Ogryn melee needs rework and more depth, random ideas

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Current ogryn melee playstyle is about heavy spam with club or shield. Sure why wouldn’t you when heavy attack is fast, gives insane toughness regen, stacks bleed and procs Haymaker on clubs.

First, blunt weapon shouldn’t be able to put bleed, it’s just silly. It should be knives.

Knives - after every third crit attack (or 4th, 5th or something) your next heavy attack will apply n bleed stacks on first target you hit.

Clubs - could be control, like melee supression, kiling human-sized elite puts nearby (some small radius) trash mobs into supression state. Killing ogryn - puts all human sized enemies in supression state. Basicaly ogryn scares the crap out of enemies. Can proc once per time period, something like that.

Shovel - something in between, can do bleed like knives, but less stacks and crits proc rarely. Can cause melee supression with blunt attacks, but shorter duration/smaller radius.

Shovel special - imo it should be something like that - activation will consume up to ~3 stamina and will buff your heavy up to n%, So if you activate it while having only 1 stamina, will give you +1/3n%.

Or just slow down animation. Free oneshot vertical attack is dumb, especially with high survivability archetype, there is no risk involved.

Pmaul - brittlenes or armored enemies hunting. Like killing armored target with energized attack cause armor to blow as shrapnel, n nearby enemies/enemies in some small radius take x% of killed target HP as damage.

Or something like - energized attacks convert some ammount of stagger you deal into brittleness stacks.

Shield - make lights to be meanignfull. Maybe something like Haymaker for lights would be good. Also there should be THORNS. Almost every game has this mechanic for shield, why? Cause you trade your damage for defenssive playstyle, but damage still matters. Can be 2 nodes - one gives you protection buff on taunt, and another - thorns on blocked attacks.

Also for shield blessing could be somehing like ~3% to auto block any attack (only melee maybe), autoblock don’t consume stamina (like no animation, just blocks dmg as in any other game)

Slap, punch - meme idea, once per run hit your knocked teammate to insta res it.

Toughness regen - needs a bit more flavor. Something like:

  • Bully - earn more toughness for killing trash mobs (smaller buff)
  • Browler - earn more toughness for killing non-trash mobs (significant buff)
  • Bone’ead - earn toughness for applying status effects on enemies - bleed, brittlenes, supression, aggro etc.

TL;DR for a better melee there should be:

Reason to use light attacks with this weapon
Reason to use heavy attacks with this weapon
Combo (i don’t mean chains) but reach condition - trigger effect, atleast for one of attack types, like a mini game, or a game inside a game
In a pefect world - block and push attack should play a bigger role.

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Lots of ideas here. I agree that the current play style of Ogryn is too ‘heavy attack spam’ dependent. I would like to see more talents that proc off of melee attacks in general rather than just heavy attacks (RIP in Peace Bull Butcher).

Having clubs be unable to apply bleed would imply that Batter would not be able to exist as a talent. Currently, Batter is very strong and easy to obtain unless you are Gunlugger. I would be fine if Batter was removed as long as more blessings were added to have the shovels and cleavers apply bleed.

For the new MkV and MkXIX shovels, I don’t think making them consume stamina to activate works all too well. I don’t know what I would do for them, but MkV special heavy killing 4 crushers in 1 swing is a bit silly.

Paul has seen better days (kind of). It’s never been great, but with the buffed health on enemies now L1 and L2 can’t 1 shot groaners anymore. That’s pretty bad.

Never been a huge fan of the shield, but I don’t like the idea of thorns. It rewards passive play and would have the potential to be overpowered or completely useless (making it a noob trap).

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I generaly believe they just should add weapon-talents tag system. So atleast some talents will be specific for weapon type.

So Batter or any kind of bleed will go to sharp weapons or sharp type of attacks, or just to knives. And blunt weapon needs some more unique talents - control, stagger, anti-armor etc.

They kinda did it already
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Like for human class, let’s say vet, i would like to see something like “if both weapons in your loadout are mundayne weapons you take n% less damage from scab melee elites, also grants +1 dodge limit” so the idea if you suck to deal damage to crushers, maulers and ragers, you can kite them better in exchange. Cause i don’t like current situation, when the most popular weapons are all-rounders or those can handle armor. I think it will be better if you can take loadout that sucks against armor but you can counterbalance it with deep specialization.

People tend do dislike ideas to trade stamina for damage as i’ve seen so far. I have no strong opinion, but in case with ogryn i think it migh work cause he has a lot of stamina by default, and he can take stamina curio without loosing much in survivability. But overall it can be anything, it’s just having fast to activate and at the same time strong vertical attack on archetype that almost can’t die is …eh.

I kinda see it reversed. Noobs already tend to play passive with shield, so if they will be able to deal atleast some damage with thorns, it will teach them to be more aggressive and aggro everything they can find with push/ultimate.

Anyway I don’t think thorns should be your main source of damage like in ARPG, more like minor buff in situations like agroing bosses. No bleed on thorns, regenerating millions of toughness in one sec cause of thorns and stuff like that.

Maybe it will be a bad idea to have thorns in game like DT indeed, was just an example that game needs more mechanics and specialization.

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A lot of your ideas seem to be based in real-life reasoning rather than game balance. While I disagree that blunt weapons aren’t as good at making things bleed, I think that’s beyond the point.

Haymaker as a way to promote light attacks is a really great idea. A lot of players miss the fact that light-heavy chainig is also a great way to use skullcrusher, since the light followup is more likely to catch the enemy while they’re still staggered and apply the debuff.

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That’s a good point about Shock Trooper! I forgot that it existed somehow. Vet does have a problem in their skill tree with too many passives, and I think that having a niche talent only usable for a few weapons would not fit well in Ogryn’s skill tree. This is because Ogryn currently doesn’t have much in the way of weapon variety and not nearly as many passives in the skill tree. I would be fine with Batter doing different things based on the weapon equipped as long as it is easy to understand.

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Yes and no. Some of them comes from other games.

But the thing is it’s just better when you can look at something (especially if you are a new player) and intuitively say what the outcome will be, like knife cuts, axe chops, club bonks, rifle with scope probably not a shotgun. It’s ok to have some ammount of unexpecting interractions and synergies for builds diversity and stuff to learn, it brings longetivity to a game’s lifespan.

Real-life based mechanics isn’t a bad fundament. Like what do you expect from bludgeoning weapon except from anti-armor? Something like crushing bones, how could it be implemented into a game? Well something like “your heavies have a chance to cripple enemeis decreasing their movespeed for 10%” etc.

I don’t see there is any reason to argue about bleed on clubs much, i just personaly would like to see something more thematicaly, cause i think there is a value in such approach.

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just as a quick “throw in”:

i currently prefer my bull butcher and gameplay wise i get why some stuff isnt feasible when you want to keep the flow of the game.

aka lights and heavies that boil down to a quick math game of damage and “overkill”

what i’d like though would be akin to a glory-kill where the ogryn utilizes his size, grabbing say a rager by the neck with his spare hand and gut him like a fish, toss him in the crowd afterwards.

so far stagger + 2x heavy damage is somewhat in range of killing a rager.

make this your animation window while keeping the ogryn vulnerable so he cant cheese it as a free out of jail card and it’d add some oomph to an otherwise repetitive pattern.

granted that in itself would repeat as well eventually, but repetition is the name of game after all.

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THIS. It even was in another warhammer game - space marine, before Doom 2016/eternal. Fits “ogryn fantasy” well. I was thinking about the same stuff - either grab and throw enemy or crush its skull with bare hand. So when they added Friendly Rock i was feeling like it’s kinda missed opportunity.

Or another more simple thing i was thinking of - you reach some condition and can perform brass knuckle punch, cause… WHERE?!
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But speaking realistically glory kills and finishers will take too much of resources to implement them, atleast i don’t believe something like that will be added. Or i don’t know, mutie can grab players, slam and throw them, wonder how hard it to adjust this animations for ogryn and mobs.

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sadly i doubt them coming as well. space marine, while fun, was a little to heavy on the stop and go recharge mechanic, hence my restraint on how to implement it without getting clunky, static.

main culprit right now would be the extremely poor server quality.

how can i expect my team to see my animation window and acknowledge the rager as “done” when my own screen denies me a proper reload animation or weapon switch sometimes?

different projectiles overkilling the rager would make no difference whereas my screen shows the rager choking by the neck, while my buddy sees him running past me whistling the song of nurgle.

and thats the shame about the franchise at hand really,the design team/audio/animation, atmosphere as a whole is bar none.

to the point where i, as a life long doom and fallout fan, having had nothing to do with warhammer at all:

*put the most hours of any game into darktide since release/putting every other “main” game aside basically

*try other warhammer games because atmosphere/universe

*spend a good amount on mcfarlane figures and got my 3d printer do overtime

*has baldermort and scholars lore on his youtube sleeping routine to battle damn tinnitus

*think about getting a new tattoo in my 40s

*made my own youtube channel to document my ogryn progress

all that and its based on such a foundation that screams “problems” at every corner.

i know passion is easy as a consumer and doesnt keep bills payed/costs down, but come on, this is a freaking gold mine if done right.

currently i ponder at what other game would give me the same adrenaline treatment when darktide would be no more.
right now every other game falls flat and i’m to old with energy draining shifts to hunt for that k/d in pvp games.

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Well crap, wh40k rabbit hole at its finest.

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People use those because the other weapons are to slow. Also the devs have tried to get Ogryn to use the heavy attacks and finally succeeded.

Blunt doesn’t mean edge less. Not even the clubs are smooth round weapons.

What a terrible and useless mechanic.

Needlessly complicated and the shovel specials are fine.

Shield is fine as it is.

What do you need autoblock for? If you get beat on a lot you need to work on your melee game. Worse this means its uncontrollable.

The very fact that you already call it a meme highlights that this is a waste of time to implement.

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couple months ago i had to quit playing for a week because my wrist wouldnt move after painting a dozen ymgarl genestealers… the 7 inch ones :smile:

recently learned whats the fuzz about death korps of krieg, being german those non-translated fragments usually put me off, sounding silly in the first place, but boy i could listen to that lore for hours, coming to think of it, i do :laughing:

so yeah, basically all thanks to a game called darktide.
should give the devs something to think about, what they got in their hands, in a best case scenario.

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As long as it doesn’t feel arbitrary. I don’t think its unreasonable to a club to cause bleeding, but if some weapons are made to receive less benefit from certain feats with no justification balance-wise, it doesn’t feel good, and can be confusing for players. A smart designer will bake synergies into the math of a feat rather than creating something that needs to be tweaked for each individual use-case.

Take for example Onslaught for Veteran. The bonus it gives can be massive (40% brittleness!), but only if you’re using a weapon that will hit the enemy 16 times before they die. By the nature of how it works, Onslaught is significantly stronger on fast-firing weapons with large magazine sizes, and almost useless on anything else.

I agree that more build variety would really help Ogryn. Haymaker applying to lights for example would be really great. At the moment, the biggest use-case for lights is to proc confident strike and thunderous on gunlugger builds that aren’t specced into melee. Skullcrusher is another feat that works well with lights, since the feat requires that you hit the enemy while they’re staggered for the effect to apply.

I think a simple approach would be to add some feats that rely on you hitting the enemy multiple times in quick succession. More chained hit blessings would be a good fit for this I think.

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It’s not only about some weapons are popular and some are not. The whole ogryn melee loop lacks of depth. Like all toughness regen talents are about to just smacking things, it’s not bad to have simple stuff and not every playstyle should be piano 300iq mind games, but there should be something more.

You use light attack cause of this reason.
You use heavies cause of that reason.
There is a combo atleast for one of them (i don’t mean chains) but reach condition - trigger effect combo, like game inside a game.

No it’s not. There are poeple who play lower difficulties just for fun, and even on higher difficulties in a current state you can play with meme builds after you tried almost everything. You can’t have every talent as viable meta giga damage look at my scoreboard. You need mediocre and just stupid fun meme things to have something good in comparison with them.

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oh the shield is fine indeed, did my twin hardmode with it.
its that wet noodle of a club that could easily be replaced by a red signal flare.

imagine my ogryn being more effective getting attention waving that thing like dr. grant at the t-rex
rather than swinging that club for a measly amount of damage for swinging sake.

there is a 3 step combo heavy/push/light repeat, that keeps the flow while staggering.

though i use it mainly out of boredom and maintain an “appealing” flow when for simplicities sake i could skip step 3 all along, so meager is the damage it does.

reason i mainly play ogryn is the presence and “heft” his physical appearance promises.

little of that carrying over to a large chunk of his arsenal is disappointing at best.

bleed or no, having a 500kg 3,5m monster swinging solid steel down your temple would crush you to a pulp, poxwalkers on chicken legs even more so.

i’d be fine if the heavy was about stagger and dots while the light could fresh stuff up for horde clear.

aestethics of 300 (movie) works because the swords chopped and the shields stunned, not the other way around.

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First, blunt weapon shouldn’t be able to put bleed, it’s just silly. It should be knives.

Blunt trauma is a thing, and if anyone can hit hard enough to cause pressure cuts, it’s an ogryn. Ogryn kits works well with bleed mechanics, making that kit only work with half of their weapon selection needlessly limits the class, and hurts weapons that already struggle with hordeclear. Hard nope from this slab.

Knives -

Why bother even coding an ability that has no player behavior interaction that procs a couple of times a match? Who is this for?

Clubs -

Clubs are already control. It’s called Stagger, it works fine, and it doesn’t require reinvention of the wheel.

Shovel -

Shovel is already an excellent hybrid of club and knife without an ability that procs once per match.

Shovel special -

Having messed around with the new shovels before abandoning them, they really don’t need a function to punish you for using them. They don’t have the on-demand control of the club, knife, or original shovel, most things they can oneshot you can kill almost as fast with other weapons, and if you whiff that swing, they’ve got enough recovery time to discourage being careless.

Pmaul -

Paul isn’t in a great place, it’s true. He’s actually Saul, anyway, as that’s 100% a shock maul, not a power maul, but taking one of the weakest anti-armor weapons and turning it into a dedicated anti-armor weapon doesn’t seem like a likely - or terribly practical - direction to go in.

Shield -

A little more damage on Shield lights would be welcome, sure enough, but thorns and autoblock are about as contrary to this game’s paradigm as you can get. Hard pass.

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Only if you don’t bring more options, i’m not sugessting to devide current tree and mechanics just to make other weapon viable. It’s about global approach.

I don’t mean it to work like that. Let’s say you can make knives to crit often and scale it with crit damage to make sense. Or it could be another condition like “killing elites and specials with light attack”. So it will be similar to Bloodletter but you need to deserve it first via your actions, and even than such actions will be a part of your natural gameplay flow - stabbing things. It simply adds extra layer.
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Well guns and staves has both stagger and supression aswell, noone use supression but still. With stagger you have different synergy mechanics like the more stagger you deal the more damage your next attack will cause etc. It applies only on direct targets and can knock enemies. While suppression has no further interractions like “allies receive more toughness when kill enemies that suppressed by you” etc. Stagger is your basic stun mechanic, and supression is fear status.

But i’m not advocating that all this stuff my inner game-designer has invented should be in the game, my point is all about ogryn melee is too simplistic.

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These suggestions are not for me. Except for better light attacks for shield.

But I get the sentiment. I am not getting the same endorphin hit of beating the living sh!t out of monsters the way I’ve been feeling with indycrusher zealot.

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There is quite a lot more, when you are playing Auric. It isn’t just heavy attacking into a blob. Especially since these days a lot of damage for the Ogryn seems to come from “soften them up” and “Smackdown”, meaning you effectively have to worry about building debuffs to do good damage.

Which means shoving. And you can’t also just stand there and keep getting hit. Ideally you weave in light attacks to keep the enemy numbers down.

Which is already a thing. Or at least that is how i play my Ogryn. I mix light and heavy attacks as needed. If i need to tank, it will be a combination of Push-Taunts and heavy attacks. If i just need to kill the horde quick, its a heavy attack to stagger and then a series of light attacks to dispatch.

I am not just heavy attack wailing into things. I mean, it does work that way too, but it is a lot more ineffective.

I kinda already do that with mine. Especially with the shield i build up Impact with Thunderstrike, and damage with Smackdown. Which means i want to get the enemy in a staggered position before i wail on them. Thunderstrike and Smackdown will build extra damage for me, while also giving that feeling of hitting like a truck when you ragdoll things.

Over the past year, it has become very clear to me, that the Devs want the Ogryn to be Crowd Control first and foremost as well as heavy attack focused, as opposed to the more light attack focused Zealot.

I have in the past made a thread on this Feedback section about how i find the dissonance between the Ogryns poor damage output with its size to be an issue. Since the Class Change this feeling is gone.

So as far as i am concerned the Ogryn is in a good spot with its melee (we need more weapons for diversity and some of the old ones brought up to snuff to be a serious option, but we generally moved in the right direction). Especially compared to where it was before the Class Change. And i dread the whole idea of having to go back to previous levels because the Devs mess with the precarious balance.

I do not know why you would take it into hardmode. The Shield isn’t meant to be a damage weapon. Its meant to be crowd control and defensive. Those “attributes” listed on the Item Description ain’t just decorative. They tell you what the weapon is meant to be. If you want damage output you don’t bring a Shield, you bring a weapon with Strikedown or Assassin trait (IIRC there are no Assassin trait weapons for Ogryn tho). You bring a Shield to be defensive and to Crowd Control.

You seem to be doing something wrong then. A couple months ago i would have readily agreed with you. But these days we have weapons that hit for 800+ damage against Monstrosities. Say nothing of the new Shovels with their massive strike down damage on the special.

That isn’t to say some weapons in the Ogryn Arsenal don’t need some love. The two Cleavers, that ain’t the Kourke IV, definitely need some looking at and increase in damage to fulfill their intended roles. Especially considering how the Ogryn is supposed to work these days. All Cleavers and Shovels could need a slightly faster Heavy attack. And the Power Maul needs a complete rework.

And there are ways to get to a point where you can one shot Poxwalkers, in the current class tree. Provided you build your Ogryn for it.

And yet here you are complaining about the shield doing exactly that. Stunning and Protecting. Your issue seems to be more that you can’t have it all. But that isn’t how this game works on a fundamental design level.

I’d happily trade my mostly pointless ranged weapon, that is focused on close range anyway, for the ability to carry a 2nd Melee weapon on Ogryn. But until such a time, we will be constraint by melee weapons not doing everything.

Maybe one day we’ll get an actual proper “long range” weapon on Ogryn and then my opinion changes, but just plinging into the distance with highly ineffective weaponry… for that i prefer the Rocks.

But of course, if they gave us the ability to carry a 2nd melee weapon, everyone’s 2nd choice would always be Shield.

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This is what I’d have said if I had the time to write it all out.

Crits on Ogryn are basically non existent apart from cavalcade+flechettes, which still isn’t optimum. Any feat that relies on crits is automatically worthless on Ogryn unless they get a major buff to crit chance.

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