Hence my concern - normally I'm just happy with piling on ad-hoc tweaking until each weapon has evolved into its own niche, but to take a weapon down from "I kill Satan for puppies" to "at least it's not the fist" is a bit much.
The way HD is set up right now the double-barreled shotgun blast is two normal shotgun blasts, each blast with 25% more spread and double that horizontally if both barrels are fired at once. (I may change this having learned that real side-by-side shotguns aren't actually supposed to be parallel like this, but converge towards a single point at a certain distance - shows what happens when you sacrifice common sense for video game bias.)
So thus far I've noticed the following situations where the double is advantageous:
- When you need to make two (and no more than two!) distinct shots in rapid succession (I've speeded things up since my last upload so that both shots empty pretty much at the speed of vanilla Doom's chaingun)
- When you need double the power of the shotgun immediately at very close range (basically only when you've ambushed an enemy marine; you can afford to wait for two pump shots with the spectre and anything else either needs more or needs less)
- When you need the extra spread to make sure you hit (somewhat dubious, since many monsters regenerate and can't be taken out through gradual attrition and you'd need to make a solid hit anyway)
- When you've got two one-shot enemies in line and can take them both out in one double-barreled shot (except for the first two goons in Map01 it's usually so much trouble to set this up you might as well kill them one at a time)
Now if I could somehow affect turning speed in ACS, I'd be able to account for weapon bulk much better. But sadly the only advantage I can give the double here is a faster select/deselect animation.
Now all that said, I have to concede this: It
feels so much more awesome being able to take out the enemy with the double than with the pump. Maybe I'm just influenced by stuff like
this, I dunno. Anyway, I'll at least give the extra-power thing a try before creating new graphics for it, so at least I don't do the latter for nothing if the idea ends up being no good.