I’ll keep it to summaries and not go into numbers. If you’re actually interested in number comparisons you can head to Darktide Breakpoint Calculator and check out how the numbers compare. Rest assured you can verify what I’m saying there, but it’s beyond my scope to literally compare the numbers in this format.
First, we can compare the Achlys Mk I Power Maul to the Zealot’s Indignatus Mk IVe Crusher.
Indignatus Mk IVe Crusher
- Speed: one of the fastest weapons in the game
- Stagger: very high stagger, capable of knocking over crushers and bulwarks with certain talents and blessings
- Hordeclear: has great cleave values and distribution for for very top of the line horde damage
- Singletarget: has chainable overheads that allow you to single out and kill elites well.
- Finesse: has good headshot/crit multipliers especially on the push attack which is capable of oneshotting mutants, twoshotting maulers
- Moveset: varied moveset that lets you pick between a horde clear combo and a singletarget combo without any resetting
- Special Attack: activation is spammable quickly and does not slow the zealot down much
- Blessings: has slaughterer to elevate pretty much all of this by another 50%, skullcrusher which it can capitalize on by itself due to great cleave and stagger and attackspeed values
Achlys Mk I Power Maul
- Speed: one of the slowest weapons in the game (if not THE slowest)
- Stagger: high stagger, but less than the crusher, is not capable of actually throwing crushers to the ground, slower attacks mean less horde CC
- Hordeclear: usable cleave values but only on the heavies and decidedly far worse than the crusher
- Singletarget: Light 1 and Light 2 are decent singletarget but pointless to use because the sideways swings heavy, while harder to hit, are still harder hitting.
- Finesse: has borderline nonexistant headshot/crit multis on any attack (roughly 25% more damage on a headshot crit)
- Moveset: Can chain heavies. Have to block cancel to keep using the lights. There are no combos. For some reason Light 3 and 4 are unusably bad and don’t chain back into 1+2.
- Special Attack: activation slows you down to an actual standstill and is far slower than the crusher, but otherwise functions about the same
- Blessings: no power blessing, skullcrushers can alleviate some of its issues somewhat but its more of a support blessing since it’s very slow to apply outside of the activation and the weapon basically swings slower than enemies stagger animations lasts for
Conclusion: In literally every single metric I could think of, the Power Maul loses. Keep in mind that this is THE ogryn weapon, shown on the box art and most promotional material.
Second, we can compare the Ogryn Brute-Brainer Mk III Latrine Shovel (the non foldable variant) to the Veterans Munitorum Mk I Sapper Shovel (the non foldable variant also)
Vet’s Munitorum Mk I Sapper Shovel
- Speed: one of the fastest weapons in the game
- Stagger: decent stagger, but nothing outstanding (outside of the special attack). Can lock down hordes very well due to attack speed and nature of heavy combo
- Hordeclear: has great cleave values and distribution for very good horde damage
- Singletarget: With the meta blessings light spam actually ramps up to have pretty strong damage if you keep hitting headshots. Capable of doing more singletarget damage than the ogryn shovel that way. Otherwise lacking
- Finesse: Completely average headshot multis (roughly double damage on a headshot crit)
- Moveset: Straightforward heavy spam for horizontal chaining heavies for cleave, light spam for diagonal strikes for singletarget.
- Special Attack: activation is spammable quickly and staggers every non-boss enemy in the game including mutants. Can borderline stunlock crushers (even on bodyshot) and opens up Bulwarks with a heightened stagger animation on headshot.
- Blessings: Decimator and Uncanny Strike basically let this wep deal with anything, very high value blessings
Ogryn’s Brute-Brainer Mk III Latrine Shovel
- Speed: on the fast side for Ogryn, but slow compared to the Veteran Shovel
- Stagger: decent stagger, but nothing outstanding. Can lock down hordes decently due to alright cleave and decent speed
- Hordeclear: Worse damage profiles on the combo than the vet shovels hordeclear combo, all around.
- Singletarget: Pretty good singletarget when overhead spamming, but must block/qq cancel to keep doing that. Otherwise roughly same as the shovel without decimator.
- Finesse: Dogwater (+25% damage on a headshot crit or so)
- Moveset: Decent hordeclear combo that alternates lights and heavies, but no real single target combo, have to either mix in wide cleaves or block cancel. Lights on their own are basically worthless.
- Special Attack: Punch throws some specials and dreg ragers around. Throwing dreg ragers to the ground has middling uses because other staggers will reset them to their feet. Causes minor flinch animation on maulers and can interrupt the overhead. Opens up Bulwarks the same as the Vet shovel on headshot. Can’t do anything against Crushers or Mutants. Slower than the vet jab and combos worse.
- Blessings: Skullcrusher and Thunderous are basically the only usable blessings on it, but suffers from the same issue as the powermaul, the combination of medium speed, relatively low stagger and medium cleave means you won’t actually benefit from skullcrusher a ton yourself.
Conclusion: In every single metric, the Ogryn shovel is either on par or worse. Keep in mind this is on principle the exact same weapon, both in terms of gameplay niche and style (except the Ogryn one is 3x bigger and wielded by an actual 2 ton ogre)
I think these are the most 1:1 comparisons you can pull, weapons that are conceptually very much the same but executed with very different numbers. Or at least I got bored and couldn’t think of any more right now. Stuff like Bully Clubs are also very undertuned, but have no close comparison.
If I got something wrong just correct me. I’m fairly confident due to having used all of these a ton but this is more of a theory writeup and I may misremember small details about some weps. I may go test some of the stagger stuff I wasn’t sure about on the spot.
My thoughts are as follows: All in all I just wanted to show how oddly undertuned on principle many of Ogryns weapons are, despite being 2x bigger and in the hands of a class that is by design slower and less nimble. I’m not saying they have to be downright superior, but for them to have worse damage profiles, worse cleave, worse finesse multis, and worse breakpoints on basically everything on top of having worse attack speeds and movement speeds across the board just feels utterly wrong and nonsensical both from the weapons feel in comparison and how they’re balanced on a slow heavy hitter melee class.
To summarize, it seems that on principle many Ogryn weapons were designed to be slow, low damage, high stagger weapons. They then gave the human variants of the same weapons more speed, more damage and more stagger and the same reach. Obviously that’s pretty bad design.
The other notable design difference is that Ogryn weps don’t get much headshot/crit damage. I understand that the devs internally call it “Finesse” and probably thought “Finesse? That’s not an Ogryn trait!” but in reality it just makes his weapons ass. Why wouldn’t a big ass club hurt more when it hits the head or gets a lucky kidney shot in?
And lastly, batter helps cover a lot of these issues up by just making the Ogryn bleed everything. Not baseline though, and not pickable on different Ogryn builds, so the weapons just suck ass without it. Some weapons even suck ass with it, because their heavies aren’t good. Meanwhile e.g. Vet can pick up a 100% ranged build and still do great with a sapper shovel (and it’s not even like, a really meta weapon to begin with)
Honorable mention goes out to many Ogryn weapons having crit blessings, despite Ogryn having crit in the negatives with some weapons, and basically no crit talents. (and no finesse multis as mentioned).
My constructive suggestion to fix this is to try these weapons out on a gunlugger build without batter and tune them up to perform adequately there. At the bare minimum, all weapons should feel usable without batter. This is currently not the case for roughly 70% of ogryns arsenal.
