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MrGlide

How would you, if you would, rebalance the pistol?

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Macblain said:

I still think the pistol/shotgun/unarmored phase could be explored very much more.

I agree. I'm not trying to be rude about some people's ideas of buffing the pistol with higher rate of fire, but I feel that rout ether makes the chaingun less significant or the pistol is just really staying in the position that it is now. I'm going to mess around with this idea in dehacked when I get the chance, I'll start off slow like increasing the pistols damage a little bit.

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MrGlide said:

I'm going to mess around with this idea in dehacked when I get the chance, I'll start off slow like increasing the pistols damage a little bit.

Too bad that it's not possible to directly change damage of a hitscan weapon via DEHACKED. Each bullet deals randomly 5-15 damage, that's hardcoded. You can merely make the weapon shoot more bullets at once, consuming appropriately more ammo units at once. It's also not possible to change the amount of ammo units consumed per a bullet to whatever number you want. You can merely pick from 1 of 3 options: 1 bullet fired for 1 ammo unit (like pistol/chaingun do), 7 bullets fired at once for 1 ammo unit (like the shotgun does), or 20 bullets fired at once for 2 ammo units (like the SSG does).

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Both the pistol and the chaingun could use a slight fire rate boost. It seems weird to me that the minigun in wolf3D that the chaingun appears modelled after is both faster and sounds cooler than its Doom counterpart.

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40oz said:

Sounds cooler than its Doom counterpart.


Which reminds me, the chaingunners using the shotgun sound for their chaingun attack sounds far more beefy and powerful, and in turn makes the player's chaingun feel weaker, even though it isn't.

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How many Barons can you kill with full SSG ammo and how many with full Chaingun/Pistol ammo? Assuming no misses.

Food for thought, or maybe someone can do the math.

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VGA said:

How many Barons can you kill with full SSG ammo and how many with full Chaingun/Pistol ammo? Assuming no misses.

10 and 4, assuming always average random damage.

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scifista42 said:

10 and 4, assuming always average random damage.

Thanks. That's with max backpacks, right?

My point is that the chaingun should rev up after a couple of seconds and really bring the pain. Otherwise it takes half an hour to kill a high-health monster and you waste a LOT of your ammo.

SSG is powerful enough that it makes sense to even fire at a Cyberdemon, I have killed some with it. They are huge and soak up all the shots. With the Chaingun ... there is no point in using it against them :D

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Yes, I counted with backpacked ammo capacities. And I agree that the game lacks a powerful weapon that uses Clip as ammo. If not powering up the Chaingun, I'd introduce another weapon to use Clip and deal heavy and/or fast damage, but behaving conceptually differently than just a rapid fire hitscan weapon like the Chaingun already is, keeping the Chaingun still be a good tactical choice at some situations.

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While it wouldn't hurt to give the chaingun a boost, I don't think it's that far off. I've been playing Quake 2 lately and its chaingun is absurd. Far too easy to kill high-hp enemies with, as long as you don't mind burning through all of your ammo. Even the Skulltag minigun was a bit much I thought. Yeah, killing a cyberdemon with the CG is no fun, but it's not like the weapon doesn't have other uses or situations where it's valuable.

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I would give the chaingun a build-up speed and increased damage, if modern features are taken into consideration, an ever wilder pitch change would also help.

Can't think of anything that would help the pistol, other than changing it into a submachinegun or rifle with manual and/or burst shot.

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37 minutes ago, Krull said:

Couldn't you speed up the firing state so it fires multiples of these three options (almost) simultaneously?

 

You could, but DECORATE can actually make this happen with a little coding magic.

Take the DECORATE code for Doom's pistol:

ACTOR Pistol : DoomWeapon
{
  Weapon.SelectionOrder 1900
  Weapon.AmmoUse 1
  Weapon.AmmoGive 20
  Weapon.AmmoType "Clip"
  Obituary "$OB_MPPISTOL"
  +WEAPON.WIMPY_WEAPON
  Inventory.Pickupmessage "$PICKUP_PISTOL_DROPPED"
  Tag "$TAG_PISTOL"
  States
  {
  Ready:
    PISG A 1 A_WeaponReady
    Loop
  Deselect:
    PISG A 1 A_Lower
    Loop
  Select:
    PISG A 1 A_Raise
    Loop
  Fire:
    PISG A 4
    PISG B 6 A_FirePistol
    PISG C 4
    PISG B 5 A_ReFire
    Goto Ready
  Flash:
    PISF A 7 Bright A_Light1
    Goto LightDone
    PISF A 7 Bright A_Light1
    Goto LightDone
  Spawn:
    PIST A -1
    Stop
  }
}

And define a new actor and alter its firing state.

Actor UltraGigaPistol : Pistol replaces Pistol
{
 Weapon.AmmoUse 28 //Since the weapon is firing 28 bullets
 states
 {
  Fire:
	PISG A 4
	PISG B 6 A_FireBullets (11.5, 7.8, 28, 5, "BulletPuff")
	PISG B 0 A_PlaySound ("weapons/ultragigapistolfire")
	PISG B 0 A_GunFlash
	PISG C 4
	PISG B 5 A_ReFire
	Goto Ready
 }
}

If you wanted the weapon to use both shells and bullets, then you would write something like

Actor UltraGigaMegaPistol : UltraGigaPistol replaces Pistol
{
 Weapon.AmmoType1 "clip"
 Weapon.AmmoType2 "shell"
 Weapon.AmmoUse1 2 //Two individual bullets fired
 Weapon.AmmoUse2 3 //One single shotgun attack and one SSG attack, so three shells
 +WEAPON.PRIMARY_USES_BOTH
}

This would result in one of the most bizarre weapons ever designed in this game. Of course, you wouldn't have to define a whole new actor just to make your Ultra Pistol use both ammo types. You could just move the code from UltraGigaMegaPistol to UltraGigaPistol and replace Weapon.AmmoUse 28 with the two separate Weapon.AmmoUse definitions.

 

Of course, if all you want to do is make the pistol do more damage, then replacing A_FirePistol in Pistol and rewriting it as A_FireBullets (5.6, 0, 1, 10, "BulletPuff") A_PlaySound ("weapons/pistol") A_GunFlash would make it do more damage, because the fourth variable of A_FireBullets is hitscan attack damage (1d3). Here, it would do double the damage it used to.

That one's a lot simpler.

 

One last thing, don't actually take the DECORATE code for Doom's pistol. It's unnecessary.

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37 minutes ago, Krull said:

Couldn't you speed up the firing state so it fires multiples of these three options (almost) simultaneously?

That's what I meant when I said:

On 2/3/2016 at 10:18 AM, scifista42 said:

make the weapon shoot more bullets at once, consuming appropriately more ammo units at once.

 

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As far as the original topic goes, I'd opt for just shoving the chaingun on slot 2 and letting a fifth ammo type weapon take slot 4, since the chaingun is basically to the pistol as the chainsaw is to the fist. Except with no berserk for the pistol.

 

As far as making bullet weapons more viable in general, I'd opt for increasing their damage-per-ammo by like x1.5 or x2. I don't think shells and clips need to be even - especially since the chaingun means clips are better at controlling enemies through stunlock - but the disparity between the two is large enough to the point of really making the clip weapons underwhelming.

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Sadly, a pistol with 4 times the strength would also consume 4 times the ammo: the damage output of the hitscan attacks can't be altered in DeHackEd and the only way to increase the damage is to layer firing codepointers on top of each other.

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Perfect accuracy makes the pistol noticeably more enjoyable against small fry, so I'd start with that. I'm not too wed to the existing 'weak weapon progression' and wouldn't mind a set of buffs that make the single shotgun marginally weaker than the SSG, and the pistol marginally weaker than the shotgun, with the chaingun being roughly SSG strength.

 

But if I were to design maps for any amount of serious pistol use, I'd also add a few low-HP glass cannons -- think along the lines of the plasma marine and alien drone of Ancient Aliens -- to allow for a wider variety of enjoyable pistol-centric combat, rather than just 'you get to plink down ambiently placed low tiers faster'. 

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I think valiant's pistol is quite alright. Don't mind lack of accuracy personally, but making it a tad more accurate would sure be nice to have.

 

EDIT: Also: Holy necrobump, Batman!

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I'm torn between rd's consistent accuracy thing and just leaving it unchanged.

 

Imo the pistol fills a very important role by defining one of your last resort weapons, which in turn changes how the higher weapons feel. Ssg, rockets and berserk punching literally don't feel the same to me if I know the base pistol is still a strong weapon.

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My pistol is made to be versatile, so it isn't entirely useless after getting the shotgun. It fires as fast as you can click, holds 15 bullets per magazine, and is moderately powerful. It reloads pretty quick, but that's due to my own laziness with reload frames. It's accurate, but has enough recoil to throw off your aim here and there.

 

I can't ever go back to using Doom's default pistol or similar variants now.

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Replace it with a revolver, up the damage a bit, but add a relatively short reload animation (such as a speedloader) every 8 shots.

 

I'd do this myself, but I'm no artist.

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While I enjoy the vanilla game-play very much, I do find the pistol is a little too weak. There is really little reason to choose it over chaingun. I wish the pistol dealt a little more damage (e.g., 40%) per bullet. It would make the pistol not only more powerful, but also more ammo efficient. I looked around and found no mod doing that. Inspired by the discussions on this thread, I made my first mod. I am sharing it here just in case someone else find it useful.

 

It should work on all ZDoom derivatives. I tested it on GZDoom g3.5.1. Please refer to the txt file for details.

 

powerpistol.zip

Edited by zmodder : Add sourceport requirement.

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