So ogryn has the following synergies for heavy attacks:
passive 10% attack damage
option to regain toughness on heavy hits
option to bleed on heavy hits
option to take reduced damage when near bleeding enemies
Which kind of screams that you would want to be heavy attacking a horde. However, Ogryn has no good horde clear heavies. Almost all of them are slow as hell and have bad cleave. Ok, there is one feat that gives toughness back on single target hits but that makes the bleeding and resist near bleeding quite useless.
Rumbler & Kickback bash is the fastest heavy chain on Ogryn. You give up the ability to block and melee will track you better so there is some risk into using that. Whatâs the reward? You can only hit two enemies with laughable damage and the rest are just pushed around.
But wait, there is this Pierce blessing that makes you cleave better through armour! Nope, can still only damage two targets.
The shovel has probably the next fastest heavies with light heavy combo AND it has access to brutal momentum. However, that horizontal heavy can also damage only 2 targets EVEN WITH BRUTAL MOMENTUM.
The rest of the heavies are either too slow (cleaver) or have no good cleave (clubs, grenade gauntlet).
Dealing no damage means no bleed, no bleed means no damage resist. Whatâs the point of the increased heavy damage and all the synergies around Ogryn heavies when you are just better off spamming lights??? The toughness back on multi heavy attacks with the bleed canât match the toughness regeneration and damage of a Slaugherer Momentum Bull Butcher light spam regardless of your melee weapon choice.
Furthermore not using the toughness back on heavy attacks feats allows you to pick the increased toughness regen in coherency which helps a lot during ranged fights (who the hell said itâs a good idea to give a big hurt box tank only 100 base toughness).
âBut wait, bleed on heavy helps you deal with single targets betterâ so does the +50% ogryn damage which works for your ranged weapon as well⌠and having 10% damage reduction is not noticeable.
This is basically the same topic is the one I started here so I obviously agree.
I donât know why FatShark are budgeting items the way they do; Iâve noted previously that horde clearing weapons are by far the choice meta in this game. If youâre an Ogryn the BB is a no-brainer; it shreds hordes and has a singular weakness in Carapace which is easily overcome by an appropriate ranged weapon. It comes with Slaughterer which turns its already highly desirable attributes into something monstrous.
Then, as you rightly point out, thereâs the heavy sweeping attacks from the âbigger weaponsâ.
These attacks suck.
Itâs as simple as that, they suck.
Whatever the budget is, itâs wrong. People donât want them. The stagger on them is nowhere near as important as the damage they deal for cleaves. Generally these weapons have not only bad maximum targets but they also have drastic damage drop off after the first.
I donât know whatâs going to happen until someone just bites the bullet and accepts that these weapons are clunky and bad for most content and they need a revamp. Ogryn melee is vastly centered around the BB with a few niche alternatives and then just C and D grade âeverything elseâ.
Thrust IV on clubs go pretty hard. I can donk crushers in 3 hits with one of my rolled clubs on T5, but thatâs about the only situation thus far that feels good to use heavies.
I also wish weakspot priority wasnât so awful on all ogryn weapons. Even moves like stabs and strikedowns literally cannot hit the weakspot unless you do the pre-fix Rashad tactic of staring at the ceiling. By now I canât tell if itâs intentional that ogryns canât hit weakspots or if itâs a bug they havenât addressed.
This is anecdotal, but I do very well the the heavies on the Krourk and Butcher knives. With Thrust and Slaughter the heavies absolutely decimate hordes and bleed will usually kill anything that survives it, or at least easier to kill. With 2 toughness curios, its very easy to fight hordes and take 0 health damage. As you wind up the heavy you take 1 hit, and the feat will put you back to full toughness when you hit people, not counting the kills.
Yeah this. To qualify a little bit from memory the game doesnât have a specific health DR stat coded, so in practice that 20% health DR acts as global DR so stacks multiplicatively with the toughness DR.
Yeah, I donât really get it. Thrust is the only way to make the oh-so-clunky Heavy attacks feel worthwhile and even satisfying, yet even the weapons explicitly designed around wide swings canât actually damage much of anything in a horde scenario, so youâre left with this awesome force of nature feeling swing that does nothing other than make more of a mess for your team after all of its killing impact is lost after a single target or two. Story would be very different if you could actually annihilate hordes with those meaty swings.
The way cleave damage works and is balanced between weapons at the moment is just nonsense. Light attacks on whatever weapon should barely cut through things while heavies should reward their far more risky gameplay and be allowed to bash through whole packs if a weapon uses swings as such. At the moment it feels like the opposite is true.
The unfortunate reality is that if every weapon could sweep hordes, then weapons geared toward being horde clearers would end up being in a useless spot.
In a game that heavily favors being able to kill things as quickly as possible, itâs hard to look at a lot of situations where you actually survive or do really well because thereâs enough impact cleave across your team to stop a horde or elites dead in their tracks.
My Thrust IV ogryn club can nearly one-shot a T5 crusher, for example, so I accept that itâs going to do really poorly at more or less anything else. The one upside over that is that it has a very fast light attack due to its finesse modifier and a whole lot of impact cleave that sends hordes flat on their ass.
But the problem I consistently run into in that circumstance is that having my toughness constantly broken by enemies interrupts my heavies, and I canât hit weakspots at all with those heavies. If I do, they only do like 30-60 damage more over a body hit. Itâs very unrewarding and makes melee on ogryn a lot less fun to manage than compared to everyone else.
Butcher lets you mow through hordes like butter while dicing through and stunlocking virtually everything short of Crushers as it is with completely free and riskless light attacks doled out in any scenario. Why is it bad for a weapon to be able to damage 5 or so rather than a pitiful 2 or 3 targets when you spend five hours winding it up and putting yourself in danger? I was probably exaggerating too much with my âannihilateâ wording, Iâm not saying that there shouldnât be some hefty falloff in that process that you have to make up for via Thrust for example, but any damage making through at all would be SOMETHING. It would still lend to a fairly different playstyle and way of dealing with hordes that would give Ogryn melee weapons other than the Butcher an actual place in the game.
So the ogryn club does damage around 5 or so enemies. The problem is that its damage distribution is about 1.2 or so. The first target takes the full damage and the second target takes a fraction, while everything else takes about 20-30 damage before it hits damage cap and moves onto impact cleave.
Vermintide was always about taking advantages in lieu of disadvantages, and they took that idea into Darktide with a lot more ways to boost your advantages and soften your disadvantages. Not every weapon has to be good at doing a particular thing, but I would propose that every weapon should be reliably capable of killing unarmored enemies consistently.
But it also just comes down to playstyle in what youâre arguing. Clubs and heavy-oriented cleavers would feel a LOT better if mechanical oversights are addressed for the ogrynâs sake. Reworking weakspots on ogryn melee weapons and making it less difficult to get heavies out during toughness breaking would be an amazing start.
To be fair, thatâs only because thrust is currently bugged. The bully club can two-shot a crusher under normal circumstances, but it needs T4 thrust, +25% caparace and near perfect damage/penetration stats.
Okay, but thereâs a lot of room to play with between BB-level cleave and the abysmally subpar cleave that weapons like club or shovel have now (and more so in the case of the MkIIIb club, which was born without the overhead swing).
In comparing DT to VT2 melee combat - Iâm finding that for whatever reason heavy attacks feel much harder to pull off while also being less effective in DT. Animation times on heavy attacks are maybe too long, which leaves you exposed to getting attacked/interrupted before you can pull off the heavy attack. Another contributor is that maybe the range and movement speed of a heavy attack is relatively lower, making it harder to safely position yourself to land a heavy attack.
Something feels different, and the result is that 95% of the time spamming LMBs seems to be the way to go in Darktide. Which as the OP points out hits Ogryn and some of their feats kinda hard.
I came to DT with the idea that heavy attacks with mace / hammer style weapons would be a bit like Bardins 2H hammer attack.
You could fend off hordes with well timed sweeps as the knock back was significant and cleave was generous , even if it took a while to whittle them down.
Iâm not disappointed theyâre not as slow as that in terms of ttk, it wouldnât suit DT I donât think on reflection, but as it stands you canât heavy much as mobs just sneak in for a jab. The time to prepare a heavy swing is too long when youâre mobbed.
Now: that speed just after your ult⌠That worksâŚ
Thrust damage was fixed almost immediately so this is incorrect. They even fixed being able to bank the stacks by stopping your swing.
As is demonstrably true for most weapons that need good blessings and perks to perform admirably. That is the entire point of building a weapon under this current system, after all!
Keep in mind that Brittleness does not affect this damage at all, as the damage modifier for carapace on heavy attacks is already >1x damage. Brittleness and Rending stacks do not further increase your damage beyond 100%.
Quick and dirty test /w MK I bully club in the meat grinder (damnation) on a crusher:
Heavy attack without thrust: 780 damage
Heavy attack, 1 stack of T4 thrust: 1170 damage
Heavy attack, 2 stacks of T4 thrust: 1560 damage
Heavy attack, 3 stacks of T4 thrust: 1949 damage
780 x 1.5 = 1170
780 x 2.0 = 1560
780 x 2.5 = 1950
Thatâs thrust adding 50%(!) extra damage per stack, rather than 20%. As far as I can tell, thrust has not been fixed (in fact, the latest hotfix broke it further such that activating your ult on zealot now causes you to lose your stacks).
Huh, my apologies then. I thought I read that it was fixed in the patchnotes but maybe it got reverted when they had to for the cosmetic issue. I didnât really have any Thrust IV weapons prior to this update since a lot of my weapons started coming online this week, so I had no reference to tell. Didnât even occur to me to check the math after that.
