Wolfman, from what you said about your compression damping setting, it does sound as if your rear spring is too light for your weight. I'd check into a heavier spring.
When we set the compression damping up into the higher end of its range we don't get the best characteristics from a damper. Think about the behavior of a spring this way: when a spring is at full length, uncompressed in any way, it offers/presents its full potential for use. It is at its most "supple" in this uncompressed state. As we crank spring pre-load (damping), we are compressing the spring through this initial, most supple state. If we go beyond half-way through our adjustment range, and higher, we end up compromising the ride quality of the damper as the inherent "spring-ness" of the spring is diminished. We are left working with (enjoying) much less of a spring than what we've paid for.
The other compression damping on a fine damper such as your Ohlins, some little blue knob that you're probably turning, is actually changing (restricting) the flow of oil through various orifices within the shock. When set with no or low compression damping, the oil within the damper is moving through, relatively, large orifices. The shock is easy to compress because as we do so, the oil is being channeled through big holes. But as we crank up the compression damping, we are changing the orifice size to smaller and smaller sizes, we're increasing the resistance of the shock to compression.
I'm not sure how the guts of an Ohlins are built. Shock manufacturers use a number of different means to create damping circuitry. But irrespective of the means by which they do so, generally speaking, the less damping pre-load we use, the better the damper will "feel."
Getting to the "sweet spot" is achieved by starting with the correctly sized damper and the correct spring rate for your body weight. Starting from there, the pre-load adjustments should be somewhat minimal and you should be able to notice behavioral changes in the damper from, relatively, minor adjustments.
Now, as for rebound. Here again, setting this too high can introduce undesirable ride qualities. There's a sweet spot with rebound, too. On bicycles we check this by how quickly the seat comes back up at us when we hit a bump. Yeah, I know, we're not talking about bicycles. But the behavior, the desired behavior, is the same. If the rebound is set too high, as you're riding the bike through the twisties it will have a tendency to feel too stiff in the rear. It will lack feel as, instead of remaining somewhere in the middle of its travel, moving up and down, absorbing bumps, the damper will shoot right back to full length. And that's no fun at all.
When cornering a motorcycle the desired behavior of the rear end is that it doesn't wallow first off (blow through the compression stroke right away) but then, on the rebound, that it doesn't just jump right back to full extension at its first opportunity. We want the damper to work with us, not against us, as we corner. So as we tip into a turn and accelerate as we hit the apex, hopefully we haven't slammed on the binders thereby totally upsetting the balance from front to rear. If we've gone into the corner smoothly, not shifting the balance abruptly from rear to front, then the rear damper should be poised to do its thing: provide us with smooth and predictable extension of the swingarm as power is applied.
I'm sure there's probably an engineer or true suspension guru on the forum who can explain this concept using more concise, professional terms, but hopefully I've managed to make my point. And I hope you'll forgive me if this is all a bit pedantic -- stuff you already knew.
