TLDR: Not enough AP damage, Not enough Cleave/AOE DMG, Not enough Ammo, Ranged weapon that “excels” in melee is redundant, It should be good at either Armor Piercing or AoE
Giving every class a melee and range AP option is cool, it lets people have different specialized loadout and it feels really good when the stars align and your build gets to do what it was made for. And the G. Gauntlet kinda fails to fulfill the AP range role. It takes like 3 shots to take out crushers which isnt horrible but comparing it to something like a bolter or plasma gun is definitely the weakest option of the three when taking in stuff like the cleave, RoF, and mag size of the other two weapons into account. To further rub salt in the wound, the weapon isnt even good at killing specials. Flamers take 2 shots unless you fully charge Pinpoint ADS and land a headshot, but keep in mind that this isnt a hitscan gun and aiming at the ground near them or the shot getting blocked by a poxwalker does a literal 20 damage to the intended target.
Now lets talk about its near nonexistent AOE Damage. Personally I dont think this is that big of a deal though because the Rumbler exist to fill this niche of explosive AoE gun. But even then its AoE is just really pitiful, the kickback has around 60 shots can can kill like 15 shooters, a shotgunner, and bomber in one shot with no active blessings or ranged damage talents. Meanwhile GG is maybe getting 3 kills in one shot if the enemies are on the precipice of clipping into each other out of its pool of 35 ammo. What about the Crowd Control though? I think it can be borderline detrimental at times. A bomber is on a platform and you dont land a direct shot, so all you did was knock it down and basically give it cover so that now you nor your team can shoot it until it gets up and prepares another throw, also you only did 20 dmg to it. Or how about you see a patrol gunners get the first shot on them. Well now you just took that nice tight formation that they had, which made them ripe for your team’s cleaving guns, and just scattered them around the room. Also when you disperse enemy formations the GG just gets worse, cause now you have to waste your limited ammo pool on individual shooters with no hope of getting a double kill with the explosive radius. Furthermore, it doesnt even consistently stagger elites anymore. Ever since they buffed the stagger thresholds last year, they forgot to go back and touch up ogryn weapons that were designed to have good stagger but lower dmg from the earlier design philosophy of the game from launch. So the GG still fails to stagger crushers and bulwarks on occasion.
Ok so what about the cool punch that people most likely pick the weapon for? Well the Special is way too punishing on a miss and just doesnt come out fast enough or do enough damage considering its an Armor Piercing melee that uses ammunition. Like imagine if the thunderhammer or power sword needed ammo to kill enemies. But even if the weapon special was like on par with the frag bomb, it’s counter intuitive. You’re bringing a “ranged” AP weapon to deal with armor in melee range? At that point just bring a pickaxe or club.
Combine all this this with the fact that you can just straight up get locked out from using the weapon at a range if you are getting shot at without toughness by gunner doomstacks and it becomes super obvious why this weapon barely sees the light of day despite being one of the coolest things in the game.
Seeing this weapon not only basically go untouched for another patch but also getting new blessings that only add the novelty melee gameplay of the weapon is just a huge bummer.
I main Grenade Gauntlet on my Ogryn and I strongly disagree. The Grenade Gauntlet’s in a really great spot right now for both anti-armour and single-target damage. It’s quick to equip, it’s reliable, it reloads quickly, it’s a melee-ranged hybrid thus still usable when you don’t have the time to reload it, it’s got high damage against EVERYTHING while also staggering anything that isn’t a Monstrosity, and it’s got a reasonably forgiving ammo count. If you’re concerned about its range, Grenade Gauntlet’s actually not much worse there than the Twin-Linked Heavy Stubbers while also having wayyyyy better accuracy… when in doubt, just aim it a little bit higher!
It’s like a Rumbler, but with 4 Grenades per magazine that detonate on impact instead of having a fuse. I’d argue it’s the best single-target and anti-armour ranged weapon for Ogryn in the game right now according to my personal experience with using it. The stance that not being able to fire it without aiming is a significant flaw comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the Grenade Gauntlet’s purpose. The Grenade Gauntlet is designed to be fired from a safe distance or to beat the living heck out of anything unlucky enough to be within an unsafe distance from YOU.
In conclusion, I think the Grenade Gauntlet is fine as-is and shouldn’t be messed with.
The Grenade Gauntlet is more for sniping specials from a distance than doing melee, AoE, or heavy anti-armor IMO. If you can reliably aim, you can snipe gunners and bombers. It’s Ogryn’s only long-range option (besides the Kickback LOL) and it fits nicely into a mostly close-range class.
It’s a solid weapon. The melee is pretty bad, I agree, but your proper melee weapon has no draw time, so it’s moot anyways.
If you can reliably aim the Ripper 5 can kill snipers in one burst from well beyond the range the Grenade Gauntlet explodes mid air (50m). You can one burst flamers if you aim for the head (which is cool to have on an ogryn weapon, some semblance of aim).
The existence of Ripper 5 makes GG a total wash unless you max out the use of the punch. In which case its just bad Rumbler with for some reason far less potential damage to reserves (even on the splash damage boosting punch). I hope they make some identity for this weapon and abandon the idea of making variants for it. The current GG is far too garbage at single target to bother, so it will be obsolete the second one with splash appears. Just give this one some kind of identity instead.
My Rumbler one hits Reapers, drops a line of Crushers to the ground where they gain Skullcrusher stacks and get smashed before they even climb back up. But you do you.
And? What, that magically makes the Grenade Gauntlet bad? Does it need a buff in your eyes?
If what you’re saying is true, both the Rumbler AND Kickback need some fat nerfs if anything. The game shouldn’t be trivial to the extent you just described.
Another wonderful descent into ‘everything just needs nerfs’ which beyond Kickback reserves isn’t true. Rumbler is totally blind on specialists, and the majority of ranged encounters. On solo ogryn I would rather not be weak to the things I actually swap off melee for, for the upside of being stronger on the crowds I already dominate with no effort.
Grenade gauntlet just has no strengths worth equipping, which no amount of making other weapons less appealing would solve. Meaning yeah it could use some love in any direction.
KB max ammo could probably be toned down a smidge or something, but I’ve never heard anyone state Rumbler needs a fat nerf, if anything it needs a slight buff, maybe just to max ammo.
GG could use some love for sure, the max range could at least be boosted to 100.
If they’re not lying about their Rumbler’s capability and damage (or using Malice or something as a base for that statement) the Rumbler trivialises the game completely. If someone can’t see that, they’re insane.
My point being that the Grenade Gauntlet is fine and completely balanced. It’s not wiping multiple Ogryns in one shot on Damnation but that doesn’t make it in need of a buff in any way, shape or form.
I had a guy get over 700 lesser enemy kills and 800K damage done with mainly just that weapon. He went through a crap ton of ammo but it was well worth it LOL It’s an excellent weapon and has the ammo limit it does for a good reason
Its actually a super niche set up. You need to tap a couple of Ogryns that are already on the ground from your dash while running a weapon with Skullcrusher, while using Soften Em Up talent (so no rocks running Rumbler, oh god what an OP set up lmao). I run Power Maul on this loadout so I can actually so something without running stuff over first. And trying to set this up at all without Debuff mod is near impossible, if those ogryns don’t land on each other it doesn’t work either. The fact that the Power Maul is the only weapon able to actually make good on this makes me think it doesn’t break the game at all.
Rather its knowing game interactions like this that demote the already bad GG to useless.
Yes. The power maul and rumbler set up that has to forgo rocks is breaking Auric damnation…Rumbler is pure crowd dominance at the cost of the range utility. On the character who is pure crowd dominance with no weakness besides getting shot and specialists…maybe in the patch 13 where it could dumpster and stagger monsters while being infinite ammo near veterans, but current Rumbler is one of the only unique weapons in the game and paying well for its current advantages.
So…scoreboard mod cred for trash by using up a crap-ton of ammo? That does not an excellent weapon make. If anything you kinda made the opposite point here…
Even the Krourk Stubber starts to look good relying on the dumb damage mods. Just play solo and fail, who cares there’s no progress. The weapons that are underperforming tend to be the ones that really don’t do a lot of killing in game. When it’s up to just you it’s a lot easier to sort the weapons out. Grenade Gauntlet needs to stale aim with Pinpointing Target for most Specialist/Elite breakpoints, the punch is basically the only thing you do if you equip it at all, the reloads are frequent and slow. It doesn’t really achieve a whole lot even when you have access to all the ammo pick ups yourself.
The solution to that isn’t just nerf 2 other Ogryn weapons so it feels less bad purely by comparing it to those 2 weapons.
I’ll not refer to the entire post, but I do have a couple of observations from personal experience with the thing:
You don’t want to miss with this weapon, which is relevant especially since it’s a projectile-based and not a hitscan weapon,
It’s too slow in terms of action fluidity and reload speed,
It has a smidge too low total ammo (but had it had like 1-2 more magazines, it would be fine-ish),
Its damage-dealing potential is largely OK, but I wish the special action punch had slightly more pronoun epicentre radius (even as “little” as 0.25m), to not excessively rely on enemies stacking on top of one another to bank on these special action hits.
There is a lot of emphasis put on the special attack, but the weapon is limited by its magazine to perform these attacks, they consume ammo and require you to reload the weapon on repeated use, which may leave you open to attacks from typical targets you want to shoot with the GG.
Being limited with the GG to mostly deal with elite/special enemies can feel terrible at times when one’s overwhelmed by shooters - it does suppress reasonably well, but it won’t kill a gunline immediately.
Going back to the point I brought up about its speed, it seems to fall off whenever there’s trains on trains of special enemies to kill. You will often not handle all of them in time (considering no teammates - those can’t always be relied upon), you have to account for projectile drop, distance, what have you. It’s fine, but you really feel that slowness when you have to reload every 4 shots and are a sitting duck for 4 seconds afterwards.
It’s an OK weapon. Not terrible, not amazing; quite versatile, actually, but it could be so much better had it at least been quicker with its animation speeds.
I love the GG, it’s somewhere between a rumbler and a revolver, so fun to use and has the highest skill floor of all the ogryn weapons by far. But I have to agree with the critiques here, its problems are so punishing that the weapon tends to become too unreliable above standard damnation. With good aim, you can pop 4 elites or specialists in a few seconds… but on any auric mission, there’s going to be 6 more after them, barreling down at you while your gun has the reload time of a muzzle-loaded flintlock. Not to mention the restrictive ammo supply that has you second-guessing whether each shot is going to be “worth it” and the baffling max range that nullifies it against distant snipers and other ranged dangers. The special punch is nice when SHTF but it’s not enough to make up for all the drawbacks.
Of all the ogryn guns it’s the one that would benefit the most from single-round reloads, though I doubt that’s in the cards. The blessing pool could use some more interesting options as well.
It’s also kinda funny that the melee was useless, got that big buff so people starting using it, and then FS nerfed it back down to crap tier and once again no one bothers with it. What’s the point?
