DOOMablo: a looter-shooter DOOM (v0.8.0a - Smooth, but not quite silky edition)

[Darkbeetlebot]

Okay, finally got the free time to actually test out the latest version. Here are my takeaways:

1. Enemies feel extremely bulky right now, especially at higher levels. I think this is primarily down to the prevalence of +Health, Undying, and Armor affixes on them. In my playthrough I ran into several epic tier enemies that had this exact combination, most being health +200%, undying 4-7, and armor 30-50. They were damn near impossible to kill and took nearly all of my ammo, but didn't actually drop anything worth killing them for unless I got very lucky. I think maybe monsters shouldn't be able to have both +health and undying, either that or take the approach Nightmare Reaper did for this problem and have +health enemies drop ammo periodically on hit while undying drop more ammo when killed.
2. Higher rarity enemies just aren't worth it to kill. There's no inherent reward to them, and the items they drop tend to be worse than what I currently have equipped.
3. Ammo feels a lot less scarce now, but is offset by the bulkiness of the rarer enemies.
4. Thorns damage is really hard to tell that you're being hurt by. I often accidentally used the chaingun on these enemy types and was shocked to see that my health suddenly vanished with no indication that it went down. Also, thorns enemies heavily punish rapid automatic weapons which are already bad. Not sure if that's intended.
5. I found myself almost never wanting to use a turret over potions. They just don't seem that effective. They don't die too quickly, but they do run out of time before they can do much damage, and have trouble with large groups because of how long they take to retarget.
6. I also found myself not wanting to use the auto-shotgun, pump shotgun, pistol, chaingun, or the BFG variants very often. The auto-shotgun was frequently too ammo-inefficient to the point that even though I was playing a slaughter wad I still felt it wasn't worth the increased DPS when I could just use the SSG, rocket launcher, or gauss rifle. It was good at stunlocking isolated bossees, though. The pump shotgun just got completely outclassed by the other shotguns and I never found a slug variant, or I would've used that. The chaingun just tended to waste ammo and was useless against armor affix enemies, which ended up being pretty common. Wasn't really strong enough to deal with heavier enemies before they could kill me, and too inaccurate to use at range. The BFG variants had a very unique problem where when the appropriate level, they were fine, but they were so rare that they quickly became underleveled and it was hard to find updated versions. The automatic one also has such a long and unwieldy wind-up/down that most of the shots I fired with it missed or were total overkill. The pistol meanwhile was technically good, but just wasn't enough to deal with a slaughter wad and the revolver was better for sniping anyways.
7. I felt like with the inclusion of armor repair kits and how often they dropped, it was a bit pointless to use energy armor. Mostly because with the way doom armor works, they would go down in just one or two hits and then take forever to come back up, being unable to take armor bonuses as recharge in the meantime. They worked great against a stray cyberdemon missile, but that's about it. They are technically strong options, but are very unreliable when they need to be. Regular armor with good affixes was just objectively better for this type of mapset. Energy armor either needs a buff in its reliability/capacity with level or works better on more standard maps.
8. The assault rifle over the SMG was a good change, IMO. Its firing sounds are much better and the reload animation is superior to the usual jostling animation.
9. I never encountered a single status inflicting gun or flechette gun, which was disappointing because I wanted to see if flechettes were good now.
10. I liked the addition of the new effects for the strength leveling option, but I did not see a discernible difference when leveling up rare item chance (could be attributed to gradually increasing it).
11. I'm not sure what the EXP curve for leveling is like, but given the upgrades are strictly linear, I think a linear growth curve would work best, or anything really just as long as it roughly matches how the monster XP curves. I ultimately thought that even though I got to about level 90, there just weren't enough skill points to distribute where I wanted. I ended up mostly investing into vitality and strength, no criticals, and a little bit of rare item chance. I would've liked to more evenly spread things out, but health felt too important to not get to 200 ASAP.
12. I frequently found myself wishing the artifact screen would show my entire inventory and not just what I have currently out.
13. I also found myself wishing the mod had a class system similar to DRLA. If you add this, do keep the standard doomguy with no modifiers as a class.
14. I pretty much never used the grenade launcher either, even though I used it a lot last time I played. It's only really good for cheesing monsters from around a corner or behind cover. Otherwise it has a tendency to get me killed.
15. Enemies with Undying had a very nasty habit of teleporting right next to me on death and immediately attacking with what was usually an instant kill. It was extremely frustrating. Thank god for the resurrect cheat.
16. In 30 maps, I don't think I ever got any of the unique weapons. I did get one called Blazkovic's Shotgun or something that fired heavy slugs, and it was... kind of bad. I liked it but it was pretty hard to use, a bit too inaccurate. Don't know if that was one of them. What made it the worst was that the projectile got caught on decor a lot unlike hitscan slugs, and there was a LOT of decor to get stuck on.
17. Higher rarity weapons would probably benefit from being abnormally strong in some way. I more often preferred to use uncommon and rare weapons at an appropriate level compared to legendaries or even mythicals because the affixes absolutely did not make up for the raw damage loss of like 4-6 levels between maps. And most of the affixes I got on them were just bad. Could potentially be broken, but even some positive affixes aren't worth taking. Like increased knockback on an automatic or reduced recoil on semis.
18. I'm starting to wonder if the dynamic of DPS = Ammo Inefficient was a mistake, because I keep falling into the Stealth Archer trap of only using the safest possible weapons as a form of loss aversion (the high damage, low fire rate ones like the revolver, SSG, and gauss rifle). And that's weird because I normally don't fall into that, even in Skyrim where it's most prevalent for anyone else. Reminds me of a critique I saw of bethesda's balance philosophy with Fallout 4 where they would proportionally decrease a gun's base damage if it was made automatic. And all this did was make automatic guns terrible because they get less bullet per bullet and nothing in exchange, then the armor system made it so that only really high base damage mattered unless you had some broken legendary effect like explosive or bleed. I wonder if that's applying here, and if there should be some other drawback instead of base damage for the privilege of having high fire rate. Realistically that would be either accuracy or recoil, but I don't know if that would be fun or just annoying.

That's all I can think of in the moment. It may sound like a lot of complaints, but I generally enjoyed my time and am just trying to nitpick ways to improve the mod. I might try it with an enemy replacer (angelic aviary, rampancy, or colorful hell) next to see if it plays nice, though those tend to be really difficult compared to vanilla. If I had to prioritize suggestions, I'd say that I'd love to have a class system the most. Doesn't need to be anything fancy, just something to spice up repeat playthroughs. Aside from that, a starting level/inferno level option for debug and testing purposes would be great. I also think a multi-shot affix for weapons that lets them shoot multiple shots at once with increased ammo cost would be pretty cool, though I'm worried it'd just become the next meta one that you have to have on a gun to make it good (just look at how good Bulk is for shotguns). It would definitely be funny, though.

Thanks to such thorough feedback. I'll continue reworking all this stuff when I'll have some time for the mod.
In general, did the update make the mod better or worse in general?

Given I was able to get through an entire 30 map mega-slaughter-wad in about a couple days, I'd say it's a definite improvement overall. Generally, the quality has only gone up over time. I'd reckon that these issues are just ones that have always been present.

[sidav]

A new release is here, it's built around some of Darkbeetlebot's feedback. Most of the weapons are buffed, and are now not that weaker than the vanilla counterparts. The whole thing is horrible to balance properly without your feedback, but it should be much more enjoyable for slaughter wads now anyway.
Also I've added smooth animations because why not non-vanilla weapons were smoother and it was not consistent.
Have fun!

[Mini--Joe]

Hey, this mod gradually builds up a massive FPS loss for me. I thought it was because of dynamic lights, but I simply couldn't figure out what was actually dropping frames. Right now I can't play this mod because the performance is so bad.

[sidav]

Hey, this mod gradually builds up a massive FPS loss for me. I thought it was because of dynamic lights, but I simply couldn't figure out what was actually dropping frames. Right now I can't play this mod because the performance is so bad.

Please give me the list of other mods you play this with.

[Mini--Joe]

I am using the current version of Uzdoom, running with this mod and "CChest.wad"
Further testing revealed the map I was playing on seems to somehow be the culprit: the first map of "The Community Chest Project 1" has something about it that, when loaded with this mod, makes the game aggressively drop frames. This doesn't seem to happen with other mods.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Had to take a break from testing this because my damn mouse broke. Have a new one now and very excited about the new update! For this test, I am making an obsidian megawad which is just a little bit slaughtery. I'll be trying to use exclusively energy armor and turrets. I'll also just immediately be spawning enough items to get the level scale really high, since that's where most things tend to break when you're number crunching if they have an issue.

Stat affixes are now in effect even for unequipped weapons.

Holy shit, way to give me something I didn't know I wanted. I think. It's been a while since I last commented. This makes stacking a bunch of weapons with this affix for a particular stat actually a viable strategy, and really cool.

Energy armor base stats buffed.

It is pretty damn good now, I must admit. Though I got lucky and found a mythic one really early. The only issue it has it's not really that different from normal armor witht he regeneration aspect. The low delay is nice and all, but I think it would be more fun if it provided something like a hit and run playstyle by maybe inverting the dynamic between recharge rate and delay. Make the recharge rate be like maybe 5-10% of the shield's max capacity (or about like 6-8x its current rate) but make the delay two or three times longer. So that way it can alter your playstyle at a core level instead of just being spicy armor. Maybe you could make it an affix or maybe a second type of shield? Just test run that and see how it plays, I think it could be good.

Enabled decals for all the weapons. It required a divine revelation for me to notice they were missing.

This + the monsters having tints depending on rarity has made it SO much easier to tell what I should be looking at, at a glance. Thank you for this.

Added smooth animations for most weapons and projectiles. The sprites are taken from Smooth Weapons Enhanced v3.2.1 by NightFright / Nash. I haven't found any license for the mod, so I guess I may use it (and it's based on another mod, which I didn't find the license for either). Full credits are included in sprites dir.

Another good change, I especially like the plasma rifle's reload animation.

Pistol was reworked again. It won't consume ammo from now on (still needs to be reloaded, though) and its rate of fire now depends on how fast you click the mouse. Alt-fire war removed as it's inherently worse now.

Another good one. The pistol is now really good on stingy wads without being a pathetic peashooter. Reminds me of playing with Final Doomer.

Turrets are buffed.

Tried using them and... yeah, they're alright. I'd say they're about on par with potions now, although maybe they could use a small duration buff? One change I'd advise is to make them able to be walked through by the player, if possible. running into them while strafing has gotten me killed on a few occasions. They also seem to have a weird issue with not shooting at monsters sometimes? I think it might be something to do with height difference but I wasn't able to figure out what was causing it.

Added an overpowered unique armor.

I managed to actually get this one. Not as OP as I thought it would be, but uh, yeah. Definitely pretty insane. The regen this thing is about the idea for the energy shield I proposed (but really strong), and it confirmed what I thought, that it's a cool playstyle. It's just that this armor is itself really overpowered, lmao.


Also, I got a Tesla Plasma Rifle on my test run, and it just completely obliterated everything. It might need a...small nerf to its crowd control abilities. Needs more testing. I like that I can carry enough ammo to actually be able to afford picking up backpacks that don't exclusively have the highest possible capacity. The mild loss of damage from homing bullets also is no longer a dealbreaker, so I've been using them a lot more. I also received in this run what I believe is possible THE best affix combo obtainable in the mod at present. At least, it's the I've encountered. A super shotgun with Leadstorm and Slugshot. It is genuinely better than the OP armor because it just deletes anything I point it at.



Just to be clear, don't remove this. It's extremely rare and funny. If you want to, you could make it a unique weapon.

If I could propose an addition: It would be cool if we had an artifact slot for something like class mods. Instead of having preset classes, you could do this (though you could do both if you feel up to it). Basically, just an artifact that provides a themed bonus to your general stats and mechanics independent of what you have equipped. For example, an explosives-based class mod that improves the damage of rocket and grenade launchers, regenerates rockets, and significantly reduces splash damage to self. Maybe a chaingunner class mod that specifically enhances the chaingun's functions and regenerates bullets. Maybe even an Evil Dead mod that's themed after abusing the chainsaw and Super Shotgun. Those sorts of things.

Another idea: Try making the more unique affixes such as the rockets, homing bullets, poison damage, slugshot, etc. more common. They're fun to use, but I don't come across them that often.

[sidav]

Thanks for your feedback! I'm glad you like the changes.