Marathon Runner Shells Guide: Picking Your Poison

Extraction shooters are a meat grinder, and stepping onto Tau Ceti with the wrong synthetic body is a guaranteed death sentence.

Bungie is throwing a shiny coat of cyberpunk paint over a genre built on pure paranoia. Instead of playing a generic military grunt wrapping bandages around a gunshot wound, you play as a consciousness downloading into disposable, printed bodies called Runner Shells. It is a brilliant lore excuse for dying repeatedly. If you lose a body and all your hard earned loot, you just boot up a new one in orbit and try again.

But these Shells are not just cosmetic skins. They operate entirely differently, serving as Marathon's class system. The chassis you pick dictates whether you walk out of the zone with a backpack full of priceless artifacts or leave your expensive loadout in the mud for someone else to steal. I spent time digging into the kits for all seven available frames to figure out exactly how they function in a live fire scenario. The roster covers everything from hyper aggressive tanks to sneaky loot goblins. You need to understand what you are piloting, and more importantly, you need to know exactly what the enemy squad running over the hill is capable of doing to you.

The Destroyer

This is the class for players who lack subtlety and want to turn every extraction zone into a frontline war.

The Destroyer is essentially a walking tank built to breach rooms and anchor fights. You give up the quiet approach for the ability to soak up a massive amount of punishment while drawing attention away from your more fragile teammates. It is loud, it is aggressive, and it relies heavily on managing heat to stay mobile.

Destroyer Kit Breakdown

Built for the brute force approach. If you like kicking down doors and eating bullets, this is your shell.

Ability Type	Function and Details
Primary: Search & Destroy	Shoulder mounted missile pods that lock onto targets you have recently damaged. Fires a barrage of immobilizing, homing explosives.
Tactical: Riot Barricade	Deploys a frontal energy shield to block incoming fire. Cooldown penalty increases the longer it stays up and the more damage it absorbs.
Trait: Thruster	A lateral dash that works on the ground and in the air. Vital for dodging grenades.
Trait: Tactical Sprint	Moves faster than a standard sprint but generates a dangerous amount of heat buildup in the shell.

I see the Destroyer as the ultimate stalling tool. If your team is getting pushed hard while waiting for the extraction ship, throwing up the Riot Barricade buys you precious seconds. The Search & Destroy missiles also act as a fantastic execution mechanic. You do the hard work of breaking an enemy shield with your rifle, and then let the auto targeting rockets finish them off before they can duck behind cover.

The Assassin

Invisibility in a high stakes loot shooter is a recipe for broken keyboards, and the Assassin is built entirely around causing that exact brand of rage.

This shell is a backline disrupter. You are entirely focused on slipping past UESC patrols, flanking enemy teams, and striking when they are busy looting. The learning curve here will be steep. Invisibility is never absolute in multiplayer games, and firing a gun or taking a stray bullet will instantly rip you out of your camo.

Assassin Kit Breakdown

The coward's favorite tool. Master the smoke and you will extract with everyone else's gear.

Ability Type	Function and Details
Primary: Smoke Screen	Throws a disc that leaves a line of thick smoke, blinding players and completely scrambling targeting optics.
Tactical: Active Camo	Temporary invisibility. Moving fast makes the shimmer more obvious. Shooting, healing, or taking damage completely drops the cloak.
Trait: Shadow Dive	Negates all fall damage by slamming into the ground and violently deploying a defensive smoke cloud on impact.
Trait: Shroud	Touching any smoke cloud instantly turns you invisible, with the cloak persisting for a few seconds after walking out.

The synergy between the Shadow Dive and the Shroud trait is terrifying. You can jump off a massive cliff right into the middle of a firefight, take zero fall damage, detonate a smoke bomb, and instantly vanish. It is a kit designed purely to terrorize people trying to extract.

The Recon

If the Assassin is the disease, the Recon shell is the cure. This class is designed purely to strip away the element of surprise.

Information is the most valuable currency in Marathon. Knowing exactly where the enemy squad is hiding before they hear your footsteps wins fights. The Recon kit provides legal wallhacks and tracking mechanics that punish players who try to play passively.

Recon Kit Breakdown

For the paranoid player who assumes there is a sniper behind every single rock.

Ability Type	Function and Details
Primary: Echo Pulse	Fires a sonar wave that paints targets through walls. It completely counters Active Camo by exposing invisible players.
Tactical: Tracker Drone	A robotic spider that hunts targets, detonates for burn damage, and instantly overheats the victim's shell to cripple movement.
Trait: Awareness	You get a HUD alert if an enemy pings you. Executing a downed player automatically reveals their remaining squad mates.
Trait: Stalker Protocol	Breaking a target's shield forces them to leave glowing footprints on the ground for a short duration.

The Tracker Drone is nasty piece of work. Forcing an enemy into a severely overheated state basically roots them to the floor. Combine that with the Stalker Protocol tracking their escape route, and you guarantee that nobody can successfully disengage from a fight with you.

The Vandal

The Vandal is built for the hyperactive player who relies entirely on mechanical skill and movement tech to win gunfights.

This shell trades defensive capabilities for raw kinetic energy. You are constantly managing your internal heat gauge to pull off absurd acrobatics. If you stand still while playing the Vandal, you are playing it wrong.

Vandal Kit Breakdown

High speed and high risk. Designed for players who cannot stop pressing the sprint button.

Ability Type	Function and Details
Primary: Amplify	A massive temporary buff to sprint speed and gun handling. It also drastically lowers the heat penalty for using movement tricks.
Tactical: Disruptor	Fires a projectile that blasts enemies backward. Holding the charge button increases both the damage and the knockback radius.
Trait: Microjets	A standard double jump that chunks your heat meter every time you use it.
Trait: Power Slide	A highly extended ground slide that covers massive distance at the cost of heavy heat generation.

The Disruptor tactical is the wildcard here. Being able to physically push enemies out of cover or knock them off ledges adds a whole new layer of environmental danger. Popping the Amplify buff right before a push allows you to string together double jumps and power slides without instantly burning out your chassis.

The Thief

Bungie straight up calls this the "loot goblin" class, and the kit reflects a staggering level of greed.

You do not play the Thief to dominate firefights. You play it to strip the map of valuables and run away before the heavy hitters show up. This shell focuses heavily on vertical traversal and gathering intel on local loot caches.

Thief Kit Breakdown

Because the only thing that actually matters in an extraction game is the profit margin.

Ability Type	Function and Details
Primary: Pickpocket Drone	A remote controlled drone that physically rips loot out of enemy backpacks and retrieves it for you safely.
Tactical: Grapple	Fires a physical dart to pull you toward the impact zone. Works identically to Destiny 2's Strand grapple mechanics.
Trait: X-Ray Visor	Highlights unopened chests and hostile players through solid geometry, color coding the loot by rarity tier.
Trait: Unknown Backpack Buff	Passively boosts the grapple recharge rate and core stats based purely on how stuffed your inventory is.

The Pickpocket Drone is hilarious and deeply toxic. Hiding on a rooftop while flying a drone to smack the artifacts out of a rival player's hands is going to ruin friendships. The X-Ray Visor is the real workhorse, letting you bypass empty buildings and head straight for the high tier drops.

The Triage

Every squad needs a medic, and usually, someone gets bullied into playing it. But the Triage shell actually packs enough utility to make the role fun.

You are the babysitter holding the squad together when a raid goes sideways. The Triage provides remote healing, area denial, and weapon buffs. A team without a Triage player is operating at a severe disadvantage against a squad that has one.

Triage Kit Breakdown

The designated driver of the squad. Your job is to make sure your chaotic friends survive their own bad decisions.

Ability Type	Function and Details
Primary: Capacitive Gauntlets	Fires electrical arcs that can instantly zap enemies or remotely revive downed teammates from a safe distance.
Tactical: Med-Drone	A hovering companion bot that actively restores lost health and shield integrity for whoever it is attached to.
Trait: Battery Overcharge	Provides flat weapon buffs and allows specific battery powered guns to inflict an EMP status on enemies when their shields break.
Trait: Shareware	Any teammate currently tethered to your Med-Drone automatically receives the exact same buffs when you pop a consumable item.

The Shareware trait is incredibly powerful. You can pop an expensive combat stimulant behind cover, and the teammate actively getting shot in the open receives the exact same buff for free. Remote revives via the Gauntlets also eliminate the massive risk of standing perfectly still over a dead body to pick them up.

The Rook

This is the most unique option on the roster. The Rook is not a standard combat shell; it is a desperate scavenging frame.

You cannot play the Rook in a squad. It forces you into a solo queue and actively drops you into matches that are already in progress. The game does not notify the server when you arrive. You are effectively a rat scurrying into a warzone to pick the bones clean after the heavy hitters have already killed each other.

Rook Frame Breakdown

High risk, zero investment. You bring nothing to the table except a desperate need for scrap.

Ability Type	Function and Details
Loadout Restriction	You are strictly forbidden from bringing any stored vault gear into the match. You drop in with a pathetic starter kit.
Tactical: UESC Disguise	A temporary masking protocol that forces the AI controlled UESC drones to ignore you, letting you slip past security checkpoints.
The Goal	Survive. Scavenge whatever weapons and artifacts the other players missed, extract quietly, and restock your empty vault.

The Rook is the ultimate reset button. When you inevitably suffer a string of brutal deaths and completely bankrupt your vault, you take the Rook. You creep around the edges of the map, avoid all player contact, use your disguise to bypass AI guards, and extract with enough garbage to fund a real run. It strips away the power fantasy and forces pure survival horror.