So we all know the game is in a pretty unbalanced state right now, with stuff like duelling sword and gunners as a clear example, but I wanted to bring attention to what is also one of the worst offenders in my opinion. Let’s compare 2 similar abilities, voice of command (shout) from the veteran and loyal protector from the ogryn (taunt):
Cooldown:
Shout: 30 seconds, can be reduced by a flat 6 secs for special kills, needing 5 special kills from you for one ult.
Taunt: 45 seconds, can be reduced by 4% for elite kills, needing a total of 25 elite kills from the party or you for one ult. (Not even considering the stagger cd talent, objectively non-existing cause you give up the only good effect of taunt, 25% damage boost).
Great start, already a balance mess.
Buffs (why you use the ult):
Shout: a self-buff, making it worth the entire duration. Ult is teamwide. Full 0->100 toughness in a milisecond, plus gold toughness. Can tank anything for 15 seconds, plus regen that extra toughness again like normally.
Taunt: enemy debuff only, 25% damage is great but a waste if they are all dead. Ult only affects the ogryn. Doesn’t give any toughness. Taunts enemies keeping pressure off allies, however, you get no “shield”, no damage reduction, no stamina block cost reduction… nothing.
Stagger: Both vanish trapper nets so I’m not considering that.
Shout: staggers everything. Strong stagger. Even throws most enemies to the ground giving enough time for revives without even needing the additional skill point.
Taunt: staggers everything. Weak pitiful stagger. Doesn’t throw any enemies around even though the scream comes from a 2 ton ogryn with lungs bigger than the entire veteran’s torso. Can’t even revive after cause now everything is attacking you and you’ll eat an overhead without gold toughness or get stamina broken and lose half hp.
Radius:
Shout: 9 meters, overtoughness effect works based on coherency aura.
Taunt: 8 meters, up to 12 if you invest 1 more skill point.
Duration:
Shout: 15 seconds, only need 3 special kills to refresh it and have teamwide infinite gold toughness effectively, because it’s a self buff, not an enemy debuff.
Taunt: 15 seconds, doesn’t really matter because most enemies die faster and any of the debuffs (taunt,damage) are gone.
Skill tree optimization:
Shout: Pretty much a must pic because it’s below grenade regen, one of the best veteran talents. Only requires a 2 point investment, even so, the revive shout doesn’t lock the other node.
Taunt: great flexible placement too, but requires minimum of 3 skill points because of the radius node. Also why the heck is there no vertical line below that to keep going down the same tree column??? Make the ogryn talent tree horizontal instead of a weird triangle shape already.
I don’t think I have to say more. Ogryn taunt has been untouched since it got released, while voice of command actually got a buff to reduce its cooldown… Now I’d like to provide some solutions to this big balance mess.
Possible ogryn taunt buffs ideas: (wouldn’t need all, just some).
It’s called loyal PROTECTOR, let me protect perhaps? Any stamina related buff would be appreciated, or even infinite blocking like the ironbreaker from Vermintide 2. Other options would be higher stagger on pushes like the pushover talent effect but for all the duration, or just a simple toughness refill honestly. It DOESN’T even need the unbalanced gold toughness clutch, screw that. Just give it any or all the above. A self-buff for yourself in addition to the enemy debuff. Also let it taunt big monsters as base.
Stagger. Initial shout should stagger more than the veteran shout. Put crushers on their ass, and possibly make small enemies run in fear for a few seconds before being taunted. Hell, even a trauma/voidblast psyker staff without charging it to full has more radius and stagger, plus spammable with infinite ammo.
Radius. Why not put the radius node as base? Why the skill point tax? Isn’t the ogryn tree bad enough already? Actually, why not make it like 15-18 meters even? With stagger strength based on distance, current weak stagger at max range. To be honest, it should probably be just a mobile taunt, an area that follows you around (stagger still on use only, of course).
Cooldown. If it’s gonna keep this long as cooldown, even 50% longer than the actual protector ultimate (vet shout), and even the psyker shields, it better give a massive self-buff like any of the above or I’m gonna keep picking the charge ultimate. Also why does the stagger CD talent lock you out of the damage buff???
Veteran. Yes, a buff by nerfing, by nerfing the stupid shout already. It’s trivialises the game, and makes a squishy class into a tank. Gold toughness should be rare, like with the zealot chorus ability; now that is balanced with the long cooldown, long cast time, and percentage % based cd reduction, instead of an instant win button.
It doesn’t need all of those though. My personal belief is that if you gave it all the self buffs (damage reduction, any stamina related buff, toughness refill), keep the same 45 sec cooldown or even make it 60, remove the radius node and make it 12-15 meters base, and make the damage and stagger CD not lock each other out… then with all of these it would be a pick you might actually consider in the current meta.
So yeah, just another day of suffering when playing ogryn. I still use taunt and it has its uses, but I feel like complete utter garbage whenever I think of what I’m missing out by not playing actual support classes.
I agree i think taunt should have the extra damage node at the very least added to the base.
I think vet shout has the small cooldown because the devs designed it as a vehicle for all the other ult upgrades scattered everywhere on the tree
the Ogryn’s skill tree seems to be undergoing a rework, so we might get a new skill tree in the next update.
as for the Veteran, I’ve said it many times, but the skill and cooldown reduction are blatantly overpowered and need to be revised. It makes absolutely no sense for a human’s shout to send all nearby enemies flying, so it should be removed. Instead of over-toughness, the skill should fully restore toughness upon activation and provide a 25% reduction in toughness damage and a 25% reduction in stamina consumption for 15 seconds—that should be sufficient.
If the current effects remain unchanged, the cooldown reduction should be adjusted to reduce by only 2 seconds upon killing a specialist. alternatively, if it remains at 6 seconds, a proper cooldown system should be introduced. on higher difficulties like gauntlet, the abundance of specialists causes the skill to be spammed excessively, which becomes a major issue.
when thinking of balancing i need to keep in mind not everyone plays ogryn the same way.
for example i’d as of right now wouldnt trade the bullrush for taunt since i’d lose my “out of jail free card” as well as a huge part of my mobility.
thats not to say taunt isnt in need of adjustments.
on the other hand, what i’d like to see is a self-sufficient part in the left, offensive focused tree.
most randoms i encountered dont cash in on the buffs they get in the time they have (gold toughness/bubble not included)
but more often than not when ogryn taunts, people dont chime in on the aggro and one is bound to deal with the enemy yourself.
personally i deal with stuff myself from the getgo, hence rely on the damage output to be able to do so.
what i’d like to see is some form of additional toughness generator by actively killing stuff instead of being waterboy for the team.
right now everyone is allowed (though not always able) to be at the frontline at his own pace with a toolkit to sustain himself, except oggy.
for lets be real, teamgame or not, at the end of the day you can only depend on your own skill to see the match through.
i finally got myself to finish ogryn penances 2 weeks back. switching from rush to taunt felt horrible. the damage amp doesnt feel very worthwhile unless you’re with a team that you know can output some damage when you taunt.
and the bleed stacks or the damage amp from rush actually feels useful in getting bleeding stacks going which further works with other ogryn tanlets that rely on bleed.
taunt just feels w/e
“right now everyone is allowed to be at the frontline at his own pace with a toolkit to sustain himself, except oggy.”
I think this could be solved in many ways. Some possibilities in no particular order:
Give the ogryn a talent to get toughness on stagger just like the one that is in Vermintide 2 for various tanky classes, or one to get toughness on succesful block. Would probably need to lock the toughness on heavy attack ones to not make these busted.
Make the heavy toughness talents work on light attacks too but with a reduced number, like the confident strike blessing.
Make every ogryn weapon able to block ranged fire like the shield, but at a higher stamina cost.
Make coherency regen work in combat for ogryn.
Making any of those changes, even just a single one, would work wonders for oggy sustain.
you have to be really aggressive with the Ogryn shout so you are near all the gunners to draw them into melee, it needs a bigger radius for one, even with the extra node that takes it from 8m to 12m
Shout is the dumbest most OP ult in the game, it should be nerfed into the ground. Ten times the cooldown would be a good start.
Taunt is in a pretty good place, a bit of toughness DR would be a nice add on if anything.
First off, Yes to all the Ogryn stuff. Think all of that sounds great, one of the worst things about Ogryn is that the skill that feels like it’s ‘most built for the class’ is basically the absolute worst one, being used most effectively as a reaction based microstagger just to keep the ogryn out of trapper nets that little bit longer. It does basically nothing else/actively hinders the Ogryn by clumping all the enemies around him otherwise, and getting any form of survivability with it or a proper knock down to show that ‘the enemies feel threatened and that’s why they are attacking him’ would just be fantastic. Only one build I have on Ogryn uses this skill and it’s strictly to get access to the newly moved explosive range increase on a melee class, otherwise I just never use it because it just feels so bad/low impact compared to even the other two actives he has.
Now, on to the note of the Veteran Shout…
It is a bit much, as much as I enjoy it. As many have complained about it’s to spammable, as fun as it is, and to effective for what it’s able to do. Knocking away even a monstrosity with a good yell just feels so fantastic as a fantasy, but being able to do it on top of all it’s other effects/all the other nodes littered around the vet’s tree is part of the issue here for sure, and I feel like going ‘ahh what the heck’ and airing out an idea I had in my head for it’s possible ‘raining in’ that will also keep a bit of it’s ‘clutch’ fantasy intact:
Increase it’s cooldown to 45 seconds, but bake in ‘only in death does duty end’, I always felt like that part of the skill was never worth both it’s negatives, but if one of the negatives get backed into the skill itself, I think having the revive as part of the base skill is totally fine/really cool and helps the fantasy stay intact.
Reduce the base skills stagger amount to a microstagger (what the Ogryns Taunt currently does right now), to compensate for the above change.
Change the name of Duty and Honor to ‘Voice of the Emperor’, implying his influence, reduce the golden HP given to 25 instead of 50, but also add to the talent node that ‘stagger amount is increased’. This can either increase it to the amount currently present (maybe than can stay/be ok with the existing?) or, if that still (understandably) seems like to much, make it knock over all small/unarmored enemies, jostle/trip ‘mid tier’ enemies (ragers/maulers/etc), and then Ogy’s and above stay at a micro stagger. That, or put the stagger increase as the second node tax and then for sure leave the stagger as is (as in, it would replace the now baked in ‘Only in Death Does Duty End’, and probably take the name of ‘Duty and Honor’).
Back ‘Born Leader’ into the ability somewhat (keep it as a Talent just have it’s effect in VoC), so that when it’s cast you give 15% of your max toughness to your allies on top of the +25. To help make up for the fact that you’re losing a base 25 toughness you would have otherwise been giving to your allies below max.
I feel this is would be a nice way to nerf VoC in noticeable ways, but still keep it’s fantasy intact. CDR increased and Golden Toughness down, stagger reduced or requiring a separate further talent investment to gain back, but get to help up your fallen brethren without it just completely tanking your base level of capability. Seems like it would work out to me, but can let others deliberate on it!
(also debated on changing Tactical Awarness, but I realized if I increase VoC’s CDR to match Infiltrates, then changing TA to a percent would literally do nothing if I wanted to keep it’s effectiveness level the same with Infiltrate, as that honestly feels fine/balanced to me. So I say it’s ‘fine’ with my changes above, though is some think the CDR should be upped to even a minute, I could see that. I just think it should still be capable of procing stuff like Marksman/For the Emperor/Close Quarters Killzone at least semi consistently, just not keep them up permanently).
Veteran shout was way overbuffed, that monster and elite heavy stagger should have been a node and not just made baseline + 15 seconds lopped off shout cooldown fight me.
i posted in some other thread that random guardsman staggering monstrosities by yelling at them is pretty dumb. so what if the monster has only a “wtf moment” if yelled directly at, before going ham on the vet that provoked it.
means that you can give your team a breather, but think if it’s worth using because this will make the monster very angry, at you specifically.
shouting some mobs to the floor is fun, just gold toughness generally (both voc and relic) is imo out of place in non-havoc play with any competent team.
Technically 100% block cost reduction but close enough. AND it gives 50% DR (stacking multiplicatively with his base 30% DR plus can stack barkskin as well for absolutely absurd EHP).
To be fair though it is on a 120 second cooldown and between CDR is much much more plentiful in Darktide, you can have stuff like EG Bruiser + Psykinetic Aura but even factoring just Bruiser the uptime difference between Impenetrable and Loyal Protector is night and day. Yes I’m aware you get cooldown from hitting things and being hit in VT2 so that cooldown difference isn’t quite as vast as my above comparison, but it’s still pretty large. So while LP does come off looking inedibly limp compared to Impenetrable while clearly sharing a design space, the comparative uptime makes it perhaps not the best comparison point.
None of that is to defend current LP though. It does definitely need some help.
What if you remove all CDR entirely for all classes, because they are always best in slot no matter what and rebalance the ability cooldowns accordingly?
either this, or make sure each of the 3 branches has a (minor) cdr node somewhere down so you can’t take more than one, and have a reason for picking something else than that particular branch.
