[0.10.6] Gun Bonsai -- everything-compatible weapon upgrading

[eternaldreams]

Absolutely love the concept of this mod but Paralysis is absolutely busted. Against a single enemy with even a moderately fast weapon, the enemy will be completely stunlocked to the point you can kill a Spider Mastermind or a Cyberdemon without it ever firing a shot in return (speaking from experience - I've done both these things). I think paralysis should be a percentage chance based on the pain chance of the enemy, or should have some kind of cooldown so an enemy can't be stunlocked completely.

[Dan_The_Noob]

Absolutely love the concept of this mod but Paralysis is absolutely busted. Against a single enemy with even a moderately fast weapon, the enemy will be completely stunlocked to the point you can kill a Spider Mastermind or a Cyberdemon without it ever firing a shot in return (speaking from experience - I've done both these things). I think paralysis should be a percentage chance based on the pain chance of the enemy, or should have some kind of cooldown so an enemy can't be stunlocked completely.

or you could play harder levels.
everything is overpowered in this mod.

[Gourry]

https://imgur.com/a/dUJHFNO

Got the lightning (thunderbolt) crash again with PB 3.0. Maybe not compatible for some reason? Using gzdoom 4.8.2

Load order:

TNTR.wad
Project_brutality-master.zip (latest)
libtooltipmenu-0.2.1.pk3
GunBonsai-0.9.4.pk3
flashlight_plus_plus_v8_5.pk3
target-spy-v2.0.1.pk3

[Dan_The_Noob]

what even is thunderbolt? lol i have never even seen that come up as an upgrade ever.

[Gourry]

It's from the lighting stun upgrades. It blasts damage from above from what I've seen.

[eternaldreams]

Absolutely love the concept of this mod but Paralysis is absolutely busted. Against a single enemy with even a moderately fast weapon, the enemy will be completely stunlocked to the point you can kill a Spider Mastermind or a Cyberdemon without it ever firing a shot in return (speaking from experience - I've done both these things). I think paralysis should be a percentage chance based on the pain chance of the enemy, or should have some kind of cooldown so an enemy can't be stunlocked completely.

or you could play harder levels.
everything is overpowered in this mod.

That's an extremely silly way of looking at balance - you're basically suggesting that you only use this mod with hard slaughtermap wads, which is very limiting - but the problem is not that it's simply "overpowered" -it's BROKEN. It's overwhelmingly the best choice and also extremely boring to use. There's no reason not to make it less ridiculous.

[Dan_The_Noob]

That's an extremely silly way of looking at balance - you're basically suggesting that you only use this mod with hard slaughtermap wads, which is very limiting -

i'm suggesting don't use overpowered mods then complain they're too powerful...

but the problem is not that it's simply "overpowered" -it's BROKEN. It's overwhelmingly the best choice and also extremely boring to use.

notice you used the word "choice" maybe you should not "choose" it

There's no reason not to make it less ridiculous.

maybe because it's not actually ridiculous for everybody? shock is barely useful except against solo bosses in most cases or killing things that you should already be killing in 2 seconds anyway.

you could also increase how much EXP you need to get level 1 which doubles every level after.

[MrPyrite]

Fun Fact: when combined with War Rooster, the "Increased Firing Speed" upgrade doesn't actually upgrade the gun's fire rate, but inreases the RELOAD speed, which makes weapons like the m60 less taxing to use since I can load the weapon up with bullets faster.

[Shatter-Thought[V-4]]

I have a few more ideas to suggest:

I sometimes feel like I would like to dump experience points into a new weapon I get that I know I'm going to use more exclusively, and I thought of a few ways to implement something like this:

1: A player can block access to a weapon for a period of time to increase experience points overall. The more weapons you block, the more the percentage increase goes up, but it's very slight, so you have to block about 3-4 weapons to really make it matter. The block can last for a good ten minutes or so.

2: an actual level transfer, but you can only transfer half the levels of one weapon into another, and that weapon loses everything from it's level to upgrades.

3: A mechanism where you can weaken a chosen weapon's damage output by half or so, and temporarily block all powerups on it, but it increases xp gain for it by double or so, for a good minute or so.


Lastly, an odd idea but I think it would be a fun option some would enjoy: An option to have the weapon go through a brief upgrade animation. It would be relatively simple, having a copy of the ground sprite for the weapon being upgraded spawn in front of you, about mid-waist of your character, and having a tiny little sprite or particle show that has it upgraded before the copy disappears and you can use it again.

I realize that sounds odd, but I think a few people would like it because it can make it a little more challenging to upgrade a weapon, since you have to take pains to upgrade it out of sight and mind of monsters or other hazards, and the animation/ritual could be relatively quick so it's not annoying, like 5 or so seconds.

[stainedofmind]

In regards to paralysis, I'd have to say I agree with eternaldreams, as I've been finding myself avoiding it as it a complete game changer. I also feel like a percentage based chance would be a good modification of it.

[ToxicFrog]

I played Stronghold and noticed huge lag spikes after using SSG with Embrittlement, Chain Lightning and Elemental beam upgrades. Other upgrades were Rapid fire and Damage. Could it possibly be some actors spawned by one of these upgrades causing all these lags? Even bouncy shots don't cause this much lag.

Chain Lightning and Elemental Beam are both very particle-heavy, and Chain Lightning also has some gnarly zscript to implement the chain. I should probably implement a "disable particles" option and see if that helps; even if it doesn't that will at least help me narrow down where the problem is.

-if a player is using the upgrade menu and the stage ends, they are locked out of upgrading for the rest of the wad even after restart/loading (some kind of token given when opening menu getting stuck or something?)
-fragshot is super laggy when fired near pain sector liquids or paired with corruption cards (on hit) effects such as shields and acid blood
-revivify shock effect can also cause some intense lag depending how many things are killed simultaneously
-submunitions seem to cause minimal lag until you get too many of the same upgrade stacked, maybe can change them to cause more damage or something instead of spawning extras?

This is another place where you can see that I did not design this with MP in mind -- the level ending while someone has the upgrade menu open is not something that ever occurred to me as a possibility. You're pretty much right on the cause; when you open the upgrade menu it sets a field on the player used for ui/playsim coordination on the upgrades that also acts as a mutex on the upgrade menu (so you can't end up with two upgrade menus stomping on each other), and that gets left in place on the level transition.
Also, "fragshot is super laggy when fired near pain sector liquids" is completely baffling to me. I have no idea how to even start debugging that. Earlier versions of frag shot used hitscans and I switched to fastprojectiles because they looked a lot nicer, but maybe I should revisit that decision... :/

Hard cap on the number of submunitions and increase damage instead is probably also a good idea.

https://imgur.com/a/dUJHFNO

Got the lightning (thunderbolt) crash again with PB 3.0. Maybe not compatible for some reason? Using gzdoom 4.8.2

I thiiink I see what's happening there -- the way Thunderbolt works is that it damages the enemy immediately, and spawns the aux object to generate the actual lightning bolt effect, which it does by zipping around underneath the enemy using A_CustomRailgun. In vanilla this is fine because even if the damage killed the enemy, the actor still exists, it's just dead. If PB changes things so that the actor is removed from play immediately (possibly replaced with a cloud of gibs or something), the aux actor fails to lock onto it and crashes.
What I should probably do (and which might improve performance anyways) is to replace the A_CustomRailgun stuff with a fancy lightning bolt sprite and just plop that down at the target's feet; I just hate sprite wrangling...

what even is thunderbolt? lol i have never even seen that come up as an upgrade ever.

One of the two lightning capstone upgrades, the alternate to chain lightning -- stack enough lightning on an enemy and it loses all of its lightning stacks and takes a huge amount of damage.

In regards to paralysis, I'd have to say I agree with eternaldreams, as I've been finding myself avoiding it as it a complete game changer. I also feel like a percentage based chance would be a good modification of it.

I'll gnaw on it some more; historically I've had a lot of trouble striking a balance between "eternal stunlocking that makes 1:1 matchups too easy" and "slowdown/temporary stun effects that are too weak to actually be useful and sometimes don't work at all".
One thing I've toyed with is swapping Thunderbolt and Paralysis: the first lightning upgrade gives you periodic damage bursts as you apply stacks in the form of lightning strikes, and then one of the capstone skills adds a temporary paralysis effect to that. Would still need some tricky tuning to make it not an auto-win button, though. It's possible that there's no way to make it work well and I should completely rethink that effect into something else, like some kind of magnetism field that pushes enemies away from you and towards each other or something.

As far as balance goes, this mod does make the game significantly easier and I do generally assume that people playing it who still want some challenge will be either (a) playing on a higher difficulty than they normally do or (b) pairing it with other mods or map packs that increase the difficulty more generally like CC, Champions, Colourful Hell, Legendoom/LDL; that said, I also want to make sure that none of the upgrades in this are so powerful that they warp the whole game around them, or so weak or fiddly that there's no incentive to take them. So I do appreciate the feedback!

[Dan_The_Noob]

-if a player is using the upgrade menu and the stage ends, they are locked out of upgrading for the rest of the wad even after restart/loading (some kind of token given when opening menu getting stuck or something?)
-fragshot is super laggy when fired near pain sector liquids or paired with corruption cards (on hit) effects such as shields and acid blood
-revivify shock effect can also cause some intense lag depending how many things are killed simultaneously
-submunitions seem to cause minimal lag until you get too many of the same upgrade stacked, maybe can change them to cause more damage or something instead of spawning extras?

Earlier versions of frag shot used hitscans and I switched to fastprojectiles because they looked a lot nicer, but maybe I should revisit that decision... :/

Hard cap on the number of submunitions and increase damage instead is probably also a good idea.

Ya, hitscans would work perfectly. you can have thousands of hitscans active.

In regards to paralysis, I'd have to say I agree with eternaldreams, as I've been finding myself avoiding it as it a complete game changer. I also feel like a percentage based chance would be a good modification of it.

I'll gnaw on it some more; historically I've had a lot of trouble striking a balance between "eternal stunlocking that makes 1:1 matchups too easy" and "slowdown/temporary stun effects that are too weak to actually be useful and sometimes don't work at all".
One thing I've toyed with is swapping Thunderbolt and Paralysis: the first lightning upgrade gives you periodic damage bursts as you apply stacks in the form of lightning strikes, and then one of the capstone skills adds a temporary paralysis effect to that.

can you branch electric in the middle? so the branch would go
1. lightning strike
2. paralysis OR chain lightning
3. revivify.
because revivify is not super useful either way in most cases. but also being able to chainlightning and paralysis would make it a worthwhile decision.

[Starman the Blaziken]

(At Dan)
Saying revivify is quite underwhelming? I do like it, at least when the proc occurs on a former dead corpse. Not exactly often which is sadly a bit of a downside to it. I do feel like it could use something... But I am not sure what.
Aside from comparing it to paralysis where I do believe it could use a tweak like a cooldown someone mentioned not long ago, or perhaps something else and just because it can be a bit of a go to for auto weapons that can really make an annoying boss a big dorky dork.

[Dan_The_Noob]

(At Dan)
Saying revivify is quite underwhelming? I do like it, at least when the proc occurs on a former dead corpse. Not exactly often which is sadly a bit of a downside to it. I do feel like it could use something... But I am not sure what.

the concept of revivify is cool. but the fact this mod is basically for making stupid hard stuff into fun hard stuff means the revived enemy usually just dies right away or contributes to lag in some cases (though this is much more rare)

[Starman the Blaziken]

(At Dan)
Saying revivify is quite underwhelming? I do like it, at least when the proc occurs on a former dead corpse. Not exactly often which is sadly a bit of a downside to it. I do feel like it could use something... But I am not sure what.

the concept of revivify is cool. but the fact this mod is basically for making stupid hard stuff into fun hard stuff means the revived enemy usually just dies right away or contributes to lag in some cases (though this is much more rare)

Yeah, that is right where I agree to. Mostly in the case as it may still be one or two of them versus the hoard, but generally lack any buff to probably make them as worthwhile as I see really.