DOOMablo: a looter-shooter DOOM (v0.7.0a - Oh noes I've changed it all again)

[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.