To be a minor contrarian, Yes*
They are stat sticks through and through, made to have obscene levels of numbers in comparison to their contemporaries and basically every ‘best in class easy to proc talent’ under the sun. Damage for hits, damage for dodges, DR for existing and your dog existing, and said dog killing specials for you and your team while weakening/stunning larger targets. That, or Lone Wolf + Shock mine = smite but I can still play the game, and you just walk through most things.
But all that being said, a lot of their ‘brokenness’ is just in numbers, their effects are ‘somewhat lack luster’, also on account of their ‘Ogryn size’ weapon pool. But unlike Ogryn, who’s entire weapon pool is new weapons to play with and use, Arbite has the 4 they come with, and then a Boltgun, and a bunch of ‘impact’ weapons that are still very heavily ignorable. This combined with their middle ability and keystone/talents leading to said keystone being incredibly forgettable and not that great, result in a class that both ‘plays the game for you’ and is insanely broken. But also feels weaker than say, an Ogryn, who does everything they do but strictly better but just has a weakness to trappers, or a well speced Veteran, who will be vastly more squishy but drop a Monstrosity in 1 clip of their bolt/Plasma gun. Or a Psyker, who again is way more squishy but will trip over and entire wave from range and cackle while doing it. Or even a Zealot, who’s to busy sprinting forward and doing high damage per hit while swinging twice as fast and being just as immortal, even if they don’t have the dog backing them up.
In general, the Arbite numerically is overstated to the warp and back, making the game feel like a cake walk and overall allowing you to basically never fall over. But on the flip side, that is all you are doing, and you aren’t really doing anything impactful for your team beyond being a stat stick and either stunning entire waves with a trip mine or killing high priority targets for free with your dog. They feel very ‘whelming’, while also being immortal and technically killing everything in front of them, it’s a strange dichotomy they sit with, likely attributed to a major part of their design space being ‘staggers’, which the Ogryn also does strictly better while bleeding everything to death, and with a better feeling weapon selection than the Arbites have access to.
So are they OP? Yes, do they feel OP? Kinda, their floor is lower than even Ogryns, but their ceiling also feels just as high as your floor. You don’t really get a sense of ‘being broken’, because unlike other classes, ‘being good’ doesn’t really translate to anything tangibly visible. You will be just as broken when you load up the Arbite for the first time as when you maxed them out at level 30 with a good set of gear, the only difference will be the damage numbers, so it feels kinda ‘meh’, at least for me. Says a lot that my friend played Damnation then Auric at level 6 (you can drag your friends to higher difficulties so long as you yourself have access to it and select it, or vise versa), and he never died. It might not be in the most dense state, but that’s still pretty obscene.
