It’s commonly agreed that the Slab Shield is one of the ogryn’s worst weapons and that the special for it is more often used to throw games than provide any help to the team. Truly a shame considering how iconic of a weapon it is. Here are where all the problems with the weapon lay and how to fix them.
A primary issue is that despite being THE weapon for advancing on ranged enemies, the movement speed while blocking is abysmal. The weapon shouldn’t have a speed penalty nearly as bad as it does, if any at all.
Despite the shield having unique block properties, it does not block while the player is pushing. Normally for melee weapons this doesn’t matter because the push staggers all melee enemies that would hit you, but the shield is meant to counter ranged enemies and therefore should, as long as you are still holding block.
The heavy attack chain is way too weak. More specifically the 2nd attack (there are only 2 attacks in the chain). The 2nd attack does far less damage than the first, despite being much harder to headshot with and even incapable of headshotting multiple enemies at all. This attack needs to do the same damage as the first.
The light attack chain is 2 horizontal swings followed by 2 downward diagonal swings. The first 2 swings should be removed. This would make headshotting with the light attacks easier and resultingly better for single target damage. The heavy attacks are more suited for horde clear anyways since they have way more cleave power and size, so losing the horizontal swings has no real downside.
I. CAN’T. SEE. ANYTHING. The “window” in the shield is too short and needs to reach down at least twice as far as it does. Give it little bars and make it look like a prison cell window or something. It could literally be your cell door from the prologue, heheh.
Edited Addition: Despite the above issue of the shield covering your entire screen, you can still get shot through your block by enemies in front of you. More specifically to the front sides, which you can’t even see the enemies from, because the shield is between your camera and them. This is most noticeable when you are advancing on ranged enemies that are very spread out, yet still all in front of you. Adding 20 degrees to the shield’s block angle will be just enough to fix this.
The special is troll. Plain and simple. It’s bait. If the player wants infinite block they can get a high defense roll, maximum stamina/regeneration curios, and/or block efficiency instead of going afk and doing practically nothing to help the team. ANYTHING would be a better special move as long as the current one goes away. I personally recommend a “warcry” that suppresses nearby enemies. Literally just copy paste the “Terrifying Barrage” blessing onto the special move.
AND THE BLESSINGS DON’T GET ME STARTED OH WAIT TOO LATE. The blessing pool is ass and 2 of the 5 blessings are deadweight.
Remove “Brutal Momentum” and “Perfect Strike” from the blessing pool. Having conditional cleave blessings that don’t synergize, on a weapon with slow and nearly infinitely cleaving heavy attacks, is beyond useless.
Add these blessings to the pool, because they make sense with the Slab Shield’s playstyle and theme:
Momentum: Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack restores 7.5-15% toughness.
Thunderous: Target receives 1-4 Stacks of 5% Brittelness on Hit. Lasts 5s.
Bash: +7.5-15% critical chance for 3 seconds on pushing enemies.
All or Nothing: Up to +2-5% Power, scaling with Stamina.
Haymaker: +1-4% to Instakill human-sized enemies on chained heavy hit. Stacks 5 Times.
I totally agree and find this reasonable as it is not just a cry for a damage-buff.
However:
I think a little damage-buff at least for the heavies should be considered.
Also the taunting blow blessing should be (more) available or integrated as a basic function to the shield.
With that, the special could nearly be left as it is, as the playstyle would be:
Trigger-hitting Taunt → block → traget looses taunt → trigger-hitting again (and therefore open yourself)
This would help with tougher enemies like Bosses, for any other enemy the special-block is not really of use imo.
I didn’t include “Taunting Blow” in the current blessing count (totaling 5 not 6), because it is currently disabled for some reason and therefore cannot actually be acquired.
I agree the raw damage numbers could use a small bit of love too.
Tbh: “Taunting blow” shouldn’t be a blessing as it would become quite mandatory/expected.
Therefore it should be
a) a weapon’s inbuild mechanic (prefered)
b) part of it’s special
Guys, do you think this would work, changing the shield to a skill.
For example, after pressing the G key, Ogrim becomes a shield in his left hand, his right hand is free to use any one-handed weapon, and the game perspective is changed to third-person mode
The majority of the current game Ogrin’s weapons are one-handed, it is entirely possible to replace the poor feel and perspective of Ogrin’s shield in this way
Or expand the visual area of the shield window and still use the first-person perspective
After all, the shield state can only be beaten setting is very unfriendly
Breh, have you thought what the changes you want will do? If they make the Shield fun and useful you will have the same usual suspects whining and raging of the forums screeching for nerfs because “Slab shield too strong” “Slab shield is brain-dead” “Slab Shield invalidates all other Ogryn weapons” etc etc.
Now I agree with you 100% and my personal opinion is that fun and enjoyment should trump “muh balance” in a PVE game always, but it won’t happen, and if it does sweats will not let it be.
I mean in theory just replace the plant with this.
Ogryn pulls out their weapon, 1 hands it, and advances. Less overall accuracy and control but lets them do funny stuff like lob grenades or use a ripper while moving up.
This reminded me that i also need to play more Fireteam Elite at some point…dam.
Those people should be ignored until other more reasonable people agree with them in large numbers.
I did propose some changes based on several sheild threads that are ongoing. Some of them more radical than others. I invite discussion on how we can buff the shield. But more damage, no plant special, and the ability to effectively and safely rush shooter groups down in melee (its lore purpose), seem like obvious ones.
I would want the power maul buffed accordingly. Been talking about how i hate how weak ogryn is in other threads and put that feedback in this proposal.
I truely do not understand how this didnt make it in by default considering its there for VT2 tanks.
Very true that ogryn doesn’t do enough damage. I think it’s less about the base damage of weapons though and more about the lack of ways to build more into damage. The slab shield blessings I mentioned are a good example of this. Shield does no damage because it has no good murder blessings and a lot of weapons are like that for our favorite big guy unfortunately.
Actually its demonstrably due to base damage. Zealot has damage feats that outcompete ogryn feats pretty badly but theyre all percentage based ultimately so the base can have a big impact.
Ogryn Pmaul and Crusher are practically the same weapon but Crusher has 250~ heavy sweeps and the Pmaul has 180.
If you want to influence Fat Shark a little more regarding the Slab Sheild. You may want to include any time you spent playing either Bardin Defender or Kruber Footknight with like the Axe/Sword + Shield weapon and your experience there in how it was different and what made it smoother or better to use.
There’s been maybe 4 or 5 posts about the shield in a week.
The weapon is so bad everyone is trying to get it buffed.
Devs might as well just make a new shield weapon to replace it. I said it in a different thread, but it needs a different design philosophy, the V2 theory of having a weapon excell at CC and defense with a negative in everything else with Ogryn’s design theme of excruciatingly slow attacks and a complete disregard of the volume of ranged combat made a very bad, immersion breaking weapon. The design is so bad that there is no one quick fix or bandaid that would make it really work. If you gave it free block cost versus all ranged attacks, it would still be a very subpar weapon.
It doesn’t work in the content where it needs to work.
The shield-theory ( best I can do for names) needs a complete rethink that at least tries to match how players are attempting to use this weapon. It would be great if FS took a look at what shieldgryns are wrongly claiming the shield can do and just try and make a weapon that comes close to that.
Shield needs better forward momentum. By that I mean it has too much movement slowdown from attacking and blocking. It’s too susceptible to knockback and block is just generally broken too easily. Planting as a special, also, not good. Not good for the game. Possibly the thing I will call a noob trap, it’s very good at decieving players. We really need a weapon that instead facilitates advancing on enemies and actually getting into the action instead of slowing the players down and dooming them to a painful death.
Shield needs damage. I’m not begging for it to be on par with the bull-butcher cleaver with slaughterer, but for the slow attack speed it has, some actual base damage and actual cleave damage isn’t going to break the game.
Shield needs better stamina economy. It’s just low right now and specifically needs stamina-focused curios. It needs stamina curios because the design is a copy of V2’s shield which needed block cost reduction and stamina regen properties on the shield itself, necklace, and trinket. I will argue this is bad for Darktide until the sun sets because, for one, gear acquisition/crafting is brutal, and two, no other weapon needs to be tied to curios to affect their performance (I think some even have better stamina stats than shield natively?). The forums are a buzz about metas, but that is still dependent on crafting items exactly and doesn’t account for bricked gear or how long it takes to replace those. Tying shields ability to block to 3 perks spread across 4 different gear with the way this game is strict about things just isn’t good. Maybe I’m over thinking it, but after 460 hours, I want to be one and done with curios when I get them.
Shield’s weaknesses need to be in other areas instead of where they are now. There are other forms of mobility that can be tweaked to be logical downsides to shields, such as sliding and dodging and sprint efficiency. That would make area denial or zoning enemies and disablers very deadly for a weapon that would otherwise do a fantastic job assaulting gun lines, enemies in cover, and fighting hordes.
A weapon just can’t be all negatives with only 1 or 2 things it’s merely ok at. The Vermintide 2 shield will not work in Darktide.
My post actually covers a lot of the parts that you think is wrong with the shield. I don’t think that a weapon being more dependent on stats from curios (such as stamina stats) is a bad thing by itself as long as the payout is worth it, but the real issue there is with the useless crafting system, not the weapon/build.
Hopefully if recommendations like mine are used, then that will happen. One of the biggest issues with the shield in my opinion outside of the damage, speed and special move (yikes, why is this a list?), is definitely the way you get staggered when your toughness breaks and how you don’t block ranged hits while pushing. If you push a melee enemy and get shot during that time you will probably get staggered and take a lot of damage, despite have the “counter” weapon for ranged troops.
Speaking of ranged enemies I actually have another post taking about how toughness mechanics should be changed to smoothen out the gameplay. 1 change involves making specifically the basic ranged enemies not 1 shot toughness, which would also help with the stagger problem in general.
Not a bad suggestion and while I do have a lot of time using shields in Vermintide2, I don’t think much data is relevant that hasn’t already been taken into account by a lot of people. The stagger system where enemies took a lot more damage while recovering was a big reason why they were good weapon choices, but It seems like that has been massively toned down in Darktide and probably on purpose so IDK. Most shield users in Vermintide had a way to restore temp-HP when they staggered enemies which Darktide doesn’t have.
Big issue is more or less that ranged enemies exist, and the current shield is not properly balanced and even has some design choices that make is less effective than it should be against ranged enemies. The speed reduction while blocking as an example.
best I can do for names) needs a complete rethink that at least tries to match how players are attempting to use this weapon. It would be great if FS took a look at what shieldgryns are wrongly claiming the shield can do and just try and make a weapon that comes close to that.