Ogryn Shovel Knight
Build for Darktide

"Boss says I hit 'em so hard with the shovel they shits themselves"

How to play a Shovel Knight

Using Shovel V, use short heavy sweeps against hordes. Use activated heavy (fold up) against single target elites. Occasionally use charged sweeps (with crunch) against spread-out weaker elites and brutes for stagger and finishing blows. The best method is a quick wide sweep followed by a fully charged sweep to kill multiple at once. Against bosses, acquire aggro then do fully charged folded attacks. Save taunt for big threats, not hordes. 

Thrust + Brutal Momentum + Crunch + Carapace perk allows the Shovel special to 1-shot a crusher, or multiple maulers at once. You don't need Heavy Hitter to do that.  To get the full 40% from Crunch!, you have to wait the full duration where the attack happens automatically. Holding it just long enough to get 3 stacks of Thrust isn't enough for Crunch!. Activated heavy strike will also 1-shot Muties without charging it.

The activated light attack is still useful against unarmored high HP enemies because it has a much shorter recovery time after being used. Very nice for waves of muties if you get +Maniac. 

NOTE: Both Heavy Hitter and Feel No Pain work for Shovel V. More detail below. 

Shovel XIX vs V

XIX has strikedown heavies that are slightly faster, deal more damage and swing almost straight down, so you'll kill Specials and Elites more easily without having to activate your special. Unfortunately, you'll be weaker in a horde and will have to rely on your ranged weapon and push attacks.

V has relentless unactivated heavies that cleave horizontally in a perfectly straight line, potentially killing a whole slew of trash. Regular heavies are enough for basic enemies, but you'll generally want to charge the heavies fully when against Brutes or when Elites are mixed into a horde. If you choose to use Slam instead of Soften Them Up, fully charged heavies will reliably stagger multiple dreg ragers. If you're not running Slam, it's situational whether you should do wide heavies or take them out one at a time with folded attacks. 

The activated Heavy is effectively identical for both shovels.

If you want an alternate weapon, Branx Pickaxe is fine on this build as well.

Shovel V Stats and Blessings

Stat priority: 

First Target > Penetration = Damage >> Crowd Control = Defenses

First Target has insane synergy with Brutal Momentum because if the first target dies, the second target also benefits from the First Target bonus, and so on until 4 enemies are dead. 80% First target is 1.15x damage, 60% first target is only 1.05x damage (9.5% difference). 

Penetration determines carapace and flak armor penetration (nothing else). 80% stat equates to ~60.9% damage against armor. 57% stat equates to ~53.3% damage against armor (14% difference)

Damage is the base damage. It's still important because everything multiplies off it, but the scaling for this variable isn't wide. 80% stat is 165 base heavy damage. 60% stat is 155 (6.5% damage difference).

Defenses affects your sprinting stamina consumption, dodge distance, and push cost. Really bad Defenses will even have a lower dodge limit. Because you're so slow already, with a defenses stat below 50% you'll be out of stamina a lot which makes it hard to block and push when you need to. Even though you're not using a shield, it's fine to just block against ragers sometimes while you wait for a window to attack. 

Crowd Control: affects stagger duration and amount, as well as cleave damage. Even with a 50% Crowd Control stat you'll cleave through an entire crowd with brutal momentum. The biggest place it matters is when swinging at spread out elites and especially ragers. Test your shovel with and without Slam to see if you stagger ragers. 

Perks: Carapace is good for most Shovels and lets you get the 1-shot reliably. Flak, Maniac, and Unyielding are all good for the second slot but none are necessary for the weapon to work well.  Without +Flak, Bruisers will be a slight annoyance, but most will die to either the bleed or a second hit, depending on your weapon's stats, and you can always take the extra second to do a charged hit. Even with +Flak you won't 1-shot bruisers unless you got a lot of enemies with your last heavy attack anyway. +Maniacs is strong. It can let you 2-shot Dreg Ragers with unactivated Crunch heavies without HH stacks, so if you do roll with Maniac on one I recommend using Rock and Slam. It also lets you kill muties with a light special instead of a heavy one. Unyielding only really matters against bosses but it makes big number feel good.

Thrust (IV): necessary to make good use of the shovel's special. It's non-negotiable on the weapon right now.

Brutal Momentum (I-IV): This is what lets you dome multiple non-ogryn elites in a single swing and gives it great horde clear despite its slow speed. The 15% weakspot damage bonus at max is actually a lot less than it seems. It only increases the difference between base damage and weakspot damage, and the difference on this weapon isn't particualrly high so instead of doing 15% more damage, you're doing like 1% more damage. This blessing also makes the crowd control stat less important. 

Ranged Options (in order)

If you don't like Grenadier Gauntlet, take Rocks instead of Frag Bomb

The biggest weakness of the Shovel is that while it's great against Armor or a horde, it's not particularly good when you have both at the same time or the threats are spread out. One answer to this is frag bomb, but without enhanced blitz it's not always an option and without rocks you need a weapon that can handle range. Your ranged weapon should compensate for this somehow. 

Grenadier Gauntlet is basically a rock that can be reloaded, as long as you have Pinpointing Target and +Maniacs on it. Melee damage is dump stat. For the second blessing, Shattering Impact, Blaze Away III, and even Glory Hunter are fine but not amazing. Shattering Impact will put 40% brittleness on a boss before you switch to melee which is somewhat useful but overrated. Blaze Away will make up for the loss of Pinpointing Target on subsequent shots when dealing with a group of Gunners, but Glory Hunter is my personal pick and can restore toughness in a pinch when harassed by many gunners. The special attack is especially effective against scab rager packs and mixed hordes, and counts as a heavy attack (super useful if using Heavy Hitter). Combining all that can let a single special 1-shot multiple scab ragers. 

Kickback is still very strong and will help you protect your teammates, but you will want Rock for distant bombers. Weapon special counts as heavy melee. Blaze Away and Run and Gun is generally the way to go. 

Rumbler: meh. 1 grenade can disrupt a pack of enemies so you can sweep up, or save a teammate from afar. Mostly held back by ammo supply, mid blessings, and its inconsistency. If its ammo supply is buffed it'll be a good choice. Its main use in this build is spam when completely surrounded so go with Blaze Away and Adhesive Charge or Blast Zone. 

Stubber: Good if you take rock. Long Gorgonum equip time to equip makes it unusable for surprise specialists and Achylys accuracy is rough, but they're great at clearing non-carapace elites within a horde. Gorgonum is the stubber of choice for any build that doesn't use Point Blank Barrage. Lucky Bullet is usable with this build. 

Ripper is a great all-around weapon, but it doesn't synergize well with Shovel V's weaknesses. It won't do much in a panic situation where there's both armor and a horde at the same time. 

Stims

Concentation: Always pick it up if you see it. Taunt will save the team in a pinch. Wall shield psykers and Chastise Zealots may need it more though. 

Med: always good. Use it to save lilun, or hand it to lilun so you can get Concentation. 

Damage: mostly only useful for you against bosses or in a mixed horde. 

Celerity: basically worthless. Increases speed of horizontal heavies by less than 10% and doesn't increase speed of fully charged heavies at all. Use on a teammate instead. 

Loyal Protector

Your weapon has great cleave and your special can kill multiple enemies if they're grouped. LP helps group enemies and gives a very useful stagger at the right time. 

Just Getting Started (cooldown reduction on stagger) and Valuable Distraction (enemies take +25% damage) are both useful but it's harder to proc JGS in this build because it only activates when you stagger an enemy but don't kill them and only once per attack. The point of this build is killing what you hit so it won't proc often. VD is mostly only useful for extra boss damage or helping the team kill things when there's a lot going on, and a lot of players mistakenly think it also affects taunt from push attacks with Attention Seeker but it does not apply the debuff to push taunts. 

The range node is optional, generally I find that the vanilla skill is plenty useful to briefly stagger enemies near you, opening Bulwark shields, debuffing bosses, and stopping a disabler from attacking at a bad time, and the range isn't really needed for that and the talent point is more usefully applied elsewhere. Even with the range node, it's not wide enough to make midrange shooters stop shooting you. The range node is quite helpful when there's a line of bursters though but its main use is getting more basic enemies in a horde to target you instead of your team and that's not a good use of Loyal Protector most of the time. Your main goal is getting the attention of big enemies. 

Talent Options

Attention Seeker and Payback Time are good substitutions for Get Stuck in and Bruiser. Same with Delight in Destruction and Dominate. Personal preference. 

About Bleed / Batter

When doing fully charged activated hits, bleed stacks will fade about as fast as you attack so it'll never do significant damage unless you're doing quick heavies on a boss. You can still get to high stacks on a boss by chaining 4 heavies  before you switch over to special heavies which will more or less maintain the stacks. So offensively it's not very useful. However, bleed is still VERY useful in a mixed horde for the damage resistance if you run that.

Rock and Slam versus Frag Bomb and Soften Them Up

Personal preference. Slam helps out immensely against dreg ragers but doesn't affect much else. Soften Them Up is nice all around, especially for bosses. 

Keystones

I recommend trying both Heavy Hitter and Feel No Pain to see which you prefer.

Feel No Pain is a very slight reduction in offensive power but you can still hit most of the important breakpoints most of the time. The problem is the keystone is total garbage right now and desperately needs a buff. 

• Where it claims to give bonus toughness restoration, it actually only increases coherency regen.
  • The only talent in the entire ogryn tree that actually increases all toughness restoration % is Too Stubborn to Die. 
• It claims to give damage reduction, but it's actually only toughness damage reduction and stacks multiplicatively with other sources of damage reduction and even with itself (so at max stacks you're not getting 25% DR, but 22.5% TDR). 
• Shooters drain your stacks super fast
• Pushing to restore stacks isn't worth your time

Feel No Pain is so bad that actually the Heavy Hitter version of the build is pretty much just as tanky (by merit of more base TDR) and offers extra goodies as well. When Feel No Pain finally gets a much-needed buff or re-work this recommendation will change. 

Heavy Hitter has better synergy with Grenade Gauntlet and lets you reach those breakpoints without always waiting for Crunch!, and increases boss and mixed horde damage. But it's annoying to try to keep the stacks up all the time with a weapon as unwieldy and slow as the folding shovel. Furthermore, most of the extra damage is overkill and the shovel V receives very little bonus from attack speed modifiers (which is also why I recommend Loyal Protector over Indomitable). Thus the only keystone modifier worth anything is Unstoppable but I don't use it in favor of more TDR. 

Lucky Bullet (BLO) is usable in this setup if you go with a stubber, and it's probably the only decent way to use BLO without using PBB.