Vermintide 2 had the luxury of having 3 careers per character you could swap between, with some having a vastly diffferent playstyle. So what if the talent tree had only one build, there were 2 other options that spiced the gameplay up with a different ability and passives.
Darktide does not have this luxury. Instead, we have one class per character, and 3/4 classes with very little to no options. Veteran is currently in the “best” spot and even they have some talents no one picks. If you’re going to force this one class and no subclass feature, you need to make 3 different playstyles that feel good to use. You have 3 rows of talents for that reason.
People shouldn’t be telling each other what the best thing to play is, such as Zealot crit bleed or psyker (before things were fixed) spamming their staff because BB doesn’t scale and the DoT did little to no damage. I haven’t played Ogryn enough to make a solid enough opinion, but right now the shield is their best melee and my friend that mains ogryn hates the shield. This so called focus on weapon balancing is just creating 1 dimensional classes, and since I like to get some variety, I get the pleasure of progressing 4 different characters with different money, resources and items.
Make the talent tree act like a class. For example, one line for Zealot is good at one handed, one for two handed, and the last one survivability/ranged weapon close up benefits. Psyker already has this in theory, one for force weapon focus, and one for BB. Maybe the last tree could be focused around the DoT, or the warp related things. Ogryn would have one for crowd clear, melee, and survivability (probably, an ogryn can comment on what they’d like from the class tbh.)
We have done weeks of testing. We know what we want. I don’t know why you aren’t at least tweaking the numbers on things to see if they work better. When the only thing going for this game right now is the gameplay, I feel like focusing on damage control (And failing at it, every time) is just going to drive the playerbase further away just like VT2.