I think the Rumbler should stay as powerful as it is currently in regards to damage and stagger, I also suggest actually buffing the explosion damage with the below nerfs I’m suggesting, but the ammo needs to be reduced.
Current ammo: 24 at 60% and 27 at 80%.
Suggested ammo: 7 at 60% and 10 at 80%.
And also we need a nerf to “Back Off!”
Current effect: On killing melee attack, gain +10% chance to trigger lucky bullet on next shot. stacks 10 times (115% chance at max stacks).
Suggested effect: On killing melee attack, gain +5% chance to trigger lucky bullet on next shot. stacks 17 times (100% chance at max stacks, needs more kills for the still guaranteed lucky bullet proc).
And also Shattering Impact blessing needs a fix.
Current description: Target receives 4 Stacks of 2.5% Brittleness on direct projectile hit. Debuff lasts for 5 seconds and can have a maximum of 16 stacks.
But what it actually does is apply the brittleness to the main target twice, and once to all enemies within the explosion radius, example video below.
I think it should apply 2 stacks to enemies caught in explosion instead of 4.
Rumbler should stay powerful as a scarce tool, not a the spam machine it currently is.
Reducing the ammo might result in ogryns taking all the ammo in mission, but it is what it is.
In a vacuum, I think rumbler is actually close to being at the right place, it’s the talent interactions that tip it over the edge into ogrynheimer territory.
The entire draw of this talent is to bank a guaranteed proc you can actually plan around. Besides being egregiously unnecessary your suggestion makes the talent feel awful because all consistency goes out the window.
If the procs are happening too often then simply increase the stack requirements. It’s very possible to nerf things without completely destroying their game feel, I really wish more people would remember this when suggesting nerfs.
Also speccing down to lucky bullet confers a pretty enormous opportunity cost. I don’t think we want to just revert to the situation where this keystone is never ever picked.
The rest of this is whatever. Shattering is good for dots but actually borderline useless for the direct damage of rumbler, which already has close to 1.0 armour multipliers for every armour type (making brittle effect negligible). With PBB fire dots sure it’s probably a bit much. It’s been long considered a borderline useless blessing for Rumbler since it does so little for the direct damage, so it is genuinely very very funny to see people now jump to wanting it nerfed.
The solution here is actually just to stop ALL dots across classes interacting with rending/brittle. Not to nerf a blessing that is objectively bottom tier when you take dots out of the equation.
I really think as has been pointed out elsewhere infinite cleave is the actual issue here. Probably just give it a damage AND stagger dropoff per target hit (counting targets from closest to the middle outwards) is literally all you need to do to get it to at least an ok state.
And regarding infinite cleave, it is a big issue with flame weapons, grenades, and the Rumbler, but I would still love to the see the current power levels maintained, but the resources needed to use these tools should be made more scarce.
I understand that compulsion but I think it’s functionally impossible to balance that resource across difficulty levels. It’ll either be functionally infinite on lower difficulties or too limited on higher difficulties.
Applying cleave falloff limits your damage per shot while having negligible impact on difficulties where enemies don’t get dense enough for Rumbler/Flamer to overperform in the first place.
There’s definitely another conversation to be had about ammo economy generally, but remember everyone thought flamer was more or less dead and buried until havoc introduced enough density for it to shine again. Basically all of these problems boil down to scaling way too good into density.
Yes, I don’t know if it was ever intended or not, but it makes no sense that uncanny strike will increase all DoT damage. Just as it doesn’t make sense that the explode blessing on bolt pistol affects grenades. I think it’s a bug that FS just can’t get right.
This and above are really the only issues for rumbler, purge staff and flamer.
But it’s problaby way harder for FS devs to adjust than reducing ammo numbers, etc.
I’ve often noticed how ogryns with rumblers feel free to shoot grenades into a small crowd of trash enemies (which is easy to take out in melee), or shoot a single specialist or even a regular small gunner - in a normal situations when teammates are nearby. That is, it definitely feels like the ammo supply doesn’t feel “limited” to save it for waves of specialists or bosses. It’s about the normal game mode
Half a year ago, right before Ogryn’s rework, I made a topic on grenadier gauntler/rumbler blessings balance.
The devs just insist on making Rumbler a spam weapon. Even more so with Lucky Bullet rework.
At this point there’s only two ways to balance it. Either rework the weapon, so that it deals no damage to armor at all. Or give it more ammo and make it gain ammo from grenades, instead of ammo boxes to bottleneck its spammability.
I don’t care how strong the weapon is, my problem with Rumbler is that it’s 30 minutes of constant explosions which make my head hurt from playing in headphones. I’ve also had situations where Ogryn spam it into elites and make it impossible to see if they’re attacking or not from all the smoke and explosion effects.