Why does the Ogryn do the least amount of damage?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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I find it difficult for Fatshark to try and find a way to balance Ogryns melee feel compared to other classes. I main Ogryn. I play Ogryn ALOT. And I promise you. Imo. They are the strongest class in the game. And absolute Powerhouse as long as you are smart about it and try to compensate for your own weaknesses.

I am glad you are a 1337-gamer that is smart and cunning and awesome enough that you do not perceive an issue, and thus there is no issue to be had. Me, on the other hand, i am an average gamer, with average skills and i am not 1337 enough to truly achieve godhood in the same way you do. I am a lowly peasant gamer who expects if the big guy hits something it does more damage than when i am playing the little guy with the pew-pew doing the same.

I also really appreciate the dis you put in there suggesting that anyone that does disagree with your opinion is to stupid to do it right.

And taken from your other post:

Raw numbers are not everything.

Yes, raw numbers are everything, when the complaint is “why is the big burly dude doing the least amount of damage?”

The fact that other classes do better in Melee, including Veterans, is proven… and we are not discussing specific edge cases of “if you use the weapon on the first sunday of the month under a blood moon, after you sacrificed a virgin rainworm on a bed of chicken bone”… we are talking Profane Weapon vs Profane weapon. We are talking raw numbers here. Have been from the very start… which is why my opening post includes raw numbers. Because from the very beginning this thread was, and i am repeating myself here again, about the biggest guy on the team having the lowest damage numbers and thus feeling the weakest of all the Classes in Melee.

I am well aware that i can slap on an OP blessing and if i am just standing long enough in the horde and swing my weapon long enough i will build up enough damage stacks that will take the damage from absolutely crap to good… but that defies my expectation as a gamer.

And also, again, the reason the vast majority of Ogryns play their Orgyns as ranged characters is due to the dismal state of the Ogryn’s Melee. They aren’t equivalent of the occassional Ranged Zealot, but in my experience Ranged is the Primary weapon for the vast majority of Ogryns these days. Be it the Rumbler, the Stubber or the Ripper. Rarely one does see a Grenade Gauntlet or a Kickback. At least that is my experience playing almost daily and almost exclusively Tier 4 and 5 missions.

I main Ogryn. I play Ogryn ALOT. And I promise you.

And i do not. I do not main any class. I play Veteran, Zealot, Psyker and Orgyn in Heresy and Damnation, including High Intensity versions of these missions. And, to borrow your argument, I am telling you compared to my other 3 classes… even an Ogryn with about the best Bullbutcher with Slaughterer Blessing and Confidence Strike is weaker in melee than all the other 3 classes. It does not have the damage of the Psyker, Veteran or Zealot, who have more potent ways to murder a Horde than the Ogryn. It does not have the Crowd Control of the Psyker with its amazing push on the Force Sword and infinite Dodge. And it does not have the sustain of the Zealot, who can become Invulnerable and Full heal in a pinch.

I am not struggling playing my Ogryn. I am doing fine playing my Ogryn… but i am doing better playing all the other classes. But that is not what this is about. What this thread has been about from the beginning is: Why is the person i expect to be the best in melee is actually the worst? Why does it feel that my Zealot, Veteran and even Psyker hit harder than my Ogryn?

The Ogryn has no redeeming qualities in melee… and only becomes usable provided you have very specific blessing combinations… which is why most people seem to rather shoot the enemy with their Ogryns than to be in melee.

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And the breakpoints on the other weapons arent very impressive.

GAME balance should be referencing the lore and pre-existing tabletop rules for direction. If it doesn’t match the lore and just wears it like a skin suit its a bad title. Fortuneatly darktide doesn’t have this problem, it just has minor balance issues. Nor was i arguing for precisely accurate to the lore gameplay either, i was pretty clear that it would be unbalanced for ogryn swings to be lore accurate. But more damage seems appropriate.

First of all we stop being mere grunts by the time we hit like level 18-30. When we hit level 30 we are inducted, formally, into the inquisitorial warband as acolytes. That means we are special.

According to the latest IG codex, every squad sergeant in the imperial guards lowest tier line troops can have a power sword. See this guy:

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He’s described in my book as “cadian veteran guardsman w/ bolt pistol and power fist.” hes part of a command squad, so yeah. Better gear. But he’s a Vet. The equipment we have is well within the range for Vets, let alone inquisitorial acolytes. The preacher in my book gets access to power mauls. Fatshark has done very well in providing lore accurate equipment to our characters.

What isn’t the case and what I am complaining about is that the Ogryn (the strongest) commonly has the lowest damage profile. Look at the Crusher vs the Power Maul just to take a proper example. Heavy attacks on PMaul do less damage than heavy attacks on Crusher. Why? That makes 0 sense.

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Ogryn needs no help dealing damage to higher end enemies and he does have plenty of horde clear in his guns, but the light attack damage values of Bully Clubs and Shovel fall really short versus unarmored. It’s very weird. Base damage on par with the Catachan swords with a target limit of 3 and cleave damage that’s wildly weak.

They can up those without breaking the game’s balance.

The attack speed of Brute Basher’s heavies need to be upped slightly, too.

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I think you are not reading what I said and instead assuming what I said. Not once did I ever claim there’s no issue. I am claiming it’s difficult to balance gameplay vs lore. Ogryns have issues. But the disagreement is not wether there’s an issue or not.

You believe that it’s a balance issue.
I believe it’s a skill issue.
That’s the disagreement.

I know this to be true because I see way to many Ogryn players just go in and die against anything. They overextend, they don’t have proper game knowledge, they don’t know how to break a firing line and instead just turtle next to their team where they are not seeing their true value, they use weapons that are on the same spectrum For example any knife + ripper and you will struggle against Crushers while I on the other hand have no issues at all because I consider these factors and I build my different setups on Ogryns with this in mind. To cover for one’s weaknesses as I like to call it.
Don’t get me wrong, there are builds where you are more close to your team. To me that’s using the knife + grenade fist. That’s my babysitting build. I will be turtling around me Psykers and Veterans constantly covering them from strays.
But if I want to actually carry a game, I use my Bully Club + Ripper build and just cause havoc on the heretics. It’s my most versatile build that works against everything.

That’s also where I disagree. Ogryns destroy anything that gets to close. At least mine does. But I can only consider what I experience and what I see. And what I see when I look at other Ogryn players is that the struggle is mostly because of skill and not balance. I see them spamming heavy attacks when they shouldn’t or spamming light attacks when they shouldn’t instead of adjusting to what’s coming at you. Sure you can buff the hell out of Ogryns just to bring the ceiling up which is fine but it would feel like an odd solution to me when I believe the issue is on the players end.

That’s probably because the devs thought if they make it to strong it becomes just another power sword and makes it mandatory. That’s how I feel about it. Personally I don’t use it the Power Maul because of it’s atrocious charge up mechanic where it slows you to a near dead stop. Why is that? That makes no sense to me imo. Why does Veterans get the golden gun in the form of the Power sword and Ogryns gets that garbage. So yeah let’s face it the Power Maul is kinda garbage, no argument there. It does have great crowd control though. But I feel the amount of effort one has to put into the Power Maul to achieve the same result as you would get from the Bully Club or the Knife makes it a horrible choice, same with shield.

With a subpar Bully Club I would agree. It’s a struggle to kill hordes. Both unarmored and infested. But once you get that Bully Club with 20-25% unarmored/infested you’re set. That club is godlike. The blessings doesn’t even matter in that case.

So in my eyes, all of the Ogryns melee weapons work with specific exceptions like the shield The difference is the amount of effort you have to put in to make it work. This takes everything into account, perks, blessings. Certain weapons require certain perks to reach their true potential. Also you need to look at the kit as a whole and not just each weapon in a vacuum.
The only weapon I see on Ogryn that really REALLY needs a buff is the Shield. Because there’s no combo, no setup in which the shield is actually useful. Unless ofc you play with 3 Veterans who all use Camo Expert. Then yeah, shield might be viable because you’re in for a bad time otherwise.
Most people I see on YouTube and other media that have made guides etc on Ogryn always only show the same cookie cutter build with the knife and for some reason people tend to just gravitate towards that instead of actually doing their own testing and figuring out what works and what works less.

So let’s agree to disagree, I see this mainly as a skill issue. Because that’s how I perceive how most Ogryns players behave in-game. They rush in, they die and then they scream for buffs. Or they try to hurdle vs 20 shooters and can’t do anything because the shooters will win in a ranged fight against you.

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I mean, I kind of feel like there’s more to talk about there

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Oh that final part of the reply was in general. Not specific to your comment.

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No amount of skill changes the damage cleave of club, it’s just not good against hordes when it comes to actually killing them. I’m always willing to learn new things and be proven wrong though, so here’s my proposal. Go into meat grinder set to Damnation with creature spawner mod, spawn 50 poxwalkers, and record a video of you killing them with club with AI turned on or off, whatever your preference there really.

That should pretty quickly show us what club skills we’re missing out on that transforms it into something that isn’t abysmally slow at killing hordes. Basically put your money where your mouth is if you want to convince us of your minority opinion. I am genuinely open to the idea I’ve been playing non BB weapons wrong this whole time so I hope you oblige.

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I guess I could use shadow play to record a clip. But it will have to be in a normal game as I don’t use any mods. I’ll make sure it’s high intensity just for funsies. Also it will have to be later because of work.

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It’s pretty easy to install mods and TBH the creature spawner test would be better to avoid team interference and show the true solo horde clear rate, but sure, whatever you’re willing to record would make the conversation more productive.

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Well, it’s been 5 days. It is safe to assume the video will not be happening?

I mean, i wouldn’t be all to keen doing it myself, as i never made a recording of my gameplay, so i probably wouldn’t agree to it… but now that it came this far, i was kind of hoping to see some evidence for why Raw Numbers ain’t everything and how skill compensates for them.

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Shadowplay is just Alt+f9 or whatever, assuming youre rocking an Nvidia card, and works quite well. I’m not some big brained youtuber with 9000 hours in anything other than MS paint but OpenShot seems to work decently for cropping videos down to size. Something short and exported at around 720 at 60fps would be sufficient for us to view it and probably see it here. Otherwise just slap it on youtube.

Which reminds me I need to do another Crusher Challenge with the Chaxe and see how it stacks up against the C.Axe.

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LMAO you nailed it. In fact, you nailed this entire post. Your experience with the Ogryn mirrors mine. It just doesn’t feel right. He’s underwhelming in every way and lacks the finesse of the other classes. I’m sure many people had certain expectations when choosing the Ogryn that just weren’t fulfilled. Bottom line is, he’s LACKING. I don’t understand why people feel the need to keep making excuses for him.

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The only thing i dont like with Ogryns are the entitled players, most of the time they use the last voice not the bodygard not the brawler the last one.
I just hate them.
But it doesnt matter.

I agree that the ogryn doesnt feel Ogryn. Maybe a lore reason: they have inhibitors to avoid catastrophic scenarii. Like killing their squad in a frenzy.
But even so, the Ogryn shouldnt be a running gag tossing ennemies around, but…thats what they should feel. I guess its just a question of impact. Ogryns should do more impact on a hit, farther than what we have now, vertical also. And they should be able to grab human size ennemies like Hulk and Loki scene “puny god” .

They are not brutal enoough, not impacting enough. Okay its like a 6yrs old giant that survives by killing the weakest. But here we are facing Chaos plagued legions, wich means unlimited constitution bonuses. So yeah, it feels weird not to one shot any poxwalker with any non blessed weapons, but even more so, it feels even weirder on a flak armoured or unarmoured dreg or scab. They should be “skull crushed” with a bit** slap or uppercut around a 60% dmg weapon.
But tbh, imagine if the ogryns we want were that powerfull in the gameplay…

On paper they can defeat a Chaos Space Marine with but mostly they will die after killing it from their injuries or to the point they cant fight anylonger in the astra militarum without augmentations. So it was a bold move from FS to incorporate them. Because its hard regarding the powerbalance of w40K to translate it into gameplay.
And imo, they actually do just fine, you dont need specific blessings to trash anything, except maniacs maybe. But visually they should be more impacting.
Maybe add a chance to kill human sized ennemies with any bullrush charge, allow them to grab ennemies and kill them on the spot like haymaker blessing. Just for the show. We dont need an unblanced game, and by witch i mean a class really far above all the others. Having some unbalanced core mechanics is not a bad thing if you approach it in terms of character spread sheet and lore.

“You should see me when im angry” … that summerize it all, we want to see angry Ogryns. Instead of having damage resistance when players go down, give them increase damage resistance AND ludicrous damage bonuses. They are loyal after all. It would fit.
+20-25-30% damage bonuses + 20% damage resist for each downed party members regardless of coherency.

Or add some prometheus barrels to drink from, that actually enable friendly fire and give an allrounder damage boost.

Imo classes are to generalistic in their approach. Thats why the meta always go for more power blessings / toughness regen / armor pen and damage perks. and curios are just min/max health or toughness or stam. Its a narrow customisation grind when you play it like that but sadly its the most efficient regarding some rng on damna missions.
I mean ofc there are roles that befits a class more than another. But its not that clear of a limit or a proper specification enough yet.

Evryone has to find their playstyle and the games allows that. Still, its not tailored as good as we could expect from the possibilies the games allows us to dream about. Except for veterans that are too op. And i guess they did that on purpose since w40K is newly passing into mainstream culture, they wanted to catch COD/BF/CS and FPS players to feel like home. vets never runs out of toughness. Never… and they have wallhack/damageboost/invisibility/immunity to supressing fire/gives free bullets and grenades…
if you want to be efficient, play all the other classes based on the template of the vet. Ironhelm th is a powersword that makes boom. Same for the psycker and their new swords.

Ive been in a 4 vet squad…rekting everything. 4 psyckers…Low pace. very low pace. 4 ogryns gorefest and explosions everywhere everyseconds, 4 zealots: mostly dying because running in everydirections at once when they do not have flamer that ground them. But if you play like vets…every combination rekt every situations, and you can run into hi int shock troop gauntlets with grey weapons from lvl 1 without sweating.
Aaaaaand thats not good. I wont say its bad, but its not good. its a more generalistic approach of the gameplay than in V2 thats all.

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Oh and in regards to the Shield Ogryns, when you are a vet players and you complain because the shield ogryn plants his shield and waits for you to actively kill priorty targets instead of focusing on melee…that might be why they keep staying immovable and ergo have you to kill the mobs that pass trough the shield. And btw, a proper shield ogryn user does use his shield with … intelligence. Because thats not true that at some point the shooters will stop shooting at the shield. Most of the time the shield ogryn lift of the special, and deal with the trash mobs when they overrun the squad.

With every bonuses a vet have, watching one shooting at poxwalkers when there are flamers/ bombers at such HIGHLIGHTED by your feat and you dont shoot them, even with 10 trash mobs around you, you are not a good vet. Its not the shield ogryns fault.

But i do agree, that a shield ogryn that completely disregard line of sight with his shield is not yet a proper Ogryn shield player. But a vet that does not look for a line of sight is also bad. So stop pretending that every scenario with a shield ogryn is worthless. Its not. When you are with a shield planted its usually because their is a lot of fire incoming and a horde. So asking for the ogryn to switch to his ranged weapon to take down specials and elites for you is just a death sentence. It takes too long to make the swap and the shield planted is their because he is FRONT of you taking MOST of the ranged attacks AND melee attacks: not all of them, but MOST of them.

Here it is. Period. And for those who bring the scoreboard to prove something is like quoting some random verse of the bible to do an authoritarian argument. It does not works that way. Even in science, consensus is a norm but the way of reading things is subject to this cautionary thing that is called " observer perspective/bias" = right until proven wrong.

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Then don’t plant at all. That’s exactly what high damage, no downs, ogryn do when not using the shield. They just kill whatever the highest priority threat is or whatever their kit is best at handling.

Unfortunately this just only kind of works and it isn’t more useful than just using a corner or a box as cover. Which is what everyone else and the non-shield ogryn all do.

The shield is a fundamentally bad weapon because it naturally encourages players to become useless while teaching them that they are helping. That isn’t a fault of the players either, its a fault of the weapon. Thank goodness it is already being reworked so we can stop having to explain why its not just useless but detrimental to the team. Are there niche uses for it? Absolutely. But that’s not saying much since it does absolutely nothing outside of those niche uses that make it worthwhile.

The vet has to either put away his gun and melee, losing his special ability bonus, or shoot the poxwalkers because the shieldgryn is just standing there not helping. Those 10 trashmobs in a damnation game can down him very quickly if he isn’t doing something about it. A Vet can dodge dance their attacks for a bit to take care of priority targets but not forever. The fact that shieldgryn is literally just standing there not getting rid of the mobs around him and not getting rid of the mobs around the vet, is exactly the problem. Its not just the veteran’s responsibility to kill specials in the first place. What if its a game that doesn’t have any veterans at all? What if its 4 ogryns? Is the shieldgryn going to just stand there behind his shield and tell me the other ogryn have to deal with it but not him? All the other ogryn I play with are perfectly capable of using terrain features and dodges to avoid large volumes of fire and effectively retaliate with ranged weaponry but the shieldgryn just cannot do this?

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he fact that shieldgryn is literally just standing there not getting rid of the mobs around him and not getting rid of the mobs around the vet, is exactly the problem.

And if they would introduce a damage reflection Blessing called “Spikes”, it wouldn’t be as much of an issue and the shield could remain largely unchanged, as the enemies would die to the planted shield.

Anyway, i get both sides of the argument. The ability to create mobile cover is nice. The problem with the shield is the lack of follow through. When the shield is planted the ogryn can’t reach around and hit things (and it should be able to).

I’d hate to loose the mobile cover utility of the shield to be honest… the biggest issue with the shield is the lack of damage on the light attack and its utter inability to dispatch anything.

From the position of my Veteran, i have to say that a well placed shield is actually very much preferred. The problem is that the downsides of the shield way outweigh the benefits.

But this is again the point where i have to wonder why the Ogryn isn’t doing more damage. He should do at least as much damage with this club than with the others. More, to be fair, given that the Bully Clubs pretty much look like the Janitor tinkered something in his basement and couldn’t be bothered to give a proper weapon to the Ogryn.

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As warhammer 40K fans, we all know what the term “suspension of disbelief” means. Well here, the damage output of the ogryn is counterintuitive considering those have the strength to tear a space marine in half, but it has been set this way in this game for balance purpose. The superhuman strength of the ogryn is characterized by it’s ability to easily stagger elites in melee - he can even stagger bosses and stop mutants with it’s ult - which the other classes struggle to.

As a zealot main I’ve played the Thunder Hammer and Crusher extensively and I can give you that this feeling is very unsatisfying, but having weapons and classes with different strengths and weaknesses is what contributes to the variety of the game. Some weapons or classes aren’t going to appeal to some players, and some others will. I for example have a lvl 30 veteran with full top tier gear - power cycler and all - and I barely play him anymore, maybe one game once every two weeks. The gameplay of the veteran feels dull and unsatisfying to me, whereas another player will exclusively play this class because he has an absolute blast with it. I don’t play ogryn for about the same reasons as you are pointing out. Psyker and zealot, that’s my s**t! My point is, if you don’t like a weapon, a feat or a class in a game, then don’t play it. Darktide is offering us enough variety to just let us browse the different tools at our disposal until we find a glove that fits us.

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I for example have a lvl 30 veteran with full top tier gear - power cycler and all - and I barely play him anymore, maybe one game once every two weeks. The gameplay of the veteran feels dull and unsatisfying to me

I would suggest you make a feedback thread, seeing how this is the Feedback Forum and try to explain, in detail why you feel this way, and then let the Devs decide if there is a need to take action.

Just like this is a Feedback thread about it being unsatisfying that the expectations set by the visuals ain’t met by the game experience.

I don’t play ogryn for about the same reasons as you are pointing out. Psyker and zealot, that’s my s**t! My point is, if you don’t like a weapon, a feat or a class in a game, then don’t play it.

At this point i very much wonder if you maybe gotten into the wrong subforum. This is the Feedback Area where we provide Feedback to the Developers. And my feedback, as expressed in the OP is that my expectations aren’t being met when i play this Class. The expectations being: Big Burly Dude should hit harder than the tiny dudes i am playing, but it doesn’t… it feels weaker than the small dudes.

Thus far in the this thread i have been told that i need very specific conditions for it to feel right, to which i can only say that even when these conditions are met i am still feeling weaker than with the other classes when i take similar very specific conditions into account.

And now i can add to the list that… i apparently shouldn’t provide feedback in the feedback area and just not play the class instead? This confounds me. Especially since you seem to agree with my feedback… given you wrote this:

I don’t play ogryn for about the same reasons as you are pointing out.

So why tell me not to play the Class? Shouldn’t you be adding to this feedback and maybe get the Ogryn in a place where you actually want to play the Class?

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Representing the ogryn’s strength by pushing things around far pales in comparison to showing the ogryn’s strength tearing things apart.

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And the numbers very clearly bare this out. His swings far too weak. At a minimum his first target on all weapons needs to be high enough to make him feel ogryn. That would be so easy to do and he still wouldn’t be OP. Unless you think thunder hammer unpowered heavy attacks are OP…

Actually a good point. More gore effects on kill would be good for the ogryn. Imagine if when you killed a groaner with a club he exploded the way they do when you hit them with a bolter?

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