Plasma gun's purpose when having a BFG

[GarrettChan]

It's pretty funny that someone likes to make crazy assertions about things they think they know a lot, but in reality, many people know more about the same topic but this person refuses to listen to others.

 

I honestly thought people overreact this this person when they made some comments about 180 key, but now I don't think anybody overreact to what they said since what they said is just... nonsense.

 

Also complaining that nobody does gameplay MODs is completely crazy. There are a few here and there, or some WADs come with their own balance to a few things. However, even with these, why many people still like to stick with the vanilla weapon set/enemies set? The reason is that, these don't really have an issue to begin with. Fixing hypothetical non-existed problem is a problem itself.

Edited August 26, 2023 by GarrettChan

[thiccyosh]

The only time I would use the Plasma is when I have to fight anything that doesn't have more than a 700 Hp, which is unsurprisingly, most of the time in a lot of maps. Plasma gets rid of fodder and mid-tier enemies fast. And the BFG is more for Barons, Archies, Cybers, Spiderdemons or very large groups of low to mid-tier foes, where you could save cells if you play your cards right and maybe get rid of a few extra demons if you're lucky.

Almost as if Doom's weaponry is heavily dependent on map layout, how much ammo you have and how many monsters you have to deal with. Almost as if it has been designed this way.

 

I know most has been said in this thread but I'm not reading that :P

Edited August 26, 2023 by thiccyosh
fixed a typo

[Shepardus]

23 minutes ago, banjiepixel said:

That only means that everything except pistol is balanced in the original games.

Balance doesn't exist in a vacuum, the weapons don't just exist relative to each other but also to the maps they are found (or not found) in. You yourself were suggesting as much when saying that only the vanilla game should be considered and not custom WADs.

 

24 minutes ago, banjiepixel said:

And in the end, situation feels to me alot like what happened with Doom Eternal. People being too stuck with this idea of Doom being just a basic FPS game when it could have the quality level of a great arcade game.

Many of my favorite arcade games (and games in general, really) thrive on imbalance, and are full of lopsidedness that armchair game designers are quick to declare as "objectively bad design," shunning what makes the game tick in pursuit of an ideal that they themselves do not understand. Feel free to pursue that balance patch you talk about, but I'll just say that balance itself is not a virtue.

[Dan87]

1 hour ago, banjiepixel said:

People like the fact that BFG makes plasmagun mostly useless?

 

I love that the BFG makes the plasma useless, because it does so by being the most interesting and nuanced weapon to use in any FPS game. It is the sole reason that an entire subgenre of maps (slaughter) exists in their current form. The BFG's power is a critical aspect of that enjoyment for me.

[Ravendesk]

5 hours ago, banjiepixel said:

Why exactly are we analyzing the balance of vanilla weapons by using modern levels as the standard= The weapons were balanced for the IWAD levels so changes in weapon meta caused by PWADs should be taken as its own separate thing. The weapons themselves need to be rebalanced too if we want stay close as possible to the original intended balance that exists when playing IWAD levels. If PWAD makes Plasmagun underpowered and lose its purpose, that is a flaw in the PWAD and it would be then great idea to fix that weapon balancing issue.

I'm sorry but no level of weapon rebalancing can fix iwad gameplay. It is fundentally inferior to combat design that people can craft today with almost 30 years of game knowledge existing.

 

And this is why you are so misunderstood in these discussions. People don't expect that you are talking purely about iwads and naturally assume that pwads are included in your statements. Because literally nobody cares about weapon balancing in iwads, original gameplay was improved million times already in pwads by creating interesting encounters that make each weapon shine (that does not mean that all weapons are equally useful, it just means that each weapon can be used creatively to make interesting fights).

 

It absolutely doesn't matter that SG becomes useless once you have SSG or that plasma usage becomes very limited once you have BFG. It doesn't matter because mappers made interesting gameplay that does not depend on these weapons still staying universally useful. Because each weapon being always useful is not a requirement for a good gameplay.

[banjiepixel]

Here is current version of my rebalance patch. Oh no! I have totally ruined Doom with my amateurish changes and have made the game literally unplayable. Doom should the play this way.

 

rebalanced-beta1.zip

[Maximum Matt]

Because it sounds awesome, it gibs zombies and it's bound to 6, the most Satanic number

[Yugiboy85]

It's a good panic weapon if you are pinned down. 

 

[D0M0]

7 hours ago, banjiepixel said:

It does seem to me that people include too little weapon switching in their playing style for the BFG cooldown to matter for them. But thing is, you are often not shooting primarily to deal damage. That's very common thing with Chaingun and also as it's bigger brother Plasmagun has usually very similar role in combat. They're great crowd control weapons and using that to open opportunities to use SSG or Rocket Launcher.

 

I’m sorry to be backhanded (i’m also not sorry), but i really doubt you know how the bfg works. 

 

I’ll give you a scenario:

You encounter 40 imps and you want to kill them.

 

Lets say damage rolls do not matter in this example, and each plasma bolt does around 40 damage (the maximum damage it can do). It also fires once around every 3 tics so we can assume it’s roughly 12 shots per second at most. 40 * 12 is 480 damage. Considering imps have 60 Hitpoints, you’re killing around 8 imps per second with the plasma in hand. That’s 5 seconds to clear the crowd.

 

Now, same rule applies. If we take the BFG, one shot would kill ALL 40 IMPS.

 

So basically the BFG is 5 times more powerful than the plasma, and most likely always will be. The decision between the two shouldn’t take too much thinking and that’s what I think makes it enjoyable. Once you have that sort of power in the game, you use it and don’t waste the potential. 

 

Also for the record, I get what you mean by damage output not being the main focus, but my point isn’t damage output. It’s more the fact the BFG can clear a horde of enemies much faster and much more efficiently than the plasma gun. It’s unfortunately a fact and not just an opinion. 

[riktoi]

1 hour ago, banjiepixel said:

Here is current version of my rebalance patch. Oh no! I have totally ruined Doom with my amateurish changes and have made the game literally unplayable. Doom should the play this way.

 

rebalanced-beta1.zip

Did you seriously just make the BFG take longer to shoot?

[thelamp]

1 hour ago, banjiepixel said:

Here is current version of my rebalance patch. Oh no! I have totally ruined Doom with my amateurish changes and have made the game literally unplayable. Doom should the play this way.

 

rebalanced-beta1.zip

Spoiler

 

I'm honestly not certain what you did to change anything here; both weapons feel more or less the same to me at a glance. It always annoyed me how much less ammo efficient the plasma is compared to the BFG which is why in my own wad I bumped up the plasma's damage a little bit to get them closer to even. Might be an easier solution than tweaking frame duration

[banjiepixel]

7 minutes ago, riktoi said:

Did you seriously just make the BFG take longer to shoot?

 

That's the current change, might increase ammo use later or make the big plasma ball deal less damage so you have rely more on the tracers, BFG is more complex weapon to rebalance than SSG and I am generally less familiar power differences between the stronger weapons in the game.

 

1 minute ago, thelamp said:

I'm honestly not certain what you did to change anything here; both weapons feel more or less the same to me at a glance. It always annoyed me how much less ammo efficient the plasma is compared to the BFG which is why in my own wad I bumped up the plasma's damage a little bit to get them closer to even. Might be an easier solution than tweaking frame duration

 

Might increase plasma damage but i do generally prefer to only alter the weapons that seem to be too overpowered or too underpowered. I didn't really expect the current change to BFG be too minor, I was worried about it being actually too big of a change. Alot of more can be done just altering BFG. There is a slight issue with bumping up plasma in that my personal ocd makes me want to increase the damage of arachnotron plasma to match as they are technically the same weapon. There is no enemy that uses bfg so it is much cleaner to alter while keeping the consistency that exists in vanilla.

[Astar]

Discussion on this topic made us draw this little joke picture :)

Plasma vs. BFG:

Edited August 26, 2023 by Astar

[VoanHead]

Lmaooo that’s funny.

 

Plasma is great as a 2nd, great alternative if you don’t have the BFG yet and put those cells to good use for now. But once I get the BFG I just forget about the plasmagun in favor for the BFG’s crowd control in case some more annoying enemies need to be taken out fast.

[printz]

I use the plasma rifle in unknown territory because it's the best defense in case of ambush. Mappers are ruthless with releasing chaingunners and other dangerous enemies right in your face. With the BFG9000 it's too easy to waste 40 cells when firing in panic. As soon as the immediate threat goes away, I switch from the plasma rifle to a more suitable weapon. 

[Bauul]

3 minutes ago, printz said:

I use the plasma rifle in unknown territory because it's the best defense in case of ambush. Mappers are ruthless with releasing chaingunners and other dangerous enemies right in your face. With the BFG9000 it's too easy to waste 40 cells when firing in panic. As soon as the immediate threat goes away, I switch from the plasma rifle to a more suitable weapon. 

 

Honestly this is my take too. With the BFG I feel I need to be pretty confident that I'm going to make the best use of the tracers before I press fire (not least also because of the 1-second warmup time). 

 

The PR is great if don't know what's ahead and need to be ready to provide immediate damage immediately in front of you (and the stun lock can be beneficial too), such as stepping through a teleporter. 

 

For any combat encounter where you have a moment to get a good grasp on the enemies and the lay of the land, the BFG becomes the better option, assuming there are enough hit points in front of you to make it worthwhile.

[THT]

 

42 minutes ago, Astar said:

Discussion on this topic made us draw this little joke picture :)

Plasma vs. BFG:

Wow I've seen a lot of threads on here over the years, but I've never seen anyone anthropomorphize the actual weapons. Can you do the whole line-up?

[Astar]

2 minutes ago, THT said:

Can you do the whole line-up?

There's already one in Creative Works :)

[Midway64]

All of you guys aren't doing the real talk.

 

The LaserGun (Unmaker) deprecates the Plasma Rifle by a LOT!

I mean, the Unmaker is really just a hitscan Plasma Rifle, which can be upgraded with the Demon Keys.

Like, being able to shot 3 lasers at a time real fast? Damn it gets better than the BFG.

At one point its better to use than a Rocket Launcher when fighting Hell Nobles.

 

Y'all get my point?

[Stroggman]

BFG i treat as a SSG, like only for short distance combat

[SealSpace]

Other than the only weapon you have to use when you are short of 40 Plasma Cells for the BFG-9000, I think the Plasma Rifle's purpose in the presence of a BFG-9000 is ammo conservation and being able to stunlock certain enemies, one-on-one and hitting targets from further distances and ranges with more reliable speed and accuracy as opposed to big slow hulking BFG projectile and its relatively short-as-fuck hitscan tracers.

[banjiepixel]

Here is a fun little experiment. What if we replaced the regular damage made by the bfg big plasma ball with blast damage. This does lower the overall damage that BFG can make and makes plasmagun more viable in some situations. It also basically removes the cheap exploit of bfg faceblasting bosses to death from the game. And it is probably how things should had worked in the original game. Actually kinda makes BFG feel more powerful weapon too. And lower overall damage does matter very little as tracers were dominating the damage output so heavily anyway.

 

Here is the dehacked patch for testing purposes:

blastbfg.zip

Edited August 27, 2023 by banjiepixel

[galileo31dos01]

On 8/25/2023 at 5:03 PM, Griffonki said:

when and why should I ever really use plasma when I have a BFG?

 

- When you wanna blow out your speakers or eardrums

- When blue is your favorite color and green isn't

- When the BFG is from orange is true love which is a plasma gun with lag

- When you have 39 cells or less (non-serious response)

[Zulk RS]

I sometimes use the Plasma Rifle when I have a BFG for two main reasons:

 

1. If there is a Cybie or a Spider that I need to kill but for whatever reason, I don't feel safe going in close enough with the BFG to get a good shot off (Maybe there's like a big gap between me and the cyber and so trying to shoot a BFG would mean all but a few tracers would miss). In this situation, I use the Plasma Rifle to pick off the cybie or Spider from far away.

 

2. If I have played a map enough times to be able to beat it without a BFG, I use the Plasma Rifle because I just like the Plasma Rifle more (it's my favorite weapon) and I find that it's a shame it shares its ammo with the BFG.