Buff and Add - “10% chance of triggering Lucky Bullet and not consuming ammo when making Ranged Attacks. After 20s of not triggering Lucky Bullet, your next shot has a 100% chance of triggering Lucky Bullet.”
More Burst Limiter Overrides!
Rework - “For 10s after using an Ability, your chance of triggering Lucky Bullet is increased to 30%.”
Added effect of guaranteed trigger so players can get better value out of the Capstone with weapons like Rumbler and Kickback.
If the 30% chance is too strong for the MBLO talent (especially with Rumbler spam), then that can be turned down to 20%.
And no, I don’t care if it sounds ridiculously broken, I want the big Ogryn with a big gun to be shooting a lot. MBLO being busted makes up for the fact that it’s way deep into the tree, where you would’ve sacrificed a lot of defensive nodes in favour of reaching it.
I’ve had enough of BLO being the black sheep amongst the Ogryn’s capstone. Having it not be the literal worst capstone in the game would be nice for a change.
Strong agree with the general idea but this is how I’d handle it. Buff base BLO to 10%, MBLO to 15%. Add an alternate, mutually exclusive node next to MBLO that has the guaranteed BLO every 20 seconds effect. I think it’d be in a pretty good spot with those changes
Good idea in general and reminds me of Saltzpyres ammo passive in VT2. I think the obvious issue is that it would just make Kickback even stronger which it really doesn’t need. But that’s kind of a seperate matter, they should first look at kickback and adjust it.
I think it certainly doesn’t need the 30% aspect either. I’ve been spending most of today playing gunlugger missions, and almost none of my games had a veteran with scavenger in it. I did not struggle ammo wise, the 12% chance to not consume ammo pretty much carried me through the missions
Yeah I think kickback and Rumbler being strong enough as is is a poor argument for them to not benefit much from the shooty Keystone (I know that’s not what you’re saying just a relevant tangent to pre-empt criticism of buffing that Keystone for those weapons). There should be a good branch in that Keystone for every gun ideally and then guns that were strong enough without it can be toned down appropriately.
Agreed the 30% after ult is probably unnecessary, hence my suggestions to buff base value and MBLO a little more then provide an alternate cooldown based final node to suit lower mag weapons better.
I think current BLO/MBLO has pretty good synergy for stubbers to help proc charmed reload and generally extend effective mag by a lot while also making your total ammo pool go further. Ripper has kind of mid use with it but I think slightly higher proc chances would be enough for it, meanwhile Rumbler, kickback, and GG all need the suggested cooldown BLO option to get good use out of the Keystone.
On the topic of GG I was messing around in meat grinder and it’s disappointing how much of the Ogryn ranged kit doesn’t apply to GG special. As far as I can tell BLO literally can’t proc on grenade punch, neither do the fire stacks from PBB. That should all definitely be fixed to work with it.
I believe the rending and close damage PBB nodes for it do apply, have to check the rending one again to be sure on that though. It also doesn’t proc shattering impact blessing since that requires the grenade itself to hit something, not just the explosion. I get why they don’t want AoE brittle application but perhaps letting the initial punch proc shattering so it remains single target but actually benefits the special attack would be a good compromise.
BLO should work like the Ammo Efficiency spec imo, so it could have value for both stubbers and low ammo weapons. Just make it randomly reduce ammo use by 50% for like 3s when active, or however long Rumbler/Kickback reload is.
I can bargain with that – just reduce the duration from 10 to 5s.
A lot of capstones are sustained complementaries to builds, but a 8-12% chance to not consume ammo at any time just kinda sucks. I’d rather it have the “high impact moment” value instead of something that’s just in the background (although I do admit that it’s a bit strong when there’s a Scavenger Vet around, but that’s a different headache on its own that I don’t want to address).
Agreed it’s still a bit weak at its current values but since it pulls double duty as an ammo efficiency increase AND an effective mag increase (as well as crit chance/CDR) I really don’t think you have to go too crazy with the values to make it be very felt.
Like 10% base 15% MBLO might still be a bit conservative but I’m confident it would be very much felt on ripper and stubber. 13% base 20% MBLO is probably the upper limit of what I think would be reasonable, 20% proc chance maths out to a 25% increase in total ammo and effective mag size with either the extra PBB cooldown or crit chance as a noticeable side benefit.
The effective ammo increase from BLO/MBLO is also multiplicative with the 25% increased ammo talent so all in all its a 47% - 56% increase in total ammo from committing to right tree depending on which end of the values I gave before you use. It’s a little less than that in practice depending on the reserves/mag ratio of the weapon in question but that seems about right to me.
I think this is the most sensible part of your suggestion. The way BLO currently works feels like it was made specifically for the Heavy Stubber without consideration for other Ogryn ranged weapons.
However, BLO is not actually a bad Keystone, if it is used with the Stubber. I don’t know where people are getting this idea from, I’ve seen other people say it with no evidence. BLO’s right side node, Good Shootin’, can make Stubber crit more than usual which not only boosts its damage a bit but these crits help trigger Charmed Reload. The ammo savings with the extra Lucky Bullet chance node are competitive if not better than that of Veteran’s Shock Trooper talent if used on a VId Recon Lasgun blessed with Headhunter and we all know that Stubbers are far better weapons than Recon Lasguns. BLO also does not essentially require headshots or Deadshot to proc well; only ranged hits, if I’m not mistaken. BLO is not Survivalist and not intended to be Survivalist but it does ease a bit of the ammo stress of using a Stubber in its current form.
For reference, I last tried to math out the ammo savings before the buff to BLO so it’s definitely a little juicier now. If you spend 2000 ammo in a match in the current patch, you would be expected to get back 240 ammo on average and this number lines up fairly well with my experience of farming for the Ogryn BLO penance on Damnation.
You’re mathing it out wrong because that extra 240 shots can also proc to further save ammo. Simplest way to do it correctly is total ammo/(1-proc chance).
So 2000/(1-0.12) = 2272 total shots. An extra 272 shots from 2000. It’s not nothing but it could afford to be a little more IMO.
Basically you can think of it like this. For every 100 bullets you fire, 12 of them don’t cost you anything. Therefore you spent 88 bullets to get 100 shots. So 100/88 gives you the effective shots you get per bullet. Multiply that by total ammo and you get the total number of shots you’ll get on average for your ammo spent.
Generally the ammo return starts to really take off above ~20% proc chance which is why I’d never advocate for it going higher than that.
True, this is incidentally also why I like gunlugger with the rippergun a lot. With flechette you have some pretty good synergy with the juicy ranged crit rate that lucky bullet also imparts. Then there’s stuff like inspiring barrage which really starts to shine the more actively-shooting uptime you have.
I think a good indirect buff to burst limiter override could be adding more blessings to Ogryn ranged weapons that scale off crit or off total magazine like that. Most have some form of it, but they kinda suck, like the GG crit blessing is just trash.
From a game of the full Keystone of Luckey Bullet on Gorgonum Stubber, it gave back about a box and a half of ammo. Very stinky keystone, would rather spend the talent points anywhere else and just find an extra red bag of ammo somewhere.
Additionally it has the weird negative synergy with crit chance, in which you can get a “double crit” that doesn’t do anything.
Also this penance is hell.
Just scrap BLO and redesign it from the ground up.
I won’t repeat the math I did above showing that further incremental increases have a pretty big effect on ammo gain, and can’t remember if you’re the one I had this “double crit” argument with before but gonna math that out again to show how inconsequential it is.
Using stubbers since the crit isn’t beneficial enough to run over CDR for other ranged weapons. My memory is stubber has -4% crit chance base, so add a perk, base 5% crit rate, and 8% from massacre, and you get 14% crit chance. With MBLO your effective crit rate becomes ~24.5%, which losses out all of 1.5% crit chance vs them being additive crit chance, and this is worst case currently. I just don’t think that’s any kind of an issue. Even if MBLO was buffed all the way to 20% proc chance you’d lose all of about 3% crit chance, except less actually because you wouldn’t ever bother with crit chance perk in that scenario, you’d have more than enough proc chance for charmed reload which is really the bulk of what crit chance is doing for you here anyway.
To reiterate what I said above the BLO pulls multi duty as mag size increases (extra so with charmed reload), minor DPS increase through crits or CDR, on top of the ammo savings. Just looking at the total ammo saved really isn’t showing the whole picture IMO. Still not convinced number tweaks and the previously suggested alternate final node for cooldown based BLO wouldn’t be a perfectly good way to address it. Honestly it wouldn’t take much more before a charmed reload stubber could basically never need to reload at all, which is a pretty huge boon.
Stubbers have a -2% crit chance and ogyns base crit is 2.5%.
Lucky bullet is a dead end and it deserves to be scapped. No amount of futzing with the proc rates can hope to produce something that is usable across ogryns entire arsenal.
Can you explain why this wouldn’t work? I genuinely don’t get why not. Proc chance could probably safely go all the way to to 20% with MBLO but that aside I don’t see how this wouldn’t be desirable.
The entire bottom right section of ogryn’s tree is too much squeeze for not enough juice. Not only is lucky bullet bad, but the talents on the way to it are similarly crap. Stuff like coherency radius & movement speed on ranged kill are very low impact. Explosion radius is only decent on one gun: the rumbler. Most ogryn guns are made worse by bracing, so getting damage reduction while braced is not good. Massacre is only ‘useful’ to proc charmed reload or flechette because ogryn’s crit damage is pretty bad across the board. And how much value those blessings realistically provide is pretty questionable as well.
Lucky bullet is just the dingleberry on top of the crap cake. The base keystone by itself is, at best, exceptionally underwhelming. Getting one extra shot in the mag is the definition of low value on guns that lean towards volume of fire. And the low %, random proc chance is bad for guns that have small mag sizes and ammo pools. To rephrase that: lucky bullet’s mechanics favors guns with both a high volume of fire and high value per shot. I.e. a weapon design that is anathema to Darktides entire balancing ethos.
Essentially, this means that lucky bullet is designed to be bad on every weapon. Either through low chance of working or low impact when it does. Since it takes a minimum of 6 talent points (20% of your total) to get the keystone and the talents on the way to the keystone are similarly meh, that makes lucky bullet exceptionally inefficient to build for.
But you asked about increasing the proc change to 20%. Well, let’s analyze what that would actually do for ogryn’s guns. I’ll list the gun (assuming 80% roll and no ammo talent), the mag size, the total ammo of the gun, the average amount of extra bullets per mag due to lucky bullet procs (and how much that increases the average magazine size), and the average amount of ammo saved over an entire ammo pool (along with the equivalent number of small ammo pick ups). I’ll also be rounding my numbers in favor of lucky bullet because I’m lazy and don’t want to try to remember calculus today.
Gun
Mag Size
Total Ammo
Average Mag Increase
Average Total Ammo Savings
Achlys Stubber
139
676
35 (25.18%)
169 (2.10)
Krourk Stubber
120
548
30 (25%)
137 (1.97)
Gorgonum Stubber
82
400
20 (24.4%)
100 (2.08)
Mk2/Mk5 Ripper
7 bursts†
56.33 bursts
1-2 bursts (~14.3-28.6%)
14 bursts (1.83)
MK6 Ripper
10.5 bursts
54.5 bursts
2 bursts (19%)
14 bursts (1.22)
GG
4
39
1 (25%)
10 (1.67)
Kickback
1
48
0-1 (0-100%)
12 (1.5)
Rumbler
1
28
0-1 (0-100%)
7 (1.4)
† - Note: For all ripper gun left clicks lucky bullet procs affect the entire burst. When the Mk2/Mk5 are braced, lucky bullet only affects one round of the burst. Since bracing the ripper guns is kinda pointless, I will be ignoring this oddity and only focusing on the left click mode.
Again, for a minimum of 6 points going down from the 10% toughness DR node I don’t see how a ~25% mag size increase and savings of ~2 small ammo tins is worthwhile. Sure there is some dps gains too, due to reducing the frequency of reloading, but the value of that is super goddamn volatile.
Still don’t like the reliance on Crits proccing to get charmed reload as really the only way to make it work, and the guranteed every 20s is fine, but would really only feel good on the Kickback and not great on the Rumbler imo.
I just really don’t see a way in the current implementation, why I wouldn’t just take Point Blank Barrage and one of the other 2 keystones to either be more survivable or better in melee instead of dubious dps increases and a small bit of ammo.
Thank you for explaining. I see what you’re saying but it sounds like your issues go well beyond the Keystone itself. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to expect the Keystone to make up for the failings of the whole right side tree.
Regarding your table I applaud the work but it does seem to use the fatal assumption that you’re only shooting the ammo you start with. Assuming you shoot at least twice the amount of ammo you start with (pretty reasonable assumption since using one ammo box while close to empty will fairly well cover that on its own) you can double those numbers for a real run at minimum. Then there’s also survivalist gains that will be extended by the keystone too. Seems simpler to just frame it as 25% more ammo, whatever you shoot you’d get 25% more than that. To reiterate a point I made above that is effectively multiplicative with the +25% ammo talent (you lose out a bit here for high mag weapons but close enough), leading to around 56% more shots you can fire in a mission by committing to right side. That doesn’t seem like a bad deal to me with the other benefits.
Sounds to me like BLO would be completely salvageable with my suggestions if other parts of right tree were buffed up or reworked alongside it. If there’s a general issue with right tree I don’t think just reworking the Keystone makes sense as a solution to that, you’re just back loading the branch at that point.
