Lost Soul health

Rayzik said:

If the lost souls are effectively 'gibbed' like a telefrag upon being spawned inside the player, you could give them an 'XDeath' state in decorate (or an 'Exploding Frame' sequence in Dehacked) and make them explode when they die like that.

Of course, that means incidentally telefragging a lost soul would be like telefragging a barrel, but you could use a custom 'A_Detonate' in Decorate (or use the MBF Dehacked 'Detonate' frame codepointer) to create a weaker explosion effect.

The other side effect is that the pain elemental will likely take that damage too since it's right next to you when that happens, but if you made the explosion small enough (32 radius/damage?) it might not make a significant difference and still deter a player from kissing the elemental.

I think it'd be much simpler to just give it the pinky bite executed at the same time as its regular attack. It won't hurt anyone other than the intended target of the attack.

Ijon Tichy said:

http://jinotra.in/downloads/mods/doom/assorted/cappedpe.wad

it's zdoom-only (2.8.1 and up, so no zandronum compatibility), and obviously won't work with any DEHACKED, but this does exactly that

change pe_soulcap in the DECORATE to change where the cap is (default 8)

edit:
http://jinotra.in/downloads/mods/doom/assorted/cappedpe_v2.wad

this version works in zandronum 3 (and therefore zdoom 2.7.1), and has three cvars:

cappedpe_maxsouls (default 8): how many souls each pain elemental can have tethered to it (0 means infinite)
cappedpe_maxsouls_total (default 0): how many pain elemental souls can exist in the map at once (including ones spawned on death) (0 means infinite)
cappedpe_uncappeddeath (default true): if this is false, the souls spawned on death are also capped by the above two cvars

This is excellent, thanks for sharing.

I'm pretty sure Lost Souls were gimped in Jaguar for the same reason as Revanants' homing missiles were made slower in the Ps1 version. To make it easier for console players because consoles are more mainstream.

you had me until the last 3 words, the hell does that even mean

Not hardcore/not 1337/dirty casuals?

Here's a post from the Things that bother you about Doom thread by Kapanyo, what a loser lol

Kapanyo said:

Not really something that bothers me (except in Doom (1)), but I had an idea for Lost Souls' health. They should keep the 100% health, but take 2x damage when charging. This would mean you'd wait until they shoot towards you, then you blast 'em with the shotty and they die in one hit, which would be very satisfying - it would be kind of reaction-based, depending on their distance from you.
It could also make Pain Elementals a bit more fun to fight.

Kapanyo said:

Here's a post from the Things that bother you about Doom thread by Kapanyo, what a loser lol

This is how I typically fight them if I only have a single shotty.

Doomkid said:

To all those who think the Lost Soul is too strong: find an SSG or learn to dodge :o)

With that said the 20 Lost Soul limit is really effective at keeping them from fucking you over in an entirely unfair way due to the sheer number of them. I'm convinced all server hosts who disable the limit are black-hearted masochists.

21, actually :)