BloodThirst isn’t bad in theory, since there’s 60% damage reduction with your passive (multiply way)
Like you said, it’s unreliable since Ogryn’s slow and most of his weapon’s cleaving heavy attack is 2nd one. Even Cleaver that have cleaving heavy attack as 1st one, it has long wind-up time.
That’s why Confident strike or Momentum blessing is mandatory on high difficulty like zhurtek said above. I know somewhere there’s someone who can beat Damnation difficulty without that blessings. But it makes Ogryn’s life easier like he’s designed through it.
Even then, 2 salvo’s just break your toughness. Most of time you can’t get every aggro of shooters on damnation. 1~2 always spread out before charge, or hid before charge. So there’s gonna be some health damage.
So in short, I agree you that he has serious ranged problem.
Yes, his ranged weapon is not for range fight. It’s for CC, or horde and weak armored elites. For first usage, you can compete with Psyker arguably. For the last usage, other classes are far better than Ogryn.
His lack of ability to handle ranged makes his melee weapons are versatile by game design (or at least I think it as that way). Longer reach than Eviscerator, longer dodge distance than Eviscerator (only 5%, and Ogryn’s big hitbox negate this advantage), better cleave in general, and flak armor penetration that many cleave weapon the other class don’t have. That’s the reason I don’t think they’ll give us some precise weapon.
And actually people use Bull Cleaver usually because of obvious reason, faster attack makes you live longer.
Toughness regeneration blessing with easy damage reduction can be too powerful. Think that Ogryn has Zealot’s damage reduction, and he can pop crit super easy with his toughness cleaver. It means 80% damage reduction all the time with that toughness regeneration with high cleave, decent dps, armor penetration (but not Carapace).
Damnation cannot be challenge then. (arguably)
This is what I thought about Ogryn and buff/tweak feedback. I don’t propose some radical buff since some brilliant and funny ideas can make some balance disaster.