This is some solid feedback, and, especially since I often struggle with ideas, I appreciate it -- and I'm glad you're enjoying the mod.
Some replies inline.
retronutcase wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 1:52 am
-The fact things like Submunitions and Fragmentation can proc elemental effects from the get go makes them obscenely powerful for element purposes. I feel like they should require a rare weapon upgrade to be able to proc elemental effects.
They're not as powerful as they look because the
amount of element they proc is based on the damage they do; the submunitions are individually not very powerful and the explosions fall off in damage rapidly. So while you can tag a lot of enemies at once with them the effects will usually be pretty weak unless they're really snuggled together.
-I am not 100% sure on this, but can Submunitions that kill an enemy trigger more submunitions? If so, this feels like it should also require a rare upgrade to actually allow for it. Something like "Chain Reaction: Allows death explosions and submunitions to trigger their effects on enemies they kill."
Submunitions used to be able to, but can't in recent versions. Explosive Death still can, but the comparatively small blast radius (and the way the damage is calculated) make it much less likely to trigger chain reactions unless the enemies are both closely packed and already damaged. I do like the idea of adding chain reactions as an upgrade, though.
On another note, maybe to spice things up, offer upgrades that come with upsides and downsides? Some examples of what I mean:
-Superdense: Adds 50% more damage to projectile weapons, but also inflicts a 25% speed penalty in exchange per level.
-HP Ammo: Adds 50% more damage to hitscan weapons, but they now fire projectiles (They cannot gain projectile based upgrades however). Further upgrades increase weapon spread by 25% per level.
-Big Spender: The weapon gains 50% more damage, but its ammo cost is doubled. Both bonuses are doubled on future level ups: 100% more damage and 4x ammo cost, 200% more damage but 8x ammo cost, etc.
Not sure how I feel about these, but I think they'd all be possible to implement, at least; I'll spend a while rotating them in my mind.
-Reduced Spread: Reduces spread of hitscan weapons by 10% per level. Caps at level 5.
-Increased Fire Rate: Increase weapon rate of fire by 10% per level. I admit I dunno how easy this to implement with the universal upgrade style you're aiming for.
-Suppressor: Reduces weapon noise and distance per level. At level 5, the weapon becomes completely silent.
These were all part of my original design doc, but aren't possible to do in a general way -- they need to be implemented specially for each weapon you want to support -- so I scrapped them.
-Critical Hit: 10% chance to increase weapon damage by 50% when firing. Unlocks Critical Damage and Critical Chance upgrades which further improve these. Critical chance is +5% chance per level, caps at level 8. Critical Damage increases the damage bonus by 5% per level and caps at level 10.
-Critical Gamble: Reduces non critical damage by by 50%, but boosts Critical Chance by 5% per level, and Critical Damage by 10% per level. Caps at Level 5.
-Free Shot: 5% chance to not consume ammo per level, caps at level 10.
Also something I'd never thought of -- apart from the selection of upgrades you get on level-up there is very little randomness in this mod. That said, as currently written Critical Hit is strictly worse than the basic Damage upgrade -- the numbers would all need some tweaking. Also, bear in mind that those caps are really high; in my experience it's rare for a weapon to get above level 10
in total over the course of a megawad unless it's a slaughterwad or you're using it very heavily at the expense of the rest of your arsenal!
There's definitely potential for more variety in character upgrades too, I think:
-Better Healing: +1 Health from Health Bonuses, +5 Health from Stimpacks, +10 Health from Medkits per level. Caps at Level 5. Rare upgrade
-Charged Shots: When not firing, the damage of your next shot increases over time. Starts at 50% with a 25% damage gain per second. Upgrades increase max charge and charge rate by 25% per level. Rare uipgrade.
-Stronger Armor: Adds +5% to green armor protection value and +10% blue armor protection value per level. rare upgrade.
-Sneak Attack: Adds 50% damage when striking an unaware enemy. Damage increases by 12.5% per level, caps at level 4. Rare upgrade.
There's no concept of "rare upgrades", but I guess that could be done by (e.g.) rolling a die in IsSuitableForPlayer() and only returning true on some rolls. That said, remember the player upgrades take a lot longer to earn than weapon upgrades; a sufficiently "rare" upgrade may never appear. (For calibration purposes, I just finished a 100% kills playthrough of Ashes Afterglow on Arcade -- the UV equivalent -- and reached the credits with 10 player upgrades in total, one of which I earned during the final boss fight.) If I want an upgrade to be hard to get I prefer adding non-random requirements, like having other upgrades as prerequisites, or making it mutually exclusive with other upgrades.
As for the specific ideas -- Better Healing is, I think, weaker than Scavenge Blood in most maps. Stronger Armour might be difficult to implement in a reliable fashion, or even impossible, but I don't understand the armour mechanics as well as I might like, either. Charged Shots and Sneak Attack sound neat, although I'm not sure if they make more sense as player or weapon upgrades -- Charged Shots in particular won't do much on a chaingun or a pistol but would be really spicy on a rocket launcher or SSG.
Also, is there any way one could add overrides to the upgrade list for specific weapons? In case a certain weapon just ends up being TOO good with certain upgrades? (Looking at the MetaDoom EKG pistol, which is way too easy to make overpowered for a basic pistol, give this thing some piercing, fragmentation, and submunitions and becomes way too beastly for a low end gun)
Not yet, but that's one of the features I'm working on for 0.9.0, and it's almost done -- I've been using it locally already to apply some mod-specific patches, and when it's done it'll be used to both ship a set of default compatibility tweaks with Gun Bonsai itself, and provide an easy way for players (and other modders) to tweak things further.
That said, I'm not planning to nerf the EKG.
I probably
should finally make good on my threats to make Piercing mutually exclusive with Bouncy and Fragmentation, though, and probably also have Fast Shots as a prerequisite for it.
Anyway, regardless of if these ideas have any merit and end up being something you can use, I'm looking forward to seeing where this mod goes!
I'm glad you're enjoying it, and thanks again for all the feedback!
