A normal (aka non-Arbites) Shock Maul with 80 in Crowd Control deals 17 stagger vs Carapace on a Heavy strikedown weakspot hit. This is the third lowest Heavy strikedown stagger damage in the game. Only two weapons in the game deal less stagger vs Carapace on Heavy strikedown weakspot hit: the Combat Knife (0 stagger) and the Chainsword (6 stagger). Hell, the Knife deals 17 stagger vs Carapace on a critical hit.
Buff the weapon’s Stagger vs Carapace so the crowd control weapon can actually crowd control. And no, stunning yourself so you can stun a single enemy with the special doesn’t count.
6 Likes
meanwhile combat axe has 44 stagger on heavy and with enough impact you can perma lock a crusher. even tacaxes special can. yeah this game needs an impact and overall melee rebalance
4 Likes
except crushers have 3-6 seconds of stagger immunity after being staggered based on what level of stagger it was, so you cant really stunlock crushers even with the taxe/shovel special despite them having enough stagger to instantly put them in that state
2 Likes
its not perma, that was misleading. when you’re fighting lets say 3 crushers by the time you cc the last one and get back to the first one the cc window is just about up again. you still have to dodge, but its a lot more comfortable fighting them
C-axe can stagger Crushers with their first heavy in both regular difficulties and H40 with no blessings. This amounts to a stagger about once every four heavy attacks with no attack speed talents. On the other hand, Shock Maul needs to build full stacks of the Hammerblow blessing in addition to several more hits to deplete the stagger meter to stagger a Crusher.
This means you can use the C-axe as a semi-reliable CC tool against Crushers since it has enough impact to stagger a Crusher with a single heavy so you can easily guesstimate when a Crusher is staggerable by counting attacks and keeping in mind which one was staggered, meanwhile you can’t on the Shock Maul because you have to build stagger.
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I think that electrocution status should stun for longer on fast jabs with the special and have more bonus damage for committing to the whole lock on. Force sword empowered also got lost on these buffs but the Obscurus and Deimos are actually really good and have stagger outside those moves. But yeah the regular stagger is indeed low, I’d also like to have more flexibility in stunning and disabling enemies mid combat. It could redeem this weapon’s underwhelming damage and huge unyielding shortcomings giving it a role as a gimmicky enemy disabler…
I think locking onto an enemy for like 3 ticks of the electrocution should put them in that 5s stun lock they get when an ogryn gets tackled by a voltaic mandibles-augment dog.
Many impact values in this game are egregriously random and nonsensical. They don’t make sense from a balance perspective nor intuitively. There’s generally also way too many ways that causes crushers to stagger from random stuff which messes with consistency because they’ll be in stun immune states when you don’t expect them to be.
In general I’d like if ogryn elites became a lot more unstoppable, forcing players to actually interact with their melee mechanics, then keeping effective ways to stagger crusher/bulwark/reapers only on classes that are actually stagger focused, or with heavy opportunity cost on those classes that aren’t stagger focused.
2 Likes