How would you buff the pistol?

[Maes]

What if the Pistol was the BFG?

[wallabra]

57 minutes ago, Maes said:

What if the Pistol was the BFG?

 

Or what if it shot thermonuclear missiles?

[Valhen]

5 minutes ago, Gustavo6046 said:

 

Or what if it shot thermonuclear missiles?

Or what if you only shot the pistol once, and every monster in the map dies?

[wallabra]

2 minutes ago, Valhen said:

Or what if you only shot the pistol once, and every monster in the map dies?

 

Or if it had proper a radius of obliteration, but then it just spent an ammobox everytime you did it, instead of being one-time only?

 

 

[Valhen]

2 minutes ago, Gustavo6046 said:

 

Or if it had proper a radius of obliteration, but then it just spent an ammobox everytime you did it, instead of being one-time only?

 

 

That would be pretty cool. (Maybe I could even do a wad for that...)

[wallabra]

Yeah, yeah. It could be.

 

I mean, imagine the strategizing.

[Grazza]

I would give it horns and change its firing sound to "tatanka".

[smeghammer]

How would I buff the pistol? I'd use Turtle Wax and a decently aged and used (but clean) dish cloth. It works wonders on my bike, so it'd probably bring out the grain in the barrel really nicely. 

 

No - wait! that's not what you mean is it?...

 

I would not change it's characteristics at all as it would screw up the balance of the other weapons - I would however like the sound to be punchier and more aggressive sounding.

[JezChrist]

Change sound and up the damage, increase accuracy so it the same as chaingun, keep the button pressing aming issues, shoots 2 bullets,

 

so it is still a back hand weapon as intended, but now it has more punch and can act as useful in some situation when facing chaingunner by example, so it becomes this middle tier sniper.

 

But then it is kind of a shotgun, but without the spread though.

[Zulk RS]

Increase the damage and make it always aim where you're pointing. While you're at it, slightly buff the Chaingun's Rate of Fire to balance out with the pistol. This would essentially make it a very good for ammo conservation and sniping while still being something you don't want to use if you have things like the Chaingun and the Shotgun.

[HQDefault]

On 2/3/2021 at 12:52 PM, Stabbey said:

For a while I was tossing around the notion of making the pistol a lot stronger, more accurate, with slower firing... but then I realized that I'd effectively just be making another shotgun.

 

This was exactly how I rebalanced it in my wad but I really didn't get that vibe. (Albeit it was a little faster firing and a little weaker than the shotgun)

Combined that with making the chaingun fire faster but with worse ammo efficiency also so using the pistol was much more ammo efficient.

 

The result was a weapon that I found situationally useful and is good for long-ranged encounters. That, and I also made it deal very consistent damage so you always knew how much it would take to down an enemy.

 

 

If I was making a new game from scratch tho? I'd just make it shoot a bit faster and have a bit better accuracy, but also have it use its own ammo. So it would be like the wand in Heretic.

[Azuris]

Maybe dual wielding to have a higher Fire and Stun rate.

[Varis Alpha]

i would probably make the pistol have significantly increased damage output and perfect accuracy, at the cost of the rate of fire being slower, and it needing to reload after a couple of shots. make it a revolver more or less, and maybe give it infinite ammo to make it a sort of fallback weapon.

 

this would of course mean retooling the shotgun and chaingun some to accommodate this change: the chaingun could probably work similar to before, just with a higher ammo capacity and a faster fire rate while removing the perfect accuracy tap, and the shotgun firing faster as well, with it dealing slightly more damage to make taking down imps and chaingunners be more reliable. the other weapons would probably be fine without any significant changes.

 

so the pistol would be useful for long range but bad at close range, the shotgun useful for most general encounters but not the most effective at a specific task, and the chaingun for dealing with large groups of enemies at close range but being unreliable for long range. this would make those weapons have better, more interesting uses, while also solving the problem of the pistol being effectively worthless.

[TenenteZashu]

Slightly slower fire rate but deals more damage and after some shots it would make a Duke 3D auto reload

[wallabra]

Or it could say "wololo!" and turn your enemy a different colour. Not sure what that would do.

[Doom-X-Machina]

Black-powder flintlock.

[inkoalawetrust]

I would buff the pistol like this (I already did though, hence the video existing.).
 

 

[Arrowhead]

I'd buff it by making consecutive shots 100% accurate without it having to finish its animation first...

[wallabra]

Buff if with steroids! Pistol on berzerk! WHOOOOO

 

11 hours ago, Arrowhead12 said:

I'd buff it by making consecutive shots 100% accurate without it having to finish its animation first...

 

The pistol can't snipe like the chaingun can. This isn't Valiant!

 

[dew]

Go full Xaser and emulate the Dispersion Pistol from Unreal, complete with pickups that upgrade it into an increasingly powerful weapon.

[A Nobody]

On 2/3/2021 at 11:25 AM, xdarkmasterx said:

Replace it with the assault rifle, that works like the chaingun does now. Turn Chaingun into a real gatling gun with higher speed and less accuracy :)

Maybe make the pistol like Duke Nukem 3D's and the gatling being what you said. Maybe give the pistol its own ammo pool?

[Telemassacre]

On 2/3/2021 at 2:35 PM, Artman2004 said:

Be able to fire it as fast as you can pull the trigger. Think of the Half-Life 2 pistol.

I'm actually working on that as a mod. A nice balance is that if you hold the fire button, it fires at normal speed.

Also, sorry if i double post. This ddos is making me lag big-time.

[94's the best style]

Personally, if there were more weapons, I would have it be like this:

 

Pistol, good accuracy, medium fire rate, low damage. Uses pistol ammo.

SMG, very poor accuracy, very high fire rate, same damage and ammo as pistol. Appears mostly in later levels where fighting with pistol would take too long.

 

Machine Gun/ Assault Rifle, good accuracy on the first shot, loses some if you hold fire, fire rate between pistol and SMG, damage per bullet is better, uses rifle ammo. About as good as Doom 1 Chaingun

 

Chaingun, Poor accuracy, but better than SMG, very high fire rate, same damage per bullet as machine gun as they share ammo. Appears in Doom 2 after super shotty.

 

 

[wallabra]

Make it do like a pew pew

[Sotenga]

I'd say put the shotguns in slot 2, and put a scoped pistol or sniper rifle in slot 3, which consumes like five bullets per shot and shoots somewhat slow but does good damage and has perfect accuracy. I still think the one retrospective fault of Doom's arsenal is a good means of dealing with long-range enemies, so whatever replaces the pistol should fill that void.

[Jello]

I've just been messing around with Supercharge in Slade, adjusting value damage, so what I'll say is probably blasphemous. 

 

I've adjusted the pistol from a 115 grain 9MM round, to a 300 grain .50AE round. And reduced the magazine capacity to 5 (which isn't accurate, the DE should have 7 rounds, but for balancing I kept it at 5). So I switched it from maximum 15 damage, to 40 damage, based on the weight of the bullet (I'm not going to deal with muzzle velocity or foot pounds of energy in the damage calculation because this is simply something I'm having fun with trying, just straight across changing from 115 grain to 300 grain by multiplying the damage by 2.6, so going from 15, to 40.) This actually seems to work, it makes the pistol a workhorse, that can take down zombies and imps in two shots, but the slow fire and reload still hinder it against tougher enemies. It would probably be better to set a different ammo pool for it, but even as is, with the 200/400 ammo limit, I tend to run out.

 

And I've also changed the shotgun from firing pellets to firing slugs. I used the max 105 damage, but all in one shot. Which may seem OP, but you can't get scatter damage, so against a hoard of enemies you can't wear down multiple demons, and you have to make your shot count. We'll see, I'm still playing around with it, and it's the first time I've actually messed with editing weapon damage, but it's fun. It makes the game seem faster and more frantic.

 

Again, this is just me testing shit out to see what I think is fun. Buffing the pistol is hard, because it's an iconic starting weapon, and it's given to you because you feel underpowered with it. You need to find a better weapon. But, increasing it's power, adding a cool-down/reload to it, reducing firing rate, and possibly adding a different ammo pool for it, makes it a great starting weapon, but something that you can continue to use throughout the game.

 

I've made arguments for the pistol in the past, and I will defend it for it's original purpose; it's very useful if you need to save ammo, and for some reason a demon didn't die from two shotgun blasts. I don't want to waste another shell on it, and I don't want to waste two bullets from the chaingun if I don't have to, so I'll put a pistol round in it. Same with imps, one shotgun shell didn't take it down, I'll switch to the pistol and use one round.

 

But it's really fun having a useful pistol. And again, I'm toying with it, and I will never play a .wad using my jacked up configuration and complain about gameplay imbalance, but having a shotgun that fires slugs and a pistol that actually works is fun.

 

 

Edited February 18, 2021 by Jello

[Chezza]

I have an idea, but I don't actually like it that much.

 

Give the pistol its own exclusive ammunition and it performs the exact same as now. Ammo is picked up from Zombiemen and ammo boxes.

 

When you get the berserk pack, the pistol dual wields at a fast fire rate. Almost as effective as chaingun, but doesn't use same ammo, so decent alternative for low ammo situations.

[wallabra]

On 2/17/2021 at 11:53 AM, Sotenga said:

 I still think the one retrospective fault of Doom's arsenal is a good means of dealing with long-range enemies, so whatever replaces the pistol should fill that void.

 

The chaingun does that better than the other weapons.

 

Bullets in general are too low-damage - they take so long to kill a reasonable amount of enemies. Even the chaingun suffers from this, yet it eats ammo so quickly. Bullets in Doom are a tad underpowered.

 

Bullets are powerful, they're a lot of energy concentrated in a tiny area. The hole they poke might be small, but it is deep, and it is permeated with devastation. I suppose enemies with penetration-resistant armour (like the Cyberdemon) or penetration-resistant skin (like the bruiser brothers and their thicc sexy legs) should be a bit less vulnerable to bullet damage? On the other hand, the Cyberdemon is already blast resistant. That armour deflects kinetic energy well. I guess that's why we have energy weapons, heh.

 

So yes, one thing that probably could be done is increase the damage each bullet does, both for the pistol and the chaingun. We assume the same caliber, since both weapons draw from the same ammo pool, so we'll try to make the damage per round the same as well. Now, the Chaingun could use a bit of an increase in fire rate, akin to the Valiant super chaingun (although not quite that much), to make it more useful in more diverse scenarios. Instead of having the Chaingun being able to "snipe" on the first frame, transfer that to the pistol. It'll still be useful, given the extra damage bullets do in this scenario. And finally, I would recommend also including an extra weapon to share slot 4 (akin to how the Super Shotgun shares slot 3), which would be a rifle that uses the same caliber, but shoots a few (multiple) bullets in quick bursts and with little to no spread. It would have a fire rate a bit more similar to the pistol's than the chaingun's, but at the same time deal a bit more damage (1.5x per round maybe?), but we can justify that by saying it uses more energy when propelling to push the bullets through the longer barrel, so they are more precise and hit the target at higher speed.

[DoomedPerson]

A mix of the eviternity and doom zero pistol would be perfect

[Kokoro Hane]

I'd just change it's sound effect and psychologically it'll feel more power!

 

That and maybe make it where Doomguy can wield 2 of them.