Is it me, or... [more damage when you take your time]

[sidarmas]

Do you do more damage when you take your time in firing you weapon?

For instance, with a SSG, if you wait 2 seconds after reloading, you can down a Revenant with 4 shells instead of 6-8. With the plasma rifle, shooting in controlled bursts also seems to kill an enemy quicker. With a rocket Launcher, you wait 2 seconds after firing your first rocket, and it seems to hurt the enemy more. I donno. It might just be me.

[fraggle]

Sorry, you must be imagining it. The closest thing that I can think of is that the chaingun is more accurate when fired in bursts than continually.

[DOOM Anomaly]

fraggle said:

Sorry, you must be imagining it. The closest thing that I can think of is that the chaingun is more accurate when fired in bursts than continually.

Is this a Doom coding kind of thing or a heat-of-the-moment kind of thing? :D

[Ichor]

It's a coding thing. After the first couple of shots are fired from the chaingun, the shots spread out a bit. This may not be noticeable if the enemy is right in your face, but try hitting something half a map away with just short bursts instead of holding down the button.

[Ledmeister]

UDoom v1.9 chaingun-accuracy demo (tapfocus.lmp).

[Coopersville]

sidarmas said:

Do you do more damage when you take your time in firing you weapon?

For instance, with a SSG, if you wait 2 seconds after reloading, you can down a Revenant with 4 shells instead of 6-8.

Not at all. I can fire like a madman, and I'll take down a Revenant in 2 or 3 hits.

[Inferno]

I'm pretty accurate when going all out or taking my time, so either way, the enemies die around the same amount of shots fired.

[Steeveeo]

actually, this does do somtm weird with the BFG, I made a monster "factory" if you will that you could choose which monster to spit out.

I had a SpiderDemon out and charged at it with a BFG.

Two shots fired while holding down the button destroyed it, but firing two shots in two separate clicks (at the same distance as when the BFG was fired while running), damaged it only to about a quarter...

is this a coding thing?

[Maes]

Typical SSG shots counts for killing stuff:

1 for zombies, imps, demons and spectres.
2 for Cacos, PEs, Revenants
3 for Hell Knights, Arachnotrons
4 for Mancubi
5 For Barons of Hell and Archies

Sorry to say it, but 6-8 SSG shots for a Revenant means you're doing something very wrong.

@Steeveeo: the "One shot BFG kill" vs the Spiderdemon has been beaten to the ground countless of times. It is theoretically possible, but extremely rare with the original Doom RNG. In source ports it's more frequent, however it requires almost-contact firing, so that all the invisible plasma scattering hits the Spiderdemon.

[GGG]

I think a lot of this can be attributed to accuracy and timing. When you hold down the fire key on a non-automatic weapon (i.e. SSG), it's harder to tell exactly when the next shot will go off. If you know exactly when it's going to fire, your aim will more strongly match your timing. Experienced players know how fast a shot cycles and can time their aim to the next shot without having to let off of the fire key. It's all just a matter of familiarity with the weapon firing speeds.

Maes said:

Typical SSG shots counts for killing stuff:

4 for Mancubi
5 For Barons of Hell and Archies

If you're close enough to a mancubus, it can easily be done in 3. And you'd also have to be pretty close to a baron to do it in 5. Taking out an archie in 4 is usually easy to do even if you're not very close.

[Belial]

4 for an archie is normal.
5 for a baron if you do the run-up dance properly and don't get hindered by the blockmap.
3 for a manc, same as above.

[Ichor]

2 for cacodemons and pain elementals about 20% of the time. The rest of the time you can just fire a couple of chaingun or pistol shots to finish them off. A third super shotgun blast would be a bit wasteful (for cacodemons anyway) unless there's a lot of them and you don't really remember or care which one you hit how many times.

[GGG]

Ichor said:

2 for cacodemons and pain elementals about 20% of the time.

Since you can almost always take them out with 2 at near-point blank range, it depends more on the map and how you approach the fight rather than percentages.

[Ichor]

GGG said:

Since you can almost always take them out with 2 at near-point blank range, it depends more on the map and how you approach the fight rather than percentages.

I was actually talking about close range. I mean, there's hardly any way you're going to kill a cacodemon floating around halfway across a large room in 2 shots. More often than not, I could get right up to a cacodemon and after 2 super shotgun shots, it would still be alive, but just barely. Sometimes just a single bullet is enough to kill it then.

[xit-vono]

You should theoretically be able to kill a caco with 2 shots most of the time, but because of a glitch in the engine, you need to have a precise angle or some of them will miss. The same thing happens if you try to kill a mancubus with 3 ssg shots or a baron with 5 ssg shots. If you fire only 2 bullets with a chaingun then they will go straight forward, but if you fire more then they will be scattered somewhat.

[fraggle]

Steeveeo said:

actually, this does do somtm weird with the BFG, I made a monster "factory" if you will that you could choose which monster to spit out.

I had a SpiderDemon out and charged at it with a BFG.

Two shots fired while holding down the button destroyed it, but firing two shots in two separate clicks (at the same distance as when the BFG was fired while running), damaged it only to about a quarter...

is this a coding thing?

The damage done by weapons is randomised, it isn't the same every time. If you try again, you'll probably get different results.

[Steeveeo]

fraggle said:

The damage done by weapons is randomised, it isn't the same every time. If you try again, you'll probably get different results.

nope, I can do it every time I try (I just did it 5 times 20 minutes ago and it did not fail at all...must be GZDoom)

[myk]

Steeveeo said:
(at the same distance as when the BFG was fired while running),

It's not clear what you mean there. As fraggle indicated, the shots themselves won't vary in damage between the two cases (they cause the same random range of damage each), but the two afterblasts may be hitting the spider differently in each case. Are you moving faster or differently in one case than the other? The afterblast occurs some time after each shot hits, and if you're closer or otherwise properly placed in relation to the target after each burst strikes, more of the afterblast tracers will hit it, and thus the total damage will be greater in the end.

[printz]

xit-vono said:

but because of a glitch in the engine, you need to have a precise angle or some of them will miss.

The glitch is related to the block map. The block map is the grid you see on the automap, after you press G. If a gridline passes through the middle of a 64-wide corridor, expect to have problems hitting the monsters inside with hitscan weapons. This is where the G key comes in handy. The monster size is clipped (cropped?) by the blockmap it stays in. A spiderdemon in Doom/Boom is effectively 128 (half) wide to hitscan weapons.
Note that I'm not sure what causes spiderdemons (and others) to be passed through by physical things.

[Maes]

Bah, the Doom wiki has some rather precise damage probability tables for each weapon. (Super Shotgun article).

These are mostly theoretical however, and possibly flawed as they are computed considering entirely sequential RNG values (I think, while in reality they come in couples, damage + scattering angles, so the "RNG" table should be used by skipping each other value, really).

3-SSG mancubus kills and the such are possible, but a bit on the right side of the bell-shaped curve. Also, these RNG values are "valid" for vanilla doom only and its highly simplistic 8-bit LUT RNG, while some source ports may exhibit entirely different behaviour just from using a differend RNG.