while intentionally pinging devs like their idea of balance is much greater than someone else’s
I think you are projecting here.
As for your other points, we can agree to disagree.
The whole point of this topic is to throw up a ball and then leave it up to the community to decide what happens with it. If people dont like these ideas at all they can simply voice it in the thread while at the same time have their responses be visible to devs (since they were pinged). For that bit about removing cleave cap entirely i should have written it as: Remove the cleave cap while rebuilding the entire cleave system with a focus on moving away from hard caps and more towards soft caps that can be manipulated by the player to a degree (through stats, blessings or traits, or something else entirely)
Also, i just looooooooooooooove having words put into my mouth. Way to go sir! Especially with the creative ad hominems.
Uh, I’m not the one pinging the devs on a generic topic where I didn’t expound on my point in any way, shape, or form. Spare me the pseudo psycho analytical garbage using buzz words you learned from internet discussions.
See first quote response.
Thanks for actually expanding on what you were getting at, that goes a long way on actually fomenting discussions. As I said, weapons do need adjusted though I think ultimately you’re just saying the same thing as me in a different manner. I don’t think a sweeping total removal is the way to go though as that will just cause balance issues in another direction. Having a cap works well for keeping melee combat feeling meaty and responsive as well as general balance purposes. Certainly I don’t want the way brutal momentum axes play to become the norm to balance around.
As an ogryn main who’s been playing since beta:
If blunt weapons used all of their cleave mass allocation instead of harming a couple of targets and then stopping, you would no longer see any but the laziest players arguing that the Bull Butcher is the only viable weapon at higher difficulties.
Damage falloff is logical; fourth target shouldn’t be taking as much damage as the first target, but if you’re running a fully charged Thrust heavy with +50% damage from Knock Em Down… that fourth target should take SOME damage. If you’ve got BM active, the blessing shouldn’t be invalidated by a hidden statline that decrees that the weapon will only ever harm two targets per swing.
Fundamentally, I think removing the cap is the right choice, because you’d still have damage falloff based on hitmass, with the edged weapons tuned to fall off at a shallower rate. I don’t think you’d get any inherent balance problems from that change, because while it would technically enable faster hordeclear with blunt weapons, it would do so by removing an artificial suppressant rather than actually increasing their theoretical damage output.
I don’t think anyone’s sincerely asking for the clubs, hammers, and shovels to turn into launch power swords, but ‘slap them back and forth until someone comes over with a sword’ gets frustrating on Heresy+ and leaves you feeling like you’re not contributing, especially when it’s all controlled by a hidden stat that you can’t interact with in any way aside from changing to a different weapon.
I really wish people would stop implying infinite stagger cleave even through elites is useless unless it’s also damaging those enemies because that is an extremely silly take. What actually invalidates BM on Ogryn is basically all their weapons having torso priority making the proc condition very unreliable.
I maintain that if you could reasonably build to make eg Paul kill the first two poxwalkers cleaved every heavy swing you really wouldn’t care that much if it was doing virtually or even literally nothing to the fifth one cleaved. Just give blunt weapons a good deal more first and second target damage and voila they’re not nearly as painful against hordes while still retaining their own identity and feel.
I can’t tell if you’re genuinely suggesting every weapon get infinite stagger cleave (that is implied by OP and you’re agreeing with them?) That’s such a goofily broken suggestion, entirely removing enemy mass from the game. If you just mean damage cleave limit that’s very much something you should clarify, that’s certainly not as wild a suggestion but as you can see from my suggestion above I really think there are better ways to improve blunt horde clear without removing stat elements that exist to give a distinct difference in feel between different weapon types.
The ogryn blunt weapons have functionally infinite stagger cleave on heavies already, unless you’ve got an ogryn in the target mob. I’m not suggesting changing anything about the stagger math and it’s kinda weird that your first assumption is that I am.
Removing the hidden cap means exactly what it says: removing the hidden cap.
Mass would still apply, and the attack would stop when it ran out of its mass budget, determined by the formula of weapon traits and the power of the attack. Literally just removing the line equivalent to “or 3 guys, whichever is less” at the end of the damage equation. If BM needs to change to say ‘you ignore the hitmass of the first X targets for Y seconds after a headshot kill’ to bring it back in line, or if it changes to say ‘you ignore stagger mass for X seconds’, either one would make at least make it less misleading.
Edged weapons being better for cleaving makes absolute sense, but taking blunt weapons into difficulties above 3 is an exercise in frustration specifically because you’re not even getting attrition buildup on the vast majority of your targets. Heavy swings with the right buff lineup that completely paste the first two targets should still do something to targets later in the queue. Having the guy next to the guy that was oneshotted take no damage at all feels silly and makes horde fights feel like a slog.
I don’t mind that blunt weapons have a steeper damage falloff formula than edged weapons- I just want the formula to actually be followed through, not preempted!
I still want their ability to kill targets improved over horde killing, like I’d make the trade of dealing with horde slowly if they actually bonked things fastly. Why does your only option for killing single targets need 4 heavies and a perk to kill the weakest elite enemy in the game. While not even staggering it like a combat axe would? Or an entire moveset of 0.5 maniac mod attacks beyond the Strikedown heavy? They’re so badly designed before you even get to cleave damage. Make them able to kill elite enemies in like 2 hits so there’s actually a point to not just gun things down in seconds with ripperguns or stubbers as Ogg. The club is still useless the rest of the time.
That 0.5 maniac mod is a lot of the problem in practice, I think. I get that thematically, blunt weapons are meant to be less effective against Maniacs, but I think it goes overboard.
In Vermintide, there was no melee weapon that just could not handle a given enemy type, just ones that were better or worse at the job. Heavy attacks are generally a raw dps loss, require commitment and exposure, and should reasonably have a higher performance floor even against defense types that a given weapon is not optimized for.
Yes, this means I think knives and swords need better damage against Carapace on their Heavies. It also means I think blunt weapons need better damage against Maniacs on their heavies.
I’m cool with the statline still making it clear that that’s not what the weapon is for, but I don’t think it should ever take more heavies than the difficulty rating to kill a special. Not talking about crushers here- mutants and trappers and flamers are all just absurdly tanky against blunt weapons.
That 0.5 maniac mod is apparently so bad to play that when they applied it to the light attacks on the bull butcher and combat axe (since all of the rest of their moves have it) everyone rallied to have it removed in the next hotfix, complaining that they were absolutely gutted and felt terrible to play. Even though the krourk cleavers have that, and the tactical axes have 1.0 mod on maniacs as a trade off for their terrible 0.25 mod on carapace, but we can’t actually have weapons that do different things in this game.
It’s not unreasonable to expect heavy attacks to not have as strict restrictions on ‘right targets’ as light attacks do.
This isn’t Vermintide, but it is surely a successor to it, and in Vermintide, the role of heavy attacks was, in part, for dealing with “wrong” targets.
Yes, 0.5 maniac mod attacks are near universal in ogryn’s kit because I guess box funny meme was more important than you having a grenade function or decent weapons. Especially the brunt’s club that’s supposed to be like an axe, but struggles in 1v1s because it has no stagger power unlike most ogryn weapons. Or damage.
Those same light attacks also aren’t useful in general, like the strikedown that doesn’t oneshot a groaner, or scab. Or 99 damage sweep attacks.
Mk1 with haymaker and confident strike is a playable weapon till t5+STG. I personaly would like if weapon types will be more distinct. Incase with ogryn recept is something like this:
knives for bleed, crits and mobility (add bleed blessings for knives)
clubs for instakill chance, control, anti armor
shovel probably somwhere in between
Remove Haymaker from blessing pool to free a socket for something else (nothing to choose currently, so Thrust) and reintegrate it as a blunt weapon trait with some decent chance and without need to chain heavies. Just don’t make it a hidden stat like crits, there is a room on weapon cards.
And buff club attack speed a bit also. Now spaming lights to farm toughness via confident strike works better on clubs, aswell as heavies are better at damage.
