DOOMablo: a looter-shooter DOOM (v0.6.2a - Pistol needs more love)

[sidav]

Thanks for the ideas people! Sadly, I didn't have the time to do anything for the mod in the last several weeks. Life goes on with its problems, and it seems to drop a legendary bag of them for me lately, huh.
As for the weapons - I'm sure the perfect variant would be to have two weapons per slot. So, we need "another pistol" and "another RL". But that's only about the "regular" weapons - uniques (which aren't there yet) are a different thing entirely.
Btw, feel free to make pull requests on GutHub if you have something.

[sidav]

A new release is there. It is minor-ish, as I still can't work as much as I wanted to, but hey - a new content for ya! There are three new randomizable weapons and 8 new affixes!
I initially wanted to start unique weapons code, but was terrified by its size and thought I couldn't finish it during the time I have.
Have fun!

[sidav]

Another minor release is there.
I was playing with the current version and noticed some things not filling their niches even when not playing Plutonia. So, I think it's time for buffs. Especially for those new Revolver and Auto-Shotty things.
upd: I forgot to add increased crit dmg for railguns. Pushed the updated version to the same release right now. For those who already downloaded the version: sorry for inconvenience.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Oh boy, a new version with new toys to play with! Also, I'd like to add that I think this mod could really use a way to retain progress across gameplay sessions. There's an addon for Gun Bonsai that does that same thing. Will provide feedback on new stuff when I get around to playing.

[stainedofmind]

Another minor release is there.
I was playing with the current version and noticed some things not filling their niches even when not playing Plutonia. So, I think it's time for buffs. Especially for those new Revolver and Auto-Shotty things.
upd: I forgot to add increased crit dmg for railguns. Pushed the updated version to the same release right now. For those who already downloaded the version: sorry for inconvenience.

Finally getting around to giving this another run through. Boy, that Auto-Shotgun is a BEAST! Haven't gotten a chance yet to use the revolver, but I briefly messed around with the grenade launcher. I'm not usually a fan of grenade launchers, s they normally just feel like less useful rocket launchers, but I'm sure I'll find a good use for it once I really get into this playthrough.

That said, I made an addon for my own personal use tweaks a few things, and fixes a few "bugs" that I've found. If you're interested, I can let you know what I changed or post it here. A lot of changes revolve around rebalancing things, like the dynamic between the green and blue armors, the railgun feeling a bit underwhelming, and an almost global redo of accuracy for all weapons. Still testing things out, but it feels a lot nicer to me, although as-is, it renders the accuracy related affixes moot on some weapons.

[sidav]

That said, I made an addon for my own personal use tweaks a few things, and fixes a few "bugs" that I've found. If you're interested, I can let you know what I changed or post it here. A lot of changes revolve around rebalancing things, like the dynamic between the green and blue armors, the railgun feeling a bit underwhelming, and an almost global redo of accuracy for all weapons. Still testing things out, but it feels a lot nicer to me, although as-is, it renders the accuracy related affixes moot on some weapons.

Yeah, share your ideas please!

[stainedofmind]

Yeah, share your ideas please!

Edit: Realized I made a mistake in implementing Armor Repair Kit. Uploaded a new version, so redownload if needed.
Okay, link to the addon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kecXqY ... sp=sharing

Here's a quick breakdown of what's all included. There's more detailed changes in the pk3 file itself.

Bugfixes

---

Railgun has the language tag, but there's no entry for it in the default language file.

BFG2704 still has tag and pickup entries set to BFG9000 language data.

Summoned monsters via flask affix were still counting towards monster counts. After looking into it a bit, I found the following on the wiki:
https://zdoom.org/w/index.php?title=ClearCounters
"For the kills, the actor needs to be non-friendly and alive to not be counted successfully, so if this is being done for changing an enemy to a friendly to remove them from the monster count, for example, it must be placed before the friendly flag is set."
I presume the same issue exists for A_ChangeCountFlags. I used ClearCounters as I am more familiar with it, and it's a touch simpler.

Fixed the starting code to switch you to the pistol automatically.

Personal Tweaks

---

Pickup Info Retooling:
I prefer the older style pickup info as opposed to the new ZForms interface, as I find it faster, but I wanted to tweak it a bit. It's pretty hacky, but it works for me.

Info Display Key:
I wasn't a fan of the reload button showing the HUD for your current items, so I moved it to the zoom button.

New Weapon Switching:
I don't like my weapons changing on me without my permission, so I made sure it only "switched" weapons when replacing your currently equipped weapon with a new one of the same class.

"Useless" Broken Armor:
I found once your equipped armor is broken, it starts to feel a bit useless, and I felt like I was being forced into swapping it out for a new set just to get my durability back up, even if I didn't really want to get rid of my current set yet. I created an "Armor Repair Kit" pickup that gives you 10x the repair amount an ArmorBonus does. From limited testing, it really helps make your armor feel like it goes farther. Currently testing drop ratio for it replacing ArmorBonuses, currently I have it set to 1-to-12 ratio that feels nice.

Rebalancing

---

Green Armor vs Blue Armor:
I started to feel like Blue Armor was lacking a bit, and after doing some calculations, I realized that with the current stats, Green Armor is always a better choice then Blue Armor. Simply, with Green Armor having 150 points at 35% damage reduction, it saves you from 52.5 damage total, whereas Blue Armor, with 100 points at 50%, you only are saved from 50 points of damage. Not a huge difference, but when you also consider Green Armor repairs for TWICE as much, there's no advantage to the Blue Armor. After trying a few different ideas, I settled on the best way to fix this imbalance was to simply swap their RepairFromBonus values.

Railgun Buff:
Compared to the Plasma Rifle, the Railgun felt wimpy. I broke down damage potential per cell ammo used, and realized that where Plasma Rifle does 5 to 35 damage per Cell, the Railgun only does 7.5 to 12.5 damage per cell. For as slow and ammo hungry as it is, that's terrible. After some consideration, I boosted the Railgun's max damage value to 350 (double). I haven't had the opportunity to REALLY test this rebalance, but it feels a lot better.

Monsters Outpacing the Player:
I still feel like the monsters leveling outpaces the player, as both times I've tried to do full runs, by the time I get to around map 15 or so, I feel like I'm being overwhelmed by pretty much every mob. I'm currently testing a VERY new rebalance attempt of simply randomizing monster levels between 1 and max level. Still haven't been able to fully test this.

Accuracy Rebalance:
This was a big one for me. I know the idea was to have base weapons be slightly weaker then vanilla, and have affixes to bridge the gap, but I felt that the affixes were too far between to really tighten that gap up. In addition, I kept killing myself with rockets slamming into a wall right next to me. I took a look at the current spread values as well as vanilla Doom values, and I came up with a series of adjustments, some I haven't had the opportunity to fully test out. For the most part, weapons are a LOT more accurate, especially projectile weapons. I'll quickly go through the changes I made for each weapon and why.

Pistol - No changes. As a starting weapon, it needs all the help it can get, and the tighter then vanilla values are perfect for it.
SMG - Tightened it up to vanilla pistol hspread, with a touch of vspread. As a workhorse weapon, I felt it was a tad too inaccurate by default. It feels nice where it is now, faster then the pistol, but lacking the sniping ability.
Chaingun - This thing chews through ammo like mad, and the bullets aren't very powerful, so having shots spray all over the place made it feel like a waste if ammo. Setting its values to the SMG defaults made it feel a lot better, though it still struggles with the beefier mobs.
Revolver - No changes. I just picked up my first revolver, and based on its stats, it feels like it's going to be a good "bullet sniper" weapon, with an even tighter spread then the pistol.
Shotgun - Almost double the spread of the vanilla shotgun, much like the SMG, as the other workhorse, this was way too much. I set it to vanilla hspread and added a bit of vspread, and it feels good to me.
SSG - While not as bad as the Shotgun, it still had too much spread. Set to vanilla values.
Auto Shotgun - THE BEAST! ... Seriously, this thing makes mulch of baddies. This was the first weapon I made LESS accurate. I set it to default SSGs hspread and vanilla SSGs vspread. It's still a beast, but with way less pellets per shot, you gotta aim it a lot more carefully.
Chainsaw - Set both spreads to the vanilla hspread value. This one was a bit arbitrary. I don't really end up using the chainsaw too much unless I'm totally out of ammo, and you may have had a really good reason for giving it such a nasty hspread, so this change might be pointless.
Rocket Launcher - NO SPREAD. As I mentioned above, I'm not a fan of my rockets blowing me up from careening into a wall right next to me. Because it's such a dangerous weapon, the vanilla no spread values are best for this fella.
Grenade Launcher - No change. I just got my first one of these too, and I only player around with it a little bit, but it being a bit inaccurate feels fine since you can wing these suckers around corners.
Plasma Rifle - I was originally going to make this the vanilla no spread, but with the railgun damage tweak, I felt it was okay for this to be a bit spready. I still nudged it down a touch though, as cell ammo is expensive, and much like rockets, having bolts slam into the wall next to you feels bad.
Railgun - Set to No Spread. It's an expensive sniper weapon and should be reliable as such.
BFG9000 - No spread. It's a BFG. Should be stronk. And again, wall bonks feel bad.
BFG2704 - Haven't gotten many chances to use this weapon, so this was another weapon I changed arbitrarily. I just cut the hspread in half.
Fist - Didn't touch it. I never use fists.

Please do note, a lot of this is down to my personal preferences, and not a criticism of the mod in general. It's a lot of fun, and I always look forward to seeing a new update!

[Darkbeetlebot]

Yeah, share your ideas please!

Edit: Realized I made a mistake in implementing Armor Repair Kit. Uploaded a new version, so redownload if needed.
Okay, link to the addon: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kecXqY ... sp=sharing

Here's a quick breakdown of what's all included. There's more detailed changes in the pk3 file itself.

Bugfixes

---

Railgun has the language tag, but there's no entry for it in the default language file.

BFG2704 still has tag and pickup entries set to BFG9000 language data.

Summoned monsters via flask affix were still counting towards monster counts. After looking into it a bit, I found the following on the wiki:
https://zdoom.org/w/index.php?title=ClearCounters
"For the kills, the actor needs to be non-friendly and alive to not be counted successfully, so if this is being done for changing an enemy to a friendly to remove them from the monster count, for example, it must be placed before the friendly flag is set."
I presume the same issue exists for A_ChangeCountFlags. I used ClearCounters as I am more familiar with it, and it's a touch simpler.

Fixed the starting code to switch you to the pistol automatically.

Personal Tweaks

---

Pickup Info Retooling:
I prefer the older style pickup info as opposed to the new ZForms interface, as I find it faster, but I wanted to tweak it a bit. It's pretty hacky, but it works for me.

Info Display Key:
I wasn't a fan of the reload button showing the HUD for your current items, so I moved it to the zoom button.

New Weapon Switching:
I don't like my weapons changing on me without my permission, so I made sure it only "switched" weapons when replacing your currently equipped weapon with a new one of the same class.

"Useless" Broken Armor:
I found once your equipped armor is broken, it starts to feel a bit useless, and I felt like I was being forced into swapping it out for a new set just to get my durability back up, even if I didn't really want to get rid of my current set yet. I created an "Armor Repair Kit" pickup that gives you 10x the repair amount an ArmorBonus does. From limited testing, it really helps make your armor feel like it goes farther. Currently testing drop ratio for it replacing ArmorBonuses, currently I have it set to 1-to-12 ratio that feels nice.

Rebalancing

---

Green Armor vs Blue Armor:
I started to feel like Blue Armor was lacking a bit, and after doing some calculations, I realized that with the current stats, Green Armor is always a better choice then Blue Armor. Simply, with Green Armor having 150 points at 35% damage reduction, it saves you from 52.5 damage total, whereas Blue Armor, with 100 points at 50%, you only are saved from 50 points of damage. Not a huge difference, but when you also consider Green Armor repairs for TWICE as much, there's no advantage to the Blue Armor. After trying a few different ideas, I settled on the best way to fix this imbalance was to simply swap their RepairFromBonus values.

Railgun Buff:
Compared to the Plasma Rifle, the Railgun felt wimpy. I broke down damage potential per cell ammo used, and realized that where Plasma Rifle does 5 to 35 damage per Cell, the Railgun only does 7.5 to 12.5 damage per cell. For as slow and ammo hungry as it is, that's terrible. After some consideration, I boosted the Railgun's max damage value to 350 (double). I haven't had the opportunity to REALLY test this rebalance, but it feels a lot better.

Monsters Outpacing the Player:
I still feel like the monsters leveling outpaces the player, as both times I've tried to do full runs, by the time I get to around map 15 or so, I feel like I'm being overwhelmed by pretty much every mob. I'm currently testing a VERY new rebalance attempt of simply randomizing monster levels between 1 and max level. Still haven't been able to fully test this.

Accuracy Rebalance:
This was a big one for me. I know the idea was to have base weapons be slightly weaker then vanilla, and have affixes to bridge the gap, but I felt that the affixes were too far between to really tighten that gap up. In addition, I kept killing myself with rockets slamming into a wall right next to me. I took a look at the current spread values as well as vanilla Doom values, and I came up with a series of adjustments, some I haven't had the opportunity to fully test out. For the most part, weapons are a LOT more accurate, especially projectile weapons. I'll quickly go through the changes I made for each weapon and why.

Pistol - No changes. As a starting weapon, it needs all the help it can get, and the tighter then vanilla values are perfect for it.
SMG - Tightened it up to vanilla pistol hspread, with a touch of vspread. As a workhorse weapon, I felt it was a tad too inaccurate by default. It feels nice where it is now, faster then the pistol, but lacking the sniping ability.
Chaingun - This thing chews through ammo like mad, and the bullets aren't very powerful, so having shots spray all over the place made it feel like a waste if ammo. Setting its values to the SMG defaults made it feel a lot better, though it still struggles with the beefier mobs.
Revolver - No changes. I just picked up my first revolver, and based on its stats, it feels like it's going to be a good "bullet sniper" weapon, with an even tighter spread then the pistol.
Shotgun - Almost double the spread of the vanilla shotgun, much like the SMG, as the other workhorse, this was way too much. I set it to vanilla hspread and added a bit of vspread, and it feels good to me.
SSG - While not as bad as the Shotgun, it still had too much spread. Set to vanilla values.
Auto Shotgun - THE BEAST! ... Seriously, this thing makes mulch of baddies. This was the first weapon I made LESS accurate. I set it to default SSGs hspread and vanilla SSGs vspread. It's still a beast, but with way less pellets per shot, you gotta aim it a lot more carefully.
Chainsaw - Set both spreads to the vanilla hspread value. This one was a bit arbitrary. I don't really end up using the chainsaw too much unless I'm totally out of ammo, and you may have had a really good reason for giving it such a nasty hspread, so this change might be pointless.
Rocket Launcher - NO SPREAD. As I mentioned above, I'm not a fan of my rockets blowing me up from careening into a wall right next to me. Because it's such a dangerous weapon, the vanilla no spread values are best for this fella.
Grenade Launcher - No change. I just got my first one of these too, and I only player around with it a little bit, but it being a bit inaccurate feels fine since you can wing these suckers around corners.
Plasma Rifle - I was originally going to make this the vanilla no spread, but with the railgun damage tweak, I felt it was okay for this to be a bit spready. I still nudged it down a touch though, as cell ammo is expensive, and much like rockets, having bolts slam into the wall next to you feels bad.
Railgun - Set to No Spread. It's an expensive sniper weapon and should be reliable as such.
BFG9000 - No spread. It's a BFG. Should be stronk. And again, wall bonks feel bad.
BFG2704 - Haven't gotten many chances to use this weapon, so this was another weapon I changed arbitrarily. I just cut the hspread in half.
Fist - Didn't touch it. I never use fists.

Please do note, a lot of this is down to my personal preferences, and not a criticism of the mod in general. It's a lot of fun, and I always look forward to seeing a new update!

Looking at these changes as a fellow tester, I'd like to point out just one thing: The BFG2704 is actually BETTER with wide hspread because its primary role is to clear out hordes of enemies. Having it be more accurate means that you have to wiggle the mouse around more to blast all the demons, which can fuck up your focus and ability to evade incoming projectiles. If I wanted to get raw single-target DPS out of it, I'd just fire point-blank. A much better change would be to reduce its knockback on hit, as that's what makes it truly bad against boss monsters like the archvile and cyberdemon. (Though for achies I've always preferred to use rockets.) Also, I tested your addon out. I think you might have also overnerfed the auto-shotgun, it's performing way worse than an equivalent SSG for both burst and sustained damage while being less efficient.

But aside from that little nugget, I've got my own results from what little I've managed to get done of playtesting the latest version of the vanilla mod. I have some suggestions, though first I would like to say that I tested the mod on Speed of Doom with the DoomRL Monsters pack. And I have to say... I fucking HATE speed of doom. So much. I despise this mapset. And I'm just about ready to stop using DoomRL Monsters because some of these things are just total bullshit. Seriously, a cyberdemon that snipes you from across the map with a hitscan railgun? Who the hell thought that was balanced? Certainly isn't good for this mod. Anyways...

1. Auto-shotgun is too rare, or I had bad luck in making it spawn. This also goes for the BFGs. I know they're supposed to be rare and powerful, but with level scaling in effect I think they should at least have a chance to randomly spawn from drops or have some kind of usable item that updates a weapon's level to match yours.

2. Auto-shotgun gets easily outclassed by a fast super shotgun of equal level. I picked up a +52% fire rate SSG in my speed of doom run and it so thoroughly outclassed the auto-shotty that I never used it afterwards. Especially because I got stuck with a level 1 auto-shotty for more than half the run. I imagine that the biggest boon of that gun is its DPS with the drawback of being highly inefficient. Which I'm not against, it's just that it needs to be a more common drop to not be a waste of ammo.

3. Grenade launcher could stand to fire faster. I really do love this thing, but it feels even more sluggish than the normal rocket launcher to the point that it just feels "off" in some way. And after picking up one that had a +20% fire rate affix, I'm fairly positive it's just that. As of now, that affix is practically mandatory on any GL in my opinion. It does still retain a niche for shooting around corners and hitting hordes of enemies below you, which I appreciate since nothing else seems to fill that role.

4. The revolver is in a weird spot where it would feel better if it fired faster, but it would also become overpowered if it did. I really like it, it's exactly what this mod needed, but at the same time it feels like the pistol is even more obsolete now than it's ever been. It might be the case that the pistol just needs an update to find a new niche in the wake of the revolver. I think it would also be neat to have something for the revolver that functions like those small mags from the OG borderlands: Severely reduced mag size but higher damage. If alt-fires ever get implemented, I think the revolver should have a low accuracy hammer fanning mode.

5. Maybe test out having backpacks give a larger amount of base capacity. Random ammo drops do help quite a bit with ammo upkeep, but I especially find myself running out of bullet ammo extremely quickly. I can never have enough of it, especially because map makers tend to prefer shells over bullets. A lot of maps also balance their ammo distribution around the vanilla backpack behavior of doubling capacity. So it's not exactly easy to tell how big of a problem this is, but I'd at least try out something like giving half the usual backpack capacity as just a base statistic for every backpack type. It does take a very long time to get up to the vanilla capacity with its current level scaling.

5.5. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but Doomablo's backpacks and the ammo capacity player upgrade from Gun Bonsai are incompatible with each other in a bizarre way. The upgrade DOES work, but it kind of resets after you pick up a new backpack in Doomablo, then you have to purchase the upgrade again to reapply the buff. It isn't strictly game breaking but it is pretty annoying, and I don't know what's causing it. Just thought you should know that.

6. Add a hud element that shows all of your ammo type stores. A lot of mods do this and I've always found it useful. I also find myself always wanting to look at a total ammo counter on the side of the screen when deciding what to pull out next in a fight. It's the only thing missing that's in normal vanilla Doom's hud, but vanilla doom's hud also doesn't display some of Doomablo's stuff like the flask charge.

7. Tomes of change should be more common. With how unreliable it is, I tend to just never use it even if I pick one up because I'm always saving it for "that one weapon that just has one bad stat" that never comes along. It's like that one RPG paradox where when you get a rare, limited item, you never use it because you're always saving it for a hard battle. After all, what if you end up needing it when you don't have it? And then that never happens. It's why I hate divine blessings being limited in dark souls --- health is so easy to lose and regain that you just never really have a use case for it.

8. Try testing negative affixes giving an inherent bonus positive affix --- if feels bad to get a rare weapon only for it to spawn mostly with negative affixes. Granted, it's been a while since I looked at the inner workings of the mod, so I have no idea if it already works like this. I just know if feels bad to finally get a legendary gun only for half the affixes to be negative or neutral. Which happened quite a few times, actually.

9. Affixes that aren't linked to damage or DPS should be able to spawn with more extreme values, especially mag size. And on backpacks, having more extreme values for what different types of ammo it carries would be fun. Kind of like Doom Roguelike Arsenal's backpacks that can have a super heavy bias towards one ammo type that you just build your character around, and I really liked that.

10. Although it goes against vanilla, tightening up the damage range on the plasma rifle could help make internal balancing easier. RNG damage is always a pain in the ass to balance from my experience because average damage is never really a good way to represent those weapons. Sure, you could roll 15 damage on your plasma rifle for 90% of the shots, but you could also roll a high 30 for an entire clip and melt everything in your path. It's very chaotic and a bit of a headache, speaking from the experience of making my own RPG where I foolishly implemented high damage variance at the start and took a year to remove it because I couldn't stand it anymore.

11. HP scaling on monsters feels very unforgiving. It's difficult to keep certain weapons at an updated level that matches enemies. Just like stainedofmind said, the enemies tend to get very overwhelming even if you're not using a monster pack. I tend to always set their HP scaling to -0.2 (the lowest it can go). It's a shame because I'd like to use mods like rampancy, angelic aviary, colorful hell, and stylish hell with this, but the enemies are always just way too strong for that. I actually went back and played a bit of vanilla doom just to regain my sense of scale, and I did not expect the monsters to be so...fragile. Way more than I remember. Really puts things into perspective.

Anyways, I should stop rambling before this becomes a book. I look forward to the day I can actually manage to beat Sunlust with this mod.

[sidav]

Thanks for such thorough feedback guys. It all seems reasonable. I think I'll address that (at least partially) for the next update.
For now I'm working on alternate active slot item: instead of a flask, you can carry another item if you choose to do so. It's also recharged like the flask, but it summons a temporary sentry turret. Sadly, I haven't had enough time lately to finish it.

[stainedofmind]

Looking at these changes as a fellow tester, I'd like to point out just one thing: The BFG2704 is actually BETTER with wide hspread because its primary role is to clear out hordes of enemies. Having it be more accurate means that you have to wiggle the mouse around more to blast all the demons, which can fuck up your focus and ability to evade incoming projectiles. If I wanted to get raw single-target DPS out of it, I'd just fire point-blank. A much better change would be to reduce its knockback on hit, as that's what makes it truly bad against boss monsters like the archvile and cyberdemon. (Though for achies I've always preferred to use rockets.)

Good to know. As I said, my change for the 2704 was arbitrary, as I've only really gotten it once. From your feedback, I think I'll revert it.

Also, I tested your addon out. I think you might have also overnerfed the auto-shotgun, it's performing way worse than an equivalent SSG for both burst and sustained damage while being less efficient.

I'd have to agree with you on that. My current play through it's feeling a touch wimpy now.

5.5. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but Doomablo's backpacks and the ammo capacity player upgrade from Gun Bonsai are incompatible with each other in a bizarre way. The upgrade DOES work, but it kind of resets after you pick up a new backpack in Doomablo, then you have to purchase the upgrade again to reapply the buff. It isn't strictly game breaking but it is pretty annoying, and I don't know what's causing it. Just thought you should know that.

This is 100% an issue on GunBonsai's side due to how it's coded, and there's currently no better fix for it, other then maybe trying to toggle the upgrade off then on again.

On a side note, my thoughts on the accuracy of the grenade launcher have changed. I wasted a tone of ammo trying to bounce a grenade into a space I wanted to get it into from it being so all over the place. I might play around with tightening the spread a touch.

[Darkbeetlebot]

5.5. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but Doomablo's backpacks and the ammo capacity player upgrade from Gun Bonsai are incompatible with each other in a bizarre way. The upgrade DOES work, but it kind of resets after you pick up a new backpack in Doomablo, then you have to purchase the upgrade again to reapply the buff. It isn't strictly game breaking but it is pretty annoying, and I don't know what's causing it. Just thought you should know that.

This is 100% an issue on GunBonsai's side due to how it's coded, and there's currently no better fix for it, other then maybe trying to toggle the upgrade off then on again.

Yes, it's rather unfortunate. I think the best bet for now is the Ammo Reserves addon you made a while back, though I've never tested it before. Frankly, I think Gun Bonsai makes the game far too easy, so I stopped using it for most load orders anyways.

[Darkbeetlebot]

Monsters Outpacing the Player:
I still feel like the monsters leveling outpaces the player, as both times I've tried to do full runs, by the time I get to around map 15 or so, I feel like I'm being overwhelmed by pretty much every mob. I'm currently testing a VERY new rebalance attempt of simply randomizing monster levels between 1 and max level. Still haven't been able to fully test this.

Okay, so after some further testing, I've found that the higher the inferno level you get to, the more this particular feature becomes a major issue. It throws off the balance of the mod pretty badly, screws up my muscle memory (hard to keep track of how much HP and what level every monster is in the heat of combat so I can count shots to kill), and makes it very hard to keep items at an appropriate inferno level because the item level drops are determined by monster level. I do like the level variance idea though, so I'm going to try a different range of between -5 and +5 of the current inferno level and report how that feels.

[sidav]

A new release is here. There is now an auto-turret spawner as an alternative to the flask, 14 new affixes for that, and also I've addressed part of your feedback.
Monster HP scaling slow-down setting now allows even bigger values (up to 0.5), and it would be great if you tell if that's enough - will use your feedback for adjusting the scaling.

[sidav]

Published a new release. Buffed a bunch of stuff, most importantly made the turret much more aggressive and powerful. Also, pistol now fires in two-shot bursts, just to make it more viable. Maybe it's too powerful now. Let me know what do you think of that.

[sidav]

A new release is here. Made pistol burst-fire its alt-fire (I have no idea why I haven't thought of that before), and some minor changes are also there.