The problem with Gungryn is that if he can sustain ammo, it’s just ridiculous arcadey gameplay, gunning down hordes. The idea is that Gungryn trades durability for being able to do heavy damage during ability use, not sustained high damage output.
I don’t know what the best solution is, since the team must share ammo, a greedy Gungryn simply will start consuming all the ammo, but if you give him more ammo sustain, then you have to remove something else, and the Twin-Linked Heavy Stubbers and Auto-Shotgun are already kinda wimpy, unless you’re playing Gun Ogryn.
One idea might be to actually make his ranged suppression weapons stronger, but with even more reduced ammo usage, make it so that Point-Blank Barrage doesn’t consume ammo, and take away the 10 second extension for killing elites/specials; instead, just let it last for 30 to 40 seconds.
That would be one way to do it, make Ogryn lean more into it’s melee-range hybrid role, weaving between both types of combat, so you can get bonuses to damage, reload speed, suppression, stagger and, based on damage done with the “other” type of your weapon, x enemy types killed, ammo left. I actually found Bounty Hunter in VT2 quite interesting. PBB and Burst Limiter Override are just uninspired and do not lean into the strong / unique parts of the Tide core gameplay.
Just please no more “playstyles” which can be summed up by: I have infinite ammo, so I shoot 100% of the game, and bypass majority of the combat mechanics/difficulty. Those are so boring, and often just remove all enemy density & difficulty at extremely low risk to the user.
Combat design team seem to be sleeping at Fatshark
Ranged combat in Tide in general is extremely low “skill”, and not that engaging. Patch after match it’s more about “shooting” in the general direction of the enemy. Generous enemy hitboxes, gun “bullets” size of enemy heads, I won’t even go into stuff like psyker ranged options.
exactly. my recent experience with gungryns is modest. they lack toughness and melee power compared to melee ogryns due to investing into the ranged tree, but every encounter leads to melee when the mag is empty, and then they’re often not great. PBB is ready every 80 seconds iirc, which is slow. ranged weapons are not strong against the flood of carapace (which wasn’t as prevalent 1-2 years ago when they decimated heretics with twink stubbers), except for the rumbler build which i find rather annoying. so there’s mostly a guy on the team who runs in the middle of the corridor and eats up ammo. however, there might be a bias because experienced players like being in the thick swinging, while less experienced players find being at range safer.
Every now and then I take lugger for a spin and I will have a couple of good matches blasting elites to bits with my ripper thinking “this aint so bad” but then comes the match where everything goes to sh*t, my teammates are dead and I’m swarmed by crushers utterly unable to kill them fast enough and then a trapper net hits me and game over. Meanwhile my bullrush ogryn can’t get boxed in and would have been able to “protect da lil’ uns” unlike lugger.
“I’m not trap in this corner with you, you are trapped here with me” moment. The way I see it if gunlugger ever gets “good”, it will break the game without much of a skill check. Just like inferno psyker or Desperado HS. At least in melee people are forced to take some risks.
Ogryn pickpocket - generate ammo when you get a killing blow with your ranged slot special action. Could replace Back Off. Then a talent or two to buff gun bashes.
(then do the same for zealot, I want my gun-fu spec)
I think the main problem is the ability that doesn’t do anything that others sources of burst damage do better, but also has high ammo consumption and overall not very interesting gameplay-wise.
Some brainstorming how, in my opinion, to rework the Point-Blank Barrage to make it fun and more useful.
Replace the ranged ability to a weapon similar to the engineer’s steam cannon, with similar gameplay where the player needs to manually restore ability by rotating crank.
It could be an automatic drum grenade launcher. There is a playstyle here and I can’t imagine the existence of a ranged ogryn career without heavy weaponry.
Dual-wielding shooting. When the ability is activated, the character pulls out a second ranged weapon identical to their main one. Firing both guns at the same time, the second one doesn’t consume ammo, but recoil increased and reload is longer.
There seems to be a lot of vitriol directed towards ranged classes. This antisentiment has been repeated several times. I don’t really understand it. What exactly is bad about ranged classes?
Gungryn is one of three archtypes and it should get the love it deserves to be viable.
It’s not vitriol, just a statement about how the game isn’t fun when everything dies at range. Enemy “AI”, general gameplay are simply not designed to handle players which are able to kill them at range. Tide games offer a fairly unique close combat experience, which no other horde games offer. The last thing we need is turn Darktide into Helldivers.
I think PBB is more or less fine as an ability, but the issue with Gungryns is more to do with the weapons best used/most associated with that ability being a bit crap, IE the Twin Stubbers and Rippers. Their ammo economies need big buffs first and foremost, both for total ammo counts and magazine sizes, so Gunluggers can use their abilities more than 3-4 times per match without utterly depleting ammo pick-ups. Damage and maybe some innate rending would also be nice but only in small amounts, like no greater than 10% at the absolute most.
What’d also help is if Ogryns got some new ranged weapons to play with. Something along the lines of a Heavy Bolter and Autocannon (A true Autocannon, not those single barrel stubbers) would ideally do the heavy lifting for anti-armor used, both with and without PBB, while the Stubbers and Rippers focus on hordes and non-carapace elites.
im fine with ammo buffs, but for the rippers specifically i actually dont want a bigger magazine size, because i dump ammo in order for blessings to stack faster a 19 round magazine rounds down so blaze away/inspiring stack per shot, instead of every 2 shots
Anything else would be amazing, though. Better stagger power and better ADM.
Improved wield times might make them too floaty, but would emphasize being an all-rounder.
There were some previous bugs I would like to return and be intentional, such as being able to shoot during a melee stab or shotguns applying more DoT stacks.
Many ogryn’s weapons are unnecessarily frustrating to use, probably as a (stupid tbh) way of balancing them in the past when ogryn was OP:
The heavy stubbers have irritating delay before they start to fire in the primary firing mode, despite they are highly inaccurate in that mode already (what would be enough to make secondary viable on all of them) and overall, as all ogryns range weapon, are ammo hungry (so limited by a resource)
The shovels have unnecessarily over-delayed switch to anti-armor mode - despite not being even that special when switched, can’t one-tap (buffed) crusher even with a full charge of Thrust, for example. Veteran’s shovel can two-tap Crushers too - and it’s switched into anti-armor mode much faster
Branx Pickaxe is so extremely slow it’s painful to use it even with all talents on attack speed taken - while not being anyway close to being that great to justify such slowness. It can’t one-tap crushers anymore as well, it needs two hits at least to kill a rager - and those 2 hits take time as zealot’s 3-4 with relic blade, with the same exact result (dead rager), but RB’s combos are way easier to maintain; it’s so slow and on higher difficulties you have so much more mobs attacking you that while you are preparing one of those swings they often are able to damage you enough to start erroding your HP, bit by bit
The Ripper gun (a big arse shotgun on sterods) barely can onetap a squishy specialist in close range in primary firing mode, if you are lucky - while having enormous kickback in that mode for some reason
Edit:
Also, my personal hate is how even trash mobs’ hits can drop you out of bracing your ranged weapons. At least ogryn, who are supposed to be tough and resistant, could have this privilege of not being immensely frustrated when trying to aim at something in the distance while being surrounded by mobs, constantly interrupting his aiming. Aint he already got enough cons to playing him, eh? Give him something nice, something QoL-ish.
a 19 round magazine rounds down so blaze away/inspiring stack per shot, instead of every 2 shots
