Plasma gun's purpose when having a BFG

[Griffonki]

Hi, I just wanted to quickly ask, when and why should I ever really use plasma when I have a BFG? From my experience most encounters can be solved with shells and rockets, and when I want to use plasma it's only on those big hordes or  Archies/Spiders/Cybers, but walking up to them and having all 40 BFG tracers land seemingly does WAY WAY WAY more than Plasma could do in 40 cells, no? It feels like a waste but maybe I am wrong, I really like the plasma gun but I don't use it much because I am too scared to be inefficient with my damage as again, from what I've seen BFG does more in 40 cells than what Plasma could do in 100, I hope I am wrong though, thanks!

[banjiepixel]

I use mainly use plasmagun because it neatly functions pretty similar as chaingun but is more powerful. And I feel like the situation must be extremely escalated before using overpowered weapon like BFG becomes actually justified. I also feel like I have always had all the cells I need and I don't see much reason to worry about the missed damage output from not using BFG.

[Lucius Wooding]

Stunlocking. Spamming in all directions rapidly. Very long range combat. Having 39 cells or fewer. And if you prefer blue to green.

[ViolentBeetle]

It's more ammo-efficient if you can't afford to maintain line of sight on the target (BFG's big ball is only as damaging as 20 plasma shots, while consuming 40 cells) but that doesn't happen often.

[isme]

I always asked myself the opposite question! The plasma gun is easy to understand because you can see where it goes and it's fast. The BFG's most powerful attacks are invisible and I didn't really understand it until I saw Decino's explainer video.

[EraserheadBaby]

It's great for clearing out lost souls quickly.  The BFG is also, but i think in this situation, the plasma gun is more economical.

[Griffonki]

What about the ammo efficienty problem? Like Beetle said, it's only efficient if you can't afford to maintain line of sight, which you usually can

[Doomy__Doom]

Imo plasma's highest value comes when you're playing a map for the first time trying to do your best to survive as much as possible, assuming it's not the kind of wad where "Yay, they give me BFG!" is routinely replaced by "Uh-oh, they give me BFG". It's a good weapon to have out when you expect nastyness of nondescript but deadly variety, as it can effectively take heat off of you in a wide range of situations, including quickly developing ones (i.e. nasty traps). You can quckly focus down a specific mid-tier enemy, spray down a path through fodder, decently stunlock critical threats like an in-your-face-arch-vile-with-far-away-cover... the list goes on.

 

BFG may still end up a better* choice in many situations, but that's in the moment judgement you'll have to make. The "default weapon to have out" is always dependant on the context of a given wad's combat design (and other things) and the more you see, the more informed "best guess" decision you'll make.

 

* "better" meaning various things contextually, such as "more economic", "faster" or "higher chance of survival".

[Ragu]

The BFG is tricky to use in the heat of the moment; beyond the time it takes to switch weapons, the delay before firing and oddball mechanics make it more difficult to maximize its effectiveness in situations where it's not just "there are a million guys everywhere". It's a weapon you really need to get good at. The Plasma, meanwhile, is basically just point and kill, so despite being less efficient, the ease of use makes it a great weapon to enter unknown situations with.

[Herr Dethnout]

The Plasma is way more efficient than BFG in a long term, mostly because is faster and uses less ammo.

 

One big problem of te BFG is how tricky is to use, even if you know how it works, id you got crowded is probably to hard to hit all enemies and survive (cuz that firing delay is so goddamn long)

[Csucskos]

Plasma is the best weapon when teleporting into the unknown. With the BFG you may fire and miss and then you get shredded, but with plasma you can stunlock and quickly reengage targets.

[BGreener]

It will have it's uses, but it's a much more different case than the threads we've had lately where we've compared shotguns. There's this post by @Nine Inch Heels in a similar/sillier thread years ago:

 

Quote

BFG releases 40 tracers dealing 49-87 damage each, meaning you get 68 avg damage per cell spent (not counting the projectile)

 

Plasma gun deals 5-40 damage per cell spent.

 

BFG is vastly superior in every respect, unless you waste 40 cells on a single imp or so.

 

 

[Gaia74]

BFG has much more damage (max damage of 3559 meanwhile the max damage of 40 cells of plasma is 1600) and is much easier to land, BFG truly surpass the plasma by far but the only thing that is "better" plasma is precision, you can use it at large distances rather than the spread of tracers of the BFG

[Astar]

Imagine a situation: in front of you is a group of low-tier enemies who have little hp. A shot at them with a BFG will consume more ammo than a plasmagun.

Plasma is needed just for situations like this

[Ash4ash]

a plasma gun is good for killing a bunch of enemies in a circle

so you keep turning around while firing.

The Big Fucking Gun, on the other hand, only fires in a cone

[banjiepixel]

Weapon balance is more than just damage per second or damage per a unit of ammo. BFG's 30 tic startup delay makes the big plasma ball hard to aim and you need be aware where to look and when to use the tracers well. Not to mention just gambling with 40 cells every time you use it. BFG might be better on paper but in reality it takes extra effort to use that you simply don't need with plasmagun.

 

Plasmagun is simple to use, you only need to worry about balancing wasteful continuous firing and leaving youself unable to shoot for duration of 20 tics while the weapon is in cool down state. Actual framedata gives plasmagun alot of advantage as it fires instantly vs BFG having a delay that is almost a full second. Plasmagun also has faster recovery time and in general you need to commit much less with it and that makes it much more versatile weapon than BFG.

Edited August 25, 2023 by banjiepixel

[Maribo]

1 hour ago, Herr Dethnout said:

The Plasma is way more efficient than BFG in a long term, mostly because is faster and uses less ammo.

Painfully wrong, even a bad BFG shot that misses half of its tracers will vastly outweigh plasma in efficiency damage-wise.

 

There are cases where plasma is slightly more preferable to the BFG, but they're very rare to come by... it's basically the same situation as the shotgun vs SSG, where you might stumble across a reason to use it if you stack a bunch of low tier hitscanner monsters in a really thin hallway, but as for regular use... BFG will win out in a good 99% of cases. The raw damage output and the way it can serve both as extreme burst or a crowd-killer makes it extremely potent in the hands of anyone who understands how it works. Learn to hit your tracers.

[Daerik]

41 minutes ago, banjiepixel said:

Weapon balance is more than just damage per second or damage per a unit of ammo. BFG's 30 tic startup delay makes the big plasma ball hard to aim and you need be aware where to look and when to use the tracers well. Not to mention just gambling with 40 cells every time you use it. BFG might be better on paper but in reality it takes extra effort to use that you simply don't need with plasmagun.

 

Plasmagun is simple to use, you only need to worry about balancing wasteful continuous firing and leaving youself unable to shoot for duration of 20 tics while the weapon is in cool down state. Actual framedata gives plasmagun alot of advantage as it fires instantly vs BFG having a delay that is almost a full second. Plasmagun also has faster recovery time and in general you need to commit much less with it and that makes it much more versatile weapon than BFG.

 

This isn't a fighting game, your nonsense about frame data and recovery time is meaningless because you're not locked out of moving while you're shooting like you would be in a fighting game. BFG deals more than double the damage of the plasma gun for the same amount of ammo spent.

[Snaxalotl]

I like shooting one plasma ball at a time to conserve ammo and watch the caco die slower

[DynamiteKaitorn]

Cause BFG-ing an Awachnotwon isn't as epic as having a plasma dual to the death.

Plus, you can't fire the BFG if you have less than 40 shots. :l

[Astar]

37 minutes ago, Snaxalotl said:

I like shooting one plasma ball at a time to conserve ammo and watch the caco die slower

Daaaamn you are psycho!

[Electro Rage]

It's for you to quick switch to when you run out of BFG ammo but still have 20 cells.

[banjiepixel]

Just now, Daerik said:

 

This isn't a fighting game, your nonsense about frame data and recovery time is meaningless because you're not locked out of moving while you're shooting like you would be in a fighting game. BFG deals more than double the damage of the plasma gun for the same amount of ammo spent.

 

Framedata and recovery time/cooldown still matters even if you can move while shooting because there are limitations to your movement. You are facing only one opponent in fighting game and have deal with attacks from just one general direction while in Doom you are facing multiple opponents at the same time and will have to deal with being attacked from any direction. You combine the framedata and movement to play more skillfully instead of using movement to make framedata not to mean anything.

 

Being forced to spend 40 cells is rather big cost for the double damage, even if you have the skill and the luck to make it happen. Much more finer control over the cell use at cost of only half of the damage is a decent trade off. Plasmagun is alot safer and far more precise weapon than BFG.

 

Doom plays actually alot like a fighting game, basically as much as FPS game can play like a fighting game.

[Daerik]

8 minutes ago, banjiepixel said:

 

Framedata and recovery time/cooldown still matters even if you can move while shooting because there are limitations to your movement. You are facing only one opponent in fighting game and have deal with attacks from just one general direction while in Doom you are facing multiple opponents at the same time and will have to deal with being attacked from any direction. You combine the framedata and movement to play more skillfully instead of using movement to make framedata not to mean anything.

 

Being forced to spend 40 cells is rather big cost for the double damage, even if you have the skill and the luck to make it happen. Much more finer control over the cell use at cost of only half of the damage is a decent trade off. Plasmagun is alot safer and far more precise weapon than BFG.

 

Doom plays actually alot like a fighting game, basically as much as FPS game can play like a fighting game.

 

Sorry, more accurately, an average bfg shot is 3120~ damage for 40 cells, plasma is 900~ damage for the same amount of ammo. So, about 3.5x the damage. It gets even worse when you look at their average dps, 2730~ and 262.5~ respectively, which is an actually relevant metric.

 

You could shoot the plasma for 10 seconds and still not do as much damage as a single bfg shot, which definitely doesn't take 10 seconds. But sure, lets pretend that how long it takes to "recover" from shooting one shot is ever the determining factor in what weapon you want to use.

[General Roasterock]

I don't have a clue how I'm supposed to understand the position of the Plasmagun being any more ammo efficient when that phrase is just said in a vaccuum without describing any kind of real fight scenario where that would apply. It's almost like it's just being said to be contradictory. 

 

I would recommend that people make sure that they aren't just factually wrong about quantitative information before deciding that the Plasmagun has any kind of superiority in output over the BFG. 

 

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Plasma_gun

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/BFG9000

 

Here are some sampled distributions on raw output of these weapons. Go ahead and confirm whatever position you have on plasma from the horse's mouth. 

[Lucius Wooding]

(I can't believe this thread is over 20 posts long and no one's mentioned that) the plasma will take around 4 seconds to shoot 40 cells, while the BFG is roughly 1 shot per second. Meaning that aside from the cell costs, the projectile alone will deal around double the average damage over that time frame. The 40 tracers are each much stronger than plasma bolts by about 3x average damage, are individually auto aimed, and tend to open up space a lot faster than monsters can fill it, which is very useful. The tracers can also strike many foes at once unlike the plasma, though both have their own kind of travel time. In terms of overall average DPS, assuming nearly all attacks land in the case of both guns, the BFG is around 10x the DPS of the plasma. 

 

Firing 40 cells in a crowded room isn't always ideal, the BFG could do more damage and get everything dead within a second rather than taking about 4 seconds to fire 40 plasma balls. It's sometimes worse to tread water like that even if you're not taking much damage, such as when archviles or pain elementals are putting pressure on you, or monsters are closing in from behind.

 

In low health scenarios sometimes the more responsive plasma is preferable as you move through areas, but the BFG ends big fights before stuff can damage you. There are very few fights in the IWADs that remotely test the BFG's potential, so most of them can be handled by other guns. But in scenarios where the DPS king is needed, nothing else will suffice. Try getting through the first room of Nuts 3 with the plasma.

 

BFG can also uniquely one shot archviles, and it can do this without the effect of tracers. It can reliably 2 shot cyberdemons if used well, and can one shot spiderdemons although the plasma could carry a bit less risk if you have lots of cells. It's not that the plasma doesn't perform well, personally I like keeping the BFG out of many maps to keep more parity between the weapons and not force massive fights to scare the player. But in practice if I pick up cells in a map I try to save as many as possible for BFG. Maps that route cell usage where you have to be very careful with where you employ each shot are interesting for me as well, since it forces you to work harder to win fights with your other weapons.

[baja blast rd.]

I'm shocked no one has said having a concert. The plasma rifle is not only much louder than the BFG9000 but it also uses far fewer cells, which means that over the length of a performance it saves a lot of ammo. 

 

 

[SoBad]

30 minutes ago, banjiepixel said:

 

Framedata and recovery time/cooldown still matters even if you can move while shooting because there are limitations to your movement. You are facing only one opponent in fighting game and have deal with attacks from just one general direction while in Doom you are facing multiple opponents at the same time and will have to deal with being attacked from any direction. You combine the framedata and movement to play more skillfully instead of using movement to make framedata not to mean anything.

 

Being forced to spend 40 cells is rather big cost for the double damage, even if you have the skill and the luck to make it happen. Much more finer control over the cell use at cost of only half of the damage is a decent trade off. Plasmagun is alot safer and far more precise weapon than BFG.

 

Doom plays actually alot like a fighting game, basically as much as FPS game can play like a fighting game.

If your concern is multiple monsters attacking you, then the logical counterplay is to delete an enormous amount of them right now with one bfg shot instead of continuing to have to worry about dodging the majority of them while you kill them one at a time with plasma. Death is better crowd control than pain chance.

 

You're making an analytical error wherein you're finding ways to categorize different weapons without putting in the experimentational effort necessary to discern if those categories are meaningful. Waxing on about the flexibility of the plasma rifle is confusing and nonsensical. It sounds like you haven't really played much Doom. If you're mostly only familiar with the iwads, then you've only experienced extremely easy gameplay scenarios that just won't ever punish you for poor play/planning. You can play terribly to great success and never have the opportunity to find out what you're doing wrong. Same goes for save/rewind abuse.

 

Don't get me wrong, you can play whatever and however is most fun for you! No rules. But if you want to get analytical about these things, you should be testing your ideas fairly. That means more challenging gameplay and consistent, prolonged success. 

 

Wildly talented players are trying to explain to you why you're thinking the wrong way about these things. It's okay to take their word for it. Or go play some pwads that will actually test your Doom knowhow and execution and watch your opinions turn on half a dime.

 

Some very silly stuff in this thread and the shotgun one.  :/

[Lila Feuer]

55 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

I'm shocked no one has said having a concert.

This is unironically music to my ears.

Edited August 26, 2023 by Lila Feuer

[Shepardus]

1 hour ago, Daerik said:

 

Sorry, more accurately, an average bfg shot is 3120~ damage for 40 cells, plasma is 900~ damage for the same amount of ammo. So, about 3.5x the damage. It gets even worse when you look at their average dps, 2730~ and 262.5~ respectively, which is an actually relevant metric.

 

You could shoot the plasma for 10 seconds and still not do as much damage as a single bfg shot, which definitely doesn't take 10 seconds. But sure, lets pretend that how long it takes to "recover" from shooting one shot is ever the determining factor in what weapon you want to use. 

And that's assuming you're hitting all your plasma shots, too. Most of time when I use plasma I miss like half my shots because the target moved or died before the shots reached it.