While folding shovel might not be the best without heavy attack talents, I wouldn’t call Gunlugger “weak” in melee.
Agreed, but that’s sort of the point – we really wanted to keep the folding shovels usable on Gunlugger builds when we were testing them, and that resulted in insane shenanigans like the Crusher oneshot multikill that Skullbreaker builds can do with it. There’s no happy medium to be found this way. See for example how useless the Mk1 Bully Club is on a Gunlugger. It’s either balanced on SB and useless on GL, or OP on SB and merely good on GL.
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Why it is bad? Something like this is good for diversity of gameplay. If i can choose between game with possibility to kill 3 crushers in one blow and perfectly balanced game where all classes have equal ttk crushers i choose first.
Like in real world peoples are not equal.
Something big beat big, something smol bring revolver to a knife party.
It’s a rather obvious side effect of building the talent tree the way they have been built. It’s very obvious on Ogryn, but a lot of the talent trees have problems.
To do X, you need to full commit down one specific path, meaning you lose out on absolutely everything else.
FS made a huge mistake when they removed all the base abilities from classes, and instead made them into tiny nodes, forcing you to forego certain class identities.
It’s also pretty stupid to have zero melee nodes in the gunlugger path, when FS is demonstrably trying to make sure you can’t be ranged all the time.
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I understand the sentiment, but probably giving another absolutely busted setup for Ogryn wasn’t the right choice for this one.
Probably it would be a good idea to balance the Ogryn as a whole at this point. It was nerfed patch after patch and still hilariously overtuned to this day. Can’t be that much of indestructible meatshield while also doing so much damage.
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Cant agree with that. I love current talents trees. I can play whatever i want. Literally.
I choose to be not onebutton wizard, but a Beethoven meme tactical wizard.
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There are locked choices and forced paths, and there are also instances of things that should have been one node, being split into 5 nodes. Sometimes in completely different parts of the talent tree.
Perfect it ain’t.
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Ye, its have a problems there. But. Its definitely better that what i play from beta to rework.
It’s bad because the Thunder Hammer is supposed to be the anti-special and anti-elite melee weapon at the cost of horde control. Single-target elimination is what it should exceed at, especially in the hands of the melee specialist class.
Instead, it’s a self-stunning weapon with numerous drawbacks and costs to achieve what the support class can do in five seconds with zero cost. That is a problem.
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Can’t help but feel weapons should be toned up to fit their role, blessings toned right down to ‘perk’ level. Anything that stacks… whew, impossible to balance.
Trying to think back to VT2. Oh yeah, everyone took the +5% attack speed thing didn’t they? Then a.n.other - dunno - block stamina or something? Then you kinda picked an enemy type that you wanted to get better break points on. Sorry - it’s been ages and I can’t really remember. But it wasn’t as ludicrous as the blessings we have in DT.
Seems like the weapon and it’s blessings need a bit of normalization
Its a brutal momentum problem, the shield has the same issue where you don’t even use the rest of the moveset when you can use that beefy move to clear enemies faster instead of throwing them around. They probably should have made a Thunderclub instead so it could have actually been a single target nuke.
And on axes the combat versions take an absolute dumpstering on the tactical axe’s usefulness because of this one blessing (otherwise you would need push attacks or the Antax to hit more than 1 groaner). The tactical axe is supposed to reliably hit 2-3 of most weak enemies without BM to make the AP damage sting less.
Im talking about ogryn shovel, not hammer. Hammer is hard to use, but i see zealot who just purge not only hordes, but elites and monstres just with hammer. Most of this players use shredder as secondary “oh sh*t” weapon
It’s been a long time since this game had a proper balance patch. And it shows.
Ever since enemies were overhauled as a consequence of the new class system, several weapons have been lingering in obscurity because they were never adjusted to compensate - thammer among them. Meanwhile, the new weapons that were introduced (like the ogryn shovels, although they are not the only example) were really just obviously power crept versions of previous weapons, further exacerbating the problem.
I don’t envy the position Fatshark has placed themselves in here. The main problem with the hammer is that it needs to be better than other weapons at destroying armored enemies to justify bringing it. Since a good few weapons can now reliably 2-hit crushers (and 1-hit in the case of shovels), it’s not exactly obvious how Fatshark intends to fix this except by making thammer 1-shot them. That brings us to a discussion about whether 1-shotting crushers is actually healthy for the game. I tend to think not, but that’s where the hammer needs to be if weapons like chain axe and eviscerator can 2-shot them. And I’m not even mentioning the faster weapons with an effectively better TTK on crushers, like the dagger.
It’s certainly true that the hammer lacks some oomph. It should be THE melee single target killer. But a deeper problem is that so many other options exist for dealing with armor these days that the value of armor on enemies has in and of itself taken a nosedive. Global rending bonuses, bad blessings like uncanny strike, overtuned weapons, etc. The reasons are many, but the bottom line is that armor just ain’t what it used to be. The problem is that to solve this, Fatshark needs to rediscover another kind of hammer; the nerfhammer. A tool that they are notoriously unwilling to wield.
Honestly I half suspect that Fatshark will do another ‘buff the elite enemies’ patch before even considering the alternative.
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Given that the folding shovels can easily one shot mutants, even on gunlugger builds with minimal perk investment, I’d say you guys might have overachieved on that front juuuust a wee bit. 
I genuinely don’t see how it is an issue that weapons are not univerally useful across the whole spectrum of builds. That was never true in V2 and its never been the case in darktide either.
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Well that’s a horrible comparison considering the Mk1 club is in a pretty bad state rn even for melee Ogryn. There’s no reason to take it over the Mk3 or a different weapon.
In general I really hate the shovels, especially the brown one (horizontal heavies) as it’s another weapon with no weaknesses. The stupid interaction with BM just makes it worse.
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Please speak more about your experiences with testing whenever you get the chance – many of us are very curious about this topic!
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Because Ogryn’s melee arsenal is already so tiny, and the list of viable weapons on Gunlugger is even smaller, the feeling was that we didn’t want to add even more melee weapons that those builds couldn’t use effectively. For comparison, a chainaxe special heavy also kills a Mutant on a Sharpshooter Veteran build. I fail to see why ranged Ogryn builds can’t do the same with a similarly slow special attack on one of their weapons.
So Ogryn tree and blessings like Brutal Momentum need rebalancing, not the shovels imo.
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Before you guys ‘rebalanced’ the ogryn melees there was a clear role for all 3, and then the shield that was safety and the power maul which I’m hoping someone had an actual idea for (still haven’t seen it). After you were done the club strikedowns are weaker than the shovel ones even before the ridiculous folding entered the equation. The balance problem was made by centering all your feedback on one weapon, and trying to make sure it was feasible on a non melee loadout too (hello have you heard of thunderhammer?). Enter the current ogryn kit…sorry but you guys kinda pooched it all up.
Knives should be your horde weapon, clubs for elites and shovels in between. They hit 6 enemies. You guys really ought to consider ‘the other weapons in the game’. Especially on a microscopically small kit like Ogryn.
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We don’t decide what gets focused on, Fatshark does. It’s their game after all. I would’ve loved to give the bully clubs a glow-up treatment too and I hope we get the opportunity to do so soon.
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