What would you replace the Pistol with?

Reading John Romero's interview in The Guardian just got me thinking about the Pistol, more than I usually do. I really couldn't help but wince when he said...

Quote

For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless. That was a critical design characteristic. We’re going to add a new thing that can’t negate anything that came before. So how do you get the chaingun and not cancel out the pistol? It’s to do with how much ammo it eats, and how inaccurate it is over distance – the pistol eats less ammo and is extremely accurate at a distance.

The obvious point I'm going to bring up is the fact that tapping with the Chaingun is a thing; that in reality, I'm not sure anyone actually uses the Pistol for anything other than perhaps shooting switches (though again, a one-tap with the Chaingun works just fine) once their arsenal expands past it. This conversation has been bled to death, I'm sure.

I've seen a lot of WADS attempt to overcome the ineffectiveness of the Pistol by switching it up with dual Pistols, 3-round burst Pistols, or even fully-automatic Pistols. While these are always neat ideas, and serve gameplay really well in their respective WADS until something like the Shotgun or Chaingun actually becomes available, I've never seen it fail where their Pistol alternatives are still made obsolete. It just seems like weapon.slot 2 is invariably trapped in a sad state. There may be WADS out there that actually replace the Pistol with something that genuinely holds its value regardless, but unfortunately I've yet to discover those. (I'd happily take some links/suggestions).

So I was just curious, if you wanted to replace the vanilla Pistol with something, what would it be?

Pistol from Eviternity.

8 minutes ago, Loud Silence said:

Pistol from Eviternity.

Fair enough. Personally, I still don't remember ever touching the Pistol in Eviternity again once I had more weapons, despite enjoying the different take on it. This may have just been me, though.

I suppose a reasonable position here is that, maybe the arsenal in Doom is just too perfect the way it is -- Pistol and all -- and there's a certain charm to starting with something so meek.

Flamethrower. Just because, fun.

Desert Eagle or something similar, switchable between that and the normal pistol like the SSG and shotgun

Nothing, contrary to most, I LOVE using the pistol, especially at extremely long distance. Yes using the chaingun may be more efficient, but killing something with the pistol is always more satisfying to me. Sometimes I shoot something multiple times with the shot gun and switch to the pistol to finish it off. Saves shells

Replace it with itself. If there's something strong in that slot, a lot of design is not usable because pistol is meant to be weak and you need to navigate to find a weapon first.

26 minutes ago, GarrettChan said:

Replace it with itself. If there's something strong in that slot, a lot of design is not usable because pistol is meant to be weak and you need to navigate to find a weapon first.

Yeah, that did cross my mind. I think after all these years I'm just tired of seeing the dastardly thing. But, maybe that is its greater purpose, to give meaningful weight to finding better weapons.

Change the pistol firing speed to that of the elven wand from Heretic. It is slightly faster, if I remember correctly. The wand is much more satisfying to use and useful throughout the whole game.

Edit: On second thought, maybe the pistol would be too OP as the first weapon with the wand's fire rate. Adjust the damage too, to be slightly lower than the default one.  

Rifle, minor damage raise so that it's more powerful than chaingun but not overly so (1-8 instead of 1-5), giving it some application and also actually more accurate than the chaingun or render the chaingun tap redundant at least.

2 hours ago, Loud Silence said:

Pistol from Eviternity.

I would say something similar, but I would say "a faster pistol" instead.

Or just a pistol that can fire in the same speed as your click like what you get when you play Brutal Doom in "classic mode".

Make it so that the chaingun is never perfectly accurate, slightly increase the fire rate of the pistol, and most of the problems are solved.

Go full Quake and start with the Shotgun. 

The pistol could only really be fun if it was either powerful but with a longer reload time, or automatic. So basically acting the same as the single-barrel shotgun or chaingun respectively. It shouldnt even exist, really.

In quite a few releases I speed up the pistol and make it perfectly accurate. Tapping the chaingun is kind of annoying. Holding down the pistol and getting always-accurate shots is awesome and it’s worthy trade if it’s only slightly slower than the CG. My best take on it is in Rowdy Rudy’s Revenge.

I kind of wanted it to have infinite ammo but that would render melee pointless, at least until you got a berserk kit.

28 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I kind of wanted it to have infinite ammo but that would render melee pointless, at least until you got a berserk kit.

Infinite ammo also doesn't work on dehacked iirc, it causes the shotgun glitch after a few shots. Idk if there is a way around it.

Another good pistol to have would be something similar to the Duke Nukem 3D pistol. The damage is not that great, but the accuracy and fire rate are awesome. I can't play Duke without the pistol (I use it to make those pesky Sentry Drones explode to conserve the other weapons ammo, for example).

Imagine killing lost souls with that awesome pistol.

a zombieman rifle like duh what else

Shotgun worked for Quake. 

Turn the Pistol into a Magnum. Its firerate is the same, but its damage is 3 times stronger. Shotgun still feels like a decent pickup, Chaingun now fills its role of melting groups better.

When i think of it more, Mr. Bean's Fingerolver. It could shoot in Doom for real!

2 hours ago, Doomkid said:

In quite a few releases I speed up the pistol and make it perfectly accurate. Tapping the chaingun is kind of annoying. Holding down the pistol and getting always-accurate shots is awesome and it’s worthy trade if it’s only slightly slower than the CG. My best take on it is in Rowdy Rudy’s Revenge.

 

I kind of wanted it to have infinite ammo but that would render melee pointless, at least until you got a berserk kit.

Infinite ammo would've been really interesting. I was a huge fan of what you did with the pistol in Rowdy Rudy: Powertrip. Again, the CG sort of made it obsolete, but it was incredibly satisfying to use and really effective.

I loved what antares031 did with the dual pistols in Struggle, as well. Granted, if I remember correctly, the dual pistols basically replaced the CG, so in a sense it didn't really affect the value of weapon slot 2... as much as it was just creative, and really fun to use.

The idea of just buffing the pistols damage, rate of fire, accuracy, etc. (effectively turning it into more of a rifle) and reducing the accuracy of the CG is an interesting one. I also like the idea of just shoving a shotgun into the players hands and moving on from there, Quake style, I just wonder if opening maps might lose some of their magic. It's always such a wonderful moment to find that shotgun, especially if you had to kill a Shotgun Guy to get it. 

4 hours ago, Noiser said:

Infinite ammo also doesn't work on dehacked iirc, it causes the shotgun glitch after a few shots. Idk if there is a way around it.

IIRC you can do so by manually changing weapon ammo type to 5 in a text editor.

throwing ninja stars+ baseball bat (start off with 10 ninja stars and no bat, then find bat to have an unlimited ammo weapon that hits harder than the fists and find more ninja stars to have a simple ranged weapon that deals more damage than the bat)

the throwing stars could also be poisoned so that an enemy slowly loses health after being hit by one

Nothing, it serves its purpose as a starting weapon that, naturally, becomes increasingly obsolete once you find new weapons.

I feel that pistol should be pretty weak because it is given to the player for free. I like that pistol has two firing modes, holding and tapping but i think that there's too much delay between tapped shots. Right now I prefer my pistol to have 2 tics faster refire state, this doesn't change the gameplay too much but does make the pistol more responsive and also more fun to use.

Making pistol too fast will always be problematic as pistol and chaingun are so similar weapons to use, keeping firing rate pretty slow makes sure that pistol has it's own identity. Making pistol always accurate takes options away from the player and sometimes inaccuracy of shots can be useful.

Another thing that I have been thinking about is that pistol could be also just faster to select. By making pistol's raise and lower states faster, pistol becomes more useful for some situations. Weapon switching in Vanilla is pretty slow and making pistol faster to switch to than the other weapons, makes it serve better as a backup weapon.

"Increased firing rate + 100% accuracy" has been my favorite adjustment for the pistol in Doom. I implemented this method to a couple of wads, such as Struggle and Eviternity. Still, I found myself that I still rely on chaingun, when it comes to sniping enemies from the distance. Even if the pistol is always accurate, the same thing still applies to the chaingun, if you tap the fire button. And I've been living with the chaingun's burst fire tactic for a long time, so tapping the fire button didn't bother me that much. I do believe that other players still prefer to use chaingun in these wads, since I've rarely seen using a modified pistol to snipe the monster. So, I recently came up with a different idea; not just adjusting a pistol, but a chaingun as well.

From this video, pistol is replaced to a machinegun, allowing you to fire bullets faster than a pistol. Not to mention that the machinegun is always accurate to the aiming point, making it really useful as a long-range sniping weapon. The chaingun fires much faster than a machinegun, but now it has a cool-down delay, which is similar to a plasma rifle. So you can't use the burst fire tactic with the new chaingun, if you want to deal with the monster from afar. While the chaingun still has much higher DPS in close-range, I think this adjustment will make a pistol-replacement more useful in long-range.

@antares031 That's really cool! I love that minigun sprite animation. The rate of fire on that thing looks vicious, but I just love the balance here. The bullet spread on it definitely guarantees that the machinegun is the go-to weapon for picking things off long range, and the minigun looks absolutely crucial (and probably super satisfying) in tight spaces with massive hordes of monsters. 

Doomkid had a very similar arrangement going on with his weapons in Rowdy Rudy. Great minds think alike!

I completely understand the sentiment that the current pistol does serve its purpose well, and offers that early game tension and payoff as you transition from it to better weaponry. And, to be frank, it's not as though the Doom arsenal is lacking per se -- I just love the idea that, perhaps somehow, there could be a best of both worlds. A "weapon slot 2" gun that isn't made instantly irrelevant by a CG, but still manages to keep that vanilla early-game sensibility. I'm super excited to try that weapon duo out Antares, I'm curious how it feels when rounded out with the full arsenal. 

I would just up the damage from the min/max of 5 and 15 to 10 and 20. Possibly replace the weapon sprite with a Smith and Wesson .357 magnum. That keeps the shotguns still useful, the revolver wouldn't outclass them in damage. Keep the chaingun damage the same, but it's still useful for quick sniping as well as up close automatic fire. But if you're running low on shells, the pistol would be a good fallback. I mean, it doesn't make sense that a 9mm handgun and a .308 minigun use the same ammunition now, so I don't see why using .357 for the handgun makes a difference. 

Or, replace it with a semi-auto rifle like an FAL, with the same damage as the chaingun, increase both of their damage to 10-20, and add immediate spread to the chaingun. So the rifle would be accurate on every click and have spread if you hold the button down like the pistol does now, but even the tap on the chaingun would have spread to it like it does after the first two shots.

But yeah, Romero was wrong when he said all the weapons are useful to the end. The pistol just sucks once you get the chaingun. The only time I use it after getting better weapons is if I've shot an enemy with the shotgun and it's not dead. Like shooting an imp or chaingunner once, or a pinky twice, and it hasn't gone down. Then a single pistol shot should take them down. And that's only if I'm playing a map that's sparse on ammo and I can't afford the two shots the chaingun has.

Nothing. I'd just make it fire faster. And give it a better firing sound.