Title. I love that talent. I really do. Because, in theory, it should lean into the Ogryn’s identity as a slow but powerful brute, gathering all his considerable strength to rear up for a brutal attack, rather than the somewhat-slower-but-largely-similar-to-the-other-classes pace that his attack patterns currently are. The problem is… after quite literally over a hundred hours of testing it with any combination of weapons, blessings, talents and assorted combinations that became increasingly desperate, I’ve been forced to admit defeat. The talent is largely worthless, barring the extremely niché use case of putting it on a Mk VI Cleaver with Thrust, Unstoppable Force and any combination of damage vs maniac, flak, carapace and damage vs elites. In which case that’ll work fine in Auric Maelstrom with the “Only Scab, No Ammo, Armored Units and Elites and Hordes of Crushers and Bulwarks everywhere” modifier. With the aforementioned combination of blessings and traits, Mk VI cleaver can cleave through anything, including hordes of shields and Crushers while single-handedly keeping them in check with a combination of attacks and charging.
So, that’s it’s only use case. And that sucks. Because I want to use it more, because I want the Ogryn to have the option of a high-risk, high-reward playstyle that emphasizes his slowness and raw strength. But Crunch! fails at that. It forces you take unnecessary risks for no real reward in the vast, vast majority of runs. I can’t justify wasting the talent point on any other weapon because it simply has almost no use case there and I am strapped for points as it is. It is more of a quality-of-life thing than anything else as it’s sometimes just fun to rear up for a strong attack and it feels satisfying to land it. But it has no actual practical use, because you can just launch two heavy attacks in the time it takes to land a Crunch! heavy attack. Even with thrust fully stacked and loaded with Crunch!, its damage is only on par with two heavy attacks. Except those two heavy attacks will cleave and stagger more enemies, they will let you regenerate more toughness, they will put you at so much less risk and they will feel so much less awful if you whiff one of them.
Crunch! confers no real damage increase barring extremely rare use cases that likely haven’t changed the outcome of a single run in the hundreds of sessions I played with it. Crunch! can drive you to play actively worse if you want to make consistent use of it. Except making consistent use of it confers no advantage. You just put yourself at risk for no reason, for a damage increase that you can get entirely without it.
Edit: Almost forgot to mention its use-case on the folding shovels with the brutal momentum blessing that let’s them one-shot multiple Crushers stacked on top of each other. I enjoyed that for a while, but eventually became kind of sick of it. I’m not sure if it’s healthy for the game. But there’s that. Much as I’ve come to loathe it.
Pretty much what I’ve found with Crunch! aswell. I’ve made the suggestion that it should work by gaining stacks on how long you’ve been charging the heavy attack, exactly like the Thrust blessing, even if this meant giving it a reduction in the damage it gives aswell.
Chances are low that they’ll actually change it, so just avoid it if you don’t like it.
counter idea: why would i want to make my character slow on purpose when everyone else is able to kill elites in a blink of an eye?
rather than pushing one perk to a somewhat useable state, i ignore it all together if it means a more effective playstyle.
so far i’m usually “frontfeuerwehr” dodging in and out of heaps of enemies either smashing them to a pulp or get punies back up on their feet.
long windup times for a single attack? “Aint nobody got time for that”
either soak up damage in the process instead of regaining toughness or the plasma vet gets the job done in one shot.
for what its worth i prefer and enjoy the frantic playstyle the game offers and would not choose something that slows me down regardless of its damage output.
counter idea: why would i want to make my character slow on purpose when everyone else is able to kill elites in a blink of an eye?
Because, in my situation, you’d be at the point where you’ve done that for 1104.9 hours and crave a change of pace.
Also because it’s healthier for the game when all of its talent options are useful and allow for a variety of playstyles. Because after a while, if you’re like me and have beaten every challenge, earned every penance, gotten every achievement and are regularly soloing damnation, trying out different playstyles is the only thing left to do.
fair enough, i´m at around 1000 and try to ever optimize the playstyle i found fitting for myself.
been playing arena shooter for 22 years and still enjoyed it till the last day.
still play the same doom maps from 1 till tnt&plutonia and get my fun from it. and thats since 1996.
as for the usefulness, i agree but if it´s a minor amount in the grand scheme of things i accept certain “sacrifices”, look at the vet, he´s got the short end of the stick.
not saying it´s a “good thing” to point at something worse in comparison, still 1 skill or not…
besides, since i really tried to get into bully club 1 lately, boy have i slept on haymaker.
with this proc´ing i almost got no need to fully charge an attack.
so all in all, no i´m not like you in that regard. got the “been there done that” as well, but i still enjoy “doing it” the same way as day one.
then again, i had 6 identical barbarians in age of conan and still leveled the 7th one
It’s pretty good with the new shovels and combos decently with thrust on certain clubs. Otherwise it’s not great though. I think it’s fine for the niche it’s in, it’s just not really something you go for often. Usually it comes down to pre-winding up a hit and you coincidentally can full charge it and get a little damage bonus for it.
Like I agree it’s not that impactful, but at the same time should a little talent like that, not even a keystone, be so impactful you make use of it at all times? Or should it be a little bonus that has a single niche (folding shovels) and is otherwise just a passive benefit you get to make use of rarely?
I think most of the time it’s just bypassed through batter and not specced at all. Is it even needed for breakpoints on folding shovel? I was under the impression it was not.
Can’t see the harm in it being made more useful being split into stacks at different charge levels. Full charging is just too niche, if it built up to 3 stacks (so +13.3% per stack) at the same intervals as thrust it’d probably still have a kinda niche use but it’d at least be worth considering the extra point.
@Index - It’s good to see you are having fun with the variety the game offers. I just think it would be fairly easy to expand that variety a little more. Giving Crunch! something like a cleave bonus of 200% or a rending bonus of 10% to 20% would expand it to an additional niché for fairly rare occasions like swarms of berserkers or maulers and crushers. In return for putting the Ogryn at more risk and halving his toughness regen due to launching fewer attacks overall while being more likely to suffer additional incoming damage as he is staggering fewer enemies, again due to launching fewer attacks.
@Kambrin - Compare it to Batter, to which it stands right beside. Batter gives the Ogryn bleed on every single heavy attack. That bleed can quickly become substantial, dealing heavy damage to monstrosities and other unyielding types. Since the recent Bulwark change, the Ogryn can stack bleeds through hitting the Bulwarks exposed weapon and arm, which will quickly result in the Bulwark staggering and raising his shield due to being coded to open himself up when he receives a certain threshold of damage that the bleed passes after one or two attacks.
Batter is measured right beside Crunch! yet its application is universally useful and never a waste, it never puts the Ogryn at increased risk, it almost always raises his ability to deal damage, and it can skyrocket his durability during intense engagements with multiple high-HP enemies when combined with the talent that gives additional damage resistance while the Ogryn stands close to bleeding enemies.
Batter, on its own, can heavily influence runs due to allowing the Ogryn to heavily speed up the destruction of monstrosities that would otherwise keep the team busy for quite a while longer and put it at more risk of getting swarmed by surprise bombers, grenadiers or netters. Many talents have a clear and palpable improvement on the Ogryn’s playstyle. Crunch! does not.
Compared to Batter, Crunch! will always be a poor choice when you want to play Darktide the way it’s clearly balanced for: Frantic, high-speed action where disposing of and switching between targets at the drop of a hat is essential to deal with swarms of specialists and elites on Auric Maelstrom. I want to draw Fatshark’s attention to the simple fact that Crunch! in its current state is simply not fit for general gameplay and I hope they expand its use case either through my above mentioned suggestions (increased cleave or rend on fully charged attacks) or taking what @alsozara said with making it more of a stacking buff like Thrust. Though it should probably be a bit more backloaded (ie: the first two stacks are weaker, the third/fourth you get for fully charging is stronger).
tbh arguably batter needs to be nerfed and tuned down so ogryns damage isn’t 70% from a small talent node. Then they would have to finally buff his weapons to not be utter trash anymore and finally be on par with other classes melee weps. Like seriously, play gunlugger ogryn without batter sometime, it’s amazing how hilariously impotent his melee weps are.
But that’s probably a tall order, it seems like the batter bandaid is here to stay
How are you doing 70% damage from bleed? a damage of time effect that you need to ramp up on enemies.
Unlikely, sadly. If I’m guessing, Fatshark wants Ogryn’s melee to feel somewhat more slow and “grindy” compared to the other classes. Batter, which is a damage over time effect fits right into this.
There’s certain mods that let you see your damage breakdown via bleeds etc. Most of ogryns melee damage is bleed. It’s mostly because when you swing into 10 enemies, there’s damage falloff depending on weapon and how many targets you cleave (second target takes 30% damage, third 10%, etc, for example). But batter applies the full bleed stacks to everything you hit for any amount of damage, so it quickly starts outdamaging your actual swings.
My point is really just that it’s hard to balance weapons around that
I use the same mod, but I’ve never hit anywhere near 70% with BM Shield, BM Shovel mk V and Cleaver Mk IV. I notice the most gain from Batter on melee elites or bosses, most other things tends to die fast enough to just heavy attacks without bleed taking much effect. I’ve seen around 20-25% damage from bleed over the course of a match, dependent on what weapon I’m using (attack combo) and variation on team composition and team skill.
Yeah you’ve probably listed exactly the 3 weapons that Ogryn has that have good horde clearing attacks on their own without relying on bleed. Maybe the VI cleaver too, but it’s not like anyone ever uses it. On any other weapon bleed generally outdamages the swings
Yes, that is why I like them. It has been long since I’ve used clubs, I tend to favour haymaker on it though. Still seems to be alot of damage just from bleed, but that does lends itself that it is not batter that is overperforming, but that the weapons that does gain such a big boost from bleed might need to be looked at and improved instead.
That’s exactly my point though. So long as batter exists, there’s no need to look at those weapons because they hordeclear just fine with the bleed. And if they were to buff them they would become sort of OP since they’ll still have the bleed that previously made them just ok enough to use.
Meanwhile playing Ogryn without the bleed is a miserable experience that locks you into using 3 different weapons.
Other classes don’t have this issue as much. You can have a veteran fully built for ranged damage and he’ll still be able to have extremely competent melee via 2 power swords, 2 chain axes, 2 chain swords, 3 devils claw swords, the 3 shovels, 3 combat axes, 3 tac axes, 2 knives… probably even forgetting some.
My overarching point being as it relates ot this threads topic is that having totally gamechanging passives is pretty hard to balance around when they intersect with weapon balance with this. Vet has gamechanging passives in the form of grenade talents that you can put in every build with any weapon combo. You can elect to ignore them and your weapons will still perform the same. Meanwhile any Ogryn that wants to melee HAS to get batter or he’s just pool noodlin’ with a vast majority of his arsenal (which is tiny to begin with). Making crunch! an impactful talent would probably worsen this issue, since it’s also not accessible for every build in the same way (since they share the spot on the talent tree)
Bleed still needs time to take effect, and the bleed is still the same on the weapons I have mentioned that I use, yet I tend to be around 20-30% of overall damage being bleed. By increasing the the base damage on the underperforming weapons to do more damage will result in less time given for the bleed to take effect and you’d see a decrease in overall bleed damage as a result.
This would point that Batter is not the root cause of the weapons underperforming, but the weapons themselves. However, giving buff to these weapons might cause problems with balance with current weapons that are largely uneffected by Batter and do kinda fine on their own.
As I’ve said, Fatshark are unlikely to change any of this, because Batter fits into the more “slow and grindy” melee gameplay that Ogryn has. At best you could hope for is that new weapons are added which do damage fine on their own, such as dual-wielding or two-handed weapons and would not require investment into batter/bleed.
