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, while playing into and not overloading the good parts that are already there.
Edited Notice: This post has been updated multiple times and may continue being tweaked until I forget about it or run out of periodic ideas. If comments don’t make sense this could be why.
First off is the immediate perk lockout after choosing a grenade. This isn’t anything crazy, but it just feels 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.
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 these two toughness passives. All other maximum toughness passives only give 15, but these give 25. 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 buffing the ogryn to have a default value of 75 maximum toughess and then nerfing both of these passives down to +15 toughness to remove the weird spending bloat in the top of the talent tree. This would be a minor net positive buff to every ogryn loadout, but I believe the extra flexibility with talent point usage would be enjoyed by a lot of players.
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. I believe reworking these two passives could be critical to enabling more melee options and play-styles. An ideal change would be to have The Best Defence replenish 15% toughness on any heavy attack hit, while altering Smash 'Em! to replenish 7.5% toughness on any light attack hit. They could then be combined together or allocated exclusively to save a talent point.
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% or 4% damage while reducing the capacity to 15 or 10 stacks maximum might add some desired consistency to an otherwise solid upgrade.
Increasing the bleed to 6 stacks would be minor, but nice to see here since bleed stacks decay one at a time.
This is a talent that I feel genuinely could use a slight nerf down to 3 stacks per heavy attack 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.
This ability is fine if you only want it for taunting Bosses and Ogryns, but in its default state its base radius just feels too small for bigger fights. I think increasing the base radius to 10m or 12m would make the base ability more versatile and cause the Big Lungs upgrade for it to feel more like a luxury upgrade and less like a required point tax if you want to use this ability against spread out groups of enemies.
Edited addition: Rather than buffing the base radius of the ability, the bonus from Big Lungs would also feel good if it was buffed to +100% radius.
Edited addition: Changing Big Lungs to instead grant a player buff that grants +100% threat for 15 seconds could also be a nice way to make Loyal Protector have a more widespread impact in spread out group fights.
This would feel more relevant against hordes if it also granted 40% cleave. Nothing fancy.
Edited addition: Another idea would be to replace all bonus’ with +100% critical chance on fully charged melee attacks.
Many people on this post and others have also suggested that Crunch! work mechanically identical or similar to the Thrust weapon blessing, which is just a solid idea in general.
Lowering the activation requirement of this to only require hitting 3 enemies would add some leeway to an awkwardly niche, but not terrible perk.
The middle area of the talent tree has a tank & bodyguard theme, but could use a bit more innate assistance. I think changing this 5% health to instead grant +25% threat could make redirecting harm from teammates a bit easier. No one would miss 5% health anyways… Right?
Edited addition: Having a small passive that instead gives +25% coherency radius could also be a nice small team-play passive.
Does this talent really have to be so awkward? Maybe this could stack up to 10% or 15% increased damage in general and not be attributed to or consumed by heavy attacks. It would be nice to have a bit less heavy attack dependency on ogryn after all.
This is pain. Currently this only increases coherency regeneration rate. I recommend changing this to a variety of separate effects that would match the protector thematic better.
Effect A; increase ALL toughness replenished by 15% or 20%. Just generally good for survival.
Effect B; Increase Impact bonus of everything by 25%. Synergy with above passive Hard Knocks.
Edited addition: Effect C; you have +50% threat. this would help take the heat off of teammates. !
Get Stuck In could use a duration increase to 5 or 6 seconds to make it more relevant.
This effect is too limited in how it works and the times when you get the maximum value out of it are incredibly niche. 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 30 meters to increase the relevancy.
Edited change: So apparently 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. New 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 as a universal damage bonus works 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.
Brutish Momentum should be changed to instead cause only 1 stack of Heavy Hitter to be lost per 7.5 seconds. By default all stacks are lost at once for reference. This would just have more consistent uptime between skirmishes compared to the current effect of Brutish Momentum.
Edited addition: Another good idea that has been brought up is making Brutish Momentum simply let you stack off of light attacks too.
The toughness replenishment from this only applies to coherency regeneration and this keystone was nerfed a while back so that stacks are currently lost from toughness 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 changing what it does entirely. Change this to replenish 3% 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.
This keystone and it’s upgrade passives are very synergy restrictive. This keystone is practically exclusive to the high fire rate Heavy Stubber gun marks only in its current state. I recommend changing Lucky Bullet to instead always trigger on a 12 or 14 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 would naturally also be adjusted to cause Lucky Bullet to have an 8 or 10 second cooldown.
Edited addition: This passive could also instead grant a 10% chance to reset the cooldown of Lucky Bullet on ranged hit to help the keystone strike an equilibrium between fast and slow firing ranged weapons.
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?
