Saber Interactive may have already revealed the first new class coming to Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2: the apothecary, a dedicated healer responsible for preserving the lives of his battle brothers, and harvesting the gene-seed of the dead. Fans suggested adding the class on the game’s official community site, Focus Together, and the dev team has marked the suggestion as a ‘Must Have’ that it “will really likely implement in the near future”.
Space Marine 2 released on Monday and has hit a peak of 225,690 concurrent players on Steam alone, according to Steam DB. In both the PVE ‘Operations’ mode and PVP ‘Eternal War’ mode, there are six Space Marine 2 classes to pick from, each with unique abilities, armaments, and in PVE mode their own perk trees and ability upgrades. They’re well defined, but there’s certainly room for more.
The Focus Together community website has a dedicated ‘Ideas’ portal for Space Marine 2, where fans can suggest and vote on changes they’d like to see in the game. As well as marking the proposal for an apothecary class as a ‘Must Have’, dev Hylia states “implementing new classes in the game is an idea we’ve had already”. They caution “this kind of additional content takes time”.
There are no new classes on the post-launch roadmap, which covers new content up until late 2025, so new classes are either a long way off or will arrive as a pleasant surprise. The first wave of updates will include a new enemy, new PVE missions, a ‘Lethal’ difficulty mode, and a new Space Marine 2 weapon, the Neo-Volkite pistol.
The closest thing the game has to a healer at present is the Bulwark, which has a deployable banner that repairs the armor of allies in a radius for several seconds, though this doesn’t heal any lost health. In Operations mode it’s possible to regain health via stimpacks found around the environment, but in Eternal War mode health doesn’t return at all.
In the Warhammer 40k universe apothecaries form part of the command structure of the Space Marine Chapters. One part of their role is as a medic, both on the battlefield, and performing post-battle surgeries on injured marines. They are also integral to the creation of new Space Marines, as apothecaries oversee the process by which aspirants are implanted with the unique Space Marine organs that transform them from adolescent humans into transhuman warriors.
An apothecary’s most sacred duty is to retrieve the progenoid glands, or gene-seed, from fallen Space Marines. The progenoids contain tiny copies of the marine’s specialised super-organs which can be cultivated in vitro and eventually implanted into a neophyte to begin their ascension into a full Space Marine.
In Space Marine 2, an Apothecary class would have unique weapons as well as its healing abilities. They carry an absolver bolt pistol that is excellent at cracking armor, as it’s intended for mercy kills on marines who are too wounded to be saved. The tool they use for battlefield surgery, the ‘reductor’, includes a high powered saw for just the same reason – it’s an effective melee weapon as well.
If you find yourself wishing there was an apothecary on hand every time you play Space Marine 2 multiplayer, check out our quick and dirty guide on how to play better in Eternal War mode.
Source: Wargamer
