"Slaughterguns" Idea

I've been romping through Combat Shock 2 as of late, and it's pretty damn fun, although it's sorta revived an idea I had a while back when playing through DVII's later maps. I'm quite sure someone else has brought it up here before, but I've noticed that some of Doom's weapons are nigh-useless in a slaughter setting, with rockets+BFG taking the main stage and others (chaingun especially) being pushed really far down to the bottom of the barrel. Hell, even the mighty SSG takes on a lowly "clean-up" role, since it's not particuarly great against the sort of large groups you're likely to be facing.

As such, I've been brainstorming ideas for a really simple DeHackEd "Slaughterguns" mod that'll buff and swap some of the weapons, the intention being that slaughtermappers can use 'em in new mapsets to provide a bit more useful weapon variety. 'Course, I'm a neophyte to the slaughter world, so I figure I'd post my ideas here to see if any slaughter gurus would find this sort of thing useful/interesting/non-blasphemous.

The changes I have in mind would be as follows:

• Pistol -> Shotgun -- Let's face it: the pistol sucks. Pretty much any map these days gives the shotgun at map start (or at least really close to it), so we may as well start the player off with it and reclaim a slot for something more interesting. Behavior stays the same, naturally, since the Shotty's still an early-game classic.
  
• Shotgun -> SSG -- Following the above, the SSG gets bumped down one slot, replacing the standard shotgun pickup (while retaining identical behavior, of course). A little dehacked trickery would be employed to make sergeants drop shells rather than SSGs, which would lessen the amount of ammo they give you slightly (2 instead of 4), but it'd work.
  
• SSG -> Auto Shotgun -- The first 'new' weapon, this guy fires shells at a rapid pace, akin to Allhell's Streetsweeper (1 shot per 8 tics, I'm thinking). Since it'd use the standard shotgun's firing action, there would be an ammo tradeoff with the SSG: the Auto deals damage faster, but eats ammo like candy. It would fill in the "general-purpose close-range crowd control" role long after the BFG has obsoleted the Plasma, and it'll also be awesome because you can pretend you're a spider mastermind. ;)
  
• Chaingun -> Sniper Rifle -- Long-range weapon, basically taking the chaingun's only real role in a slaughter scenario and amplifying it. Since this'd be the only bullet weapon, it'd be easy to do something like have it shoot something like 5 bullets at once (hooray gamism) at a brisk pace, resulting in a perfectly-accurate, slightly-more-powerful-than-chaingun weapon that would prove might useful for picking off straggling Pain Elementals and such. Might also dehack the pickups so chaingunners don't drop these, since that'd be weird.
  
• Rocket, Plasma, BFG -- These stay the same. They're quite useful in such a context as-is, sans maybe the plasma which is really only useful as a "panic button" until the BFG shows up. Not too much could (or should) be done there, I'd imagine.
  
• Chainsaw -> Hyperfast Melee Weapon 2000 -- Basically, Sauron's Gauntlets from DVII, only with Doom-y sprites, since I find 'em super-useful for cleanup duty while not being overpowered since they suck against groups. Though I suppose ToD could slot his infinite-ammo BFG in here if he so desires. :P
  
• Fist -> Fist -- It's the fist. What can we possibly do with the fist other than make it a fist? :P

Any thoughts on this? It's still a rough set of ideas for now, and as such there's no graphics or anything planned yet (though they'd be Doomy in nature, naturally). Again, the idea is to target new maps rather than muck with existing maps' balance, so I'm asking these questions in a "will this be useful for a new map?" sort of way.

I figure it's worth a shot. ;)

Xaser said:

• Fist -> Fist -- It's the fist. What can we possibly do with the fist other than make it a fist? :P

Zharkov-it

If there's one thing I would like to see implemented, it would be quake2ish grenade launcher of some sort, but not exploding on impact.

Sounds like a grand idea to me! Not to sure about the auto shotgun though as I think two shotguns is enough but that's my opinion.

An auto-shotgun could be done like Shadow Warrior's Riotgun.

What about a short-ranged thrown timed explosive instead of a hyperfast melee weapon? Start laying them down in the path of pursuing monsters...

Trouble with j4rio's and Use's ideas is that neither can be done in Dehacked, so it'd have to get escalated to ZDoom/Eternity. The latter could make demos a thing, though, so it's not like it's totally out of the question.

Any thoughts on this?

I'm thinking you just left yourself open for my random balance ramblings. ;)

Been brainstorming slaughter-oriented dehacked changes of my own for a while, although I've ultimately moved on to ZDoom in the last months. Agreeing with you on most of your thoughts and conclusions.

I didn't understand the 2 shells drop per sargeant thing. You can make them drop 4 shells instead of their shotgun by switching the ID (DoomEd?) number in DeHackEd, I've done so and it works fine; or perhaps it was .bex and not .deh? I get confused between the two, but given that most slaughtermaps are at least Boom compat you probably could go for .bex without trouble.

My own plan was to go with:
- slot 1, fist. Swapping the animation so the damage hits when the fist connects (purely cosmetic). Thought about making it perhaps faster, but didn't push the idea any further. No chainsaw.
- slot 2, shotgun. Same reasoning as yours - pistol sucks, shotgun is a great early game weapon, useful for sniping to an extent and fighting small amounts of low-tier monsters.
- slot 3, chaingun. Twice the "damage", with 0 duration frames. Brings its theorical DPS right about where the SSG is; which might seem OP at first glance considering the CG has also much less spread, but in actual gameplay burst damage turns out to be a significant advantage, as you only have to focus on your aim for a minimal amount of time, leaving you more leeway to focus on moving around.
- slot 4, SSG. No change either.
- slot 5, RL. No change.
- slot 6, PG. I went back and forth a lot on this and am still not sure I ended up with the right numbers, but after much tweaking I bumped the projectile damage to 200% (from 5 * 1d8 to 10 * 1d8) and slashed the firing rate to 60% (from 3 tics per frame to 5 tics per frame). This makes the plasma gun a viable alternative to the BFG against tough mid-tier targets, as well as an interesting option at mid-range against cybies and spider MMs in situations where getting in close would be too dangerous.
- slot 7, BFG. No change.

The idea between putting SG and SSG in slot 2 and 4 is so they can use bullets (renamed "shells", obv.), and so picking ammo when you're out makes a switch to the appropriate weapon. Having the SG as slot 2 and SSG as slot 3, with both using shells, means you never get a switch to the SG by picking up shells (and might get a switch to the SG by picking up bullets), and running out of shells with the SSG will make you switch to the SG if you don't have the chaingun yet, forcing a second weapon switch in a row to a weapon you can actually shoot!

The downside of my solution is that the SSG will happily shoot with 1 bullet left, ending up with -1 "shells". It didn't seem to break anything during testing, just looks odd on the HUD.

As for plasma/BFG, I felt something needed to happen there - the BFG being so much more ammo efficient in almost every situation. The gap is so wide most slaughter players will conserve their cells until they find a BFG, sometimes even when the level is positively filled with ammo. Trying to rebalance this is a fine line to walk, though, overbuffing the PG can turn it into the go-to option for boss fights. The BFG being such an outlier, it would make sense from a game design perspective to nerf it, but so much of the Doom gameplay, especially slaughter gameplay, is based on player familiarity with the arsenal and monsters, it's hard to scale back without messing with the feel of the weapon, and as a result, the gameplay itself; i.e., I toyed with changing the amount of cells per shot so the PG would be relatively more efficient and the BFG would have less shots at max ammo, and even changing it to 12 max (as opposed to the default 15 max; 40 per shot with 600 cells), I found my doomguy lowering down his BFG at times I didn't expect. It seems easier to adjust to something being stronger than it used to be than something being weaker, so buffing the PG it is.

(Also, why only 7 weapons? In slaughter gameplay reactiveness is key, and I feel having to press the same hotkey twice to get a particular weapon is undesirable. Vanilla slaughter "alleviates" this problem in a way because you don't often want to use the shotgun, and the chainsaw is, against slaughter hordes, generally speaking, so weak you can just avoid picking it up and hold out for a berserk pack, but having better, higher priority weapons in slot 1 and 3 can make this bothersome. Of course, I am limiting my options by doing that. DeHackEd forces a lot of tough tradeoffs.)

In an earlier version of my mod, I went with the auto-shotgun idea as well; although I opted to replace the shotgun with it directly. I figure if you're going to have an auto-shotgun using the exact same attack but faster, there is little point in keeping the regular shotgun around. That is, given my reluctance to fully use slot 3, so you might not be in the same boat. You could have a chaingun or machinegun in slot 2 as an extra weapon, though - a weapon that would use the appropriate kind of ammo for its slot. I went with 12 tics per shot, which feels admittedly slow for an auto-shotgun, but at 8 tics per shot it felt too easy to lock anything into its pain state, up to and including a cyberdemon. Then again, as you mention it *does* eat ammo like candy.

Likewise, experimented with a sniper rifle for a while. Twenty shots at once (similar to a perfect SSG shot) seemed just about right for me, with a slower reload than SSG. The SSG is so well balanced against mid-tier monsters, giving a second option in that same damage range opens up interesting dynamics. The annoying part is having to devote an entire ammo type to this weapon, or live with funky results when you use it at low ammo.

Ultimately, you'd probably want to make some decent maps with your mod as a showcase. I'm guessing there would have to be some kind of momentum to get people to try mapping with such a mod.

I'm making a slaugher megawad but im buffing all the weapons and adding new ones. Heres how I did my weapons, which works really well atm.

SSG now can take out 2 pinkies in 1 shot.

The chaingun does twice the normal damage and makes the sound that chaingunners use.

Added a double chaingun for the hell of it, its a short ranged chaingun that does massive damage but is useless at mid to long range because of the spread. It also eats through bullets like mad.

Rocket launcher is unchanged since its already pretty effective in slaughter wads.

PlasmaRifle does twice as much damage so its useful for killing single targets really quickly, even more effective than the rocket launcher but doesnt do explosive damage.

Dark Plasma Rifle Its the combination between a plasmagun and rocket launcher. It fires at a decent rate but twice as slow as a plasmagun. Its projectiles do the same direct damage as a rocket but does half the explosive damage and half the radius. It eats through ammo like mad, but is a nice gun to use when you dont have a bfg.

The 2 new weapons have their uses and are pretty strong but at the same time are balanced because their useful when your cornered and have alot of ammo to burn, but are less useful when ammo isnt as plentiful and theres not alot of monsters clumped together.

Ill be adding more guns like the fusion cannon, cluster rocket launcher and Particle Accelerator gun, to add more flavor and weapon choices.

Trouble with j4rio's and Use's ideas is that neither can be done in Dehacked, so it'd have to get escalated to ZDoom/Eternity.

I believe Daniel on /idgames has managed to make both ideas in DeHackEd. He probably ate up important actions/projectiles to do so, though.

Thanks for the big wall o' rambling -- it's good to see I'm not the only one who's seriously thought about this. :)

I might go ahead and do a DEH-mockup of the mod and see how it fares with some basic tests. Probably going to stick with my own list for now, just to see how it goes. Hopefully the slot-stacking for the auto/SSG won't be an issue since the auto shotty would be preferable in tense horde-y situations anyway. Sniper should be doable, then, since it'll just so happen to have a unique ammo type. ;)

The plasma buff is a good idea, so I'll probably go with that as well. That'll make it eat a lot less ammo, which is really the key issue when it comes to PG vs. BFG.

Phml said:

I believe Daniel on /idgames has managed to make both ideas in DeHackEd. He probably ate up important actions/projectiles to do so, though.

You're right -- I should've been a bit more specific. Mines would be doable in DEH through some hacky methods, but the trouble is I'd have to eat up an existing projectile, which basically means I'd have to chuck the plasma gun and replace it with something weird. Bouncing grenades would be the "impossible" one in DEH-land.

[EDIT] Whoops, meant to respond to this part too:

Phml said:

I didn't understand the 2 shells drop per sargeant thing.

Dropped items/weapons always give half the standard ammo value, hence why zombiemen's clips give 5 bullets whereas regular clips give 10. A map-placed shotgun normally gives 8 shells, hence 4 for the sergeant's dropped shotgun. Swapping the pickup to the shells will make it worth 2, since the standard value is 4.

I like Xaser's idea alot, especially the Auto-shotty thing because when I played Stronghold, I noticed how effective and stopping it is and it's a great riot-control weapon.

Makes sense. Although one might want to change the graphic on the shells, as there are clearly four of them on the sprite. Minor niggle, really.

I did just change the pickup message to "Picked up some shotgun shells." to avoid sounding silly-like. Not sure what I can do about the sprite, to be honest-like. :P

[EDIT] Whoop! Just managed to changed the sprite to a 2-shell pickup. DeHackEd is an odd animal... ;)

Dropped items/weapons always give half the standard ammo value, hence why zombiemen's clips give 5 bullets whereas regular clips give 10. A map-placed shotgun normally gives 8 shells, hence 4 for the sergeant's dropped shotgun. Swapping the pickup to the shells will make it worth 2, since the standard value is 4.

Ooh, I see. Thanks for the clarification. I must have confused myself thinking I switched the item but what I did probably only changed the graphic, heh (as I wasn't using the original slot 3 shotgun, the discrepancy never hit me).

Then again... Trying the closest .bex patch I could find (dunno what went through my mind last year to cause me to name deh mods with such descriptive names as... "PUNCH", "wtf" or "aezae"... Bottomline is I can't find the final one with the changes I talked about above), I get 4 shells from sargeants and I don't seem to grab a new weapon. So I'm not sure what's going on. Here's the bex if it can provide some insight.

Edit: I guess whatever I did couldn't apply here anyway as I was swapping the normal shotgun for the shells directly. So, not worth checking out. Duh me. :)

I'm all behind a street sweeper equivalent to ALLHELL. That last map was tons o' fun.

Maybe you could turn the pistol into a Desert Eagle - make it ridiculously powerful, but make ammo for it scarce.

I totally support this idea and would be willing to provide sounds for it, if you're not just going to repurpose the Doom2.wad ones. (I'd even be "authentic" and downsample them to 11 KHz 8-bit mono.)

I would combine some weapons. Eg. a chaingun with an extra grenade/rocket launcher on alt-fire. Pump out some rockets, then spray into the carnage to clean up, all without switching weapons.

Mordeth said:

I would combine some weapons. Eg. a chaingun with an extra grenade/rocket launcher on alt-fire.

Genius. Even if that was the only change it would enhance so much.

Mordeth said:

I would combine some weapons. Eg. a chaingun with an extra grenade/rocket launcher on alt-fire. Pump out some rockets, then spray into the carnage to clean up, all without switching weapons.

Get Xaser's Parkour :)
http://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=26057

That is too fun. a shotgun shell launching chaingun, and the best thing is not having poorly animated new sprites and sounds that I see in so many mods.