the lines 4-5 move to the lane 3. That way, the 3rd line will have 6 more players to complete the last phase and they will fix their own misstake.
The 2nd rotation strategy has been succesfully done a lot of times. We got 9 marionettes killed in the past day using this strat. Other strats like the ones on dulfy (to go use people from lane 1 to help lane 4) might works for some servers, but it has been a fail to our server, a big fail. So… we’ll stick to the 2nd rotation strat since it works 90% of the times, it’s easier, and you don’t need people running around and screwing things out.
Try to lead it in teamspeak or through map chat. If you can make 100+ players understand this strategy, it’s almost 100% done. Have fun.
P.S. This same strat worked in an overflow the only 1 time that I dropped in overflow 30 minutes before it starts. It takes about that time to make sure that everyone understood what to do (or a bit more since i’m not native english and we had germans and french players also). However we won. It’s all about balancing the lines and knowing how to deal with champs.
But we cannot seem to get our act together for this event. I just did 3 tries over 5 hours spent camping in LP main on TC and all 3 were not just fails but horrible ones: 2/5, 1/5, 2/5.