Reginald has some interesting suggestions but wants feedback from more experienced ogryns.
AI summary because I am on mobile:
Overview of Current Issues:
Feast or Famine Gameplay: Ogryn feels inconsistent, performing well in some scenarios but failing in others due to poor action economy, slow attack speeds, and low stamina.
Weak Action Economy: Slow weapon swings, long chain times, and clunky mechanics make Ogryn feel cumbersome and underwhelming compared to other classes.
Toughness and Shooter Interaction: Ogryn struggles against groups of shooters due to limited toughness regeneration and ranged resistance.
Key Fixes and Suggestions:
Baseline Improvements:
Trample Through Chaff: Ogryn can walk through hordes without staggering or damaging enemies, mimicking Saltzpyreâs ability in Vermintide 2.
Ignore Knocked-Down Enemies: Allow Ogryn to move and dodge through knocked-down foes, including larger ones.
Trample Damage Node: Add a skill node that deals 50 damage per step when walking over staggered enemies.
Ranged Resistance in Bull Rush: Add toughness damage reduction or ranged immunity during the âBull Rushâ ability.
Toughness and Survivability:
Immunity to Crowd Control During Bull Rush: Prevent traps and dogs from interrupting âBull Rushâ unless directly sprinted into.
Unconditional Toughness Regen: Make coherency-based toughness regeneration work regardless of enemy presence.
Taunt Buffs: Grant toughness and damage reduction on activating the taunt ability.
No Toughness Stagger: Prevent Ogryn from being staggered by toughness breaks or similar effects.
Unstoppable Rampage: Add a passive where, on death-triggering damage, Ogryn temporarily gains bonus speed and damage before being downed.
Weapons Adjustments:
Power Maul Improvements:
Add a heavy overhead attack as an option.
Replace button-press mechanics with a heat-based system like the Relic Sword.
Remove slowdown during activation and allow mid-combo activation.
Improve first-target damage and armor penetration.
Melee Weapon Balancing:
Address underpowered melee weapons like the Power Maul and Shield.
I want my actual stagger back. Things are reacting to certain attacks like they were hit by a stiff fart on the wind and it feels real, real bad in comparison to the shenanigans human classes can still get into (DS poke, Shovel poke, ect). Clubs, shovel, cleaver, ripper poke, all of them.
I want FNP to stop being passive and start being active. I want my tankiness to be determined by how i play, not how i avoid damage.
I want one or both Tough regen nodes to get divorced from heavy attacks. The amount of crippledness you inflict on yourself for wanting to use a light attack is silly.
Attack delays have to go.
The box should probably be 3 or 4 charges.
Heavy Stubber audio needs to be redone, they sound like air guns.
All crit chance and crit adjacent nodes need to die. Alright maybe not all of them for the Twin-linked stubber memes, but all of BLO has got to get gone.
Crunch needs to begone.
Soooo so very many adjustments should have been made to the Krourk Twin-linked stubber.
I want his talent tree to be more like Veteranâs and Zealots so I can cross the tree without giving up completely on certain nodes.
Not going to go into that Ogryn needs more weapons and the ones he currently have needs more love, that is obvious. And that every class have a few talents that do not provide much benefit and that Fatshark should look them over.
There is currently two main problems Ogryns have when it comes to endgame (havocs). One of them is already mentioned with:
I can say now that I do not use Feel No Pain at all. I have no need for it, not because Iâd say that Ogryns can surive long fights with spread out shooters in cover, but Iâve learned to play around it with my teammates⌠and by this I mean hold charge when Zealot uses Chorus and the Psyker follows up with a aggressive bubble placement to advance deeper into enemy territory. Sometimes I can go without it, but that is very map dependent or that I have to blindfire with my Inspiring Barrage Ripper V to get that toughness back while putting in damage on the shooters.
As mentioned with:
Give Feel No Pain some more love, open up the possibility to play more aggressively against ranged enemies for the Ogryn would be a good way to make him feel better.
Increase the damage reduction, even if it now only works against ranged attacks. Give it a flat value on all the stacks and do not have it lose value as you get lower and lower in stack count.
Pained Outburst should now also suppress ranged enemies for 1,5-2 seconds, up the toughness gained back to 35-40% and lower the cooldown to 12-15 seconds. And most importantly, make it work on you reaching zero toughness instead of reaching zero stacks.
Strongest! needs to regain more then one stack, 2 at minimum but I would really like 3 stacks. Time spent pushing costs stamina and does not put damage into enemies nor gain you any toughness back with heavy attacks and/or kills.
And the second problem is more about the Party Finder really, but everyone knows what the other classes bring to the table in terms of survivability on high havocs, so why should people (with facing the threat of demotion) bring an Ogryn along when there are âbetterâ options available to them. To be clear, Iâm not saying that Ogryns canât contribute to help clear high level havocs, but the amount of time I spent looking for public games are increasing on my Ogryn. In short, I want to have a tangible reason for people to bring an Ogryn to the party.
So what do people want? Golden toughness! (I guess cooldown reduction aswell, but that does not feel like something an Ogryn would bring). Iâd love to see that a talent was given the ability to net the team +20-25 toughness (being able to exceed your maximum toughness) for 8-10 seconds on ability usage, perhaps Get Stuck In?
So why not more then +20-25? Since it should not be better then what the other classes can bring, doubly so if it actually gets tied to a talent and not an on use ability.
Why not just make it a ability modifier on Loyal Protector? Please do not make it into a worse version of Voice of Command, and by not having the desired team boost locked on one ability means that Ogryns have more freedom of choice.
Damage reduction, yes. Ranged immunity, no.
I do admit that going fast and attacking fast is fun. But here we come down to how Fatshark envision the play experience for Ogryns. While they can for sure have weapons that are faster, you can also get a satisfying experience by increasing the cleave and stagger, so that you can see that the slow attacks have a high impact on the enemy horde.
That is currently all I have to say, might edit something in later on if I find something else to bring up.
as i posted in the video comments, trample through chaff first and foremost. how many times have iâve been trapped because some piece of rotten meat i couldnât even see on the floor blocked me. itâs the most frustrating aspect imo.
same for nets or dogs stopping ogryn mid-charge.
afaik ogryn doesnât have a dodge linger time window, thatâs why he takes hits other classes just âphase throughâ.
Iâd like to see some sort of trample linked to FNP stacks, as an âactiveâ benefit to the keystone. Linked to dodges? At high-stacks dodging could use up a stack, but enhance the dodge and allow trampling.
Also: Light 'em Up not working with the Rumbler explosion is proof of the existence of evil.
Agree with this. Using a pickaxe to stagger a Bulwark just makes them do a tiny happy foot tap whilst still fully clutching their shields, then they bash you with their shield and stagger you before their âstaggerâ animation even finishes properly.
Speaking of power cellsâŚcan we make it so an enemy sneezing doesnât make you drop it?
I mean, surely toughness should have to break before you drop the powercell. As it stands, an enemy can knock it from your hands at any moment, even with full toughness.
Itâs super annoying and also if you put your little toe in a tiny puddle of corruption goo then you also drop the power cell.
One of the big things that Reginald didnât focus on would be Ogryn straight up just needing more weapons. Heâs by design the third wheel and it really sucks for the class. He needs another 10 ranged weapons and another 10 melee weapons before he has even anywhere close to the same weapon variety as other classes. To be fair theyâve been trying to give Ogryn a wep with every patch, itâs just slow.
Another thing Iâd like to see is a complete rethinking of many Ogryn talents, complete tree overhaul. Right now hereâs the decisionmaking process when building an Ogryn tree:
Which grenade do I want?
Do I want melee bleed or do I want to use PBB?
Which keystone?
thatâs literally it. These are the 3 relevant choices an Ogryn build gets to make lol. Everything else is more or less static.
Ontop of that the talents are needlessly restrictive. On one hand they said they redesigned Veteran keystones because locking players into weapons wasnât good. But then, Ogryn talents all do this. Ogryn gunlugger weapons that donât fire fast are just inferior due to the talents. Ogryn melee weapons where you donât mostly use heavies are just trash. Pre-talent tree rework shows this doesnât HAVE to be the case, the bull butcher cleaver used to be pretty meta and worth using because heavy attacks werent as enforced.
Something that I also want to say is that I donât think Ogryn needs to be faster, he needs more freedom for how slow he is. Getting pinballed by shotgunners was annoying and felt bad, and this is gone and Ogryn isntantly felt way better as a result. Getting knocked out of stuff by a bulwark push feels horrible on Ogryn too because unlike others he has a harder time just dancing around them. Flamers could also stand to have a bit more subdued knockback on Ogryns, not to trivialize them but just enough for it to not feel like the Ogryn weighs 20kg. The whole âogryn special attacks need to stagger againâ definitely plays into this equation, it feels horrible when youâre a big Ogryn man defined by his lumbering strength but your punches wonât even affect half the things in the game.
They also really messed ogryn over on the finesse curve which denies even more opportunities for spiking damage. Even on a terrible AP weapon enough swiss cheese buffs can line up to where you can deal with elites pretty easy on the human weapons. Basically all of that is because you know how to play the game and your headshots are rewarded with massive spikes on damage and especially crit.
The ogryn clubs (the worst in this department) have a finesse modifer somewhere around 1.15x. As of the thunderhammer overhauls I canât even find a human weapon with less than 2.0x.
So maybe they could improve the finesse curve of his weapons, since there is a pretty wide gap below the 2.0x you could fill in. Lots of other things said eg stagger being terrible now and some reclassed enemy stagger distinctions bullying specifically ogryn for no reason. Crunch should still be a built in thrust because nuking things with the club and shovel when they had that hilarious 50% power per stack thrust was still not even goodâŚtrading that much time should have a trade off. In current darktide a precog/duelist Zeal can click through half a patrol before you get one charged heavy off, taking out 1 enemy.
Stamina is another thing that feels off, maybe if they cut down the cost of sprinting with his weapons heâd be less yike to play in lobbies full of knives and dueling where youâre multiple screens behind at a time. Its funny how his high mobility option (cleaver) just has a neutral sprint cost of 1.0. While the human one has 0.5 and actually makes you move faster than a rager instead of barely coming up to vetâs fatigued sprinting speed with stamina.
but speaking of which, a flail (if 40k has something in lore like it) could be the âmissing linkâ between club and pickaxe.
the later right now is just so good in terms of speed damage and range, i got no reason to ever switch back.
shield doesnt get stuff dead fast enough, up until auric maelstrom you dont need the added defense anymore, havoc it can be a thing but youâll be lacking in the damage department.
bully I oddly enough overheads bulwarks more reliably than the pickaxe, but branx oneshot on almost everything except bosses outperforms it by a mile.
knifes had their time, right now in the âmehâ department, krourk IV is ok but thats it.
paul, it could be something IF the power ability was tied to the amount of heavy charging rather than the one button / one swing slog it puts you through and therefore in shtty situations.
what i cant make head or tail of right now is a loadout that has no problem clutching I II V E Gs struggles that much in havoc if you aint got book and bubble.
so oggy should get some way rewarding offensive maneuvers instead of forcing the biggest target into a stalemate where heâs forced to soak up damage.
maybe in contrast to bubble as a stationary / book as slow proceeding pushback method ogryn should (like the lore shows) whip them into a berserking frenzy building up âred toughnessâ depending on how many/how fast enemies get killed.
rewarding aggressive and active gameplay instead of reactionary stalling.
Playing some VT2 again the flail is an obvious choice for ogryn, it would greatly benefit their stagger oriented gameplay and give them something suitably hefty to justify their slowness. Armor cleaving is a huge advantage of the flail in VT2, very rarely seen. Here Ogryn has nothing that cleaves armor at the moment without special cases like brutal momentum or unstoppable force.
Plus since its an ogryn weapon you could make it look funny. I vote instead of a battle flail or some proper instrument its literally an engine hoist with the engine still in it suspended by chains.
No, no, no, no, no. Itâd be foolish to stop with a mere flail. The ogryn should be given a long, bulky, kusarigama: A chain with a sickle - letâs make that a scythe, actually - at the other end.
Iâm sure ogryns could be trained to use the weapon effectively and safely.
Initially most Ogryn weapons couldnât even headshot by design because they prioritized body hitzones over head hitzones, itâs mindboggling design that they fortunately did not insist on keeping (although some weps still have it, I think Power Maul for example). I think this is one of the few aspects of Ogryn where a straight buff is needed, either by just tuning up the base damage on most of his attacks to reach similar breakpoints as the other classes or just giving him proper headshot modifiers.
When you look into this a bit deeper, headshots are sort of a weirdly balanced mechanic in Darktide. Basically every character gets to have the Saltzpyre height which gives them easy headshots, and unlike Vermintide, the enemies are all on the same height level roughly (other than Crushers, Bulwarks and Reapers obviously) so itâs basically guaranteed for your melee weapons to just headshot away all game long. When you look at it that way itâs obvious that the character with the bad headshot modifiers just kinda sucks damage wise compared to the others.
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