Highway To Hell v3 - End Of The Road

[Dr_Cosmobyte]

I suggest the health packs staying put too. It fits the game with a more quake-ish feeling.

[SoundOfDarkness]

My only complaint is the constant flame sound when the shotgun is equipped, which is kinda annoying for me. Maybe lower the volume a bit more or remove it completely.

Oh, and if anyone cares: No problems running this mod with Zandronum 3, at least not with the version I'm currently using.

[Rustygold]

I have one suggestion for balance reasons, Make the primary fire for the SSG both barrels firing and make the secondary fire the single barrel shot. It just feels weird to have It the other way around.

[NullWire]

¿You are going to add all the guns of every Doom? Including mobile games

[-Ghost-]

I have one suggestion for balance reasons, Make the primary fire for the SSG both barrels firing and make the secondary fire the single barrel shot. It just feels weird to have It the other way around.

Agreed, it always feels clunky to have a single shot on the primary.

[Matt]

I feel the exact opposite way - primary fire is typically bound to the index finger and thus implies greater precision.

Of course, I also make far, far more use of the SSG killing 2 guys at a time rather than overkilling 1 guy and getting shot/running away helplessly (or, more typically, getting shot by both of them while trying to get them both in the doubleshot death cone), so I'm biased.

[Rustygold]

I feel the exact opposite way - primary fire is typically bound to the index finger and thus implies greater precision.

Of course, I also make far, far more use of the SSG killing 2 guys at a time rather than overkilling 1 guy and getting shot/running away helplessly (or, more typically, getting shot by both of them while trying to get them both in the doubleshot death cone), so I'm biased.

That's not what the supershotgun Is about, It was specifically designed to take out medium enemies and act as sort of a crowd control for smaller guys likes zombies and imps. The shotgun Is the one you want to be using against groups of imps, zombies, etc. It's also faster and more ammo efficient with the exception of this mods flamethrower which works good with panic firing when you get cornered by pinkys or other vermin. Although I am biased myself when It comes to the shotguns.

[Captain J]

Classic, decent and interesting mod! It's been fun touching weapons and killing monsters. But i've found some problems to talk about;

- Nice touch on pistol when lacks ammo while pressing Alt-Fire. But the problem is It only fire once even though i only had 3 rounds and i still can use them all up. But nope, it just fires once because my ammo is still not enough.

And i have no idea why is it still accurate, making Primary fire a bit useless.

- Service SMG Mk.II's zooming is kinda awkward; it doesn't zoom further enough and still inaccurate, but with slow firerate. It makes Primary fire more useful to me.

- Don't you think Plasma Combat Rifle is overwhelming? I mean, i can kill baron with one shot.

- BFG 2704's Alt-fire is pretty underwhelming. I mean the sound effects are nice and such, but it sounds like projectile has no powerful sound effects at all.

- Berserk Kit is WAY TOO LARGE! For real man, i guess?

- Heavy Assault Rifle's Missile, Precision Railgun, Plasma Combat Rifle's Projectile and BFG 2704's Alt-Fire Projectile has no decal at all.

And that's about it. Really fine mod to play with. Nice job!

[insightguy]

I seem to have found a bug, if you switch weapons while zoomed in with the railgun, you get permanent night vision until you switch back to the railgun and zoom in and out.

[Black Rock Shooter]

¿You are going to add all the guns of every Doom? Including mobile games

The SMG on the cover art is one of them, if everything goes as I expect. But not all of them.

---

Classic, decent and interesting mod! It's been fun touching weapons and killing monsters. But i've found some problems to talk about;

- Nice touch on pistol when lacks ammo while pressing Alt-Fire. But the problem is It only fire once even though i only had 3 rounds and i still can use them all up. But nope, it just fires once because my ammo is still not enough.

And i have no idea why is it still accurate, making Primary fire a bit useless.

- Service SMG Mk.II's zooming is kinda awkward; it doesn't zoom further enough and still inaccurate, but with slow firerate. It makes Primary fire more useful to me.

- Don't you think Plasma Combat Rifle is overwhelming? I mean, i can kill baron with one shot.

- BFG 2704's Alt-fire is pretty underwhelming. I mean the sound effects are nice and such, but it sounds like projectile has no powerful sound effects at all.

- Berserk Kit is WAY TOO LARGE! For real man, i guess?

- Heavy Assault Rifle's Missile, Precision Railgun, Plasma Combat Rifle's Projectile and BFG 2704's Alt-Fire Projectile has no decal at all.

And that's about it. Really fine mod to play with. Nice job!

Thanks for the appreciation Cap! Most of those issues (exceot for the BFG2704 sound) will be fixed for the 2.5 that will be coming soon, with a Chaingun in place of the SMG. But she'll will return on the v3 (btw I huge fan of your sprite work). I'm not a huge fan of decals though.

Oh, and if anyone cares: No problems running this mod with Zandronum 3, at least not with the version I'm currently using.

Thanks for the test bud, I'll be sure to include this next time (and I can lower a bit the sound too). I'm more of singleplayer guy.

And finally, I'll not touch on the SSG. She'll stay as it is.

[Armaetus]

Does this alter monsters in any way?

[Black Rock Shooter]

Does this alter monsters in any way?

No, it can be played with any Monster Pack/WAD. You'll only have issues if the wad have custom weapons (but nothing a little patch from yours truly can't solve).

[0mrcynic0]

Is it also possible to disable the grenade launcher and railgun in-game? Sometimes when I use the mod and then play MAP 30 of Doom 2, I sometimes get the grenade launcher instead of the rocket launcher, thereby making the game unwinnable since the grenade launcher fires in an arc, making it really hard to hit inside the boss' brain.

[LoneDoomer17]

Hi there! I’ve been lurking on this forum the past couple of years, using and enjoying the amazing mods this creative community seems to crank out on a near regular basis. Well, after having enjoyed your mod so thoroughly and seeing you were looking for feedback, I figured it was high time I make an account and finally see if any feedback I could give is useful to you and the other fine modders here.

First off, let me say that for a mod that’s only in Version 2, you’ve done a great job with balancing. I’ve certainly played mods with worse balancing and yours is doing pretty well thus far. That being be said there some things that could be improved upon. Other people have already covered some of these but I figure it can’t hurt to say it again. I’ve also spoilered each them so the post isn’t just a gigantic eyesore.

Rocket Launcher

---

Firstly, the rocket launcher is a bit underwhelming. It just doesn’t feel satisfying to use compared to the devastator in V1. I think this is for a few reasons. Although they share the same firing sound, it just doesn’t seem to fit the rocket launcher versus the devastator’s gyro jets. What’s more, it just feels like has less of a punch to it. Although they do seem to perform the same, 3-4 hits from either weapon will kill a mancubi, the launcher just doesn’t feel like a Doom launcher. Although I admit the secondary fire is useful and provides a good fallback for quickly killing archvilles if you don’t have access to a plasma rifle, but this runs into a different problem due to the grenade launcher, which I’ll get to here soon. Further, the AOE for each rocket feels somewhat small and it doesn’t feel as useful for thinning out large hordes of weak monsters (and that may very well be intentional on your part due to the inclusion of the grenade launcher). Overall, it’s certainly a useful and powerful addition to the arsenal in this mod, it just feels really underwhelming compared to the other selections. Really, this is more an ascetic criticism then a balance one (so of course this is something that is going to vary from person to person), but I really do find myself only using the RL when I have to “snipe” large targets like mancubi at long range or I’m out of plasma ammo and need to kill a boss monster with the secondary fire. Otherwise, for small groups of things like mancubi, hellknights, and other things at close to medium range, I tend to use a combination of the HAR’s secondary and primary fires. This isn’t a demerit for the HAR either, you’ve made it a versatile go to weapon and you’ve given it a very satisfying sense of power. It’s just that right now that versatility overshadows the RL’s primary fire in a good deal of circumstances.

Grenade Launcher

---

Secondly, and speaking of heavy ordinance, this brings me to the grenade launcher proper. Where the rocket launcher does have a solid place in the roster, this kind of feels like an odd duck to me. It’s primary fire seems to have less AOE then the RL’s rockets (which makes sense to some extent, grenades tend to have smaller payloads), but I rarely find myself using the primary fire against anything bigger than imps and even then that’s a rarity because the AOE just doesn’t seem to be able to kill more than three at a time. Further, its ability to kill efficiently really seems to fall off against anything bigger than a revenant, which again is likely intentional on your part but it does feel like the primary fire doesn’t entirely fit into the flow of the mod. This brings me to the secondary fire and all I can is: BURN! But no, in all seriousness the secondary fire is really satisfying to use, but that’s probably because it seems to be seriously overpowered. As fun as it is to rain thermobaric death down upon the legions of hell, it’s remarkably easy, once you get used to the GL’s firing arc, to trivialize difficult encounters with this fire mode. It doesn’t matter if you’re facing a horde of imps and formers in a slaughter map, a group of barons, or even a lone archville or two, this fire mode will kill it. The initial blast is noticeably weaker than the primary fire, but it’s the incendiary component of this fire mode that really breaks things. In the right circumstances, one or two incendiary grenades are enough to kill a lone baron or archville, and of course if you’re facing a group you can just saturate an area with flames. The fact that enemies can get stunlocked by the fire makes sense (you’re burning them alive after all), but it basically guarantees that anything caught on the fire will die. I’ve killed barons that were at full health because they wandered into a patch of fire. Of course, using it at close range is suicide, but in a more open area it can certainly break some encounters. Now, I’m not saying this fire mode is inherently a bad thing. It’s certainly helped in a few situations because it allows a player to cut parts of hordes off from one another and allow a player to pick them apart. The problem is that the fire is just a bit too powerful right now and creating a veritable wall of guaranteed death makes certain encounters just laughable, especially encounters that involve monsters teleporting in on very specific bits of the floor because then you can just saturate the teleport pads and wait.

Shotgun Alt-fire

---

This is going to be short, but as others have said the flamethrower on the shotgun isn’t that great. I don’t find myself using it outside of me being surprised and accidentally hitting the right-mouse button. I’m not really sure what feedback to offer here. It’s a nice idea, but it just doesn’t seem to work particularly well. Maybe you could replace the flamethrower with a slug shot as the alt-fire for when the player needs to hit something at long range but only the only non-pistol weapon the player has is the shotgun? Or maybe the best course of action for now is to just remove the shotgun’s alt-fire given it’s probably the least useful.

Already heavily discussed SMG

---

I’ve read the discussion involving the SMG so I’d thought I would give my two cents on this. I understand what you’re trying to do with it, which is make a weapon that has a high but controllable ROF while also having a precision mode for long range fire. As others have said, the zoom isn’t particularly large and even then, it still remains very inaccurate. As you’ve said, you’re planning to replace it with a chaingun in V2.5, and then bring it back in V3, but really I don’t think it fits as a good ROF weapon or precision weapon once you’ve got things like the HAR (and more so since a chaingun is going to be involved soon). As much as I like using the Doom 3 SMG in mods like this, it really doesn’t feel like a weapon that’s supposed to stand side-by-side with ones like the HAR. It fit as the starting weapon in V1 for the most part (even though it also had accuracy issues there), but you’ve since added a pistol that’s also a reliable starting weapon. As it is, I think maybe either dropping the SMG or rebalancing it as a pure starter/pre-HAR weapon is the best course of action right now. As it is, the HAR can (with albeit, some difficulty) hit targets at long range, but it’s not really “precise” since it just lacks the zoom. To keep this point short, my suggestion regarding a “precision” weapon will be in the next point.

"Precision" weapon suggestion

---

Since you’re doing weapon rips of both Doom2016 SP and MP weapons, maybe a good idea would be to add the burst rifle from Doom2016 to the mod. That weapon already has a zoom on it by default in that game, complete with zoom in frames (although this is easy for me to say given that I’ve never tried model ripping for spiriting purposes, and I know it’s very time consuming). Balance wise I could see it fitting in somewhere between the HAR and the chaingun. Where the HAR is designed for medium sized hordes of weaker and mid-tier enemies, the burst rifle’s primary fire would make it good for engaging small groups of weaker creatures while also helping conserve ammo (3 round bursts versus unfettered automatic fire which can be wasteful at times) and making the secondary fire a zoom either with the burst fire or semi-auto would allow for a “precision” weapon against things like large groups of imps and lone or small groups of some enemies like revenants or hell knights. Although balancing this would likely be a bit more difficult than that. Alternatively, I suppose you could make it so that the player could switch between the HAR’s micro-rockets and its scope like in D2016, but from what you’ve shown us thus far I don’t think that’s what you’re going for in this case and that’s a different sort of balancing problem (and maybe a bit too close to mods like D4D for some folk’s taste).

Anyway, those are my thoughts on your mod thus far, BRS. Sorry for the length of the blocks, but I’ve been playing your mod more than any other lately and I genuinely want to see this mod get better and figured maybe a bit of detail couldn’t hurt. Other than that, I’m eager to see what you have for us next!

[Black Rock Shooter]

A little update, to start the weekend in that way. As usual, changes are listed on the changelog.