The PROBLEM with the Shield is, that our Ogryns Shield works different than the enemies Ogryn Shields.
Some times you get paired with an Ogryn that thinks, that him plunging the Shield into the Ground while the team is under heavy fire, would help the TEAMMATES in his back.
But that is not the case. See, if you are a Vet or Zealot with your range Weapon out. And walking towards you, comes a Pack of Maulers, Rangers a horde AND one BULLWARK. Then every LAS, Bullet or Plasma shot, that is closer than 1 meter near the outer lines of said Bullwark, gets eaten up by the enemies Shield and giving out that pling pling sound.
You will not be able to kill that Ogryn Gunner, that stands behind the Bullwark. BUT HE will shoot trough the Shield an hit YOU.
Now to OUR Shield Ogryn!
He has to actively plunge it into the ground.
Enemy shots do not get deflected passively by his shield, because the DT KI bullet simulation is lock on target, more like an aimbot shot that can only be avoided by having the system acknowledge
the players counter movements against being under fire aka dodging, sliding and so on.
The plunged to the ground shield gives the player Ogryn 360°, 100% enemy shooting immunity. ONLY! the Ogryn… Teammates that stand behind the Ogryn have to be inside a 1 meter corridor that has to be in the perfect angle between the Ogryn Shield and the rifle of ALL the enemy shooters that are locked on to shoot the Teammates behind the Ogryn.
Otherwise you stand there as the Shield Ogryn with your Shield in the ground and have your Teammates melt to enemy fire. And you not even see them get shot down, because you can only see the slit in your Joke of a combat shield. But you may even make it worse by blocking the small corridors sight, so that the ones that get melted behind you, can not even return fire because of you standing there.
The Shield Ogryns that think it would be best to ALWAYS use the Shield special as soon as there are enemy range types, are on the same level of understanding the game, as these who bodyblock the fire line of teammates when rangers charge the team.
They go in to fight something in close range, that will definitely hit them back hard. Something that they will need too much time to smack, slash, cut or bonk down. And instead of just stepping a bit back or to the side, to let someone get some clear shots to kill the ranger in seconds, they wanna have their dance with them.
And sure people start to hate on them. Because here is the point. Do YOU KNOW, how much rounds they lost duo to other Players doing such things? How many times do you have to let a dog bite your hand before you are allowed to state the fact that you do not want to be bitten AGAIN?
There are situations where you can not right away say that it is not OK to feel or express a strong dislike, that you may understand as hatred. It is not the weapon people tend to dislike or hate. It is the majority of Ogryns using it’s special in a way that does NOT help the Team in situations where the mistake of one single teammate can mean the END of the exhausting already 20 min lasting mission.
I think it’s also the context of random lobbies vs premade teams.
There are a lot of times where you can use it for useful stuff like DH hunting, getting specific penances like the Psyker ones about killing a monstrosity with only bb damage, if you have a specific team build in mind that isn’t effected to badly by the shield and if you ogryn has a solid ranged option for when the shield isn’t viable.
A lot of time seeing a random Ogryn with a shield in a lobby it’s a 50/50 split between them actually knowing what they are doing or being a hinderance. Is it someone who has a specific build / playstyle in mind or is it someone who played a few malice / heresy runs and went “surely this works the same in damnation” when really having more mobility, options to deal with armored targets, and general damage is the biggest asset at the moment.
If someone tried they probably could clear damnation with the shield but they would also have less options in emergency situations where you absolutely need to keep things and get them out of the way so you can pick up your team or do other stuff.
Ogryn with shield are great, they can narrow down the fire incoming, block doreways, redirect de flow of ennemies, protect you from nasty ranged guys, make it “safe” to advance forward underfire…Take the whole pack of big elites and mobs while u counterfire them from behind… ime more complaining about ogryns that use their shield to bash ennemies than otherwise.
When they anchor it u have a safe spot to hide.
I played with an amazing Ogryn yesterdy, during a beast of nurgle on damnation, he looked at me and nodded, i nodded without knowing why, then he went front of the beast, and got swallowed by it. What did it do ? It gave me an me TH hammer an opportunity to 3 shots the beast without struggles because it was too busy to swallow it, and couldnt move while doing it. This Ogryn was certainly a Bone Head or a very good seasonned warrior, or just plain stupid, you never know with them. But that strat was the first i saw and it was SO good ! Great game dude if you read that comment.
in vermintide 1 shields were much more prominent, in two the loadout of your team became less important and the class dictates your role way more, the stagger update barely adressed that, shields never were top tier in v2
I’d say the main reason for this is that 9/10 shield ogryns you see on 5+ are subpar players using the shield as a survival measure. They aren’t pulling their weight at all and still keep dying. That’s where the negative perception comes from.
Let’s assume you are the 1/10 that actually knows what he is doing, and are fine with control/babysitting playstyle (much like foot knight shield built in vt2). This way you can become useful, but that’s a very rare sight.
While I believe if you use the shield as a control tool and not as a “protective measure” for your own safety it’s a valid playstyle, I think ogryns aren’t played aggressively enough to reach their true potential, and the shield doesn’t help with that. Ogryn being mainly a CC/support class has so much controll built in that I feel like the shield is overkill.
Only by bad players and people who didn’t know better. No offense to the ignorant or incompetent intended. Also i never votekick people for weapon choice. I just inform them politely that the shield is bad, at the end of the game. As a courtesy in case they didn’t know.
The shield has been known as a trash weapon in damnation for a very long time. The reason is very simple; it does no damage. Good ogryns use Pmaul or Bully Butcher MK3, or shovel. Even club. Anything but the crapshield.
The answer is we recently got scoreboard as a mod and can now prove it. The average damage, in Damnation, of a shield ogryn is 1/2 to 1/4th the next lowest player. Just for context a shield ogryn running a stubber or ripper is probably going to end the game with around 1.2k damage dealt. The next lowest player, even another ogryn, running anything else, will probably be around 2.4k.
Worse than that the average health damage taken by such an ogryn will likely be 2-4x worse than anyone else. Most good players land in the sub-1k damage taken range in hi-int damnation. The average shield ogryn is pulling 2.5k health damage on average.
Seriously? The scoreboard?
I removed this thing until we’ve get something good…
Oh yes, it showed me that the non op (at least several said it) bolter/flamer can do a lot of more damages than any weapon and that psyker, the weakiest class, is the DPS class.
But scores? seriously. This is total waste of time this board until the author permits us to remove the said scores. I would really prefer to see how many enemies you killed, how many times you liberated someone that was trapped or under a dog, how many times you revived someone, liberated after being downed a player (buggued for this) and… damages done by ranged weapon and damages done by melee weapon…
Until that, the scoreboard will remain out of my games
Shields in 1 were absolutely dunked on, had people leave when I was running dwarf with axe and shield, and having the same responses people seem to be giving to the shield here.
Before the stagger update in 2, the same thing was happening. The stagger update in 2 didn’t have people constantly ragging on someone with a shield after it dropped. They now contributed to damage, so the community leaned off of it.
Hate it or love it lots of people run it, myself included. And it is easily one of the most obvious differences that explain OP’s sudden experience of newfound poor player behavior around his chosen weapon.
I do not advocate such rude behavior, but it might explain it. I do, however, agree with generating polite social pressure to stop using this trashheap weapon until it is reworked. I will continue attempting to kindly inform all shield ogryn that the sheild is bad and crippling not only their and the team’s performance BUT their own competence and enjoyment of the game.
People love their epeen measuring sticks, it’s why there was such an outcry when it wasn’t in this game by default.
As the person who posted this said later, love it or hate it a LOT of people are going to be using it to measure their epeens. Which is why they also said they’re going to be pressuring people into not using the shield because it doesn’t hit the points on said scoreboard.
It’s exactly the reason why chunky tuna said that they didn’t want one to begin with. They didn’t want this sort of elitism to get a foothold but gamers going to be gamers. It’s not directly harassing someone for their score so it’s not one of those things that they talked about for being bannable. It’s harassing them over their choice of weapon that the scoreboard said was bad, and is shared in the community for being bad according to the scoreboard, so of course it’s bad and no one should run it. So even those who don’t run the scoreboard mod are going to be saying that it’s bad.
I agree that the shield is not one of the best weapon. However, unless I see someone using… sorry… doing nothing with its shield, well I have no problem that someone use this weapon. I have seen several Ogryn do a very good job with their shield.
What is my prefered support weapon? surge staff. This staff can make so easy a run… however it sucks on the damages. If you consider the bad scoreboard, well noone would use this staff (and few do cause they just want to kill stuff). However it is the best staff.
A shield can be well used, but it needs skill. Also, let’s not forget that the player behind the ogryn can take pleasure with this weapon.
My problem is more on the behaviour of several shield users that stand with their shield while we all do the job and… sometimes die cause we would need to be 4… and not 3.
Here is the problem.
But please, don’t quote the abomination that is the actual scoreboard. You will give reasons to FS to never add something usefull.
EDIT: scoreboard is bad as it is actually. The author plans to introduce options to tweak it and allow you to hide scores and show what you want. Once it is done, I would use it.
Totally agree. Saying that is just giving arguments to FS to not deliver us something good.
Because 95 % who use it are actively hurting your team. We have seen the ogryns who just stop in a middle of whatever, active the special and just stand there blocking. Doing this is rarely useful and even in chokepoints its probably better to just smack those enemies with ogryns insanely good cleaving weaponry.
It also does not help that the dps/stagger on that thing are simply bad in comparison to his other weapons, having easily the worst dps in this game and really nothing special in terms of stagger. If you want extremely good controlling weapon you use something like power maul. If you want damage you go cleavers.
So realistically the only thing left is that it increases your survivability
And this is why those who try heresy/damnation for the very first times think its the “only viable” option for ogryn. The more people learn and understand the game the less relevant shields have become. I have never used shield apart from the few odd runs I did for testing purposes. Its honestly a crutch for those players who cannot survive on the difficulty yet. It allows you to make silly amount of mistakes without getting punished for it, so you never have to learn the basics skills on those difficulties.
I would not actively tell people to not run it if they like it for whatever reason, but its never been the “only” viable option. People are just bad and are finally starting to understand that ogryn does not need shield to play Dif 5 games.
If anything the weapon needs massive buffs. Just being able to “push up” to shooters is barely useful when you also have the best staggering ranged arsenal in the game.
Like i said, i always wait until the end of the game to express my opinion. But in my bajillion hours i have seen 2 cases of “good” shield ogryn. And they could have just been using power mauls to do the same thing but better.
You can’t run from reality by hiding it. It’ll find you. People have known it was bad for a LONG time. Mostly by posting videos of people doing literally nothing with it all game. Standing around
“I’M HELPING”
“I’M TANKING”
memes
Or simple visits to the unmodified Psychannium where you can see how little it actually does, using basic game knowledge to be ask the question “what is the point of this piece of garbage”.
All that has happened is a sea-change in available player data. Keep in mind as bad as the scoreboard is it tracks:
Health damage taken
Damage dealt
Lesser enemies killed
Ranged/melee elites killed
Disablers killed
Specials killed
These values give you a pretty firm idea of who is and isnt being helpful. Plus you played the game, you can see who did what all game.
Again, i am a polite and generous person by nature. I don’t recommend harassing people for their weapon choice. I want to see the sheild redesigned. I’ve been cooking up a thread on that subject for a while. It could be a super fun and cool weapon.
The Shield needs a simple rework. The Bonk stick on it is the Power maul anyway already.
Special attack needs to be powering the Power Maul on it. and have at least 2 hit charges.
Light attacks need to be done with the P M only.
Heavy attacks need to be a wide sweep with the Shield Hand that works like a push with some dmg.
The normal blocking together with its ability to still move needs to have a little bit more movement speed then it has now. And must have the same dmg mitigation that the currently Special Move has, but with the simple addition, that the dmg mitigation (holding the shield infront and block) consuming stamina and becomes 50% less effective when the stamina hits zero.
I’ll 100% admit I’m in the camp that is completely ok with no scoreboard in the game. It’s too easy to have gamers be gamers when you give them numbers to measure their epeen against, and it invariably leads to dunking on those who are not meta slaves unless you’re so aggressive with your moderation that people are accusing you of toxic positivity (like is the case of FF 14).
We don’t need to have the scoreboard to measure our growth in the game, nor do we need it to assess different builds. Obese megalodon isn’t going to be moderating the game at a level that is needed to stop harassing non-meta slave builds (and if Hedge is anything to go by, they’re just going to snark at us and walk away when things don’t go their way).
I propose, additionally, the shield should be immune from stamina loss by ranged attacks.
This should apply to Bulwarks as well.
Even well before the scoreboard mod i had tons of whingey gamers being gamers about metaslaving nonsense. But they just had more obscure data sources and less to go on. People don’t stop being people just because you hide objective data from them. Also people need to stop being so sensitive. Shortly before the scoreboard was released I played a game with the most annoyingly toxic ogryn on planet earth who complained all game that we moved too slow and didn’t kill enough stuff. Ironically he was running a shield and was dead constantly. I just kept picking him up and moving the game forwards and we eventually won. I still laugh about it with my bros.
Or, in short, i occupy the other camp.
Edit;
The other thing is, as a player, it lets me see where design weaknesses are so i can propose improvements. I do not want the shield to bad, or any weapon. I want players to have fun and different ways to play. Everything should have a niche and should be viable even if its not the best
The Scoreboard mod shows you the score at the very end of the game. You do not even have the players you Pug joined with inside the end game lobby at the time that you are done viewing the scores. So there is no way to wave the epeen anyway.
And never before in my loooooooong time as a so called ‘‘gamer’’ have i encountered the trend to abolish scores and end game screens because of ‘‘epeeen’’ or even worse ‘‘toxic’’. And to be honest that word, this ‘‘toxic’’. It is a word i do not like. Maybe i am just to old for that, but the most toxic thing for me are sometimes people who use that word itself, to describe and twist a thing THEY dislike to bend it into an argument that others HAVE TO dislike it too.
Football games have scoreboards. Heck almost every team game has scoreboards. We get measured by scores from the first day we go to school. And at some jobs we get production scores. Go tell your Shift leader that the production scores of your work are toxic and lead to bad behavior. That would be funny.
The scoreboard mod is not the best build we have. But it is the only thing we get right now. I get no useful information from the over all team generated kills.
I need to know after a mission:
DMG everyone did seperatly.
Enemy Category counters for kills
seperate counter for disablers, bombers and snipers
Stagger/raw dmg
So i can judge MY own Build by comparing my scores with Loadout X compared to teammate X with Loadout X.
Team work stats like rescue and freeing others
placed Health kits and how much of said kid went into OTHER players
The social part of the game.
And YES i need the scoreboard to measure my growth in the game. Because just finishing the mission and knowing how many ANYTHING we 4 killed, does not tell me if my Build was actually helping, or if i just got carried to the end by the other 3.
When I say toxic, I’m not talking about a snide comment being levied at someone sometime during a match. I’m talking about targeted harassment against someone using something that the harasser doesn’t like. I’m talking about disrupting gameplay for everyone because someone is throwing a fit over someone not playing a way that they want. I’ve personally seen this in games (and there are plenty of examples of it online) where there’s a epeen contest… I mean a scoreboard.
This is not a job where you are being paid to perform at a certain level. This is not a competitive game where you need to measure against your opponents to see who wins. This is a cooperative game where we’re supposed to be working together towards a common goal. Giving you information about how the defensive weapon that, through good positioning, can allow your damage dealers to focus on doing damage isn’t doing damage isn’t going to help anyone, and just feed the trolls.
I’d argue that just means you need to pay closer attention to the match you’re currently playing and to get over the gamer instinct (that I still suffer from myself from time to time) to blame others for mistakes.
I haven’t played a multiplayer game in the last decade or so where it was even hard to tell if I was contributing meaningfully or not. And that’s the only part you should be caring about in a game where pugs are the norm, if you personally are contributing meaningfully or not. You have no control (nor should you) over what other random people playing the game are using, just like they should have no control over what you play.