Re: DOOMablo: a looter-shooter DOOM (0.4.1a - Heal Me)

[Darkbeetlebot]

If I could make a suggestion, I think that as of the most recent beta build, super shotguns are honestly kinda terrible. More specifically, their damage scaling is way worse than the regular shotgun.I've consistently found that the super shotguns only deal about 50% more damage, but eat twice as much ammo. For example, I have a level 47 super that does 25-816 and a regular shotgun at level 44 that does 23-500. Meanwhile, in vanilla, the super shotgun does 3x as much damage as the regular on average. I don't know if this is an intentional design decision, but I think ammo in this mod is too scarce (or rather, enemy hp is too high) for the super shotgun to be any good. Especially since its accuracy is worse.

Edit: Disregard super shotgun point, the bulk prefix is just incredibly powerful and I forgot I had it.

As far as armor scaling, I rarely ever find myself switching up armor. Between levels 1 and 50, the only difference is the durability. Which is fine, but I think more could be done with it. Maybe making their secondary effects stronger? Because armor bonuses are so abundant that max durability only really matters for the energy shields which I predict will be the best choice for armor at high levels.

Other than those two things, and also the fact that the self destructing and teleporting enemies royally infuriate me, I'm enjoying this a lot. The only bug I've found so far is that for some reason, I could have two different BFGs at once.

Also, to fix the whole problem of making sure the player is properly equipped for their level, here's an idea: If you have a way to look up the level of the equipment the player is picking up, you could then take the minimum/maximum/median/mean level of their items and scale enemies based on that instead of the player's level. failing that, I've found that with the current system, my equipment is usually about 5-1 levels behind me at any given time, with super rare ones behind about 10-5 levels. So you could just scale based on player level -5.

[sidav]

Thanks for the feedback!

Edit: Disregard super shotgun point, the bulk prefix is just incredibly powerful and I forgot I had it.

I think current SSG balance is really somewhat off. That's because it wasn't rebalanced for the scaling, so SSG still has the stats as if it expects +dmg bonuses. I think I could nerf the bulk prefix somewhat and give the SSG higher base pellets count, or +1 damage. I'm also considering making bulk independent of the item level as well.

As far as armor scaling, I rarely ever find myself switching up armor. Between levels 1 and 50, the only difference is the durability. Which is fine, but I think more could be done with it. Maybe making their secondary effects stronger? Because armor bonuses are so abundant that max durability only really matters for the energy shields which I predict will be the best choice for armor at high levels.

Yeah, I'll think what can be done with it. Currently the "to-go" way is unbinding some affixes from the item level, just as with the weapons. That alone can make earlier armors better, But in case of armors it's really a tougher task to make it properly. Some trial and error will be involved.

Other than those two things, and also the fact that the self destructing and teleporting enemies royally infuriate me, I'm enjoying this a lot.

Do you mean the enemies which fire projectiles on death? I think what can be done with them. The one way is to make some telegraphing of their death attack, and the easier one is to lower the projectile speed.

I could have two different BFGs at once.

Let me guess... Do you have BFG2701 and the usual BFG at the same time? If not, could you please share your savefile?

Also, to fix the whole problem of making sure the player is properly equipped for their level, here's an idea: If you have a way to look up the level of the equipment the player is picking up, you could then take the minimum/maximum/median/mean level of their items and scale enemies based on that instead of the player's level. failing that, I've found that with the current system, my equipment is usually about 5-1 levels behind me at any given time, with super rare ones behind about 10-5 levels. So you could just scale based on player level -5.

So you suggest making the inferno level dependent on player's equipment? That's an interesting idea, thanks! I think the books may be left there as an item which raises the level on top of that, but they should be more rare then. The downside is that the general progression will be considerably slower for the player.
How do you feel in general about this progression? Is it the right direction? I have to redo the status effects because they are not scaled right now, and it's constantly postponed because I'm still not sure if the levels' scaling is good (and if not, remaking status effects will simply be a waste of time now).

[Darkbeetlebot]

Upon closer inspection, I do in fact have the BFG2701. Very neat, didn't realize that was in there. It's awful just as that one video about it said it would be, but it's cool to have nonetheless. As for the enemies that fire projectiles on death, one of the bigger problems with them is that they can sometimes spawn in areas where you can't dodge their death attack. There was one map in I think Thy Flesh Consumed with a baron of hell that entered a teleporter into a room that only had that was extremely tight and enclosed, containing only enough space for the baron and the player. It wouldn't go back out, so I had to teleport in, nuke it with a BFG, and eat like 90% of my health in damage immediately. It would be great if they had some sort of obvious particle effect to show they explode, but it doesn't eliminate that other problem. The only thing you can really do against it is using the crouch key in GZdoom, and not everyone has that feature enabled.

The armors, however, are a bit tricky. You can't make enemies do more damage as you increase in level because the player doesn't get more health, and therefore you can't make them increase in durability or damage reduction much as the item level increases. If this were like borderlands you could just give them more durability and have them absorb all or most damage, but it's not. Come to think of it, it would be cool to have the energy armor reduce 90-100% of damage so that it actually acts like BL shields. I usually find myself just not picking them up because of their insanely low durability and slow regen coupled with the fact that I can get blue armor that protects around 75% AND benefits from armor bonuses, whereas the energy armor needs a mythical effect to get any benefit from them.

As for the progression in general, I actually really like it. The only bad thing is that new weapons at your level can be a bit scarce and I don't feel like there's a huge difference between rarities. I'd like if the rarities not only guranteed more affixes, but also a higher chance of good ones. Quality already determines how strong affixes can be, right? I was taking a look into the code with SLADE and couldn't make total sense of it, but I think that's what's happening. The biggest problem I've found with the affixes is that the effects are generally too low in magnitude to mean much of anything, though that may just be a case of them not being scaled properly yet as you said. Especially as far as backpacks go, the changes to their ammo capacities are either ridiculous or barely noticeable. It's extremely variable.

Speaking of backpacks, I found that the bullet weapons in this mod are just kinda really weak. It's a combination of low damage + low ammo capacity. The backpack and clips still give vanilla amounts, and I found that increasing the base bullet capacity to 300 or 400 actually helped a lot and made them more usable compared to the plasma rifle which was previously my main weapon. The only other thing that needs to happen is increasing the amount of bullets that clips give, which I don't know how to do even after extensively going over the code. I'm not that familiar with Zscript, you see. I think starting with a 50% increase in available bullet ammo and seeing how that feels for everyone would be a good first step. Either that or increasing the base damage of the bullet weapons to more resemble the vanilla 5-15 range. Maybe the pistol could be 7-18, SMG 5-15, and chaingun 4-12 in that scenario. Just keep in mind while balancing them that I've found the chaingun to be very finnicky with its windup, and the SMG tends to be the much more practical choice. Especially if you get a high fire rate affix that makes it fire as fast as the default chaingun.

Oh, and the biggest issue with the SSG vs the shotgun is that the SSG has 16 pellets compared to its vanilla 20, and compared to the shotgun's 7. This in addition to it having -1 max damage. This means that the regular shotty literally only needs the lowest possible bulk prefix roll to become more efficient than the SSG. I tried increasing the SSG pellet count to 18, meaning you would need at least a +3 bulk roll on the shotty to make it as good which is just about average. You may even want to bring it back up to 20, but if you do I'd recommend setting the bulk prefix to be less impactful for the super. I got a near max roll SSG after making this change that fired 32 mini rockets and could instantly kill cacodemons 5 levels higher than it.

Edit: I just got from level 70 to 90 and it took me this long to realize something really big: Berserk packs are literally useless in this mod because the punch's damage doesn't scale with anything. You miiiiiiiiiight want to make the punch scale damage off of level like the weapons do.

[sidav]

Thanks for such a thorough feedback. I'm working on those right now.
Currently done (the build is not updated yet):

• SSG slightly buffed, I agree with your suggestion about pellets count
• Fist damage is now scaled
• Energy armor rebalanced:
  • Base recharge delay is now 7.5 seconds
  • Base recharge delay is scaled with armor level even without any affixes (and the related affix is now cumulative with it)
  • Recharge speed affix logic changed (it now uses real speed, not the delay);
  • Recharge speed and recharge delay affixes' values both are now random, with more extreme values progressively more rare to roll. Item level influences the minimum and maximum values of those affixes' random rolls.

I think it's becoming interesting enough right now. Previously affix values were much less random, as their strength was directly dependent on the item level. It led to low-level items being different in very minor numbers indeed. Now you can theoretically roll some lvl1 energy armor with delay and speed comparable with common lvl50 one, although it would be very rare.
I like the results so much that I'm now thinking of reworking many of the affixes on all the items in the same vein. The general idea is to make affix values random in range [X..Y], and let item lvl influence the X and (to a lesser extent) Y. Also, such reworked affixes should roll not the direct value (like, +5 pellets), but the percentage for modifying the base value (like, +20% pellets). If the base value which the affix is influencing is scaled, it will combine progression with occasional great items which will last longer than their level would suggest.
I think I'll try it with the backpacks. Let them scale their base capacity, and change all the affixes to be plus or minus some percentage. Let's see how good it is.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Thanks for such a thorough feedback. I'm working on those right now.
Currently done (the build is not updated yet):

• SSG slightly buffed, I agree with your suggestion about pellets count
• Fist damage is now scaled
• Energy armor rebalanced:
  • Base recharge delay is now 7.5 seconds
  • Base recharge delay is scaled with armor level even without any affixes (and the related affix is now cumulative with it)
  • Recharge speed affix logic changed (it now uses real speed, not the delay);
  • Recharge speed and recharge delay affixes' values both are now random, with more extreme values progressively more rare to roll. Item level influences the minimum and maximum values of those affixes' random rolls.

I think it's becoming interesting enough right now. Previously affix values were much less random, as their strength was directly dependent on the item level. It led to low-level items being different in very minor numbers indeed. Now you can theoretically roll some lvl1 energy armor with delay and speed comparable with common lvl50 one, although it would be very rare.
I like the results so much that I'm now thinking of reworking many of the affixes on all the items in the same vein. The general idea is to make affix values random in range [X..Y], and let item lvl influence the X and (to a lesser extent) Y. Also, such reworked affixes should roll not the direct value (like, +5 pellets), but the percentage for modifying the base value (like, +20% pellets). If the base value which the affix is influencing is scaled, it will combine progression with occasional great items which will last longer than their level would suggest.
I think I'll try it with the backpacks. Let them scale their base capacity, and change all the affixes to be plus or minus some percentage. Let's see how good it is.

No problem, I only want the best for the mod.

I was playing it earlier today, actually, and I realized something. Having reached level 100, I found that for some reason, all the guns had a totally ludicrous amount of knockback that made it really hard to consistently hit enemies, especially cacodemons because just one shot from any gun made them catapult all over the place. That alone is probably an issue, I'm not sure if it's intended or not, but it also made me realize: the mod considers higher knockback to be a positive trait, when that's not always the case. Especially with chainsaws. I looked at a bit of the code in SLADE again and found something about higher rarities being associated with more positive affixes. Now I'm not well versed in Zcode, so maybe that's wrong, but I think it should count as a neutral affix rather than positive or negative if you're going to be separating them into groups.

And that also brought me to an idea: Why not make a whole class of affixes that are neutral? Maybe they could be like a mutator, where they alter the behavior of the gun in such a way that changes its role. For example: Thumpers in the original borderlands that reversed the normal traits of an SMG with three simple changes: Drastically reduced fire rate, drastically increased damage, and increased accuracy. They wouldn't even need to be particularly complicated, just having two variables being changed at once would work out. I suppose it could cause some issues with mutual exclusivity of effects and displaying stat changes, but if they could stack on top of existing affixes without any conflicts, it'd be a great addition to make some guns more unique.

[sidav]

I've been playing a lot of Diablo 1, 2 and PoE2 for inspiration lately. I'm still thinking that I love Diablo 1 more than any other Diablo game because of its progression not being that much tied to farming. Yeah, the itemization is much more boring, but you can just play for an hour and progress in the game without the need to spend hours of doing boring runs in hope of that exact thing to drop... Meanwhile, I'm still getting my ass kicked in Act 3 of D2 because I don't have the items which would work with my build.
D1 linear structure also shows what the progression should look like here for Doom.

Well, nostalgia aside, it's time to work. I've updated the current build, the changes are in the pre-release description.

I was playing it earlier today, actually, and I realized something. Having reached level 100, I found that for some reason, all the guns had a totally ludicrous amount of knockback that made it really hard to consistently hit enemies, especially cacodemons because just one shot from any gun made them catapult all over the place.

Wow, thanks for drawing my attention to this. It was because the actual knockback depends on the damage and thus gets scaled along with the level, and I've missed this fact in my code. There are two ways of fixing this, both with their caveats. I've tried the first of them in the current build. It won't resolve the problem, but it should make it much less impactful.

I'm not sure if it's intended or not, but it also made me realize: the mod considers higher knockback to be a positive trait, when that's not always the case. Especially with chainsaws.

You should never ever have a target kickback affix on a chainsaw, there is a separate check for that (and it was there before the update). If you still have it, please let me know.

And that also brought me to an idea: Why not make a whole class of affixes that are neutral?

There already is a logic for that, but it's not really used yet. I've made the kickback affix neutral in the current build just to test it.

Maybe they could be like a mutator, where they alter the behavior of the gun in such a way that changes its role. For example...

I have a very neat idea about similar change made the other way around, but I think it should wait until the current rework is over.

[Darkbeetlebot]

I've been playing a lot of Diablo 1, 2 and PoE2 for inspiration lately. I'm still thinking that I love Diablo 1 more than any other Diablo game because of its progression not being that much tied to farming. Yeah, the itemization is much more boring, but you can just play for an hour and progress in the game without the need to spend hours of doing boring runs in hope of that exact thing to drop... Meanwhile, I'm still getting my ass kicked in Act 3 of D2 because I don't have the items which would work with my build.
D1 linear structure also shows what the progression should look like here for Doom.

Well, nostalgia aside, it's time to work. I've updated the current build, the changes are in the pre-release description.

I was playing it earlier today, actually, and I realized something. Having reached level 100, I found that for some reason, all the guns had a totally ludicrous amount of knockback that made it really hard to consistently hit enemies, especially cacodemons because just one shot from any gun made them catapult all over the place.

Wow, thanks for drawing my attention to this. It was because the actual knockback depends on the damage and thus gets scaled along with the level, and I've missed this fact in my code. There are two ways of fixing this, both with their caveats. I've tried the first of them in the current build. It won't resolve the problem, but it should make it much less impactful.

I'm not sure if it's intended or not, but it also made me realize: the mod considers higher knockback to be a positive trait, when that's not always the case. Especially with chainsaws.

You should never ever have a target kickback affix on a chainsaw, there is a separate check for that (and it was there before the update). If you still have it, please let me know.

And that also brought me to an idea: Why not make a whole class of affixes that are neutral?

There already is a logic for that, but it's not really used yet. I've made the kickback affix neutral in the current build just to test it.

Maybe they could be like a mutator, where they alter the behavior of the gun in such a way that changes its role. For example...

I have a very neat idea about similar change made the other way around, but I think it should wait until the current rework is over.

Thanks. Come to think of it, it may have just been the damage scaling knockback that was causing issues with a chainsaw that already had a decreased range modifier. Either way, I'll load up the latest test build and tell you what I think.

Edit: I found an incompatibility. For some reason, Damage Direction Overlay causes a VM abort when sometimes getting hit, spitting out the error: Tried to read from address zero. Called from DmgDirOvEH.WorldThingSpawned at DmgDirOv.pk3-dmgdirov-zs/handler.txt, line 138


I only get this when I run Doomablo and DmgDirOv together, so I'm pretty sure it's just that they don't get along. I'm gonna try the other damage indicator mod to see if it works.

Edit 2: Played through the first and second episodes of Eviternity. The forced pistol start thing was annoying to get around, but I figured it out eventually. My main takeaway so far is that the balance is getting to a pretty good place, but I think the main problems right now are that the bullet weapons and energy shields still feel super weak. The main culprit being the minigun. The SMG and pistol I think feel good, if still low damage, but the minigun never really feels like it has a use. It burns through its entire clip in seconds and barely does enough to kill a single normal hell knight if you're lucky. On top of that, the spin up, spin down, and reload times combine to make the gun have very poor handling. On paper it should be good since it has a much higher DPS than the SMG, but in practice it can't do things like door fighting or peeking out of cover well. To use it, you have to stand out in the open within line of fire and pray there are no chaingunners or archviles. So on plutonia this gun would be so absolutely awful that it's almost unusable. A high fire rate SMG makes it obsolete in every way. So I think that overall the bullet weapons should just all get increased base damage, but the minigun specifically should either remove its spinup, remove its spindown, both, or increase its mag size. Because right now it operates like the brutal doom minigun but slower and without its situationally extreme DPS and ammo consumption.

[sidav]

Happy New Year everyone! I've pushed a new test version.
The target of this update is making low-level affixes more impactful and to consider scaling in more places. Most of the affixes have higher possible stat spread even before the level is taken into account, so that you may now find really useful and varied gear on lower inferno levels.
- Reworked almost all of the remaining weapon affixes (only BFG remains untouched for now)
- Reworked all backpack affixes
- Backpack base capacity is now scaled with level
- Chaingun slightly buffed (+1 base max damage, shortened "stopping spin" sequence). I hope the newly reworked affixes may help it compensate for its caveats.
I think after BFG affixes rework this version can be released if no major bugs are there.

Edit: I found an incompatibility. For some reason, Damage Direction Overlay causes a VM abort when sometimes getting hit, spitting out the error: Tried to read from address zero. Called from DmgDirOvEH.WorldThingSpawned at DmgDirOv.pk3-dmgdirov-zs/handler.txt, line 138

Thanks for the report, but for now it looks like some hard to fix incompatibility, as the thrown error traceback points to the damage indicator mod, not to DOOMablo. Did you try changing mod load order?

Update: Updated the version again. Reworked BFG affixes, added two settings to game options (scrap item keybind and a possibility to disable "jumping items"). I think it's the next alpha release candidate now.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Happy New Year everyone! I've pushed a new test version.
The target of this update is making low-level affixes more impactful and to consider scaling in more places. Most of the affixes have higher possible stat spread even before the level is taken into account, so that you may now find really useful and varied gear on lower inferno levels.
- Reworked almost all of the remaining weapon affixes (only BFG remains untouched for now)
- Reworked all backpack affixes
- Backpack base capacity is now scaled with level
- Chaingun slightly buffed (+1 base max damage, shortened "stopping spin" sequence). I hope the newly reworked affixes may help it compensate for its caveats.
I think after BFG affixes rework this version can be released if no major bugs are there.

Edit: I found an incompatibility. For some reason, Damage Direction Overlay causes a VM abort when sometimes getting hit, spitting out the error: Tried to read from address zero. Called from DmgDirOvEH.WorldThingSpawned at DmgDirOv.pk3-dmgdirov-zs/handler.txt, line 138

Thanks for the report, but for now it looks like some hard to fix incompatibility, as the thrown error traceback points to the damage indicator mod, not to DOOMablo. Did you try changing mod load order?

Update: Updated the version again. Reworked BFG affixes, added two settings to game options (scrap item keybind and a possibility to disable "jumping items"). I think it's the next alpha release candidate now.

Very exciting update. I'll go ahead and try it out with another megawad playthrough, this time of Maps of Chaos. And as it turns out, changing the load order of those mods did actually apparently solve the problem. Idk what was causing it, but oh well. I also tried out the previous update with Gun Bonsai and Colorful Hell because I have a death wish. It very quickly became mindless chaos, although that's mostly their fault. This mod's level scaling does work with colorful hell but it works a little TOO well, you basically have to have an OP mod like gun bonsai to even compete.

But anyways, I think everything so far is in a very comfortable place. The chaingun is now much more usable, and has enough ammo that it can do its niche without being a burden. It's quite good for the more slaughter-y maps. Haven't gotten one of the BFGs yet, but I had a thought: The beta BFG that your new one is modeled after had the gimmick that it would bounce off of ceilings and floors. Perhaps you could add that in to make it better? It's still pretty good here, basically just a superpowered plasma rifle, but it wastes a TON of ammo just missing. Other than that, the only thing I can think of to recommend is some more mod options. Maybe some stuff to turn off and on various affixes (i.e. Blink and Revenge enemies, which frustrate me to death [literally]), adjust the drop rates, maybe set the occurence rate of certain rarities or the magnitudes of the effect rarity has on weapons, or even alter the level scaling? Just spitballing here. You could probably accomplish all of that by making those things into global variables that can be altered in the options menu. That way you could still have the default intended balance while allowing sticklers to adjust the balance to their liking and therefore avoid a few potential angry forum rants.

Edit: Finished Doom 2 MOC in a single night, got to level 92. I can say with confidence that blink and revenge enemies absolutely need a rework. The blink enemies have a nasty habit of breaking intended map progression, such as allowing the cyberdemon from The Living End to teleport on top of you and instagib you without warning while you're still only halfway through the level. Bosses in general probably should have restrictions on what affixes they can have. Another example is that the chaingunner archvile sentry nests in Plutonia are completely broken if even one of them spawns as a blinker. For revenge, there are many times where an enemy spawns in an enclosed hallway or wanders into one, and your only option is to kill it to get past, but doing so triggers revenge and you die from the fireballs. Doesn't help that there's no telling it'll explode unless you go out of your way to look up at its health bar. I also felt like the BFGs are really weak, but maybe I just rolled badly on them. Reloading definitely needs to be at least twice as fast as it is now. Still running out of bullet ammo pretty easily, but it's at least manageable. I also found that the homing bullets don't always work as intended and will oftentimes just dumbfire for no particular reason. If I had any suggestions besides these balance changes after this playthrough, it would definitely be to make the high rarities rarer but significantly stronger and to give the energy shields either a much shorter recharge delay/higher recharge rate or a much larger capacity, perhaps in the 50s to start. Could also make them recharge off armor pickups like that one affix they can have. I feel like right now they really don't match the pacing of most doom maps. The game is demanding you go through it quickly, not take your time and wait for your shield to recharge. That said, it's also relatively easy to get a blue armor that goes up to 80% protection with that one affix that gives you bonus absorption for repairing it consistently, and I was only finding energy shields that surpassed that in the final level. I also found one that spawned with the "no license" affix that made it functionally useless because it would degrade in durability faster than it could regenerate. These changes would make it much more viable to do harder wads than just vanilla doom.

[jewelryguy]

I registered an account just to post this, as I've been waiting for a looter shooter mod for doom for a while.

Something I think that has been overlooked and is quite important to balancing the game is the reloading being locked. There should be a way to either cancel a reload to switch to another weapon or have some kind of melee attack that works during reloading. With the small magazine sizes and monsters with lots of health on the later levels it's way too easy to get trapped in a reload, unable to do anything. It would make the mod more fast paced. You could even go so far as to allow reloading to continue out of sight, regardless of realism. It's not a tactical shooter afterall.

Anyway just some suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to make this!

[Darkbeetlebot]

I registered an account just to post this, as I've been waiting for a looter shooter mod for doom for a while.

Something I think that has been overlooked and is quite important to balancing the game is the reloading being locked. There should be a way to either cancel a reload to switch to another weapon or have some kind of melee attack that works during reloading. With the small magazine sizes and monsters with lots of health on the later levels it's way too easy to get trapped in a reload, unable to do anything. It would make the mod more fast paced. You could even go so far as to allow reloading to continue out of sight, regardless of realism. It's not a tactical shooter afterall.

Anyway just some suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to make this!

Actually, I have to agree with this. I'm about halfway through Doom 2 MOC on UV, and this mod absolutely cannot even remotely handle anything slaughtery. The amount of times I've been killed either because the enemy had a monstrous amount of health or because I was stuck reloading are too many to count, though my deaths in general are also too high. That's just how these maps are, to be honest. And I also figured out that I actually had armament tuning's double ammo on half the time I was playing, so after disabling that I am actually still becoming very anemic in ammo. On tricks and traps alone, I had to resort to chainsawing 4 barons of hell and praying to god they flinched. So I think either some buffs to reload speed and ammo pickups are in order, MOC is an asshole mapset, or we need character levels like what Gun Bonsai has. But less absurdly brokenly powerful. I mean seriously, the version of that mod I have, you get like +50% fire rate for ONE upgrade.

[sidav]

Thanks for the feedback. The problem is, I mostly played OG Doom 2 when developing the mod, that's maybe why it fails to provide consistent progress for more slaughter-y maps (which I by the way dislike, but the point of the mod is to be playable with most map packs regardless of my personal preferences).
I think I'll indeed make blink and revenge disable-able for the time being until I find a solution for their issues. Also, cancelable reloading is another needed thing.
I also have an idea for an option which allows weapons' damage ramp up faster than the monster HP does.
I'll think what can be done with BFG and energy shields as well. Stay tuned.

[Darkbeetlebot]

I also have an idea for an option which allows weapons' damage ramp up faster than the monster HP does.

That would be highly appreciated. It would definitely help the issue of worrying about whether a player has underleveled weapons. I'll note that when it comes to that issue, I usually find myself with weapons about 5 or so below, with maybe 2 of them being on par with the enemies. I don't know how much of a % damage difference that is, but probably a good place to start. And yeah, about the maps, I'd personally make sure that at least Plutonia HMP is possible since that's a pretty old hard official wad. And if you're bad at it, I'll definitely take a swing at it either way when I'm not busy.

[sidav]

And it's here. https://github.com/sidav/doomablo/relea ... prerelease
Changes:

• Energy Armor buffed even more: increased base capacity (15 -> 25), base capacity is now also slowly scaled with level;
• All base BFG damage stats buffed
• Blink monster affix nerfed: blink now occurs 2x less frequently
• Revenge monster affix nerfed: decreased projectiles min and max speed, max projectiles fired count lowered (10 -> 5), projectiles accuracy lowered;
• Added an option to disable Blink and Revenge affixes altogether
• Added an option to slow down the monsters' HP scaling
• Minor menu changes

Instead of ramping weapons' damage up, I've made slower monster HP gain, because it's easier to do for some technical reasons. In the end, it should really have the same effect. You now have the slider in the settings. I ask you to play with various values to find an optimal one, and feel free to tell if it's still not enough. Keep in mind that given how the scaling work, the effect of the slider is progressively more noticeable on higher inferno levels (you should see little to no difference on levels 1-10 regardless of the slider setting). If this setting works not so good, I'll think of another formula.
I have no idea how to make interruptible reloading properly yet, but it's still pretty high on the to-do list.

[Exibius]

I have no idea how to make interruptible reloading properly yet, but it's still pretty high on the to-do list.

If I recall correctly, Brutal Doom and some other mods already utilize this feature. Could always just look at the code of some other mods for reference on how they implement it and brainstorm ideas on how to do it for your own mod.