The best Bulwark Space Marine build - Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

Published September 24, 2024 11:02 AM, by Aidan O'Brien

The job of the Bulwark is to survive. When everyone else is dead, you won’t be. Ideally, things won’t come to that, but you also act as a useful lightning rod for your team, absorbing the worst strikes from the Tyranids and the Thousand Sons and buying them the time to take out pressing threats.

The best Bulwark Space Marine build in Space Marine 2

For our Bulwark build, we will aim to plant ourselves in the bottleneck between our friends and our foes and mow down countless enemies. There is a lot to consider here, as both survival and the right type of damage output are key. Primary among our concerns is that if we are surrounded by enemies, we need weapons and perks that will help with that.

Class Ability

The Chapter Banner is our main perk, allowing us to place a banner that restores armor to all nearby friendlies while the banner is active. We also gain an extra 20% max health as a passive, not from the active banner. Our playstyle will be to draw in enemies, place our Banner, mow them down, and constantly draw out parries, which we will then use to give ourselves some big bonuses from our perks.

Perks

You have access to eight columns, each of which contains three perks. You need to level up your character by playing Operations. You may only have one active perk per column. 

Core

• Intimidating Aura - a perfectly timed Parry deals area-of-effect damage within a 5-meter radius.
• Shock and Awe - enemies in a Shock area take 25% more damage.
• Defensive Advantage - a perfectly timed Parry creates a Shcok area for 5 seconds. The cooldown is 30 seconds.

Team

• Advanced Conditioning - Contested Health fades 50% more slowly for all squad members. 

Gear

• Focused Strength - Shield Bash knocks enemies back and makes them lose control for longer.
• Invigorating Icon - When the banner is activated, all squad members regain maximum contested health. This can be incredibly useful during massive waves or boss fights.
• Inspiration - All squad members within the banner’s area of effect deal 10% more damage. Consider swapping with Glory’s Shield if staying alive is proving an issue.

Signature

• Emergency Countermeasure- When your armor is depleted, a reserve shock grenade automatically detonates at your position. The cooldown is 120 seconds. (Frankly, this is the only signature perk with any real value).

Weapons

For weapons, it’s a Plasma Pistol and a Power Sword. The Power Sword takes some getting used to, but it is definitely worth the effort as it can deal with mob and single targets, has good speed and damage, and comes in all the defensive archetypes, so you can pick what you like. The main nuance to it is that you will be used to holding the melee button for heavy attacks, but with the Power Sword, that will change your stance. As such, you need to attack and then hold to do a heavy, which will also force a stance change, so be aware of that.

The Bulwark's real complexity is the Power Sword. If you master it, you are a god; if you don’t, you are just another unnamed Space Marine. The trick here is to practice switching between the two stances: the heavy stance for mobbing and the speed stance for dealing with more challenging, single targets. 

We also have a lot of benefits from parry, so choose a weapon that will give you the parry window you need. I strongly suggest you get used to a balanced blade, learn to parry correctly with it, and then take advantage of the increased cleave for more healing and damage output.

For the Plasma Pistol, I am all about going for a model with good venting speed and damage and then building the first three perks in the bottom line of the perk tree before jumping up a level and taking all of the top. This will give you a weapon that allows you to dump out considerable area-of-effect damage that will both vent fast and charge fast, perfect for maximum damage while you are repositioning.

And there you have it, a Bulwark build that, with practice, will act as a perfect beach upon which the waves of enemies may crash. If you need more helpful guides, be sure to check out our Space Marine 2 page.