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

[sidav]

Hello. I still can't work as much as before, but this time I have dawnbreez on my side, who helps me to bring you some fresh, distilled and organic fun. Thus being said, the new version is there, with many sweet changes!
The most important one is the lift of one-suffix constraint for items. Do you want a backpack which regenerates you both the bullets and cells? An armor which both heals you and repairs from your blood? A weapon which is both vampiric and fires flechettes? It's all now possible!

With sword and shield of adamantine strength, the Doom Slayer set to banishing all that were left unbroken by his savagery to the void.
For he can wield a Railgun now.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Hello. I still can't work as much as before, but this time I have dawnbreez on my side, who helps me to bring you some fresh, distilled and organic fun. Thus being said, the new version is there, with many sweet changes!
The most important one is the lift of one-suffix constraint for items. Do you want a backpack which regenerates you both the bullets and cells? An armor which both heals you and repairs from your blood? A weapon which is both vampiric and fires flechettes? It's all now possible!

With sword and shield of adamantine strength, the Doom Slayer set to banishing all that were left unbroken by his savagery to the void.
For he can wield a Railgun now.

Hello, Sidav, I see you're still struggling with Plutonia. I unfortunately don't have much advice, plutonia is just a ballbuster. Even after over 10 years of dooming I still have trouble with it.

That said, awesome update. I was actually completely burnt out from nearly everything and haven't been able to get any work done, but here comes Doomablo to save my day! Will provide feedback when I beat another wad.

Edit: I finished a wad. I think the railgun might be a touch too expensive to fire. I found myself not wanting to use it oftentimes because the plasma rifle felt more efficient and I didn't have many cells to use. Tweaking it to cost 10 cells made it feel much better. LOVE the new chaingun, though. If there's anything else I can say, it's that some of the affixes feel like they should have a higher scaling floor. Such as the potion effects that give you a buff for a certain amount of time. Most of the ones I get like that only give you the buff for like 3-7 seconds, which isn't enough time to do anything with. Come to think of it, I hardly ever find myself using the big potions due to their cooldown and very small amount of health recovery. The only time I need to use a potion is when I'm in a very bad pinch, and the medium flasks are way better for that. And the small flasks let me chainsaw safely because of how long their duration is, really good for the rage pinkies. The only time the big ones are good is in wads that don't have many healing items because you can just stockpile a huge amount of uses and use that as your periodic stimpak. But even then, the small one fills up so quickly that by the time it's off cooldown, it's filled up again. So I think either reducing the big flask's cooldown so you can spam it a bit more or increasing the amount of charges that the small and perhaps medium flasks use per drink (and therefore how much they need to get filled up).

[sidav]

A new version is there.
I've added new affixes as well as a possibility to reroll bad affixes on an items (via a very rare consumable). So if you've encountered a good artifact with a fly in the ointment, with some luck you can fix it.
Railgun got buffed, and several other rebalance changes are there as well. As usual, the full changelog is on GitHub release page.
Enjoy!

[jackalope]

i really like this mod, so far. its great. my only real complaint is that theres no real level up notification. like theres the text in the corner, but itd be nice if there was a sound or something so i know midcombat

[Darkbeetlebot]

It's difficult to find a huge difference between the last version's balance and the current one. I will say the railgun feels much better, but you might have overnerfed the armor things? I'm not sure if it's just my low level while playtesting resulting in weaker effects in general or what, but I usually find them (specifically flat damage reduction) to be a non-factor in my choices. Only thing that one's good for is dealing with hitscanners. The BFG2703 buff was not one I expected but it's welcome nonetheless. Certainly makes slaughter wads easier. That said, I just want to focus on the new item with my testing for now.

The one huge flaw I find with the tome of change is that it's opaque with how it specifically works, mostly in regards to how it chooses what affixes it changes. When I use it on weapons with two or more, I often just find myself praying it picks the right one, which leads to a lot of savescumming. I mean, I already savescum, but this just makes me want to do it more. I don't know how hard it would be to make a UI pop up on use that lets you select what you want to change, but that would be good if it were possible. Also, is there a hotkey to drop your equipped armor/backpack/potion? I'm not aware of one that exists, and that means that when I do pick up a tome, I can't use it on any of those until I find another one to swap it out with so I can look at the old one and use the tome on it.

I welcome the tome's existence though. It fixes a pretty glaring flaw with the whole system. What I'm currently wondering is what affixes would be able to be detached from the leveling system so they can have a larger range of values at any level, because one thing I don't like is how in the really early game, the effects on affixes are so small that they barely have any impact. Will have to make a list of them next time I play. I think that maybe having player HP scale with level instead of a skill point upgrade and having enemy damage scale with it would open up a lot of design room, too, though that might be a bit too much of a task since it would require a lot of tweaking. (I've worked on RPGs before, and those are one of the more annoying things to balance.) That and I don't know if the technical limitations of doom 2 prevent player HP max from going beyond 200. I know I've seen mods before that let you have thousands though, like Russian Overkill, so it should be possible.

[stainedofmind]

Finally got around to testing this wonderful mod again! Been several versions since I've been able to, so I've been getting to experience the Flank for the first time, as well as the Railgun and new pickup. Feedback so far:

I don't know how hard it would be to make a UI pop up on use that lets you select what you want to change, but that would be good if it were possible. Also, is there a hotkey to drop your equipped armor/backpack/potion? I'm not aware of one that exists, and that means that when I do pick up a tome, I can't use it on any of those until I find another one to swap it out with so I can look at the old one and use the tome on it.

I'd have to agree with both parts of this. The pick up is rare enough that it would feel better to be able to pick which affix to reroll. I've only picked up one so far, and the reroll was lackluster at best. To further that, being able to drop currently equipped things, or somehow rework the pickup to allow for direct selecting of the item you wish to apply it to (maybe directional keys?) would be nice.

I wasn't able to do a full run through, but I was finding myself pretty underpowered the farther through I got. Not being able to find decent BFG level weapons probably wasn't helping mind you. I keep finding myself wanting the ability to level up really good weapons/armors/flasks/backpacks/etc that I find. Maybe some kind of combining functionality? I dunno. I know I've brought it up before.

Either way, I still really enjoy this mod, and I really liked the addition of the Railgun! Only found one and it was fairly weak, but I'm looking forward to a new run through and finding a better one.

Also, as an aside:

That and I don't know if the technical limitations of doom 2 prevent player HP max from going beyond 200. I know I've seen mods before that let you have thousands though, like Russian Overkill, so it should be possible.

Since sidav isn't trying to go for full universal compatibility (expect monsters of course), this is very trivial to add luckily!

[sidav]

Wait, do your HP not exceed 200? Even with a high Vitality? It's a bug then, as I've made max HP ignore default Doom constraints. Need to investigate. When exactly does it break?

[stainedofmind]

Wait, do your HP not exceed 200? Even with a high Vitality? It's a bug then, as I've made max HP ignore default Doom constraints. Need to investigate. When exactly does it break?

Just did a quick test, healing (normally, not with overhealth via blue vials etc) worked fine for me at 203 max health via vitality upgrades.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Wait, do your HP not exceed 200? Even with a high Vitality? It's a bug then, as I've made max HP ignore default Doom constraints. Need to investigate. When exactly does it break?

Oh, I wasn't reporting that it did that in my runs, just stating that I know doom traditionally limits your HP to 200. I pretty much never level up vitality, so I haven't noticed it being unlimited. I don't think I've seen it get higher with soulspheres, though. I still need to test if Intelligent Ammo/Pickups has any conflicts with this.

[dawnbreez]

Wait, do your HP not exceed 200? Even with a high Vitality? It's a bug then, as I've made max HP ignore default Doom constraints. Need to investigate. When exactly does it break?

I actually noticed this a while ago and have been too busy dealing with IRL/personal stuff to address or report it--health bonuses and soulsphere/megasphere health caps at 200 regardless of Vitality. The health cap for those items is defined in the items, not in the player, so replacing the player doesn't change their behavior.

There's a couple different ways to address this, but I'm still getting my brain back in order after dealing with a bunch of emotional turmoil (long, complicated, very personal story--I won't get into it here), and I still have a bunch of other stuff I was working on that I want to finish working on, like figuring out what to do about the weapon spawner command.

(I kinda want to make all health pickups scale with Vitality--that is, make it so that medkits heal 25 percent health instead of a flat 25 health, so buffing Vitality also improves health pickups. As it stands, between bonuses not respecting your new max health and regular healing items not scaling with it, building for tankiness simply doesn't make sense compared to improving loot rolls or crit chance.)

[sidav]

I kinda want to make all health pickups scale with Vitality--that is, make it so that medkits heal 25 percent health instead of a flat 25 health, so buffing Vitality also improves health pickups.

A neat idea. I've did it for the current version, added to the releases just now.