Ogryn Charonite | Frag Bomb | Indomitable | Feel no Pain | Auric Ready
Build for Darktide

The Charonite way

Ogryn as a class is seriously slept on. It is the least played class, especially when it comes to Auric, Damnation and Maelstrom runs. When played correctly, Ogryn is not only incredibly strong, but also pretty forgiving. Once you understand that chained-heavy attacks equate to infinite toughness, everything becomes a nail to be hammered. I started running Maelstrom Damnations consistently whilst still rocking three blue Curios. You don't need a perfect min-maxed build to do well, making life considerably less RNG-dependent.

Playstyle

We are primarily a front-line tank. With a slab shield, our role is to control hordes. Constant heavy attacks not only replenish our toughness, but is able to stagger even a line of maulers and ragers that other classes would struggle with. We control these mixed hordes until our team can deal with them. In cases where they are not able to support, 3 heavy attacks combined with our bleeding stacks can deal with most elites. Even crushers can be staggered semi-reliably. If there is a wind-up attack we have not been to stagger, we can dodge backwards or to the side and hit them again. If there is a line of crushers looking to smash our team, we can charge through them and knock them on their back. You shouldn't be taking much damage with how effortlessly we can recharge our toughness, and what little chip damage we do take we can shrug.

When it comes to ranged combat, we still mostly rely on our melee. By raising our shield and blocking shots, we taunt ranged enemies, forcing them to come to us. Even snipers sometimes 'spaz out' and start meleeing thin air once taunted, eliminating their threat. The only exception to this are gunners, and reapers who do not have a dedicated melee. These should be advanced upon with our shield until we are ranged to give them a good crumping. Very rarely will be using our special ability to plant the shield in the ground. You want to always be advancing and attacking. We are not a tank in the traditional sense, we are a high-health DPS machine. Always be attacking and moving. Blocking a doorway with our shield does not help our team, and makes us incredibly vulnerable to disablers.

Our ranged weapon, the rumbler should be used sparingly. It should be used to snipe the occasional distant special that our team has not gotten to, such as bombers, flamers and snipers. It can kill a sniper in one hit on direct impact without the explosion even being needed. With this set-up, it can 1-shot reapers on direct impact and deal significant damage to monstrosities. It deals only moderate damage to crushers, but can help to stagger them before engaging in melee. Our frag bomb should be saved for those 'oh shit' moments, to help turn the tide of battle. If everything goes smoothly, you can play an entire mission without ever needing.

Build-Path

The Best Defence & Smash 'Em! - Does not matter if you hit a single target, or a horde, every heavy attack is going to replenish 25% Toughness. This is what allows you to wade through the enemy without taking any damage.

Heavyweight - +30% extra damage against Ogryns is a no-brainer. Synergises fantastically with Batter. This allows us to 1-shot reapers with our rumbler.

Indomitable, Stomping Boots & Pulverise - Loyal Protector is the go-to for tanky Ogryn's but I prefer running the bull rush ability. Yes, a 25% damage debuff is nice, but the extra mobility and hard crowd control Indomitable brings to the table allows you to provide far more support for your team. The best defence is a good offence as they say, and the fact it has a much shorter cooldown is a nice bonus. Indomitable lets you reposition if you are in a bad spot, CC priority targets such as a line of crushers or that Monstrosity voring your friend, and lets you get to downed teammates quickly. Pulverise also synergises amazingly with Delight in Destruction. 

Batter - You do not do a lot of damage naturally to Maulers, Crushers and other high-health targets. Ordinarily, you would just keep battering them, CC-ing them into submission until your team can actually deal the killing blow. The bleed from batter is what allows you to take down these big targets, and turns your defensive shield into a vicious weapon. Bleed stacks multiplicatively. One heavy attack on an Ogryn will see you deal about 11 damage per tic on your dot. After three heavy attacks, it is over 100 damage per tick. This skill alone will allow you to control large threats solo stun-locking them in place until they bleed to death.

Delight in Destruction - Up to 60% damage reduction simply for doing your job. Whether it be through Heavy attacks with Batter, or bleeding a horde with Indomitable, this skill allows you to laugh at gunners whilst you cut down their brethren.

Attention Seeker - You can keep your shield raised whilst advancing on ranged targets. This skill, however, will force most to put down their ranged weapons and come at you with melee. It is a fantastic tool for eliminating ranged targets without having to snipe them out. It also allows heavy damage enemies, like gunners and snipers to focus on you whilst your team takes them out. Gunners will delete your stamina pretty quickly. However, you can use the shield's special ability to plant yourself in place, taking all the aggro from these units so your team can eliminate them hassle-free.

Everything else, you can fit to how you like. I favour speccing down into Feel no Pain keystone for the extra survivability it offers. I like Soften Them Up to buff my ally's damage on priority targets with my rumbler. I would say it's an almost necessary node, but will allow that some people like Big Friendly Rock too much to pass it up. Soften Them Up is one of the best nodes in the game and allows us to grab Frag Bomb, as a rarely used back pocket blitz. It can be a wonderful 'get out of fail-free card' when the proverbial shit hits the fan. However Bombs Away! can work if you don't like the idea of only having one grenade and Big Friendly Rock can also be good if you do not trust your teammates to take out those distant specials and gunners.

Battle Maul & Slab Shield

Whilst you are sacrificing some raw DPS over other options, the utility this thing offers is second to none Just constantly spam heavy attacks to keep your toughness high and stun everything in your path. The only time you should be using light attacks is if you took the keystone modifier Brutish momentum, and you don't need to be topping off your toughness. Also when there are a lot of disablers around, especially packs of pox hounds, so you can more easily dodge disables and eliminate them swiftly.

The first heavy attack is a strikedown. If you want to maximise your damage against tougher targets, attack once, block and then attack again. Admittedly, most of your damage will be coming from bleed so it's not super necessary to succeed. You can make most perks and blessings work, so again, not super important that you get the perfect roll. I like to run extra damage to carapace and flak armoured enemies, as Scab Ragers, Maulers, Crushers and Scab Captains are the main threats you want to increase your DPS against. Extra damage versus maniacs is also viable. 

Skullcrusher is a fantastic blessing for making enemies take more damage from all sources. You are going to be constantly staggering enemies anyway, so it will proc constantly. It synergises well with Batter to increase our bleed damage. Confident Strike just adds to your already ridiculous toughness replenishment, although you can make one of the other blessings work just fine too. Keep your guard up whilst advancing on ranged targets to get into the swinging distance, or rely on Attention seeker to bring them to you. 

Rumbler

The rumbler is the closest thing we are going to get to an accurate long-range weapon with Ogryn. Yes, the grenade will often hit a target and bounce off, but the impact damage alone is enough to kill a sniper outright. There are even some cool niche tricks you can do with it that make me favour it over our other ranged options. If there is a teammate that needs reviving, you can fire a grenade at the ground. I have had a few occasions where I've found myself in a sticky situation surrounded by a horde. I've gone to revive teammates, and been pounced by a pox hound, only to have my grenade go off and free me from its clutches.

Adhesive Charge is a necessary blessing here. The damage it can inflict to Ogryn's and Monstrosities is night and day, and will become your main DPS source against these targets. Not only does it do considerable damage, but the constant explosions will stagger them, meaning that there is not an enemy you will face, that you do not have some way of stunning. Add to this the debuff you will be applying with Soften Them Up, and most threats will melt when paired with a semi-competent team. I like to run extra damage to the carapace and unyielding enemies, as these are the targets your grenade is going to be sticking to. For the second blessing, there are two options. Shattering Impact helps to soften up Crushers and other high armour targets for our team, and is exceptionally good on Scab-only melee Aurics. Blaze away increases our damage against prolonged Monstrosity fights, and one of its best uses is in bursting down these large targets. Bear in mind you have to fire the weapon almost immediately after reloading to gain the benefit here. The choice of which to go for comes down to whether your struggling more with Monstrosities, or more with Crushers, maulers and the like.

Other Weapon Choices

Grenadier Gauntlet - Works pretty similar to the Rumbler if you find your not getting on with the thumper. You are sacrificing raw damage versus Ogryns and monstrosities, for a weapon that can better deal with specials if your team needs it. It still benefits from big boom, although it might be prudent to swap out Reloaded and Ready for Dominate to better deal with elite and specialist threats. For blessings, run Pinpointing target for the potential 40% increase in damage the longer it is aimed, and Shattering Impact to help us chip through big armoured threats better.

Curios

I would say there are a few options you can run here.

1. 3x Toughness
2. 3x Health
3. 2x Toughness & 1x Health
4. 2x Health & 1x Toughness
5. 1x Toughness, 1x Health & 1x Stamina

Wound curios are never worth running on Ogryn. The only time they are viable is on Zealot Martyr builds. Never run them on Ogryns, Psykers or Veterans. 3x Toughness can help keep your shield up. You want to try and keep your toughness at 100% to prevent bleeding through to your health. Extra health gives us a little more wiggle room to deal with the occasional bleed-through hit we might get, or that pesky Pox Bombers that our teammates decided to shoot in front of our faces when we were about to push them. An extra 3 stamina bars give our shield 10 stamina and a fantastic margin for error when reviving downed or trapped teammates. Remember that Ogryns do not get interrupted when reviving allies, so this should be a priority for you if you do not have a veteran who can revive teammates with a shout, or a stealth ally who can do it without being harassed. Also, our stamina drains very fast with the shield. This can be alleviated by pulling out your ranged weapon when sprinting, or trying to minimise sprinting in general.

Most of our toughness will be coming from smacking things, however toughness regeneration can still provide much-needed help for situations where there are no enemies in grabbing distance to pummel. Gunner resistance is always a great perk to grab. You are a big target, and whilst we have our shield to deal with ranged engagements, there are going to be times when gunners are chipping us away whilst we are knee-deep in plague worshippers. This helps us keep our toughness high to avoid as much bleed-through damage as possible. Some like to run resistance to snipers. I honestly don't find them much of a threat, and I think that can be attributed to our glorious shield. They might be valuable if running a different melee weapon, but are not super necessary for us.

The remaining, I leave to your discretion. If you want to see how beefy our boy can get, then run 3x health curios with 3x health perks. Stamina regeneration, combat ability cooldown and straight Toughness are also viable options. A curio gives 21% Health or 17% Toughness. The perks are 5% Toughness or health, however, so the health perk gains diminishing returns and is much more valuable as a blessing rather than a perk. I may tweak my curios without updating this section. Let it be known that you can achieve success with any number of combinations. I most likely will not rewrite this section, but I will update the information above to what combination I am finding most effective at any given time. For now, I find the raw stats offered by extra toughness, health and gunner resistance to be the most impactful, and these are the curios I run on most of my characters. If you are not sure where to go, then these three can seldom be a bad choice for most builds.

Strengths

The biggest strength of the Charonite is its versatility. There is nothing the Moebian 6 can throw at us that we don't have the tools to deal with. It doesn't matter how many ragers or maulers are mixed into that horde, we can suppress and kill them, all while remaining the tankiest member of our team. We don't need to worry about the Ogryn's lacklustre ranged accuracy, when we can just force them to come to us. Even if a dozen gunners are blazing away in the distance. If for some reason our teammates cannot deal with them whilst we pull aggro, we can simply rush over and smack them down ourselves.

That is why I favour Indomitable over Loyal Protector. Not only can it help us close the gap, but can also knock an entire team of Crushers on their back so we can better deal with them. With a traditional tank Ogryn build, I find two glaring weaknesses. The first is that yeah sure, you can shout at a crusher team to pull them off your allies, but they are probably just going to smack through your shield and put you on your back, especially if you are hemmed-in or backed up. The shout is honestly used more as a disruption tool anyway by good Ogryn players, and is something I feel is outclassed by Indomitable for its sheer utility. Do you want to stagger enemies, or knock them on their back whilst also bleeding them?

The other major weakness I find is their below-par boss damage. A normal rumbler I found incredibly underwhelming, as the grenade rolls to the side and delivers only a fraction of its explosive payload. Adhesive Charge is an absolute game changer, turning what would traditionally be more of a horde clear weapon, into an absolute boss deleter, all the while keeping said bosses stunned in place. You are going to be focusing on your melee damage most of the time, meaning that unless you are particularly trigger-happy, ammo management should never be an issue.

You should not be aggroing Daemonhosts anyway, but if for some reason that thing absolutely, positively must die, you can tank it infinitely with your shield's special ability whilst your team whittles it down. Just please, if you do this, communicate with your team first. Shield Ogryn's mindlessly rushing at these things when they can be easily avoided is what gives the rest of us such a bad reputation. Sure, you killed it, but now everyone's health is majorly corrupted and you got... nothing... absolutely nothing as your reward. Remember that discretion is the better part of valour.

Weaknesses

You can't be overzealous with your ranged attack, especially if you do not have a veteran with Survivalist Aura on your team. As such, Conditions where a large amount of specials spawn in can be tricky for you. Trappers are the bane of your existence, given the already larger hitbox size of Ogryn's, and you need to co-ordinate with your time to prioritise these threats. They can be dealt with by yourself, but they are not your speciality. Also, your damage is spread over a large number of threats. Heavy attacks into a horde of maulers or ragers can apply bleed stacks to multiple targets, but a single mauler will have them applied just as quickly. Your damage increases the more threats in front if you, meaning you can take longer than expected to deal with just one or two elites.