Bullet weapon balance

[Xfing]

Do you think the two bullet-firing weapons have appropriate levels of power? I've noticed that many praised the rebalance of the pistol in Eviternity, which got me thinking, what would be the best setup for these weapons? The pistol has a rate of fire of 2,5 shots per second, which is pretty poor. But The Chaingun only has 3,5x that, at 8,75 shots per second, which isn't all that impressive either. Not to mess with existing balance, I think it'd be cool to explore some or all of the following options: 
- Allow pistols to be pickups in maps and droppable by zombiemen - upon first pickup your pistol gets replaced with akimbo pistols for doubled firing rate (5 shots per second). Your single pistol gets permanently replaced like the non-berserk fist does with the chainsaw
- Reskin the chaingun to the rifle model and rename it the Assault Rifle, put it on slot 4. Make it a static map pickup
- Re-add the chaingun (also in slot 4), but increase its firing rate to 12,5 rounds per second.

I know it's silly to discuss weapon balance in a game as old as Doom, but it's just hypothetical. And the one thing I'm wondering about - wouldn't a faster Chaingun encroach too much into Plasma Rifle territory and create functional overlap? The chaingun does feel rather slow for what it's meant to be - which is further exacerbated by the fact that Strife's assault rifle fires even faster than it, actually.

[BaileyTW]

The chaingun is a balanced weapon for what it is. Good for stunning things that don't have a low pain chance, comparable damage to the shotgun (or more, never been sure) and good for sniping.

 

I do however think the chaingun is entirely too weak to be a chaingun on top of just sound weak for one. Valiant's super chaingun fixes this and I don't feel like it encroaches on plasma's function too much since the plasma is still more powerful and the super chaingun burns through ammo extremely fast.

[Astronomical]

Pistol balance is something that is very interesting.  Rowdy Rudy had a burst file rifle that fired 2 accurate shots, the squeal had an assault rifle that was also 100% accurate, but every other weapon was buffed as well.  Many other wads make changes I really like to the pistol.  It's not really a silly question at all. 

[Gifty]

I would raise the ammo capacity for bullets. Power-wise I think it works, but I'm consistently running out of ammo for it in pretty much every levelset.

[idbeholdME]

I'd say it's fine. Pistol is a starter weapon and really shouldn't be used unless finishing off enemies or shooting switches when you want to save a bullet and not waste 2 or a shell for it.

 

Chaingun's power is the painlocking potential, not DPS. And it works great in that regard. Plasma does that job better, yes, but the ammo is usually much rarer. And then there is sniping. Being hitscan, you can snipe from around corners with minimal exposure and hit enemies even when only a pixel of their hitbox is showing, as opposed to the width of plasma projectiles.

 

The only thing I'd rebalance when it comes to weapons would be ammo pickups. Namely reduce box of shotgun shells to 15 from 20, and energy cell pack to 80 from 100. 

[baja blast rd.]

On the surface, the pistol is easily obsoleted, and the chaingun is underwhelming, but their actual gameplay roles are quite effective: 

 

- The chaingun is very useful at what it does: sniping, picking off spread-out low-HP monsters (especially hitscanners), and painstunning stronger monsters, all while generally being ammo efficient at that. It doesn't have a lot of DPS but it comes in handy in a set of scenarios where you don't need DPS. 

 

- The pistol.

 

As you make the chaingun more powerful, you start to make it less efficient and satisfying at its old specialist role, and make it more of a power weapon. But we already have power weapons around the magnitude of strength of a sped-up chaingun: the SSG (usually equal or below), and the PR and RL (above).

 

So to justify it, the question has to be: what makes this more fun and different enough at that? I think that question can actually be answered without great trouble, as existing mods with beefy chainguns show, but you can't simply slap it into any old thing without a plan. And all of that explains why beefing them up might be uncommon compared to how easy it is to beef them up. 

 

Also, imo, being oppressed can be just as fun as power-tripping; being quiet and small can be just as fun as being loud and big. So I appreciate that, in addition to the big quartet of SSG, RL, PR, BFG that all efficient DPS dealers in their own way, the stock arsenal has weapons that are clearly inadequate or awkward, even if those weapons can become afterthoughts. Part of the challenge in designing with them is making them feel fun and not-obsolete anyway.

 

Maybe someone should design a small mapset that gives you nothing but the chainsaw. Maybe this energy should be channeled more often. :>
 

 

[ViolentBeetle]

Pistol was a mistake, particularly when it somehow shares ammo pool with atomatic gun later. It's shocking in retrospect how long did it take FPS games to remove it from the roster.

I think chaingun should be a starter weapon. Pistol is just not fun to use, even if it has a niche.

[ICID]

40 minutes ago, rd. said:

being oppressed can be just as fun as power-tripping

 

This is absolutely the key. WADs and mods that make all the weapons more powerful are a lot of fun, but they lack the depth of Doom's original weapon set, where the value of each gun is highly specialized and often not immediately obvious.

[Pseudonaut]

The fun of many pistol-start runs is dependent on the almost total uselessness of the pistol itself. Rather than clearing out a safe area right away, you need to be evasive and perhaps clever to survive long enough to seize the means of destruction.

[msx2plus]

51 minutes ago, rd. said:

Also, imo, being oppressed can be just as fun as power-tripping; being quiet and small can be just as fun as being loud and big

+infinity to this. "balance" is not exciting in most design, unbalance is amazingly tantalizing. when there stops being heavy contrast, a great amount of texture is lost. there are aspects of doom's balance that i certainly don't agree with (*1,8 damage), but i don't think fixing things by offering a middle ground is always the best solution. it's more about zeroing in on extremes and using them to contrast one another. it is "balanced" but only through the existence of one another.

[DOEL]

check out @Doomkid's Bourgeois Guns, for me it's about as balanced as you can make the weapons with a vanilla compatible mod. chaingun and shotgun are so much more viable and the melee weapons are actually worth the risk. only thing to watch out for is cyberdemon rockets are faster so that can mess up your muscle movement

[Azure_Horror]

The main problem with bullet weapons is the bullets themselves. The usual doom map has too few bullet pickups. This tendency encourages the players to rely more on shells and to use the chiangun only when the situation really calls for it (typically, against lone Pain Eles and hitscanner crowds). The bullets behave like a premium ammo type, funnily enough!

 

Buffing bullet weapons is a fun idea, and it have been done succesfully (Example of such WADs: Struggle; Valiant; Roudy Rudy 2 and 1; Antaresian Reliquary). But done poorly, such change can damage the game balance instead of enhancing it. For example: even a moderately fast firing pistol can make a lone pinky demon harmless without -fast, because the pistol would slow it to crawl. For a WAD built around small-scale combat this can indeed be a problem.

 

On 9/2/2021 at 1:16 AM, Pseudonaut said:

The fun of many pistol-start runs is dependent on the almost total uselessness of the pistol itself. Rather than clearing out a safe area right away, you need to be evasive and perhaps clever to survive long enough to seize the means of destruction. 

 

This is true. But, on the other hand, you can reduce the starting ammo to 25 or less. Even with the Valiant-style chaingun the player would still need to be evasive. Fighting 5 lowly imps, for example, would present a noticable problem on such low bullet budget.

[Biodegradable]

The vanilla pistol is just really lame. For me personally, even if you just made the changes purely cosmetic but makes it more fun to use, has my approval.

[Sergeant G]

Responding to the op and seconding a point already made; 

- I agree that the chain gun fires far slower than it's closest real world equivalent does. And really, it makes no sense. You're not going to be carrying around 20mm cannon or a Vulcan gun by hand. It was, dare I say, an oversight on id Software's part that there is no assault rifle in DOOM, something DOOM 3 did not correct, unless you count the plasma rifle as an assault rifle, which I don't.

The plasma rifle is descended from the Lasgun, and that's even less realistic than carrying a mounted weapon by hand.

Brutal DOOM certainly has an assualt, and I'm sure other mods do too. The shotgun is serviceable against former humans and imps at distance, but using it that way often involves more shots than would do the job up close. 

- I loved what Eviternity did with the pistol, both in terms of accuracy and rate of fire. I've never been cool with the fact that the vanilla pistol is basically certain to miss almost half the time, not cool. 

- It would be neat to have a select fire assault rifle, maybe semi-auto plus three and five round bursts. Might change the dynamic a bit. It seems that, generally speaking, and by design, you can't always rely on the shotgun killing an imp in one hit, sometimes, not always. But I think three rifle rounds would drop an imp, honestly, at close range. Maybe an optic too, but perhaps that's just getting too fancy for classic DOOM, we don't want to overdo it. The simplicity is critical to the carefully set balance. 

- Might be nice to follow Half Life's example and have a high powered revolver, .357 or .44 mag, but make the ammo more scarce. You'd be able to drop a few Revenants with one hit from a lower order gun, rather than expending two rockets. 

- Shifting the balance with more powerful, more realistic weapons would allow for mappers to create more challenging levels, but again, it seems that if we upgrade DOOMGUY past a certain point it would be necessary to likewise give the demons some upgrades. Otherwise we're making is easier on ourselves. I totally think some kind of assault rifle could be grandfathered in without doing that, but maybe replacing the chain gun with it and leaving it at that would be best.

[7Mahonin]

I think if the pistol was just slightly faster at shooting, for example like the SMG in Wolfenstein 3D, that would make it a far better starting weapon without having to change the damage and sounds, and it would still be slower than the chaingun.
 

I think the chaingun is perfect as-is, but maybe could have slightly more damage than the pistol. It’s a larger gun, so it would have increased velocity making the pistol ammo more deadly than it is from the pistol barrel. Making it shoot faster just makes it harder to conserve the ammo in my opinion, and I hate it when people put “wind up” and “wind down” crap into how the gun works, that completely ruins the fun of using the gun. 

 

I don’t like the idea of making it a rifle if it’s just going to be a chaingun reskin. Rifles should be an entirely different class of weapon. They have superior long range capabilities and are painful up close. Imagine the shotgun, but instead of the pellets scattering, it’s all one solid projectile with all the power of the shotgun pellets combined into one and is as accurate as the first 2 shots of the chaingun, and fires as quick as the plasma rifle. That’s a real assault rifle. 
 

 

Also, FYI: there are machine guns that take pistol ammo. The chaingun in Doom functions more like a “futuristic” SMG. Giving it its own ammo type (like the rifle ammo I described above), would give it a more heavy/light machine gun feel. 

Edited September 4, 2021 by TelicAx7

[Not Jabba]

I've played a number of maps/mapsets that beef up both the pistol and chaingun to suit the gameplay and balance with the rest of their arsenal (usually the other weapons are also amped a bit to go along with it). I think the one that does it best is Tarnsman's Projectile Hell, where the pistol is improved but that improvement is almost treated as a joke; you always immediately get a better pistol-niche weapon for slot 2 (assault rifle) that's perfect for sniping turrets and holding individual enemies at bay. And then the chaingun is possibly the most satisfying and brutally efficient hitscan weapon I've ever encountered.

[Xfing]

The biggest problem with all this is that if we approached this like Doom 2 did the SSG - an addon without touching the existing weapon roster - there is not much room for an assault rifle between the pistol and the chaingun's firing rates. I gotta admit I really liked what KDiZD did with the alpha rifle sprite, creating the powerful Rifle weapon which felt really strong and rewarding to use and would be really fun to try out in other map packs with the very same mechanics.

[Xfing]

Ok, I've done some research into the topic and found out that there was more than one alpha or beta sprite for assault guns, which can probably still be somehow extracted and appropriated.

 

I've noticed that people are mostly fine with the chaingun, but generally despise the pistol. I think adding a generic rifle which would use one of the alpha sprites, have a somewhat higher rate of fire than the pistol and 100% accuracy on sustained fire would alleviate those problems. It could be dropped by zombiemen/preplaced, and I stand by my earlier idea that it could permanently replace the 2 slot, like the chainsaw does to the fist. Of course being able to select the pistol would also be an option worth considering for many reasons, but then the it'd be the pistol that should be the one selected on the 2nd press of the key, so as to have the stronger weapon ready quicker.

 

I agree that modifying the chaingun itself is probably not worth it, especially in a vanilla-emulating mod, for how easy it is to pick it up from heavy weapon dudes.

[Xaser]

Late-ish response to the thread, but this is something I played around with in Heartland with its akimbo pistols and SMGs, and I think I hit a nice chord with it. Short version is that you can replace 3 weapons and leave the rest of the arsenal untouched and it totally works:

- Slot 2: dual pistols -- fire once every 6 tics (same as Heretic's claw) and are perfectly accurate.

- Slot 4: Dual SMGs -- fire once every 2 tics (twice as fast as chaingun) and are never accurate.

- Slot 6: Something new that replaces the plasma rifle and does something interesting (e.g. Heartland flamethrower), as the dual SMGs fill the role the PG once did.

 

In effect, this basically makes your starter gun always useful as a sniper weapon (and occasional ammo-saver), merges the CG and PG into one slot (critically, using bullet ammo so it doesn't share a resource with the Uber powerful BFG), and frees up a new slot to do something fun with.

 

The SSG, Rocket Launcher, and BFG totally work out of the box with this set, balance-wise, so no need to change those (Heartland does have a new BFG but balance-wise it could've kept the old one and it would've worked). The shotgun and chainsaw lag behind but the former is Fine as a small upgrade progression-wise (though a speed buff doesn't hurt it any) and the latter is best ignored in favor of zerk anyway so consider it a free space for adding an infinite ammo BFG or something ;)

 

Even though Heartland also gives you single versions of the pistol and SMG for progression's sake, I have another WIP project (Epoch) for MBF21 that just eschews the single versions and keeps the dualies, since those are the ones that matter most in practice. It works. :P

[Xfing]

28 minutes ago, Xaser said:

Late-ish response to the thread, but this is something I played around with in Heartland with its akimbo pistols and SMGs, and I think I hit a nice chord with it. Short version is that you can replace 3 weapons and leave the rest of the arsenal untouched and it totally works:

- Slot 2: dual pistols -- fire once every 6 tics (same as Heretic's claw) and are perfectly accurate.

- Slot 4: Dual SMGs -- fire once every 2 tics (twice as fast as chaingun) and are never accurate.

- Slot 6: Something new that replaces the plasma rifle and does something interesting (e.g. Heartland flamethrower), as the dual SMGs fill the role the PG once did.

 

In effect, this basically makes your starter gun always useful as a sniper weapon (and occasional ammo-saver), merges the CG and PG into one slot (critically, using bullet ammo so it doesn't share a resource with the Uber powerful BFG), and frees up a new slot to do something fun with.

 

The SSG, Rocket Launcher, and BFG totally work out of the box with this set, balance-wise, so no need to change those (Heartland does have a new BFG but balance-wise it could've kept the old one and it would've worked). The shotgun and chainsaw lag behind but the former is Fine as a small upgrade progression-wise (though a speed buff doesn't hurt it any) and the latter is best ignored in favor of zerk anyway so consider it a free space for adding an infinite ammo BFG or something ;)

 

Even though Heartland also gives you single versions of the pistol and SMG for progression's sake, I have another WIP project (Epoch) for MBF21 that just eschews the single versions and keeps the dualies, since those are the ones that matter most in practice. It works. :P

That definitely sounds nice from a gameplay perspective, will mix things up a bit for sure! 

I'm personally interested in an expansionary approach, where you don't sacrifice anything, but I'm aware that sort of thing is only available using Decorate, so it'll only work wiht ZDoom-based source ports :(

[Jacek Bourne]

I figure a good solution to this problem would be to make slot 2 a pickup that has the same fire-rate as the chain gun and slot 4 a significantly more powerful chain gun similar to the one in valiant or mutabor and occula. This preserves the weakness at the start of a pistol start run and creates new opportunities for gameplay with the new chain gun while preserving old opportunities because slot 2 now functions the same as the chain gun does by default. In this sort of lineup you would start with no weapon other than your fist as well as no ammunition. I figure the slot 2 sprite replacement could be something like the duel pistols in Deus Vult 2.

 

Slot 2: Weapon with the same fire rate as the chain gun that you do not spawn with (unlike the pistol) You also spawn with no ammo instead of 50 bullets

Slot 4: More powerful chain gun with a high fire rate 

[Xfing]

On 2/14/2023 at 5:17 PM, Jacek Bourne said:

I figure a good solution to this problem would be to make slot 2 a pickup that has the same fire-rate as the chain gun and slot 4 a significantly more powerful chain gun similar to the one in valiant or mutabor and occula. This preserves the weakness at the start of a pistol start run and creates new opportunities for gameplay with the new chain gun while preserving old opportunities because slot 2 now functions the same as the chain gun does by default. In this sort of lineup you would start with no weapon other than your fist as well as no ammunition. I figure the slot 2 sprite replacement could be something like the duel pistols in Deus Vult 2.

 

Slot 2: Weapon with the same fire rate as the chain gun that you do not spawn with (unlike the pistol) You also spawn with no ammo instead of 50 bullets

Slot 4: More powerful chain gun with a high fire rate 

Yeah, either that or just add a slot 2 replacement pickup that works like the Eviternity pistol, or with an intermediate rate of fire between the pistol and the chaingun, and pinpoint accuracy. 

What really baffles me though, is that they had a much better shooting sound for bullet-based weapons back in the alpha, no idea why they went with the sound they used in the final game for the pistol/chaingun. Restoring the original assets could be a pretty nice way to go about this