Looking for input: Boosting less used weapons into more relevance

[ViolentBeetle]

I'm planning at some point to organize a heavily modded community project. Beside enemies, I'm considering altering some weaponry.

So far my ideas are:

• Chainsaw -> Axe. 50% more frames in a swing than fist, about twice the damage, affected by berserk
• Pistol -> Rifle. Same fire rate, no spread, 6-36 damage (For reference, all player's hitscan does 5-15 damage otherwise per tracer)
• Shotgun -> Assault shotgun. Same output, but only does pumping animation once per X shots, or when stopped firing
• Chaingun -> Heavy Machinegun. 50% more frames in a shot, but same 6-36 damage
• Plasma gun -> Plasma repeater. Same damage and fire rate, but fires 2 projectiles, one fires at a target and the other having offset that changes every shot, creating a sort of spiral. After it does a full circle, it adds another project into the loop until there's 4 or even 5 in total. Perhaps adding a shotgun-like blast when stopping firing for good measure?

I'm looking for some insights regarding numbers and general worth of this ideas.

[Obsidian Plague]

14 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

Plasma gun -> Plasma repeater. Same damage and fire rate, but fires 2 projectiles, one fires at a target and the other having offset that changes every shot, creating a sort of spiral.

If both projectiles do the same amount of damage as the vanilla plasma rifle, i'd probably consider nerfing the damage on that or make enemies have more health

[Doomy__Doom]

17 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

Chainsaw -> Axe. 50% more frames in a swing than fist, about twice the damage, affected by berserk 

A single melee hit is helpful. Most of the time I avoid 'saw due to the awkward wiggling while "glued" to the enemy and having to stay in one place. A slight range extension could also help encourage usage.

 

17 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

Pistol -> Rifle. Same fire rate, no spread, 6-36 damage (For reference, all player's hitscan does 5-15 damage otherwise per tracer) 

17 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

Chaingun -> Heavy Machinegun. 50% more frames in a shot, but same 6-36 damage

In this pair, I'd consider changing the pistol to have tighter damage spread with extra base. Something like 10+5d3 (15-25) vs chaingun's 6d6 (6-36). Also may be worth making specifically this weapon a very fast raise/lower, assuming you're not looking to add fast switching as baseline, so it doesn't feel like you're wasting a "too much to be worth" amount of time when switching.

 

17 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

Shotgun -> Assault shotgun. Same output, but only does pumping animation once per X shots, or when stopped firing

If my experience with Ray Mohawk 2's pistol replacement, which basically is exactly an auto shotgun, is anything to go by - this will be a stunlock powerhouse. Unless it's paired with a reduction on shell totals and/or control over ammo type availability on mappers' end, I suspect this will obsolete your pistol as-is entirely, and probably be preferred over CG for exploration. That is assuming vanilla shotgun codepointer, of course there's always the option of tweaking spread/damage/pellet count.

 

17 hours ago, ViolentBeetle said:

Plasma gun -> Plasma repeater. Same damage and fire rate, but fires 2 projectiles, one fires at a target and the other having offset that changes every shot, creating a sort of spiral. After it does a full circle, it adds another project into the loop until there's 4 or even 5 in total. Perhaps adding a shotgun-like blast when stopping firing for good measure?

That sounds like a lot of visual clutter, I'd suggest looking into changes to projectile look and feel in that case. Antaresian Reliquary's is probably my favorite plasma in terms of visual clarity.

[Xaser]

For the rifle/machinegun, the damage variance seems a bit high -- I'd just straight up double the numbers from vanilla (10-30). Fire rate seems good otherwise though. If you want to keep the rifle as the designated sniper weapon, you can remove the "always accurate on first shot" behavior from the machinegun in MBF21 (which I would highly highly recommend for this sort of thing unless you're targeting gzdoom or EE).

 

Alternatively: make them literally fire two vanilla-strength bullets at once. You may want to do this anyway for the machinegun since reducing the rate of fire will reduce its stunlock capability unless it secretly fires more pellets. This sorta depends on what the plasma replacement is, since you'll probably want a reliable stunlocker in the arsenal somewhere. Try both, see what works best.

 

Hell yes to the Axe -- I basically did exactly that in Heartland and liked it so much I ported it 1:1 to Vesper :P -- feel free to yoink the code+animations from either (just credit neoworm for the sprites). Though do be sure to let mappers know that berserk is extremely potent so they don't accidentally break their map. :P

 

The shotgun sounds OP for its slot -- it'll duplicate (or obsolete) the heavy machinegun's role. If you want a really basic quick-fix for the shotgun, try making it fire 10 pellets per shot, but keep the rate of fire. That will bring the power more in line with the rifle/machinegun and actually elevate the weapon to the "better than SSG at a distance) role that everyone really wants it to be. ;)

 

I'll need to think a bit about the PG. The tricky part with plasma is that by itself it's a fine weapon that slots nicely into the arsenal -- it's only when you get the BFG that troubles start to show, and you can sorta control that in maps (especially if you use UMAPINFO to define episodes or employ death exits, so the player can't carry a BFG everywhere). A buffed chaingun replacement starts to encroach on the PG's territory a bit though so there's an opportunity to do something interesting/esoteric with the plasma slot (e.g. the Heartland flamethrower). The spin-up idea is interesting for sure -- worth a try perhaps?

 

Walls of text aside, hell yeah more mapsets with weapon mods. :D -- that's the good shit.

[Stabbey]

I liked how Supercharge made the pistol useful by removing damage spread and giving it perfect accuracy. But Supercharge also had a machinegun and a rapid-fire chaingun which chewed through ammo super-fast.

[ViolentBeetle]

1 hour ago, Xaser said:

it's only when you get the BFG that troubles start to show, and you can sorta control that in maps

I actually was experimenting with turning BFG into how it worked in Quake II (Projectile that shoots more projectiles at everyone) but felt it was too permissive for dunking into cover. This was supposed to be a nerf, but I also suspected people love BFG too much to like it.

I might get back to this idea instead.

 

Yeah, I guess automatic shotgun is a bit extreme.

[SMG_Man]

Here are some thoughts I've had about weapons in the past

 

Fist - After re-playing some Metroid games, the idea of adding more "permanent" upgrades to Doom wouldn't leave me alone, and I figured a sort of cumulative Berserk effect could be interesting. Each berserk pack picked up throughout an episode would slightly increase the damage the fist deals, and once a certain threshold is crossed the fist's DPS would solidly outpace the Chainsaw's (though the Chainsaw could still have some utility in stunlocking certain enemies for example). I don't like the idea of taking the Chainsaw away from the player, since it offers an interesting dimension for a melee weapon that an axe/wrench/etc. kind of "slower but stronger" melee weapon doesn't.

 

Pistol - doubling the damage and increasing its accuracy is probably fine enough, though I did try going further in a mod I was working on and made it where firing the pistol click-by-click gave it a much higher rate of fire than simply holding down the mouse button. Don't really have enough data/feedback whether this was a good change or not, but it's an idea.
 

Shotgun - This one's difficult to me. The idea I've settled on liking the most is rather boring: simply increase the base shotgun's pellet count from 7 to 9, narrowing the ammo efficiency gap a bit, and maybe make it slightly more accurate/the SSG slightly less accurate.

 

Chaingun and Machinegun split - I like how Quake II's chaingun functions: a slight windup, then just fucking BULLETS raining everywhere chewing through your ammo like no tomorrow. Then have the Machinegun function as Doom's original Chaingun does, with maybe a 5 tic delay between shots instead of 4 tics.

 

Plasma Gun - I actually never really thought about this one too much until I saw a recent thread regarding the disparity in damage-to-ammo the Plasma Gun faces compared to the BFG, and I still don't have a good answer. Again, the boring option screams at me - maybe add in another cell-using weapon to complement the Plasma Gun (a Rail gun, or a pseudo flamethrower, or something) and have the BFG9000 use a new type of ammunition and then add in the Unmaker and Quake III Arena BFG10K and have them share that ammo type.

[Smoothandz]

On 8/28/2023 at 3:01 PM, ViolentBeetle said:

Plasma gun -> Plasma repeater. Same damage and fire rate, but fires 2 projectiles, one fires at a target and the other having offset that changes every shot, creating a sort of spiral. After it does a full circle, it adds another project into the loop until there's 4 or even 5 in total. Perhaps adding a shotgun-like blast when stopping firing for good measure?

 

I've had this idea for a plasma based weapon bangin around in my head for a while. Well, at least for Doom. If you ever played Dusk, the crossbow from that game. The one great thing about the crossbow is that it had the ability to shoot through multiple enemies. I know this doesn't sound like a huge upgrade, but imagine a tight hallway with 4-5 pinkies. Normally, it would take 4-6 rounds of plasma to take down the first one, 4-6 for the second one, etc. A normal plasma gun would take 16-30 rounds to clear the hall. But with the "pass through" upgrade, at best only use 4-5 rounds and all pinkies die. 

 

And just think how powerful something like that would be in a slaughter map setting. You could spray an entire floor and just about hit/kill every monster on the ground. 

 

Last, this would also help with the plasma gun vs BFG ammo to damage problem. Simple yet effective.

Edited August 31, 2023 by Smoothandz
typo/grammar