If BB is well balanced at Heresy, then I think it follows it’s poorly balanced at Damnation. But I’m not sure BB is well balanced at Heresy. At least with Empowered, it’s damn powerful.
Regardless of all the above, BB feels a LOT worse at Damnation. Increased damage would help that and not do much to change lower difficulty breakpoints.
But something to help set-up BB kills might be better - a new node off BB with some sort of conditional damage boost. “New node” because I hope for something worth paying extra.
I wonder if a node that lets you see which targets are ripe for a one-BB kill would be enough. That might change gameplay in an interesting way: Opportunistic BBs. And better combined BB/weapon play - Nuke 'em till they glow, then BB them in the dark.
That’s true, still it would be better if it elimimated Krak grenade’s charge time altogether. “Bring it Down” is arguably a better node for bosses, it applies to all damage not just nades and applies bonus damage to Ogryns as well.
By comparison the 50% bonus damage that only bosses get from Tinkerer is just too niche to be worth taking as Ogryns already get 1 tapped by Krak.
It’s not an expensive pick at least, very close to Krak grenade and the alternative talent Covering Fire is meh… But Tinkerer for Krak needs to be tweaked so there’s more situations it’s useful in.
At the base level, I think we can all agree that a minimum of 1400 damage is needed since that’s the breakpoint for Pox Hounds, Gunners and Flamers. With the current damage of 1350 (lol) you cannot one-shot them without some bonuses, which are not always active (aside from Flamers since it has additional 50% scaling against Maniac for whatever reason).
It’s even more obnoxious because the 5% ranged damage node that should put it comfortably above 1400 and would find its single use case in the entire game here… doesn’t. Because Brain Rupture doesn’t simply increase the base damage to 1350, it gives you 50% damage increase for the Brain Burst’s base of 900 so all other increases are also based off of that and thus the 5% ranged damage gives you +45 (for 1395 lol) as opposed to 1417.5. It’s infuriating.
Once that is done we can talk whether or not the Brain Rupture should get further buffs or changes. I, for example, would like it to have a mode where you can simply keep charging until it has enough damage to one-shot whatever enemy you have locked on to. Let it even work on monstrosities, I think I can live with that given how hilarious it would be.