Edit Notice: This post has been updated multiple times and may continue being tweaked until I forget about it or run out of periodic ideas and changes. Some of the things people have read here might be changed. If some comments or quotes don’t match then this could be why.
Ogryn main and massive nerd here. I’m a returning player after the Unlocked and Loaded update that let me actually customize my equipment; funny that. I noticed the talent trees for every class have been updated a bit since I last played. That’s all cool and stuff, but I noticed ogryn still isn’t looking too polished. I’m a massive nerd as mentioned and I love talent trees and think having different & viable ways to customize and vary your play-style is an important aspect in many games such as this one.
Anyways, I have some suggestions on how to make the ogryn talent tree feel more polished and better to use with more viable choice, while playing around and not overloading the good parts that are already there.
As of the new live update Towering Presence is now a prerequisite to Steady Grip. I recommend swapping the location of Steady Grip with Lynchpin so that gunner ogryns have the choice to travel through Heavyweight and not take the coherency talents if they so choose.
These two passives are very powerful and essential for any melee ogryn, but also limit the player to only using heavy attacks if they want to survive. Reworking these could be critical for enabling more melee options and play-style variety.
A decent change would be to have The Best Defence replenish only 15% toughness, but upon any heavy attack hit, while altering Smash 'Em! to replenish 7.5% toughness upon any light attack hit. They could then be combined together or allocated exclusively.
Alternative concept: Another option that would enable more light attack builds would be to keep the innate trigger condition while also adding a light attack effect. Lowering the heavy attack replenishment to 15% toughness and then adding a light attack value of 7.5% toughness replenished could enable both passive options inclusively. This conceptual change might be more balanced from the perspective of talent point investment.
Isn’t it kind of weird how insanely top heavy the ogryn’s talent tree is for raw durability? It has a lot to do with the twin 25 toughness passives. All other maximum toughness passives only give 15 in comparison. What is weirder is that the ogryn starts by default with a pathetic 50 maximum toughness, but then gets a massive spike of 25 each from these two passives.
This recommendation is the only one for this post that isn’t purely a talent change. I suggest altering the ogryn to have a default value of 75 or 80 maximum toughess and then replacing these two passives with 5% health on the left and 5% reload speed on the right. This would remove the weird spending bloat in the top of the talent tree and promote more flexibility and diversity in how ogryns allocate their talent trees and/or get tankier.
Let’s talk about the immediately unpleasant perk lockout after choosing a grenade. This isn’t anything overly unfair, but it just feels really lame. I recommend raising the position of the 10% toughness DR passive in the middle so that you can use it to travel between the Slam and Soften Them Up passives.
This ability is by far the least desirable ogryn ability and has some serious flaws that not only make it inferior to the other two, but also prevent it from even fully fulfilling its primary function of redirecting enemies.
The prominent flaw of Loyal Protector is that it’s useless against further away and/or ranged enemies and can only affect the enemies in your immediate vicinity and will not impact any new enemies once spent. In higher difficulties where new enemies constantly spawn this becomes a glaring problem that makes Loyal Protector impotent. I highly recommend changing the effect of the ability to instead Stagger nearby enemies and increase your Threat by +100% against enemies within 15 to 20m for 15s. This would completely resolve the reach and consistency issue the ability faces.
Alternative concept: Another similar implementation would be to have Loyal protector instead Stagger nearby enemies and reduce the Threat of your allies in coherency by 50% for 15 seconds. The outcome would be similar to the above concept with a few nuanced differences.
The upgrade Valuable Distraction would need to be adjusted should the ability no longer applies the Taunt debuff. The new effect could be you and allies in coherency gain +15% damage for the duration of Loyal Protector.
Another large issue with the current Loyal Protector is that it is the only ogryn ability without an upgrade that replenishes toughness and will just leave you a vulnerable sitting duck in fights. Big Lungs wouldn’t be relevant with the above change and so could be replaced with Big Heart which would grant replenish 5% toughness a second for the duration of Loyal Protector. This would enable an upgrade option to help the ogryn survive the onslaught of enemies he has brought upon himself.
The stacking for this one is a bit extreme in the amount of enemy hits required for good returns. Perhaps raising the stack value to 3% damage while reducing the capacity to 10 or 15 stacks maximum might add some desired consistency to an upgrade that needs to compete exclusively with Pulverize and bleed builds due to the ability upgrade lockout.
This talent fully deserves a nerf down to +3 stacks on heavy melee hit. You would still be able to apply the same amount of total stacks on an enemy, but it would just take an extra hit to get there. Simultaneously this talent could be buffed to help enable more light attack builds. Make it so that Batter also inflicts +1 stack on light melee hit. This would single-handedly enable light attack weapons viability with the rest of the bleed talents and open up more melee options for players.
Many people on this post and others have suggested that Crunch! work mechanically identical or similar to the Thrust weapon blessing, which is just a solid idea in general. This talent would also feel more relevant against hordes if it granted 40% cleave too.
Alternative concept: Another idea would be to replace all bonuses with +100% critical chance on fully charged melee attacks. This would enable melee critical blessings to actually function on a class with barely any crit chance.
Does this talent really have to be so awkward? Maybe this should only stack up to 10% or 15% increased damage, but apply to all damage for the duration and not be consumed by your attacks. It would be nice to have a bit less heavy attack dependency on ogryn after all.
This is pain. Currently the aura only increases coherency regeneration rate. I recommend changing this to a variety of separate effects that would match the protector thematic better. Honestly, we’ll take anything else…
Concept A; increase ALL toughness replenished by 15% or 20%. Just generally good for recovery.
Concept B; reduce damage taken by 10%. This would be like a variant of the zealot’s Benediction since it’s weaker, but also applies to all health damage taken.
Concept C; replenish 1% toughness per second. I’m low balling the numbers for this one since permanent regeneration could potentially get out of hand.
Concept D; increase global Impact bonus by 25%. Synergy with the prerequisite passive Hard Knocks.
Concept E; you have +50% threat. This would help take the heat off of teammates, but I don’t recommend this option if my above change to Loyal Protector were to be implemented.
This passive is alright when you can use it, but the activation condition is too limiting in when you can actually benefit. Lower the amount of enemies need to activate the buff to hitting 3 or more.
Get Stuck In could use a duration increase to 5 to 8 seconds to make it more relevant. This talent could also just be completely replaced with something new.
This effect is too constricting in how it works and the times when you get notable value out of it are incredibly niche. This is doubly bad since the talent has to compare location-wise with No Push Over which is one of the better defensive ogryn talents. The stacking portion of this talent should just be removed and then the rest of it should be compensated. Buff the numbers to 30% damage reduction when a rescue-able ally is within 30m to increase the relevancy. I heavily suggest the radius buff, even if the rest of this idea is debatable.
Having Won’t Give In also activate when you yourself are in trouble could give the talent more emergency value as well.
This passive is the bread and butter of bleed ogryns, allowing them to survive in the middle of mayhem. I think it deserves a nerf when I weigh it with other defensive talents, but it doesn’t deserve an execution. I recommend reducing the extreme end of things by limiting it to 5 maximum stacks.
Rending and brittle apply to bleed damage, which is insane. A lot of people also aren’t fans of so much rending being in the game either which I can get behind. Recommended change; 15% damage for 10s on elite kill. Solid damage for going on a rampage without being game breaking like rending can be. This would also be more versatile since a universal damage bonus functions against all enemy types; meanwhile rending is extremely potent, but only relevant against armored enemies.
This passive is only relevant if your toughness breaks since the ogryn is nearly immune to stuns while toughness is up. This talent should also make the user immune to knockback effects during heavy attacks. This would be useful against shotgunners and flammers amongst other things.
While it may be minor, this small passive should grant 5% melee damage instead of heavy attack specific damage.
Allowing Heavy Hitter to stack off of light attacks with the Brutish Momentum upgrade makes sense and would enable light attack oriented weapons to have a foot in the door amongst the ogryn’s arsenal.
Making Brutish Momentum not require the prerequisite upgrades Just Getting Started! or Unstoppable would also be a nice accessibility change.
This upgrade is a bit underwhelming compared to other replenishment talents that ogryns can access, especially considering it needs to stack up. A simple change would be to increase the bonus to 150% increased toughness. Not a massive buff, but enough to make the talent more considerable.
The tankyness in the bottom middle branch of the talent tree is simply lacking in raw numeric value. I recommend changing this passive stat to instead grant upwards of 10% damage reduction so that it can affect toughness damage taken. This would also strike an equilibrium between the pre-nerf and post-nerf imbalance of the Feel No Pain keystone directly below it.
The toughness replenishment from this only applies to coherency regeneration and the keystone was nerfed a while back so that stacks are currently lost from any damage and not just health damage. You can only regenerate toughness if you are missing toughness. If you have been hit then you have lost stacks. This regeneration buff is self defeating and irrelevant now. I suggest removing the replenishment bonus all together and then reworking the following upgrade passive:
Toughest! suffers from the same issue as the keystone mentioned above so I recommend replacing what it does entirely. Change this to replenish 3% to 5% toughness when a stack of Feel No Pain is lost. This alternate keystone upgrade could help take the edge off of losing stacks from hits by working to counteract the weakness of the Feel No Pain keystone; sustained damage. The effects of this new upgrade and the damage reduction from the keystone could also be interchangeably swapped as long as the numeric values were also changed to match the power of a keystone and an upgrade modifier.
This keystone and it’s upgrade passives are very synergy restrictive. This keystone is practically exclusive to the high fire rate Heavy Stubber marks only in its current state. I recommend changing Lucky Bullet to instead always trigger on a 12 to 15 second cooldown. This would make the keystone viable on every ranged weapon type and open up more options for big karking luggers.
If the above keystone change were to happen then this passive upgrade should be slightly adjusted to reduce the cooldown of Lucky Bullet by 1s when you hit at least 1 enemy with a ranged attack; allowing high fire rate weapons access to continued synergy with the keystone.
So yeah these are all my recommendations for clean and easy ways to improve the Big Fella’s talent tree. I hope Bigshark sees this. Any thoughts?
