Great post and great suggestions.
MK2 Bully Club’s slap into fist into heavy combo should deal more damage and stagger. I find it underwhelming it often struggles to kill enemies in one combo while simply light attack/heavy attack spam is way more effective. Or they should do something else with that fist attack, like making it a part of a different, that has 4 or 5 attacks, but deals tremendous damage at the end with a similar punch, basically rewarding the player for consistently reaching the end of combo.
Knives Mk3 and MK6 need ovehauls, since they are both a downgrade of mk4 in my opinion.
The idea of making shovels remain foldable is great. I used to play MK5 shovel all the time when it could oneshot Crushers with its special, before the elite’s changes. If oneshots are off the table, then perhaps they can rework mk5 moveset so that push attack or next attack deals decent single target damage, since this mark already has great horde clear on horizontal heavy swipes across the screen. Maybe push attack pattern should be swapped between mk5 and mk19. I don’t like when they make one mark only for single target and the other solely for horde clear.
The best way to play shovel mk19 right now is to spam heavy attack into weakspot and light attacks for horde clear. It just feels weird that the special is mostly single target and takes nearly 5 seconds to charge to full Thrust stacks, but has just “slightly” more damage than heavy attack loop. It feels like the damage is nearly identical, but one type of attack keeps regaining your toughness and the other disables you for 5 seconds, and you can also whiff it if somebody kills the target, pushes it with abilities or if you hit Crusher’s shoulder for even lower damage than mere heavy attack spam.
Since we’re discussing Ogryn buffs here I would also like to request a buff to “Concentrate” talent that reduces spread and gun kick. When I tested it in the past with multiple weapons I found that you don’t need it even for Heavy Stubbers which have a big gun kick on repeated shots. There’s really no realistic reason to use that talent, ever, you can recoil control every single weapon to similar results while saving that one talent point you would have used for it.
If “Steady Grip” is a considerable buff to all Ogryn bullet weapons and compliments not just Gunlugger, but even melee playstyles where people tend to snipe specials as Ogryn more so than other players, then “Concentrate” is not even 30% as good, and you’re better off taking any of the 15% damage buffs for both ranged or melee, or any of the sustain/defensive talents.