Oh man that would be a great way to do a brute shield, especially with a bigger knife or even a bastard sword.
And the game is too fast paced now for how hard on resources ogryn is to do damage in like 1 setup. Everything else falls pretty far behind but bleed HH pickaxe is respectable for damage and strong for controlling elites. The game isn’t an outright competition but in a normal balance you wouldn’t really expect one to fall behind. That wasn’t the case in VT2 unless you were doing something hardcore meme like greathammer footkrub or IB. Or my greataxe Ranger for max struggle (the miner larpers with the pickaxe rising to the heights of lore slayers).
So yeah once again you can look back at patch 13 and watch everyone’s toolkit jump way past ogryn’s in damage numbers but also finesse. They mostly just added cleave targets to ogryn’s almost universal 3 target limit besides certain knife attacks. You had a bunch of 0.5 or worse (basically everything vs maniac on him at launch but Mk3 cleaver) and other gross damage mods changed or made neutral or better. And the Mk2/Mk1 club could finally do more than 99 damage on those garbage opening lights (imagine having to run infested to one shot a pox pup). And his terrible headshot damage stays the same, on like everything except the Rippergun (the actual best ogryn marksmen weapon still because you can move and be accurate like normal humans made better with a terrible stability stat).
Meanwhile, dueling sword triple finesse double damage. Goes from like 300 crit damage to 1000 in 2 updates. And it can stagger everything while the ogryn struggles with all other ogryns, possibly the only one to suffer bulwarks anymore with the OG weapons.
If you ever want to feel like a forgotten relic, use the krourk stubber and the Mk6 knife with the OG tree. The few times you have boxes they do little more than destroy AMD/xbox player frames. The krourk does almost no damage to everything you want to shoot at because it has 0.5 to flak and limb modifiers (so 0.75 to the likely crossed arms and shinguards). I think you can see where the issues compound. It may as well get pulled if they don’t touch it. The accuracy is terrible and it has the same trigger delay/brace and swap as the goronum.
Cleavers are also confusingly bad heavy swords in game. Their unyielding and maniac damage are terrible and they hit about the same or worse to carapace. But heavy swords have a decent first target damage spike, and powerful finesse. And 5-7 targets hit instead of 3-5.
But those are all just weapons and I would rather Ogryn have some actual strengths worth playing. Like picking up players with any danger is such a waste and you can get absolutely murdered in a second these days with a couple gunners loose. Can Ogryn not use his bulk to rescue other players faster like the Handmaiden did in VT2? It could even have its own animation made. I’d also trade stamina overall for stamina regen speed, but more importantly I think they should just remove the speed reduction for out of sprint stamina. It isn’t even like you’re clearing 5 m/s most of the time anyway, so dropping below that shouldn’t occur. He’s had his morning rations, he shouldn’t be getting winded.
And more talents, because the excuse that he’s dumb has always been a bad one. He isn’t as popular because he straight up has like 3 builds, and like absolutely no variety in those sets. The idea of getting some damage for melee (soften em up) and his goofy actually fun variation of the throwing knife you have to manually equip is just sacrilege to the dev team. Bleed is only so good on ogryn because it actually does more DPS than some of his weapons when contrasted against how long you can be dueling with a single elite. It makes no sense anymore.
So yeah fix those weapons, but also turn that no stagger revive garbage into a fast one, and remove his speed penalty for starters. And lower the sprint costs of his OG weapons while fixing them too. Those are the things almost unplayably bad from the new player perspective, and where the kickback ogryns come from.
It can only be reached from the other two ults now. All FS had do do is make the connections of the three nodes below the ults horizontal instead of diagonal to make builds more flexible in that section of the tree.