[Doom] Super Shotgun Guy

[hrothgar12321]

I know that this is such a small change that it can hardly be classified as a "project", but I wasn't sure where else to post it (I'm new here). If there is a better spot for it, please let me know and I can move it.

I've always thought Zombiemen and Shotgun Guys in classic Doom to be too easy. Shotgunners can often pack a punch at close range, but I thought, why not give their attacks even more of a kick? Zombiemen, whereas previously wimpy and almost inconsequential, now have a reason for their existence, as they deal enough damage to be dangerous as well.

This is an extremely simple change that simply changes shotgunners into "super shotgunners", and Zombiemen into "Shotgun Zombiemen". Chaingunners are left as they are since they are plenty annoying already.

The "Shotgun Zombieman"'s attack is identical to the original Shotgunner's, but retains the Zombieman's health and speed stats as before.

The "Super Shotgunner" fires 6 hitscan pellets instead of the usual 3 (I played around with different values here but thought that 6 had the right balance and feel to it), with the pellets following the same dispersal pattern and vertical offset as the player's SSG. The SSG guy pauses for some ticks after firing while the sound effects of the SSG are played. Because it fires more slowly but only hits twice as hard per shot, I've found that it does not meaningfully increase their DPS when they are continuously firing (i.e. in Nightmare or with Fast Monsters), but it does mean that the burst damage from taking a shot is much more lethal.

Oh, and they drop SSGs on death . The modified Zombiemen drop shotguns.

I haven't thoroughly tested how this changes the balance of the game, though I'm sure this tilts the difficulty for many maps. Hitscan heavy maps could be made quite a bit more difficult (especially on nightmare). I know that I've definitely died in places where I wouldn't have, normally. Some maps may be made much easier due to being able to get SSG easily, and having an abundance of shells from dropped shotguns available (shells, shells everywhere!).

Anyway, just a small little tweak I typed up that I wanted to share!

https://www.mediafire.com/file/trzn7f9s ... y.pk3/file

[Felix_Margarita]

OP really said, "it doesn't hurt enough'.

Actually an interesting idea. Should offer a pretty substantial challenge.

[dawnbreez]

It's times like these that the implicit A_FaceTarget call in monster attack functions drives me nuts. That said, this is really interesting--particularly because it makes infighting more likely! Just played Valiant E1M1 with this; getting the SSG super early didn't change the map much, beyond shells being even more plentiful than they usually are in a modern doom map (though I burned through them just as fast against the swarm of imps near the end).

[Edit] I was thinking about how to make the pistol and chaingun more useful, given that the SSG outclasses basically everything already and losing zombiemen as a bullet source makes it harder to keep up your bullet supply on maps that rely on zombies for ammo. Did some quick calculator work, and determined the following:

• The vanilla pistol has an average DPS of around 25. The chaingun has an average DPS of about 87.5.
• The vanilla shotgun has an average DPS of around 66.2, and the SSG has an average DPS around 122.8(!)
• If you halve the length of the pistol's firing animation to 7 tics (letting it fire 5 times a second, assuming you hold the trigger down), its average DPS jumps up to 50 (obviously), putting it just under the shotgun. If you bring it down to 5 tics, its average DPS becomes 70, slightly outclassing the shotgun, which would probably be ideal given that bullets are now much rarer.
• Dropping the chaingun's firing animation to 3 tics brings its average DPS up to 116.7, making it slightly worse than the SSG, though the ability to painlock monsters even more easily probably makes up for it. Dropping it to 2 tics per shot would make it jump to 175 DPS, which is way too high. Maybe if every other shot fired two pellets instead of one...?

All of that to say, holy shit, the pistol fires WAY too slowly to be useful when the zombies drop shotguns. I kind of get the idea of having this kind of power difference between weapons that fire the same ammunition type, so that you can basically control the player's power level by controlling which weapons they get, and create a sense of scale and/or variety in encounters by changing what the player has access to--but the pistol is REALLY useless.