First, I want to tell you that I instantly fell in love with this mod once I saw it on youtube back when it wasn’t even released, even though it’s a bit opprobrious scurrilous and offensive for me. This mod seems to bring me hope that it would finally be a mod that I always dreamed to play even from my very young age and will grow into some a truly awesome mod that I would love all of the time if it won’t be dropped way too early in development, even if it’s marked as “finished”, because I always dreamed to play as Pure Wizard where magic is balanced to really powerful, or even overpowered sci-fi like guns that are fun to use too.
To be honest, I’m here to say that magic seriously needs a huge improvement, optimization and fix to make some of them to be even functional. And in all honesty, I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only one who discovers some issues with it as well. Yes, I’m that guy (one of) from YouTube.
Yeah, I gotta admit that I do in fact don’t like how this mod treats magic and wizards overall, and late updates been only to support and upgrade weapons only, yet some of the recently implemented features don’t even work for magic. Let’s be honest, the whole mod, just like the gameplay itself seems to force you to use weapons most of the time while the dragon guy is randomly eructing cringeworthy moaning about “wazards” and I feel like it’s trying to give you a feeling of guilt to you for even considering using magic or even loving to use magic. Doesn’t mean I hate the mod, though. Although, I would sincerely love and appreciate it if the development team would give magic some love too.
But unlike what PillowBlaster seems tend to assume that we all want just to “buff the living shit out of it”, in reality, according to youtube comments, people there, just like myself, sincerely wish that magic get as much love as guns do have. Sure, magic has it’s own pluses, like you’re immune to any sort of attack and effect of your own magic and it has slow regeneration of mana, but it’s still so much inferior to guns in it’s current state and mostly can be used merely for support rather than offense, and relying purely on magic is way harder than relying purely on weapons if you prefer one of those subjectively out of your own preference.
Some magic of course feels powerful enough and doesn’t need a change at all, yet some of them feel really weak and some just is completely worthless or bugged. But most important, I really would appreciate if all magic could just ignore of the unintended undeserved unfair and agitating damage resistances and immunities that some of the enemies do have by default, when; as even cyberdemon for some weird reason no longer has splash damage resistance of rocket explosives, especially TNT and Old Dreadful where one kills it in second, the other kills in single shot even in dragon difficulty. Because, some of us may have our favorite spells that we would like to use all of the time, be that Hitchcock’s birds or just beginning’s weak spell like skullfire, that unfortunately, a lot of enemies have resistance against in all different games along to it’s sticky flames it leaves for no reason and undeserved, even though the spell itself is so weak that it often doesn’t even kill single imp in direct hit and flames gets instantly extinguished in the water, although flammable liquid and some of solid objects like lava that I assume is used as part of that fireball (skullfire) is still burning even if it’s in water in real life.
Yet, some of the magic while they look powerful and useful, still have a few bugs and issues that most definitely need to be addressed. For example:
- I have witnessed that Annihilation has invisible wave stream of rays that hits anyone in your vision, same like of vanilla BFG9000 in doom 1 and doom 2 games when the ball hit the wall or any other surface including NPC. Although, it doesn’t always work for some weird reason, you either need to be close to the enemy while ball hit far away in the wall, or too far from enemy yet make the ball hit at any surface at any distance, while if you’re too close to the enemy or way too away it doesn’t work all the time like it should, but only does at mysterious circumstances for me. Would be lovely if this issue get addressed and the ball would work just like the vanilla BFG9000’s ball’s invisible wave stream of rays that hit anything in your vision that you can see in your point of view.
- Skypunch often bugs out and doesn’t work as intended, and I feel this issue happens even more in latest version of Guncaster. Enemies on dragon difficulty completely ignore the effect of it that makes enemies be stunned and making them unable to shoot you, which is pretty much the main feature of this spell and reason why anyone would ever use it. It sometimes makes enemy confused for a second, but then they start continuously spamming at you like they weren’t even stunned. This issue makes the spell be not just worthless, but deleterious and harmful for yourself, since you wouldn’t want to launch a bunch of chaingunners in the sky to hit you with constant hitscan while it could take you more time to kill them in the sky rather than kill them all with single explosive splash damage on ground. This bug sometimes happens in lesser (easier) difficulty as well, and in recent version it feels like it happens even more often. In addition to that, any flying enemies, or those that can just soar on floor seems being completely immune to it and do not even get fixated in the sky, although it seems to be intended to do so, at least it would be fair and make sense; although in lesser difficulty other than dragon they get some block that doesn’t let them attack the player like all other stunned enemies have. Those issues need to be solved as well.
- Chillgrasp is quite a nice spell (although it feels like some enemies have unintended resistance against freeze damage, some do even have some immunity against it which sort of pisses me off a lot, but the issue with resistances and immunity I already addressed earlier anyway, so I won’t elaborate about it much), nicely powerful and overall fun to use and can be used more than just support, even though it cost so much and drains mana fast. The issue with it is that some of the frozen enemies don’t explode in to ice splash damage boom like they intended to do once their frozen corpses either get shot or damaged by anything else, either it’s timer is over. I honestly don’t know how and why this happens, but it happens quite often. Would be nice if it gets fixed too.
- Scourgebreath costs a lot, has huge overwhelming uncontrollable recoil once fired, has a really very short range and soaks mana waaaaaay too fast in very short time, although it deals a quite nice amount of damage for all this suffering. However, for it to be truly useful and effective to begin with, you gotta get at point blank to the enemy, aaaand this is where the spell doesn’t even work at all. The spell, for some odd reason, doesn’t even shoot fire if you’re too close to the enemy or especially at point blank, yet a very close range spell with huge recoil and super fast mana drain is only effective at point blank anyway. For some reason, after a few tests I performed, this bug doesn’t occurs in previous versions of the mod. This needs to be fixed ASAP, because it makes the spell not even functional and hardly any use in real combat, even as a support element when you get trapped by enemies, although it must be used as primary offensive weapon as well if you really like this beautiful fire, and I feel like the spell is not good enough itself to begin with. it deals more DPS than Sheepshield but it still inferior to it as Sheepshield drains less damage and works at point blank. I would like if it act more like a real flamethrower, i.e. would have longer range, leave some fire on ground after itself like Skullfire, and set enemies on fire that would cause them constant DoT (Damage Over Time) damage, since it’s possible to create in new GZDoom and Zdoom without modify the enemies itself from what I heard.
Other spells however feel just too weak or worthless.
- Gunpop for example seems to be like just a clone of skullfire with faster projectile speed that falling on ground over distance but slightly less damage and no ground fire, although all the targets that are at very low hp that get hit by it will get expanded in their size and their corpses explode which gives a nice visual effect that was obviously was borrowed from Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition Microwave Expander weapon, yet used mostly like skullfire as it does no actual damage effect once their bodies explode like in actual DN3DAD. So what I suggest is that exploding corpses of enemies actually damage other enemies around it like it did in DN3DAD, making that corpse explosion caused by Gunpop should do as much damage as corpse explosion caused by Corpse Blast in current state, so it would make spell more useful and have unique feature and thus unique use of it, it as well will make spell actually make sense since the corpses go boom, and corpses that exploded by Corpse Blast spell actually harm enemies that are near those corpses while have exact same animation and visual effect of corpse explosions, so it would make things fair as well.
- The Corpse Blast, however, is waaaaaaaaaaay too gimmicky spell and in most situation is just completely worthless, and even as joke spell it’s just not fun to use at all. You’re forced to kill enemies with guns first for this spell to be even effective, as you cannot use it on demand to harm enemies around you, even if you were obligated to kill enemies with guns, you’d still have to trick enemies to walk on dead corpses, which is sort of hard considering bad AI of those games, and after all this, it only have a single use that is not anywhere deadly even if enemies stay on corpses. The idea of the spell is really awful, and could only appeal to those who have gut fetish, a.k.a. brutal doom fanboys who just love catsup pasta being scattered all over the map a lot. The spell just recently has been reworked to throw projectiles and cause a little damage, so it just became a more gimmicky and even much weaker gunpop and skullfire.
I do sincerely feel like this spell needs an overhaul, and unlike some people that want it to be removed and replaced with completely different spell, I say it just needs a real improvement. As for improvement, I would use the idea of Jitterskull: “make this magic skill actually destroy enemy corpses of any sort. I mean, it can blow up dead corpses, so why it shouldn't destroy corpses of alive things?? It's same corpse after all. What I'd suggest is to bring back the old big AoE attack that spawns from your body like in older versions of guncasters before it turned in to launcheble projectile, but instead of just exploding corpses, it would actually damage and pain the enemies all around you. It could explode light-tier enemies in one blow (zombie-like enemies and imps) and would do some serious nice damage to all other enemies while cause them pain (pain stunlock) while demolishing their guts from within, since it's their corpses anyway and so maybe it would cost more mana to use, at least it won't be so boring and worthless spell to use”. Personally, it would be great if it could toss this projectile with this some area of effect splash radius AND have body’s area of effect explosion around you like it did pre 2.6 versions at the same time while damaging enemies all around at the higher cost of mana and probably price of spell, this way it will be no longer just an bad clone of gunpop and skullfire. It should still explode corpses as additional, for those who just like to clean map out trash, but now the spell become actually fun to use, useful and overall balanced compared to other spells in game.
In fact, both ideas are written by Jitterskull, but who cares, they are pretty good and I like them anyway. - Firespit is overall just too weak and close to completely worthless. It hardly deals damage, soaks much mana, have tiny range, have huge delay between breath, have even bigger delay before attack compared to other spells (at least it feels like it is, although a little), and instead of letting enemies hug the fire, it just gently push them a little backward which won’t save you from anything. Sure, it’s the beginning spell that you get for free from the very start, although it's not really an excuse for the spell to be worthless, since it inferior to even in melee and especially kick, both of which doesn’t need mana nor anything to use, yet do both more damage and DPS alone, and kick as well can push far away even tanky enemies like IronLich and Arch-Vile; and even while it’s tomed it’s still very obsolete. While to use boots you doesn’t even need them to be selected unlike Firespit, you can always use it all of the time if you just binded a single button. I would like if Firespit at least didn’t push enemies all around but make them get full damage of the spell by making the fire go through them all and let them burn. However, I would like as well to suggest for boots to kick and knockback enemies like in Dark Messiah, and if that would be too hard to implement for Guncaster, I would give it a bigger punch force so you could punch away even more tanky enemies like Baron of Hell and Maulotaur away from yourself. Could be a good trade off since you lost gentle pushing effect from the Firespit, while the player would still need the ability to push enemies away from himself once they gets ambushed.
The guns seems to be really overpowered in comparison with magic (not a big surprise, after all it’s PillowBlaster’s mod). I beat both Hexen and Heretic using only weapons and no magic at all on hardest difficulty, as well Doom mod Hell Revealed 2 since it had lots of enemies, especially at late levels and quite nice map design.
The minigun feels very powerful and has way too much ammo for it, especially considering that backpacks stacks ammo limit by default, and Ironblast is even more overpowered. I beat all of those games using mostly Pulverizer and Ironblast, and there wasn’t even much of need for that overpowered “ball” mode attack, which is really fun actually, but wasn’t that necessary so I often tend to forget about it. Ironblast as well can be used for super rapid fire when you have dual-wielding, there is some bug that can be exploited: if you fire the left one ironblast, you can switch weapons instantly if right ironblast is idle, then switch it back to have another instant fire and instant switch back. You can use it back and forth as you with for constant rapid fire spam. It doesn’t work if you fire the right one and the left one is idle for some reason, so I presume it’s just an unintended bug and probably will get fixed.
So unlike the overused and unreasonable fallacy that PillowBlaster seems to spew out, only because magic doesn’t cost ammo, doesn’t mean you can’t get out of mana, as even with maximum upgraded mana pool and maximum upgraded mana regen rate, you will often find yourself defenseless even just in middle of intense fight even if you had full mana once you enter that fight which makes it rather very unpleasant situation for you if you try to rely purely on magic; while with weapons you have huge ammo limit that can be infinitely upgraded and instantly filling ammo pickups that you will find often in most maps, and since Guncaster has much stronger weapons in comparison with vanilla one, you’ll get much more ammo than you actually need. I never out of ammo for any of them, although I just “W+M1” and often shoot walls constantly by simple holding the fire button and never release until I sure everyone is dead in a room, even if most of the time I just shoot walls while looking for enemies. The generic argument that magic has regeneration of mana and thus must be weaker and used mostly as support is a very bad excuse, considering that you won’t out of ammo even if you try to spam around mindlessly like trigger-happy idiot and use the most powerful weapons in the game.
Sovereign is an absolute overkill, only used it a few times against huge horde of baron of hells and TNT mode used only against boss-tier enemies as it kills Cyberdemon merely in a matter of a second, fully ignore it’s splash damage resistance somehow. And Old Dreadful… Do I even need to say anything? lol. I think I used it just for fun or messing around since it would just clean map in a single shot. Either way, the ammo in Guncaster is NEVER a problem, since it’s close to impossible to get out of ammo rather than mana regardless it’s regen, which even at maximum upgrade it’s not too fast anyway. For those who just like to constantly shoot walls in random directions or just mess around and waste all the ammo in the sky, I would just suggest to sell ammobags at the shop, or even sell backpacks with ammo in it which would increase your ammo limit beyond 9999 if you decided to do a full weaponry mode and investigate all the money in to the weapons and ammo rather than the magic, this way you could never out of ammo even if you shot walls for hours non-stop, and thus the gun users wouldn’t have any excuse to keep magic be always inferior to guns, or keep them merely as support role.
Like I said earlier, some of the magic is actually really nice and powerful for offense or certain situations of combat. Arguments like “I think I killed Korax on the second highest difficulty with like 5 shots from the non enhanced ravens” are invalid and irrelevant since guns can kill Korax even faster. A simple TNT spam or two non charge, non tiberium powered Old Dreadful shots by spamming the floor or wall kills Korax on the HARDEST (dragon) difficulty easily (I really do not recommend kill him in one shot for your own good) and does this job even more easier than any of the magic. Hitchcock's Birds and Frostbite are actually one of those decent spells that shouldn’t be changed in the slightest, other than of course, removal of the damage resistance and immunity of some enemies if they have one. Not to mention that at Korax battle map (map40) in original HeXen, you have literally infinite ammo supply on this map anyway, so any argument about that magic has regeneration of mana and thus must be inferior compared to guns in power is absolutely irrelevant. In fact, the weapons, especially Old Dreadful is so overpowered, that when I first played HeXen with Guncaster full playthrough, I just used charged attack of non tiberium powered Old Dreadful and shoot at the floor in the center of map and the explosion blast was so powerful, it instantly killed Korax in a single moment once it hit the floor and I was trapped there forever and there was no way to escape other than make dragon guy kill himself and replay the level again; I didn’t even knew this would be possible in HeXen! This is why you shouldn’t instakill Korax. I have no idea why would anyone even use tiberium core ever when a charge attack of Old Dreadful that is not busted with tiberium core is already so powerful that it could instakill the highest HP enemies in the game even across the room. But let’s be realistic, I always found Korax to be a really weak final boss. He feels really squishy for a final boss and can be killed with any kind of weapons, even beginning ones. I killed him with Wraithverge in like only 7 shots of mindlessly spam and I think I killed him with Quietus even faster, both on hardest difficulty, although Bloodscourge is obviously weaker than those two so it took me much longer to kill Korax as Mage, so I end up using Sapphire Wand once I out of ammo. After replaying the boss part, he dies real quick both from Arc of Death, Hammer of Retribution and Firestorm. Plus in Doom and Heretic games you can just always buy a new ammo for Old Dreadful in the shop for just 500 coins anyway, although for some reason it is bugged in the HeXen. Hopefully it will get fixed too.
Also... “those youtube comments sound idiotic and pointless……. muthafukn”… Seriously???... How is that not even against the forum rules to leave such things here?? And yet PillowBlaster conclude that “those kind gentlemen (people from youtube, including me, that leave those comments) don't have guts to confront their opinion in a non-rude way on the forum board”, lol… In reality, those youtube comments were being fairly polite and objective in their arguments; other than some jaunty persons named MegaWater S. and Mysterious Greg had a little fight after one insulted another, but soon after the person who insulted other person apologized and it was all peaceful again.
But instead of nerfing guns and make people sad those who like to use them or prefer to use them all of the time, I’d like if magic got as powerful as guns are, given same respect and good treatment, and added new powerful magic that would match even charged and busted with tiberium core Old Dreadful. In fact, I’d as well like if Cauterizer get purchasable upgrade for it like all of the other guns. And since the fact that even weapons become projectile-based rather than hitscan based with each update, I wouldn’t mind if weapons could kill those “ghost” enemies that spawn in Heretic sometimes, although they are quite rare.
I really would love if this mod would get new spells as for future updates that would match the recently upgraded weapons and even tiberium core buster, fully charged by Stratocaster upgrade Old Dreadful. I’d genuinely would love if all of the elemental magic could get some Damage Over Time effect on enemies, like fire, lightning and ice, which would give magic some serious depth and more fun of use. Since the mod lost it’s only concentration kind of ranged constant stream-damage fire, and a nice ground AoE spells like old Threadcutter and old tome-powered Thunderstruck, and since the mod still lacks of proper lightning spells, I would as well share the idea of people from youtube comment section discussion that suggested new nice spells that I loved the most like those:
- Lightning Storm
Just something as awesome as the name implies. The Lightning Storm, something that always was overpowered in top down and mmorpg games like Diablo, but unfortunately extremely rare in FPS video games, although ALWAYS so much fun to use, especially if you can cast it anywhere you want in first person. Instead of boring single use splash damage that goes boom and disappears, it stands the on ground for some seconds, constantly doing damage against enemies that enters in or been in there from the beginning. Temporarily creating a huge cloud of lightning that is constantly spamming lightning from the sky for a certain time, like 10 seconds or perhaps more, doing huge DPS and damage to the enemies in the area you cast it; any enemy that is under the effect of it and any enemy that walks into it on their own will get stunned by painlock and zapped to death really quickly. Does interact with the environment: if you cast it on water floor, the water that are constantly getting hit by Lightning Storm will damage all the enemies that are on it.
Tomed version of the spell creates an even bigger Storm Gust that looks like a big tornado-like Frosty Storm, which slowly absorbs all the enemies that are near into it’s center and freezes to death anyone who enters it, maybe even spin around the enemies that are within it like in a centrifuge.
Should cost a lot of gold coins and waste a lot of mana, maybe about 200 for the non enhanced version and 300 mana for the enhanced one. - Glory of Tesla (I made up that name myself, since Hitchcock has been named after spell too, so why not honor an Serbian scientist too?)
This one is probably suggested the most, just like Lightning Storm. Basically, this one suggests to add a powerful electricity strike out of your hands inspired by Tesla Gun from Wolfenstein series. I’m myself big fan of Wolfenstein series, especially Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein 2009, mostly because of the hard coded weapons that both those games had, like the Flamethrower and Tesla-Gun. I still say that Flamethrower and Tesla-Gun are still the best looking, most realistic, it has an awesome function mechanics and best overall, at least I haven’t seen any better Flamethrower and Lightning gun in any other video game ever made so far.
What the spell would do is, constantly shoot 7 lightnings forward in random directions, hitting literally everything around you in your vision, and auto-hitting all of the enemies that are not way too far away from you up to 7 enemies at once, and continuously chain-lightning the enemies that are behind and/or near them, while zapping them to death while they being paralyzed (painlocked) by the constant electricity, accompanied with the zapping sounds. I think I can find some electric zapping sounds if you need them. Same as Lightning Storm, it has same effect once interacted with water. If all this is too hard to perform in GZDoom engine, which would be really sad, I would be glad if it functions just like the Powercube primary fire from Russian Overkill, just maybe much longer range and it could actually zap the enemies that got hit by it. Would do really high DPS but not as high as Scourgebreath, more like as Chillgrasp.
Tomed version of the spell would shoot a lightning ball that shoots lightning at all enemies in it’s vision all around it and do nice damage just like the BFG10000 in Quake 2, fully upgraded Plasma Coil from Ratchet and Clank series or just like alt-fire of tomed Arc of Death in the Carnage Galore 3, mod for HeXen; but instead of just hitscan rays, it should shoot some lightning beams with electric graphical visualization, that could as well zap and paralyze enemies. Perhaps should ripper through enemies. On hit of solid surface, I guess it would just do classic explosion I assume, but may work like bfg10k too.
I assume it should cost a lot of gold coins as well; non enhanced attack should drain mana much quicker than it did Threadcutter before recent update and much slower than Scourgebreath, something in-between. The enhanced version should use like 50 or 70 mana per shot. - Black Hole, the idea created by PillowBlaster himself!
Personally, I would like that once you cast it, you shoot a black hole projectile that absorbs all enemies that are near to it into it and deal constant damage like the Dark Matter gun from Quake 4, and once it hit a wall and/or after certain amount of time, it explodes and temporally grows in to bigger stationary Black Hole, which will have much bigger radius of absorption and higher DPS, which will just liquidate the enemies that enter it.
As for tomed version of spell, well… Honestly, I would love if PillowBlaster himself amaze me, since it’s his idea of a spell afterwards. Maybe even it would act just as awesome as alt-fire of a Black Hole gun from Russian Overkill to get in pair in balance matter with fully charged, tiberium-core powered Old Dreadful.
The most expensive spell in the game and most mana consumption for non enhanced fire. Mana required for enhanced version - all of it.
That is a few ideas of spells that I truly would love to see in this mod the most. Doesn’t mean those are the only ones that should be added in the game, nor that those folks suggested ideas about spells only, they as well drop some decent ideas for the overall game improvement that makes magic just be more fair compared to guns. I hope the development of this mod won’t stop any time soon and there will be added new spells and maybe even weapons in the future updates too. These are some of the things that have been mentioned by them that seriously needs to be addressed:
- Since the mod has option in the menu to activate a free dual wield for weapons without the need to get an item that does it for certain amount of time that has been added since recent updates, it would be more than fair if you could do the same with the spells and be able to dual wield Magic. The mod seriously seems to encourage the weapon users a lot since it has such option to begin with (which is not even new for GZDoom anyway. Neither that fun to use, but that is more subjective perspective), while there is not Pure Wizard and Item Independent playstyle, at least yet. This would bring alternative playstyles for the game for people who just don’t want another pew-pew real-guns-advanced, or call of duty rip off. Most important, this would make your hands be prepared and ready to fire, so all of the magic will be ready to be cast instantly once you click fire button without having any delay at all, unlike now when you have delay because you’re forced to pull out your left hand while holding a weapon and then hide it again off screen. But since having dual wield of same magic would be a bit stupid or maybe even result in crash or other bugs, and I assume having dual wield of different spells would be sort of hard to implement in GZDoom, I would suggest ability to cast normal attack for primary fire, and enhanced attack for alt-fire, but make it drain more mana than it would do once it get enhanced by tome instead and/or take time to charge it up in order to cast it. Would be awesome to be able to cast non enhanced function of spell and enhanced of the spell at the same time, even if you won’t be able to use it that much because it would take much more time to charge the attack and probably could wastes more mana per use as well.
- Speaking about “some of the recently implemented features doesn’t even work for magic”, there are some other bugs and issues that have been discovered by other people in the youtube comment section (although it wasn’t found by me, all I did was just testing them to confirm if it’s true). That would be the Loadsamoney Mode. I have tested it in Doom, Heretic and HeXen, all of them have this issue. When using weapons and melees against enemies, as stated, spawns gold once you damage them and drops even more gold once you kill them than if the Loadsamoney Mode was disabled. However, it doesn’t work for magic unfortunately. It would be a very unpleasant occurrence if once you decide to farm some money from enemies to buy yourself some proper spells and, oh irony, you would use beginners spells and all found spells to do it so, as a result you get much less money than if you just spam and spray the minigun on enemies. Although, I gotta admit, it doesn’t work with some of the weapons either. There is also a bug that doesn’t let you absorb all the gold the enemy dropped once you killed them using the spell sometimes, at least I have encountered it when I was fighting Gargoyles in Heretic, while the gold they drop once I damage and kill them using weapons is always teleported into my pocket. Hopefully those issues get fixed in the next update.
- By the way, one of the other ideas that would fit in Guncaster a lot which I liked off comment sections that were not related to the magic was giving the ability to alter gameplay from run n’ gun and full wurrrrrior (heh, if you can say “wazards”, why not mock and make fun of warriors?) to more strategic and item independent one, which suggests avoiding supply items (temporary pickups, like healthkits, medikits, ammo, and temporary bonuses; permanent items, such as weapons, spells and upgrades are available). Namely, the notorious but very useful and often essential health regeneration, which could actually bring the fun into more strategic, or even more carefree gameplay if you like. There is already Gunzerk item that provides quite very fast health regeneration (which has incredible long time before they wears off as well, though), but this definitely not something that would fit for item independent playstyle. Having purchasable upgrade syringes that would stimulate biological stem cells reproduction which would give you health regeneration is indeed a nice and good thing to have, even if they would cost far more than Mana Surge syringe and even at maximum upgrade provides MUCH slower regen than with Gunzerk, and even significantly slower than mana regeneration of fully upgraded Mana Surge, and would only regenerate your health to. However, as much I would like this, I would suggest something better. Considering there is already magic attacks that can be used merely for support purpose, so instead of adding some generic healing spell that would just heal you, I would like it be fair and suggest a weapon that would heal yourself - The Medical syringe like in Killing Floor series that you gotta pickup and use it from your hud like an actual weapon. It would heal only about 20hp and you couldn’t surpass the current limit of your health bar like with Gunzerk, and after each use it would have significant cooldown so you only could be able to use it again after 20 seconds like in actual Killing Floor, maybe even be able to use it as a unique weapon once enemies get at point blank at you. I think it should be used as one of the item you can get from chainsaw placeholder, among all of the spells with exact same chance of drop like any of the other spells, and perhaps be able to buy it from item shop as well, but for a significant price though.
If drawing it, coding and optimizing it is too much fuss, well, I guess having purchasable upgrade syringes that would let you have slow health regen is alright too. Would be lovely to have an option to disable all the medkits and health kits in game settings to turn them into gems and gold instead.
I believe that is everything that has been suggested off from comment section by various amounts of people. Although, in addition to all that, there is something that I wanted to suggest myself for an dragon humanoid character that we play as, including some bug and issue reports:
- Improved Flight Mechanics by adding proper stamina system for your wings. Since this mod replaces the proper flying magic ability of Wings of Wrath with upgradable mid-air jumps, you are no longer able to jump or fly away very huge distances like you could do if you used vanilla Wings of Wrath, especially in some very old Heretic mappack mod that I have played about 10 years ago that had a map where you had to move from one Wings of Wrath to another a number of times that are placed in air while flying a huge distances. What I wish to be done is implemented a stamina system for wings instead of having limited amount of mid-air jumps according to amount of Wings of Wrath & Lifter Syringe you have upgraded. So instead of just use one of the available mid-air jumps per wing swing until you hit its limit and fall down into the dead pit like stone rock and not being able to do anything about it, you should have stamina bar that would use a significant amount of stamina per each mid-air jump that does regenerate over time, and upgrading Wings of Wrath & Lifter Syringe would increase the amount of overall stamina limit in bar and probably regen of stamina too, although regen part is not necessary as long as you being able to kite in air and slowly but eventually going up by tiny bits even without Wings of Wrath & Lifter Syringe upgrades, or at least by having a single upgrade installed, since it originally supposed to give you a full working flying skills for certain time. So while quickly spamming space bar in order to jump higher would make your dragon feel tired even faster than is it now, but if you are going to click it with bigger interval and between each jump you would make some bigger pause while kite, you would end up being able to jump infinitely high and actually be able to escape bottomless pits that are around of some maps, so you would truly be able to fly like a true dragon should. Using this method, you could be able to constantly float in the air if you really want to and shoot enemies while kiting around; although you couldn’t be able to just spam spacebar to instantly get at the very top of the sky without consequence of getting tired before even reaching there if you mindlessly use it just to avoid any sort of ambushes of enemies and immediately get too far in the sky; neither landing on floor would instantly regen all of your stamina, nor instantly recommence amount of jumps you have before hit the mid-air jump limit again like it is now. Regeneration should be like this - faster while you’re on floor, regardless if you standing or running, and obviously slower if you’re kiting and floating in air around, so this flying mechanic pretty much should function and work like for the Lerk, the dragon alike monster from Natural Selection. Stamina would be used for wings swings, i.e. mid-air jumps only, since it’s wing’s stamina after all.
- Other small minor fix that I would like is if the monsters had more stable gold drop, since some monsters (so far I only encounter this issue with Mancubus) doesn’t drop any gold-worth items like diversity of the gems.
- By the way, not sure if this has been reported before, but… Once you try to launch Guncaster in Strife, it just crashes once you try to open a main menu. Although, it can be launched for it; which to be honest, confuses me. I assume Guncaster initially was supposed to work under Strife, or at least was designed to work.
- Also, I still have oldschool 4:3 resolution monitor to play video games and browse internet. I like it much more than 16:9 because it’s far easier to read from websites. However, it does have its huge disadvantages as well, especially for modern video games (some of which do not have proper 4:3 and 5:4 resolution support anymore); and apparently, even doom mods too… Oh the irony! Some of the text written in the “here be dragons” goes off the screen which makes it impossible to read and understand what it supposed to say, at least when you play the HeXen and Heretic. Hopefully it will get fixed and optimized for 5:4 and 4:3 resolutions too, or at least you could be able to change this in settings of mod.
- Ah and for the last one thing, I want to say that lately I’ve been playing a lot of Doom Touch on android, and Guncaster does in fact work on it too! It’s so amazing to play Guncaster on mobile device anywhere you want, although I used an older version of Guncaster due to the fact that Doom Touch is outdated, even though it uses recent 2.1pre version of GZDoom, just some of the old builds. However, I heard the developer(s) is still working on that project, so there is still a chance to play recent Guncaster releases on Doom Touch in future. Doom Touch can support v1.2. and v1.2.4. of Guncaster, including Doom converter file. The files I used are Guncaster_pb_v1.2.pk3 to play with Heretic iwad and then used Guncaster_StH_v1.1.pk3 in addition to previous Guncaster_pb_v1.2.pk3 file to play Doom iwads and some of the doom mappack mods. One I found the 555_guncaster_v1.2.4.pk3 file that doesn’t request doom convertor and can as well work for Hexen, I played a lot of HeXen, including some awesome HeXen mods like Scourge of Viscerus that perfectly fits for Guncaster, especially for android mobile device, and some other Doom mods, even though that file initially meant to work for Zandronum multiplayer. Personally, most of my time that were dedicated playing Guncaster, I mostly spend playing 2.5 version of Guncaster, although all of the stuff I early mentioned were tested specifically in 2.6 version of Guncaster in order to validate if those claims were in deed correct. I found about Doom Touch much later than Gun Caster 2.5 was released, so I cannot know for sure about any real issues with it.
However, using some of the weapons and some of the spells against enemies usually generate too much ketchup and result in massive lags. This is not brutal doom though; we don’t need moar ketchup to cheese the mod with in order for it to be good, it would be just fine without so much gore and blood around that would only generate ugly red paint everywhere and lag around. Since there is already option in settings for Russian Overkill called “choke smoker” to disable unnecessarily too much clouds or smoke of some weapons and other things, it would be awesome if you could disable ketchup truck crash in Guncaster as well, since it’s just too much lag, even for PC. Hopefully next version of Guncaster could imply that this mod could be compatible with Android device and it’s controls just like recent versions of Guncaster do. Don’t mean do a huge overhaul, just that the mod could work just fine on latest version of GZDoom that as well can work on weak computers too.
Oh also, before I forget, nice Microsoft Startup easter egg.
P.S. Sorry if my English skills made you be puzzled from time to time, English is not my native language.
