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Pistol vs Chaingun


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I have a problem with vanilla Doom’s combat and I want to make a quick post about it.

 

So, in vanilla Doom, both the Pistol and the Chaingun have the same amount of spread, do the same amount of damage in one shot and have perfect first shot accuracy. The only real difference between the weapons is that the Chaingun fires faster and fires in bursts of 2 bullets.

 

This means that the Chaingun is a direct upgrade to the Pistol. So once you have a Chaingun, the Pistol is pretty much obselete. The only situation I can think of where you’d want to use Pistol when you have a Chaingun is when conserving ammo, due to the chaingun firing in bursts of 2 vs the Pistol firing one shot at a time. So spending 3 bullets vs 4 bullets on squishies is a good idea in that scenario. But there are very few situations where you’d be that ammo starved and are completely out of any other viable options. Otherwise, I don’t see any point to using it.

 

I’ve read some topics about this before, and I’ve seen some people argue that having the Pistol be a bad weapon is the point, as it’s supposed to be a baseline for self-defense that incentivizes finding other weapons during pistol starts. However, I don’t think having this be true and having the Pistol be a good weapon are mutually exclusive. I’ve also seen some people comparing using the Pistol vs the Chaingun to using the Shotgun vs the SSG. However, the difference is that the Shotgun has many more use cases over the SSG, such as ammo conservation (which is much more compelling in its’ case, as shells are a scarcer ammo type than bullets) or at medium to long range due to the SSG having a way higher spread. 

 

So how would I fix this? Well, for the Pistol, I would increase its firerate (which is a very common solution in some megawads such as Valiant or Ancient Aliens), and I would make it 100% accurate for every shot. For the Chaingun, I would change it to no longer have 100% accuracy for the first shot. This would give each weapon their own role, with the Pistol being effective at medium to long ranges, and the Chaingun being effective with crowd control or larger monsters, but suffering at longer ranges.

 

What do you guys think? Do you agree with me or am I completely off base here?

 

 

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I use Final Doomer+ as a gameplay mod: it comes with the option to make the Pistol use no ammo, which makes it into a good backup weapon. I also seem to remember a 3DGE mod - Doom Forever? - here DoomGuy ditches the Pistol the moment he gets his hand on the Rifle that Zombiemen drop.

Edited by Rudolph

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I really think base game is perfect as it is.

However, your suggestions sounds interesting so I'd definitely play a WAD based on these changes.

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Well although the chaingun is clearly better, if you are pistol starting, the pistol is always useful until you actually find a chaingun.

 

I do like improved pistol's in stuff like Supercharge maps though, I like using handguns in game's and Doom's vanilla one is not the most satisfying, it simply serve's it's purpose. I loved the one in Doom16 though.

Edited by Wyrmwood

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It's all right for the pistol to be trash. I really don't mind playing pacifist at the beginning in a lot of cases as long as it doesn't drag on too long. But I'd rather have a completely pacifist section than actually have to kill any significant amount of stuff with the pistol. Single mid tier enemies vs the pistol feels a lot like fighting a cyberdemon without the excitement. I actually prefer being able to ignore the pistol after finding the chaingun because having too many weapons is annoying. Four or five useful options at a time is plenty and honestly most maps barely rely on more than two. It's not an RPG and I don't like getting caught up in the technical skill of weapon switching, and I don't use mods like weapon wheels. I'd rather use the tools I know well and rely on skill to make them work than get caught up always having the perfect one out for any situation.

 

Even in stuff like Valiant and Eviternity where it's upgraded I never use it past the first 10 seconds of the map. The bestiary has way too much HP to warrant a slow and low damage weapon so the shotgun is necessary at a minimum. Even if you use a healthy number of explosive barrels to spice it up, they even have too much HP for the pistol to be reliably useful. 

 

Increasing its fire rate helps cut down on the tedium a bit, but giving it perfect accuracy on sustained fire is almost totally pointless. The chaingun and pistol's spread just isn't enough to matter much at the ranges where 99% of Doom combat takes place. The only exception is probably sniping revenants because they're skinny bastards and a couple missed shots make them retaliate instead of being stunlocked. 

 

I'll use the chaingun and waste a second bullet or a shotgun shell rather than use the pistol. Bullets are so common and have so little impact that it doesn't matter. (You don't restart the map or resort to punching everything if a zombie drops their clip off a ledge, do you?) If you're that pathologically interested in saving ammo you're better off just using the non upgraded fist; it has about the same DPS.

 

 

A couple possible solutions if you really wanted a good pistol:

 

-Change the pistol to an SMG with poor accuracy and good fire rate; it'd have much higher DPS than the pistol but be less efficient per bullet and ammo wouldn't last long. It'll let you mow down a few enemies and push forward but that 50 bullets wouldn't last unless you found some groups of hitscanners. The chaingun would deprecate it in terms of DPS and ammo efficiency but perhaps the fire rate on the SMG would make it better for stunlocking enemies. Or you could simply find a second one instead of the chaingun and piss away ammo.

 

-Making a sniper rifle type of thing instead of either pistol or chaingun. One bullet-based weapon would be high rate of fire but both would be accurate. The sniper would use multiple bullets per shot and most likely use multiple stacked shots to create a piercing effect. You'd get the most efficient damage per shot (like the SSG does ideally) but lose stunlocking potential and the DPS could be a toss up. It might be a bit similar to the SSG's role except a lot better at range. It might pair well with altering one of the shotguns into something like an auto shotgun.

 

-A magnum pistol with a very slow rate of fire on par with the SSG. It could be fairly powerful (possibly use the same pseudo piercing effect) and use additional ammo or not depending on mapper's preference. However it'd be useful for sniping at your leisure or peekaboo shooting. The pistol fires a bit too fast for this tactic to be useful; to have any DPS at all you need to expose yourself to fire where the shotguns are tailor made for it. It'd fill the niche of being ammo efficient compared to the chaingun where DPS and rate of fire aren't priorities. Probably pairs well with a super chaingun like Valiant to make the two options very different.

 

-Ray Mohawk 2. Enough said.

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1 hour ago, Logamuffin said:

as shells are a scarcer ammo type than bullets

Honestly not true. Bullets are probably the 2nd rarest ammo type after rockets. Shells are by far the most abundant ammo type in 90% of WADs and it's due to massive ammo pickup imbalance. Large bullet pick up gives you only 50 bullets, so you need 8 of them to max out. Once you actually start using them, they also run out pretty fast.

 

Meanwhile, a single box of shells gives you 1/5th of max and is worth 140-200 bullets (Shotgun vs SSG), supposing everything hits. It should have been 15 tops, probably something like 12.

 

And as for the pistol I find its use for ammo conservation sufficient as it's a basic weapon after all. I use it for finishing off Imps that survived a shell or shooting switches.

Edited by idbeholdME

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Doom went with the pistol being the last resort weapon, Duke 3D the pistol is useful throughout the game. It’s mainly due to its rate of fire and having its own ammo. If the pistol and chaingun had their own ammo it probably would help more than changing their accuracy, and the pistol only needs to be so much faster really, maybe a bit like the SMG from Wolf 3D, to feel more useful. 

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11 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Increasing its fire rate helps cut down on the tedium a bit, but giving it perfect accuracy on sustained fire is almost totally pointless. The chaingun and pistol's spread just isn't enough to matter much at the ranges where 99% of Doom combat takes place.

I don’t understand this take, because if you fire at an enemy at the opposite end of even a medium-sized room, you WILL be missing shots due to the pistols spread.

 

13 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

Honestly not true. Bullets are probably the 2nd rarest ammo type after rockets. Shells are by far the most abundant ammo type in 90% of WADs and it's due to massive ammo pickup imbalance

 

You’re right. But still, damage-wise, saving a shell when using shotgun over SSG is still much more valuable than saving a bullet when using pistol over chaingun

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1 hour ago, Logamuffin said:

I have a problem with vanilla Doom’s combat and I want to make a quick post about it.

 

So, in vanilla Doom, both the Pistol and the Chaingun have the same amount of spread, do the same amount of damage in one shot and have perfect first shot accuracy. The only real difference between the weapons is that the Chaingun fires faster and fires in bursts of 2 bullets.

 

This means that the Chaingun is a direct upgrade to the Pistol. So once you have a Chaingun, the Pistol is pretty much obselete. The only situation I can think of where you’d want to use Pistol when you have a Chaingun is when conserving ammo, due to the chaingun firing in bursts of 2 vs the Pistol firing one shot at a time. So spending 3 bullets vs 4 bullets on squishies is a good idea in that scenario. But there are very few situations where you’d be that ammo starved and are completely out of any other viable options. Otherwise, I don’t see any point to using it.

 

I’ve read some topics about this before, and I’ve seen some people argue that having the Pistol be a bad weapon is the point, as it’s supposed to be a baseline for self-defense that incentivizes finding other weapons during pistol starts. However, I don’t think having this be true and having the Pistol be a good weapon are mutually exclusive. I’ve also seen some people comparing using the Pistol vs the Chaingun to using the Shotgun vs the SSG. However, the difference is that the Shotgun has many more use cases over the SSG, such as ammo conservation (which is much more compelling in its’ case, as shells are a scarcer ammo type than bullets) or at medium to long range due to the SSG having a way higher spread. 

 

So how would I fix this? Well, for the Pistol, I would increase its firerate (which is a very common solution in some megawads such as Valiant or Ancient Aliens), and I would make it 100% accurate for every shot. For the Chaingun, I would change it to no longer have 100% accuracy for the first shot. This would give each weapon their own role, with the Pistol being effective at medium to long ranges, and the Chaingun being effective with crowd control or larger monsters, but suffering at longer ranges.

 

What do you guys think? Do you agree with me or am I completely off base here?

 

 

Yeah giving the Pistol a more niche role by speeding up its fire rate sounds a lot more sensible i'd give credit for.

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The pistol is sort of a red herring for balance. The chaingun works well in its niche relative to the power weapons -- there are still lots of reasons to use it when you have power weapons. Considering how much less dps it has, it's in a really good spot with its role. So I wouldn't hamstring it just so the pistol gets a bit more play. 

 

It's okay if the pistol is useless. Not everything in a well designed game has to be useful. The pistol is good at signaling "go find a real weapon."

 

Also: 

 

Spoiler

Ammo conservation by obsessively counting ammo and making every shot is nearly always a noobtrap imo. 

 

It is so much more efficient to be even slightly more proactive about infighting, about evading enemies, about leaving turrets that aren't all that dangerous alive for later, and about rocket splash and BFG tracer efficiency. As an example, one unintended rev-HK infight is around 8 shells saved. 3 mancubus turrets left alive until you're in the clear are 18+.

 

People get very thrifty with weapon use because it's an "obvious" way to do it, but if you care about saving ammo well, I would not recommend that. 

 

I regularly use the SSG as a sniping weapon and (pistol-starting) never run out of ammo.

 

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10 minutes ago, Trustanus said:

Doom went with the pistol being the last resort weapon, Duke 3D the pistol is useful throughout the game. It’s mainly due to its rate of fire and having its own ammo.

That too, but also because there are pretty much no tough enemies in Duke. 90% of the game dies to 2 shotgun shots, so it's pretty easy for it to maintain relevance.

 

4 minutes ago, Logamuffin said:

You’re right. But still, damage-wise, saving a shell when using shotgun over SSG is still much more valuable than saving a bullet when using pistol over chaingun

Absolutely. But the pistol is only relevant in edge case uses like this. Another option would be to not give the player the Chaingun for several levels to force use of the Pistol.

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I think a lightly upgraded pistol via dehacked is a welcome change, a light boost to the fire rate and perfect accuracy helps remove the tedium of pistoling imps and pinkies. Otherwise its the bare minimum until you get something better.

@Doomkid has a good video on dehacked upgrades for the pistol too: 

 

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5 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

It's okay if the pistol is useless. Not everything in a well designed game has to be useful. The pistol is good at signaling "go find a real weapon."

 

The problem I have with this is that every single other weapon in Doom has a situation where it is useful over all the other weapons, except for the pistol. So in my mind, this idea seems to go against the design of all the other weapons.

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13 minutes ago, Logamuffin said:

The problem I have with this is that every single other weapon in Doom has a situation where it is useful over all the other weapons, except for the pistol. So in my mind, this idea seems to go against the design of all the other weapons.

 

In gunplay scenarios where you have the entire arsenal at your disposal, sure, it's not useful, but from a game/level design perspective it's quite useful.

 

The pistol represents a tier of damage output that necessarily gates you in when dealing with monsters. With a pistol, the only monsters you can tolerably fight are the zombieman, imp, and shotgunner. Upon picking up a shotgun or chaingun, your effective damage output takes a big jump and you're able to deal more damage much more effectively, thus opening up avenues, in much the same way that leveling up or equipping better gear in an RPG enables you to deal with tougher monsters. With a shotgun and chaingun in tow, grabbing a super shotgun, rocket launcher, and/or plasma rifle represents another jump up in damage output and flexibility, further opening your options.

 

The mechanic of gating off options and opening them up later is in and of itself useful for shaping player experiences. Having all weapons be more or less useful in a particular situation is very nice if you want good balanced firefights (and indeed this is what arena FPS games strive for), but that's not Doom. Doom is a (primarily) single-player game where narratives are unfolded kinetically through play and exploration. Restricting a player's abilities by giving them lower-tier equipment allows for a wider range of expression particularly with lower-tier monsters. Using a pump-action shotgun to take down a revenant is a different experience from using the super-shotgun or even a rocket launcher.

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3 minutes ago, Logamuffin said:

I don’t understand this take, because if you fire at an enemy at the opposite end of even a medium-sized room, you WILL be missing shots due to the pistols spread.

 

Shots miss with all weapons all the time, even for very skilled players. There's autoaim screwing you, the blockmap, the SSG's spread (It has the worst accuracy, but notice that it's by far the most used weapon in Doom 2), and all weapons also deal variable damage. You're better off getting 2 max damage rolls and 3 misses against a shotgunner than getting 5 minimum damage rolls that all hit. Trying to control minutiae like picking off enemies with the pistol to save a couple bullets isn't really going to matter. The fact that you're in a situation where you choose the pistol like that means that you're just doing cleanup and your survival isn't a factor. It's extremely low stakes by definition and you could generally skip that monster entirely if you wanted to.

 

Compared to something like running out of rockets for a crucial fight or firing too much plasma where you lose a BFG shot, pistol ammo just doesn't mean anything by comparison. A BFG shot or a handful of rockets can really matter in surviving a tough spot. Similarly, just going brrt with the chaingun and wasting 2-3 shots will still free you up a lot faster than wearing the enemy down carefully to save a couple bullets. If you're being sniped from the side by a chaingunner and get chunked down by 50 health in the meantime then that's a terrible tradeoff to make. 

 

Honestly playing with a crosshair or dot will probably help more with all weapons than favoring a lower spread weapon. And if you're playing the game as it was originally, with 320x200 resolution, then the enemies on the other side of a medium sized room will be little clusters of pixels. You were never really meant to do much sniping in the original games (particularly with keyboard aiming), that's why autoaim is so limited in range.

 

If you really care about ammo efficiency then by that logic you need to be punching everything you can, and be extremely careful about getting every dropped clip and making sure not to pick up ammo boxes with close to max bullets, etc. Like Baja says, it's very counterproductive to chase after every bullet when they have so little value even compared to shells. I'd rather have good movement and positioning than good accuracy in terms of skills any day. Obviously it's not great to completely whiff shots all the time, but bullet spread in particular is of pretty low importance in terms of a player's capabilities.

 

It's rare that a mapper will be so strict with ammo that every shot matters, but there's always infighting and melee. 

 

Just now, Logamuffin said:

 

The problem I have with this is that every single other weapon in Doom has a situation where it is useful over all the other weapons, except for the pistol. So in my mind, this idea seems to go against the design of all the other weapons.

 

It does: You always have the pistol and it's safer to use than melee. The best ability is availability as they say.

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Having created one of these pistol related topics myself, I guess I'll share the feelings I came away from that thread with. 

 

I think the point of the pistol gets lost in trying to apply the "combat role" philosophy of other weapons to it. I think vulnerability is the point, and as a result, it does in fact do something that none of the other weapons do - it forces you to explore the environment, rather than treating every problem as solvable with direct combat. In this way, I'd argue it adds more depth to the game than handing the player an additional combat option ever would (and pistol-start enthusiasts could probably attest to this).

 

I think the notion that the Chaingun "makes the pistol obsolete" is a little misrepresentative. It's an upgrade (and an awesome one), that makes finding the Chaingun all the more sweet, especially in Doom 1 where the absence of Chaingunners means you really have to go and find one of these in a level. Like the Berserk pack, upgrades are a fun component.

 

Obviously, I enjoy wads that buff the pistol because killing stuff in Doom is fun, and most wads nowadays (certainly the ones that take the time to customize the pistol) are typically laser-focused on delivering fast combat. That said, I enjoy them because they're distinct. I don't load the dehacked weapons from Valiant or Rowdy Rudy when I sit down to play a new wad, nor do I load any zdoom weapon packs or anything of the sort, because I want that classic adventure. I want that borderline useless peashooter because I want that terrifying scramble for a Shotgun, and the glory of finding a Chaingun. 

Edited by RonnieJamesDiner

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13 minutes ago, RonnieJamesDiner said:

I think the point of the pistol gets lost in trying to apply the "combat role" philosophy of other weapons to it. I think vulnerability is the point, and in this way, it does in fact do something that none of the other weapons do - it forces you to explore the environment, rather than treating every problem as solvable with direct combat. In this way, I'd argue it adds more depth to the game than handing the player an additional combat option ever would (and pistol-start enthusiasts could probably attest to this).

 

Thanks for this explanation, this actually is a good point for why the pistol *should* suck. 

 

Now I think I’ve changed my mind, I wouldn’t increase the pistols firing rate or damage. However, I still have an issue with the first shot accuracy, so I would still remove it from the chaingun and make the pistol 100% accurate. I think another reason why I would make this change is that i dislike tap-firing, I’d much rather be able to hold down the button than repeatedly click.

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2 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

I regularly use the SSG as a sniping weapon and (pistol-starting) never run out of ammo.

This is probably the only time I heard somebody uses the SSG as sniping gun... You mad man. :P

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14 minutes ago, Herr Dethnout said:

This is probably the only time I heard somebody uses the SSG as sniping gun... You mad man. :P

 

Not a man, but being pragmatic has value. If you're playing a map with plenty of ammo, it's often unnecessary/slower (or dangerous) to switch to the SG/CG (which might involve a second switch back to a stronger weapon afterwards). If you're in the middle of hectic firefight, the switch might make you vulnerable. 

 

A lot of people when they learn stuff they start with rigid rules, which are needed to handle unfamiliar complexity. But when you get really familiar with an area you see how those rules are just guidelines and can easily and confidently spot places to deviate. And you realize there's a lot of possible guidelines you can use at any given time to inform your decisions, so anyone who insists on using one all the time is probably being overly rigid in their thinking.

 

More heterodoxy: 

 

Spoiler

I don't (really) think in terms of "target prioritization" when playing and believe it's not really a concept. 

 

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18 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

Not a man, but being pragmatic has value.

 

Definitely agree with this whole post, and I'll add that recognizing the ideal weapon usage and target priority (on paper) is only the first step of learning how to deal with hard fights. Awareness, and most of all good prediction skills (because if you don't react in time you're boned) are huge. As a new player it can be subtle when you watch a good player, but it's something that isn't as easy to quantify or discuss unlike the basic "rules". And those can still get you pretty far to be fair. 

 

Noticing the cues for when Papa Decino switches weapons is easy for people to pick up on and try to imitate. Noticing when he doesn't switch weapons or makes a blunder takes a bit more time but arguably much can be learned from it. 

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I find the pistol useful for hitting switches  and from a pistol start I have no need for it after grabbing shotguns or chaingun.

Edited by Stroggman

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4 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

It does: You always have the pistol and it's safer to use than melee. The best ability is availability as they say.

No sense using the pistol when you have the chaingun, though, which is the entire point of op.

 

It's an objective flaw that's not easy to fix. You can rationalize it with, "it incentivizes the player to look for a better weapon", but that should, in theory, also be possible to achieve without having this flaw.

 

One suggestions was to increase the firing rate of the pistol and make it always 100% accurate. Eviternity does this, but I don't remember using the pistol there either when I had the chaingun. If you tap the chaingun, it's also 100% accurate and still faster than the pistol. So this doesn't seem to solve the problem.

Another option is to buff the chaingun like in Valiant, which is a pretty big balance change. But I sometimes found myself using the pistol to shoot switches, at least. It's still pretty lame.

Nerfing the chaingun to make it inaccurate would only be annoying, tbh, unless you also buff the pistol to make it a more viable sniping tool.

Whatever you try to do to fix the pistol seems to create other problems.

Edited by treulosetomate

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Bugs are a well established part of the game, so the pistol uses a new attack codepointer, which is buggy, and all monsters hit by the pistol (who have the player as a target) retaliate immediately with an attack if they aren't pain-stunned by that pistol shot. Immediately makes it always useful. 

 

Problem solved, easy. 

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That's pretty much what Malevolence did, except it replaced the pistol with a perfectly accurate burst rifle.

 

Edited by Kwisior

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Having pistol be very accurate (and optionally slightly faster to reduce tedium), while making the chaingun inaccurate but also very very faster is a good way to differentiate them while also making sure both remain useful. Valiant does this to an extent (although it pistol isn't more accurate than vanilla).

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I personally like to tweak things by adding refire delay the chaingun. Chaingun having extra delay after firing does force player to commit more everytime when pushing the fire button and choosing between wasting bullets or taking the risk of waiting for the delay until being able to shoot again. It also makes chaingun tap firing worse experience and pistol more reasonable option because of this and also makes chaingun function little bit more like it's big brother, the plasmagun.

 

In it's unmodified form chaingun is bit too safe to use so thing like adding 10 tic delay to firing it again will add some risk without changing thing too radically. Also that 10 tic refire delay can be from fist, pistol, shotgun and SSG leaving them all with only 3 tic refire delays making them generally smoother to use and even giving the pistol slight boost by making the timing for accurate tapping shots easier.

 

And if someone feels that 10 tics is too much delay, I would suggest trying 4 tics, I like how it gives smoother end for the chaingun firing animation instead of just instantly stopping the rotation. I would suggest harvesting those refire tics from pistol and shotgun so it comes with slighty improved pistol plus shotgun and SSG having same amount of refire delay

 

Also the nmodified shotgun normally has 7 tic delay and SSG has 5 tic delay and that generally doesn't make much sense, so I would suggest making them even or atleast switching them around. There seems to many values in the original game that are just bit strange and should maybe be tweaked by a community made unofficial DeHackEd patch. I am pretty sure the game would benefit from some slight tweaking and rebalancing.

 

Here's a set of DeHackEd patches to test:

chainguntweak.zip

Edited by banjiepixel
Added DEH patches

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Ive never liked the original pistol in Doom. It doesnt ante up into doing anything in a real fight, but thats the point of having it around.

 

If youre stuck with the pistol, you have to find something better.

Edited by Dreamskull

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