I run skull breaker and thunder strike with my slab shield on my ogryn.
I think skullbreaker is necessary to synergize with bleed damage, help your team, and just overall damage performance.
Most other ogren’s swear by confidence strike. I think that is an amazing talent. However I find myself not really needing the extra toughness Regen when I run thunder strike.
My question about thunder strike is that when I take it into the meat grinder on damnation difficulty it doesn’t really seem to affect how long things get staggered and how quickly they get staggered. Can anyone explain to me how it works, what to expect theoretically from it, and anything else?
PS. I know Shield is the worst melee weapon for ogryn. I know that I have to run a stamina trinket to make up for the lack of stamina that every other melee weapon that ogren’s have. I know that slab Shields can’t consistently talk other targets like a reverse camo expert. I hope that when they rework the slab Shield that they include a blessing or something that reflects damage when blocking. I don’t really need you to tell me the drawbacks of using a shield .thanks though
You should try the Skullcrusher blessing when running shield with bleed feat.
All of the blessings that apply x stacks of impact/damage/brittleness to the enemy work the same way:
You hit the enemy and the enemy takes x stacks of the effect.
An enemy can have up to 8 stacks of the effect.
Each hit that is allegible to apply the effect, will also refresh the duration of all stacks of the effect.
If other players apply stacks of the same effect, theirs are combined with yours.
The effect wears off after ~5s of not being refreshed.
Since the effect is applied as a debuff to the enemy, it also affects the interactions of your teammates with that enemy.
I suggested to run the shield with Skullcrusher (x stacks of +5% dmg) when you bring the bleed feat, because bleed ticks that are yours, also apply these stacks.
So you can quickly apply 8 stacks of the debuff (8 x 5% = 40% increase to damage taken) to enemies and you can easily keep the stacks up.