I’ve been testing it in high difficulties, paired with 50% block efficiency and 30% stamina regen. It’s a really good defensive tool but SEVERAL things need to be fixed to make it competitive. Also to make up for the severe lack of damage even when spamming push attack and heavies with bleed, which is a good way to balance the weapon (and should stay like it) but then you should make the defensive part of this weapon better.
It should block when pushing (not push attack) and while charging with the ultimate.
It should also block ranged shoots from every side when reviving, just like psyker with deflector.
It should block flamethrowers just like grail knight’s shield in Vermintide 2. It’s a big ass 2 meter shield ffs.
Add a small amount of block efficiency to the defence stat?
Add a different shield variant with different specials, like the power maul one with all the CC but with less damage to balance it or a shield bash that also blocks.
Fix dreg gunner melee switch, you can just walk up to a 30 shooter patrol with the mentioned block efficiency but it doesn’t matter cause many times they just keep shooting in melee range.
Now that you are at it, make some taunt and stamina feats for the ogryn and replace some of the current useless or not working ones, it’s absurd that he doesn’t have some. Defensive talents like blocking (bullets or melee) to get toughness back or something would be awesome too.
It’s a big list yes, I would say the first 3 are the most important. Currently unless you have your team in comms and play with the shield perfectly it’s just… meh I could be doing the same stagger by spamming the power maul and actually kill stuff, and for the blocking yeah, you only “block” like half the things in the game really.
On this general subject, Ogryn should be protected (from the front minimum) against dogs and mutants when the shield is up/braced. Maybe trappers as well…
Overhauling gameplay mechanics to improve the shield like giving it the ability to block dogs just bring it further away from all the other weapons. I see the shield as a weapon first, with the secondary bonus effect of being able to block range (or plant and block stamina free). Bringing up the attack damage will bring it in line with other Ogryn weapons. Right now it just tickles at heresey and damnation.
Here’s what I thought from my post on reddit. It’s almost similar as my post on this forum, but I changed some, since I’ve played the game more.
By the way, blocking when pushing is needed too.
Slab Shield - It can be useful, but not that much as people tell. Planting shield can be troll move, since supporting your team with ranged weapon is better most time. It’s useful when your team is only melee group, so you can make your teams charge distance shorter (since you should save your ammo for dire time), or very open map, or specific map that fire fight is needed. You can stagger every enemies without shield unlike VT2, there’s no benefit to use it normally. I myself don’t use this weapon, because too weak to bring it in T4, or T5 difficulty unless it’s all Ogryn squad, and it has small stagger cleave possibility compared to Power Maul. And it has terrible Maniac damage, you can’t even have over 200DPS to Trapper with 79% damage and Skull breaker Lv3 blessing. You can’t kill a mutant on yourself, since it takes too much time.
Damage against Maniac : Buff heavy attacks and push attack damage against Maniac to 75% of unarmored damage.
Planting shield : Make Ogryns look side, so he can notice danger around him. When are defending with it, make planting shield faster without redundant animation. And pls make it as toggle.
Stamina : 3 → 6
First heavy attack : It needs more cleave to armored enemies, and this attack should cover more left side of Ogryn, now it has just awful cleave, and hitbox.
As a shield main all i really want is some taunt type ability for ranged. Maybe a small damage increase. I run heresy with it all the time, it pairs well with the ripper since you can get into range easier and also deletes maniacs.
Yes for Block, No for charge. Unless they changed charge to visually show the Ogryn using the shield during charge. Since now the charge is one hand forward basically which means shield is probably on your back.
I don’t think there’s any character that can block ranged attacks while reviving. And from what I can see Psykers need to use a specific weapon with a specific blessing to achieve this. Simple solution would be give Ogryn shield same blessing?
Hmm… I think that would make it just a tad to strong. And Grail Knight was OP.
Yes. That would be cool.
If you are talking about the shooters then yeah they can be abit stubborn from switching to melee if they are shooting at you. Best course of action is to charge em down and bully them. Force the melee to happen.
No. The whole meta around Ogryn using shield thinking they are some kind of tank is one of the most stupid ideas the community has with this game. Giving them a taunt with shield would just break the game completely.
Sure, the shield works wonders if you have a team of 3 sharpshooters all running the grief feat CAMO EXPERT. Then sure shield works.
But other than that it’s just better to use either the Bully Club or Power Maul and brutalize your enemies by cheer oppression.
Having some blessings to do some of the things, like you mention for Psyker and their deflector force sword would be a nice addition… if we could craft for it.
It should offer more protection than it does when pushing or charging, especially considering enemy bulwarks often have full 180 protection from their shield regardless of where the model of their shield is or what animation they are in. If the Ogryn’s shield is physically in the path of the shot, it should block it.
Blocking flamers maybe be harder to do here as they set fire to the floor, I wouldn’t say no, but I’m not holding my breath.
My biggest problem is that the reason it isn’t competitive on higher difficulties is due to the low damage. Increase the damage, and it becomes much more viable instantly.
Adding a couple extra blessings, like a bleed perk or toughness from cleave would go a long way. Too many bad blessing for the shield at the moment.
Changing the special would be nice too. Too many people think that their job is to sit there doing nothing.
A lot of the issues stem from the weird/buggy hit registration (see ACK bugs) where the super wide swings (both heavies) don’t hit mobs they’re supposed to.
Add to that buggy/wonky feats, side-effects with other stuff, stagger reset bug etc. etc. and it loses a lot of effectiveness it’s supposed to have on paper.
Buffing the shield’s defensive capabilities would be incredibly unhealthy for the team on the whole.
We don’t need more “I’m totally helping!” ogryn sitting there doing nothing. Also to be blunt, it seems some people want it to just half play the game for them when they plop it down, rather than having to actually think if they should be plopping in front of 50 things they can’t disengage from when there’s a risk of a disabler.
I’d settle for them just making it not totally blind you, even when you’re not blocking. Its model is way too obnoxiously big.