Doom Roguelike Class Analysis: Marine

Doom Roguelike's 'default' class, made to be reasonably straightforward and accessible to new players.

Classes in Doom Roguelike are defined in three major ways: they each have some innate differences, each have a single Advanced Trait they remove the normal requirement for, and of course they each have a unique list of 5 Masteries that do radically different things.

In the Marine's case, he has three distinctions:

1: The Matine has better HP than his fellows, having a base HP of 60 where the other classes have 50.

2: The Marine innately has 20% resistance to 'energy' damage types. (Fire, Plasma, and Acid) This was added by 0.9.9.8. Previously, the Marine had only the two innate distinctions. As Fire, Plasma, and Acid threats tend to be the scariest ones the majority of the time, this 'specialized' boost to durability is a much bigger help to survival than a first-time player might assume!

3: Powerups last 50% longer than when used by other classes. This latter effect is more limited than it might sound: only Berserk Packs, Envirosuit Packs, Invulnerability Globes, and Light-Amp Goggles are affected by this duration extension. You might expect Berserker-derived Berserk to be affected, but it's not. Conversely, it's weird that Envirosuit Packs are affected, given they're classed as items and not Powerups. Also, this effect is reduced to only 25% longer if playing on Nightmare! difficulty. (Though this amounts to the same number of turns added as most difficulties, because Powerup statuses last twice as long on Nightmare! and I'm Too Young To Die: an Ultraviolence Marine adds 25 turns of Berserk from a Berserk Pack, and so does a Nightmare! Marine, it's just the Ultraviolence Berserk Pack was 50 turns of Berserk base while the Nightmare! Berserk Pack was 100 turns of Berserk base)

I should point out that the base HP boost is more significant than you might expect, as the majority of healing effects in Doom Roguelike are partially or entirely percentage-based: only Small Health Globes, Blood Skull usage, and the Vampyre Mastery provide healing unaffected by your own max HP. Small Medpacks do include a flat component, but the overwhelming majority of the time it's the percentage portion that is the majority of the healing. Large Health Globes have a flat component, but it only matters if you're close to or over 100% of base HP. Every other source of healing sets you to either 100% or 200% of your max. As such, the Marine's 20% edge in base HP makes almost all healing go 20% further.

Anyway, the Marine's advanced-made-basic Trait is Badass, which normally requires two ranks in Tough As Nails. This is convenient, as Tough As Nails is mostly good for rounding out your build in the mid-late game, where Badass can have a profound effect on your performance with just a one-level dip in it. Not having to wade through Tough As Nails ranks is a big boost to Badass' utility! (Especially in 0.9.9.8, where Ironman tends to be a better choice for improving survivability than Tough As Nails)

As for Masteries... well, I should more properly explain Masteries!

Every Mastery has three components: a list of Traits you must have a specific number of ranks in before you're allowed to take the Mastery, a list of Traits you're not allowed take alongside the Mastery, and of course the Mastery's own effects when taken. Masteries also universally require you be at least Level 6 before you can take one, and are mutually exclusive: even if two Masteries could theoretically be taken simultaneously, once you've taken a Mastery the other Masteries are locked out.

Requirements tend to include at least a couple of Traits that you would absolutely want to take with the Mastery regardless, but it's pretty common to have a requirement in there that's more about thematics or class character. Incompatibilities is... more uneven. Every Mastery blocks exactly 3 Traits, but for one thing the game draws no distinction for this purpose between Basic Traits and Advanced Traits: a Mastery blocking Hellrunner is a Mastery that's implicitly also blocking Dodgemaster, for example. As such, Masteries can lock off as many as 6 Traits -actually, they can lock off as many as 7, because Finesse gates Juggler and Whizkid! (Thankfully, in 0.9.9.7, only two Masteries did block off Finesse, and 0.9.9.8 changed one of them to not do so, with the remaining case being on the Technician, who doesn't lose out on Whizkid if Finesse is blocked, so in 0.9.9.8 no Mastery actually does block 7 Traits)

Contributing to the unevenness is how not every Trait is terribly relevant to a given Mastery. Taking a Mastery that specializes in one weapon type and blocks off access to specializations in other weapon types (eg Son of a Gun, Brute) is much less of a loss than a Mastery blocking access to a Trait that boosts Doomguy no matter what weapon he fights with. (eg Finesse, Hellrunner)

Notably, Trait incompatibility (And to a lesser extent Mastery requirements) is also used to shape the 'character' of the classes: for example, the Marine is the 'slow' class in part by virtue of Ammochain being their only Mastery that doesn't block Hellrunner. Similarly, they were historically the 'inaccurate' class in part by tending to block off Eagle Eye: in 0.9.9.7, only Survivalist didn't block Eagle Eye. (Now only Army of the Dead and Ammochain block Eagle Eye)

All of this unfortunately means Masteries are... pretty uneven in their quality before you get into the consideration of how powerful their personal effects are or are not.

As for the Marine's Masteries in specific...

Vampyre

Requirements: 1 rank in Berserker (And thus 2 ranks in Brute), 1 rank in Badass, which is a total of 4 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Hellrunner, Son of a Bitch, Ironman

Effect: If a melee attack kills an enemy, the Marine is healed for 10% of the target's maximum HP, rounding up. This heal can take the Marine over 100% of his own base HP.

The rounding up makes Vampyre noticeably more powerful a heal than you might assume by looking at enemy HP. eg 10% of an Imp's 12 HP is 1.2, but it rounds up to 2 HP, so they give almost twice what they 'should'.

Also note that 0.9.9.8 reworked the incompatibilities but doesn't mention this in the patch notes: in 0.9.9.7, Vampyre blocked Eagle Eye, but now it blocks Ironman. (Which is surprising: in 0.9.9.7, nothing blocked Ironman) Which I guess makes sense in conjunction with Marines getting innate energy resistance and Ironman giving physical resistances: Berserking would easily be near-invulnerability even while naked for a Marine with a couple ranks in Ironman!

Building toward Vampyre generally means having a rough start; this is true of all melee Masteries, simply because you'll often be in situations where you've got points invested in improving your melee competency but are still shooting things rather than benefitting from those points. Vampyre is actually less bad than the other melee Masteries about this, since an early point in Badass is often strongly helpful for surviving the early game by letting you benefit from Health Globes across floors and the fact that Vampyre has a 'free' level you can commit however you like (So long as you don't block off Vampyre) means you have more wiggle room to focus on improving your non-melee competency without this automatically meaning you delay getting your Mastery online: a rank in Finesse, for example, improves your immediate shooting competency, and remains relevant once you commit to the melee focus.

Vampyre also has a bit of awkwardness with how it intersects with difficulty and with progressing through a run, in that once you're pretty firmly set (Have Vampyre online and a Chainsaw or better equipped) more elite enemies are, to a noticeable extent, better to be fighting: enemy durability rises a lot more than enemy firepower (An Imp has 12 HP and does 2-10 damage. A Baron of Hell has 60 HP and does 4-20 damage. That's doubling the firepower while quintupling the HP!), so right there Vampyre's healing improves as you fight more elite enemies, but more importantly is the twin points that you'll often do severe overkill damage to regular enemies (A Chainsaw with Brute 2 is 10-30 damage, or 20-60 damage if currently Berserking: compare those numbers to 12 Imp HP and 60 Baron HP) and that basic enemies will never trigger Berserker on their own. Taken altogether, Vampyre Marines are actually a lot more likely to die in the mid-early game to mobs of weak enemies like Formers than in the late game to Archviles, Revenants, etc.

As a concrete example of the jank with difficulty: the ambush in the Phobos Anomaly. On Hurt Me Plenty (The middle difficulty), the ambush involves a bunch of Lost Souls. On Ultraviolence (One step up in difficulty), these Lost Souls are all upgraded into Pinkie Demons: Pinkie Demons are modestly more deadly than Lost Souls (They can attack 30% more often once in range and do 1 more point of damage, meaning they do roughly 12-25% more damage per attack), but are much higher on HP (10 for Lost Souls, 25 for Pinkie Demons), but not by enough to be likely to delay a kill. (If Berserking with an unmodified Chainsaw, they'll sometimes live through one hit by virtue of rolling low... assuming none of the splash damage from Cacodemons firing on you has softened them up) So Hurt Me Plenty Vampyre gets nibbled for about 2/3rds the damage per melee attacker compared to Ultraviolence Vampyre, but Ultraviolence Vampyre is getting three times the HP per turn in healing as he cuts through the horde! The Ultraviolence Vampyre is thus much more able to simply scythe through the enemies without bothering to heal or retreat with no risk of death than the Hurt Me Plenty Vampyre. (And to be clear, this isn't me theorycrafting: I was genuinely shocked when my first Ultraviolence Vampyre run to reach the Phobos Anomaly ambush breezed through it, never in any danger, where my prior Hurt Me Plenty Vampyre had burned through 2 Large Medpacks trying to not die to the Lost Souls)

I'm using the Phobos Anomaly ambush as an example because its nature as a fixed encounter makes it straightforward to talk through the math in a concrete way, but this holds pretty reliably true for Vampyre: going up in difficulty makes the pre-Mastery portion of the game reliably harder, but once Vampyre is online raising the difficulty overall lowers the danger presented. Version 0.9.9.8 giving the Marine innate energy resistances has only exacerbated the issue, since the distribution of damage types skews away from energy attacks for early-game enemies: with Berserk active and no other sources of resistances, the Marine will actually take half as much damage from Fire/Plasma/Acid as from Bullet/Shrapnel/Melee!

(Qualifier: I would be very surprised if Nightmare! is even easier than Ultraviolence for a Vampyre. But as I noted in the intro, I've barely played on Nightmare! and so can't speak from experience properly on this scenario)

The aforementioned wonky bits aside, Vampyre is a very solid way to intro the concept of a melee Mastery: simply charging targets and shredding them is often adequate play once Vampyre is online, where the Scout and Technician melee Masteries tend to require more thought and care to avoid burning through Medpacks until you run out and subsequently die. My main complaint is that the learning curve on its healing is frustratingly high if you don't look up spoilers: in-game you can't directly get info on enemy HP values, so a no-spoilers player can have a pretty hard time figuring out what's going on that sometimes they get swarmed and come out with more HP than they started the fight with and other times they get swarmed and have to blow Medpacks to avoid dying. (Especially since this is further obscured by things like resistances existing and not being clearly communicated: a no-spoilers player won't necessarily realize that enemy melee attacks always do the Melee damage type, and so might have a reasonable-but-incorrect theory like 'maybe Lost Souls do Fire damage in melee?')

On a different note, Vampyre is also a good example of one of the iffier experiments Doom Roguelike is fond of with Masteries: that a number of Masteries are defined in part by lacking access to a Trait that would obviously be highly desirable for the playstyle of the Mastery. In theory, this could allow for points like 'a Marine has a legitimate choice between a Vampyre melee run vs doing a no-Mastery melee run', but in practice it tends to contribute to unevenness in Mastery quality. Vampyre being denied Hellrunner isn't too bad, in part because it mandates Badass and Badass is also valuable for improving Doomguy's ability to successfully close to melee, but while Vampyre is viable without Hellrunner access it doesn't really result in two equally-viable playstyles for a melee Marine, or anything of that sort.

Bullet Dance

Requirements: 1 rank in Dualgunner (And thus 2 ranks in Son of a Gun), 1 rank in Triggerhappy (And thus 2 ranks in Son of a Bitch), which is a total of 6 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Hellrunner, Intuition, Brute

Effect: Each rank of Triggerhappy additionally causes Pistols to fire an additional shot, but also causes Pistol shots to add 50% of their firing time per rank. (ie 2 ranks of Triggerhappy results in Pistols firing 3 shots but taking twice as long to recover) Has no effect on Aimed Shots.

In 0.9.9.7, Bullet Dance was a sufficiently awful Mastery there was a strong argument the Marine was 

better off ignoring Masteries entirely if he wanted to do a Pistol run. In that version, instead of blocking Intuition, it blocked Eagle Eye. (Which meant it still didn't have access to Intuition, I should point out) The result was that Bullet Dance was grossly inefficient on ammo and really unreliable and bad in general: across a run, you'd regularly have enemies survive being shot at that really should've died instantly, as a result they'd do HP and Armor damage, possibly smash items or (in the case of Archviles) set you back by reviving enemies, and over time your resources would be eroded more than with other Masteries in part because you're spending six 10mm ammo on every firing action.

In 0.9.9.8, Bullet Dance is... still not exactly great, unfortunately. The ability to take Eagle Eye eventually resolves the reliability issues and also reduces how ammo-inefficient Bullet Dance is, but it still is prone to being very ammo-inefficient. It also hasn't escaped the biggest problem:

Why are you running it instead of Ammo Chain?

Fundamentally, Bullet Dance is turning Pistol usage into behaving like a rapid-fire specialization, where you spray lots of shots per pull of the trigger... and then it's a bad variation thereof. A rapid-fire specialization has predictable access to both Chainguns and Plasma Rifles, giving rapid-fire specializations better ammo security (Running entirely out of 10mm ammo and Power Cells with no opportunities to find more of either on a floor is pretty unlikely to happen), the reliable ability to work around heavy Bullet resistance (Which Lost Souls and Revenants have) as well as high Protection values (Such as one sees on the Cyberdemon), whereas a Pistol specialization can only count on finding basic Pistols and so is often strictly dependent on 10mm ammo to fuel its competent offenses and entirely reliant on outside-specialization weapons or on non-Basic Assemblies to work around Bullet resistance. (Note that Dualgunner is unfriendly to smoothly using a good swap, worsening things, and Son of a Gun making Finesse worthless in the long haul makes incorporating Juggler to fix this issue an awkward solution) Bullet Dance is also really anti-synergistic with the Blaster, the Exotic Pistol that evades the above problems. Even finding a Unique Pistol isn't much help: they all use 10mm ammo, and the only one that doesn't do Bullet damage specifically has splash Fire damage and so is problematic to try to use as a staple offense.

Bullet Dance's performance is also dragged down by the constant need to reload: regular unmodified Pistols have to be reloaded every two volleys when using Bullet Dance, resulting in constantly needing to reload in combat, giving enemies even more opportunities to attack. (By comparison, a Chaingun only needs to reload every 10 volleys at base) More generally, Bullet Dance directly erodes some of the big strengths of specializing in Pistols: by default, Pistol specialization is remarkably ammo-efficient and very responsive, able to snap off multiple shots into enemies before they get a chance to react and so potentially kill multiple priority targets. Bullet Dance ultimately doubling the time taken per volley substantially erodes that edge, and I've already been over the ammo efficiency point.

Also not helping is the general layout of Bullet Dance's requirements is... awkward. It requires 6 points spent to be allowed to take, meaning it doesn't come online until Level 7, noticeably delaying the Mastery-derived power spike -for example, on Ultraviolence you usually don't hit Level 7 until after the Bruiser Brothers- and the requirement of a rank in Triggerhappy is a 'dead' level until you actually take Bullet Dance per se. Furthermore, its requirements don't include Son of a Gun 3, but going from Son of a Gun 2 to Son of a Gun 3 is a bigger power spike than getting Bullet Dance online (50% more shooting per second and an extra point of damage from Son of a Gun 3, vs 33% more shooting per second from Bullet Dance: with Bullet Dance, you shoot twice as many bullets, but your volleys take 50% longer) and can be acquired sooner, which is ugly design all on its own (Why is my Pistol Mastery inarguably worse than one more rank in a Basic Trait?) but also means that optimal play means not getting Bullet Dance online at all until Level 8! And then waiting until Level 9 to actually have it fully online, since you'll still need that second rank of Triggerhappy!

Exacerbating all this is that Bullet Dance exists on the Marine and so the rapid-fire specialization it's having to very directly compete against is Ammo Chain, one of the best Masteries in the game, and which solves ammo as a problem rather than making ammo management a more dire issue.

And to be clear, I'm not just talking about Bullet Dance's problems with viability here. Even if Bullet Dance were perfectly fine as far as win rates or whatever, I'd still be unhappy with the design being 'the Marine's Pistol specialization makes Pistol play very akin to focusing on Chainguns' given that rapid-fire specialization is in fact an intended valid category. I'd rather have seen something like 'your Pistol shots now penetrate through enemies', which would solve a weakness of Pistol builds (They can struggle with fighting crowds) without making Pistol specialization overly-alike to a different specialization for the Marine. (Shotguns do admittedly penetrate enemies, but they also use different ammo, do a different damage type, and have radically different priorities in terms of Trait support)

I do hope the restarted development with 0.9.9.8 means Bullet Dance is on the chopping block...

(A big asterisk to all this is that Bullet Dance is inarguably the best possible Pistol build if a run is lucky enough to Assemble a Nanomachic Pistol. It doesn't even need the highly improbable scenario of Assembling two such Pistols to be absurdly lethal, and if a run is lucky enough to Assemble two Nanomachic Pistols, that's basically 'the run is already victorious, the remainder of the game is a formality'. But I don't consider it sensible to argue that this means Bullet Dance's current state is fine: most runs will never see a Nano Mod Pack. It's not even particularly likely to result in a Marine swerving to Bullet Dance: if you do get a Nano Mod Pack, this probably occurs well after your build has settled firmly, with good odds of having blocked Bullet Dance)

Army of the Dead

Requirements: 1 rank in Badass, 1 rank in Shottyman (And thus 2 ranks in Reloader), which is a total of 5 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Son of a Gun, Hellrunner, Eagle Eye

Effect: Weapons that use the Shrapnel damage type instead use the Piercing damage type. (ie most Shotguns switch from being poor at defeating Protection to completely ignoring Protection)

In 0.9.9.7, Army of the Dead was viable-but-clunkily-designed for a standard run, and was basically a trap choice for Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 runs. The crux of the issue was that it used to block Finesse instead of Son of a Gun, which was a problem less for Finesse itself and more because Finesse gates access to Whizkid.

For a number of reasons, Whizkid is basically mandatory to an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run. You will get an enormous pile of basic Mod Packs to Assemble basically anything you could possibly want to Assemble, you'll almost always want to Assemble Cerberus Boots so you can safely wade through the Lava rivers that crop up regularly given there's no guarantee you'll get enough Envirosuit Packs to handle these hurdles, and you have decent odds of getting multiple Exotic Mod Packs before you finish (It's basically guaranteed in Archangel of 666), meaning you'll almost always be able to Assemble multiple Master Assemblies (Which are, to be frank, often noticeably more powerful than the best competition from Uniques), all of which 100% requires ranks in Whizkid.

As such, a Mastery blocking off Whizkid basically directly makes it an unviable trap choice for those Angel Challenges: thankfully, with 0.9.9.8 having arrived, no Mastery blocks Whizkid anymore.

That said, Army of the Dead is still dubious for those Angel Challenges for the key reason that its benefit can be overshadowed by successfully Assembling a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun, which will give you a Piercing-damage Shotgun that can fire infinitely without stopping to reload and without needing ammo in inventory. Most Angel of 100 runs will get a Nano Mod Pack at some point, and it's extremely unlikely an Archangel of 666 will completely fail to get one, at which point Army of the Dead is a wasted skill point and blocking off other options you might appreciate, such as Hellrunner. I would in fact argue that in Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 it's probably better for a Marine to just skip Masteries entirely if you want to specialize in Shotguns. (In 0.9.9.7, that wasn't 'probably', it was 'definitely')

For standard runs (And several Angel Challenges that aren't Angel of 100/Archangel of 666), Army of the Dead is more clearly good, and in fact for a player early in the learning curve I suspect Army of the Dead Marines are just the easiest Mastery to get an early victory with. In the first place, all that stuff with Assemblies is much less relevant (Especially for a player avoiding spoilers of any kind), particularly the Nano-shrapnel Shotgun Assembly: something like one in four standard runs sees a randomly-generated Exotic Mod Pack at all, and only one Special Level pair can reliably generate Exotic Mod Packs. (Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory) And even if an Exotic Mod Pack generates, who says it's a Nano Mod Pack? And if you're a new player avoiding spoilers, you're pretty unlikely to stumble into a given Assembly construction even if you get a Nano Mod Pack.

In the second place, a standard run has some noticeable danger spikes placed early enough that Army of the Dead being a reliable way to boost Doomguy's performance early is actually a really important bit of utility. Sure, if your Army of the Dead run Assembles a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun right after killing the Cyberdemon, now Army of the Dead is a dead level, but ignoring Army of the Dead very possibly would've gotten you killed by the Cyberdemon, or possibly earlier, such as if you go into Deimos Lab and try to fight the Shamblers. Army of the Dead carrying you through midgame is plenty valuable on its own.

As for 'good for a learning player', Shotguns are in general favored for coming to grips with corner shooting, the fact that they ignore Accuracy means you don't need to understand the game's accuracy system at all to play competently, and their perfect reliability opens up a lot of straightforward safe play options like blasting enemies from beyond line of sight so they can't fire back immediately. Army of the Dead causing Shotguns to ignore Protection (And Shrapnel resistance, which matters anytime an enemy equips eg a Green Armor) does away with one of the main learning curve issues with Shotgun use: that there's no way to tell in-game how much Protection an enemy has, and so it isn't necessarily obvious which enemies are extraordinarily bad targets for Shotguns such that you should consider breaking out an alternate weapon when fighting them. Army of the Dead lets you just blast everything perfectly competently, letting a learning player focus on things like coming to grips with positioning, inventory management, etc, without also juggling a secondary weapon, ammo for that weapon, etc.

In 0.9.9.7, I suspect an experienced player with a good grasp of the game was better off skipping Masteries entirely if they wanted to focus on Shotgun usage as a Marine, even in standard runs. The loss of Finesse rose in prominence as Doomguy picked up a Combat Shotgun and ultimately an Assault Shotgun and so started shooting 5 and then 6 times in a row before needing a reload, and while Whizkid isn't as centralizing to a standard run as an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run, it's still very useful to be able to do stuff like put an Agility Mod Pack on your Tactical Boots, make your Fireproof Red Armor better, super-mod a key weapon, etc, so Army of the Dead blocking off Finesse was a sufficiently big problem it was honestly probably a bad trade once you knew what you were doing fairly well, at least so long as you were playing on a high enough difficulty to expect to be able to squeeze in Finesse ranks and all. (I'm Too Young To Die in particular has very low enemy counts and causes some Special Levels to not generate at all, ensuring you end at a pretty low Level)

As of 0.9.9.8, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still worth considering ignoring Army of the Dead in a standard run -Hellrunner is pretty valuable, for one- but I'm a lot less certain this is truly Smart And Optimal Play for an experienced and skilled player. Gaining access to Finesse and by extension Whizkid really is a huge jump in its long-term viability.

Ammochain

Requirements: 2 ranks in Reloader, 2 ranks in Triggerhappy (And thus 2 ranks in Son of a Bitch), which is a total of 6 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Tough as Nails, Son of a Gun, Eagle Eye

Effect: Weapons that fire at least 3 shots per volley no longer spend their per-shot ammo amount per bullet, but instead per pull of the trigger. (This applies to Chain Fire where relevant)

Ammochain is honestly probably the single most absurd, crazy-powerful Mastery in the game.

This probably doesn't seem so to most inexperienced players just looking at its description: compared to, say, Army of the Dead directly improving Shotgun lethality (By ignoring enemy damage reduction), Ammochain sounds like it doesn't improve your damage or survivability at all, just warding off the danger of ammo starvation. Which is self-evidently a very bad fate that is good to avoid, but it's entirely possible to have a successful run where you just never run low on ammo, so Ammochain negating that risk doesn't necessarily matter, right?

But Doom Roguelike's design is such that it does so much more than that.

First of all, rapid-fire weapons are exactly the category of weapon most prone to completely running out of ammo, because they're extremely slot-inefficient on ammo. This isn't necessarily obvious at a glance, as 10mm ammo stacks up to 100 units per inventory slot, where Shotgun Shells only stack up to 50 units per slot, which is identical to Power Cells, but the problem is how different weapon types expend their ammo: most Shotguns use one unit of ammo per pull of the trigger, a few use 2, and one Unique uses 3. (When looking at the ones that use Shotgun Shells, specifically) As such, 50 Shotgun Shells is 50 shots, or 25, or at worst 16.66~. A Chaingun uses 4 ammo per volley, and so 100 units of 10mm ammo actually only provides 25 volleys. With 2 ranks of Triggerhappy, suddenly it's 6 ammo per volley, and we're at that 16.66~ volleys per inventory slot figure again! Only Shotguns have to find a specific Unique to do that, while rapid-fire weapons will reliably hit that number just with a basic Chaingun and grabbing the rapid-fire-specializing Trait! And Plasma Rifles are even worse, spending 6 ammo for volley when you only get 50 Power Cells per inventory slot: that's 8.33~ volleys per inventory slot, or 6.25 volleys per inventory slot if you have 2 ranks in Triggerhappy.

So right there Ammochain's benefit is legitimately huge, making Chainguns get 100 volleys per inventory slot and Plasma Rifles 50, which is an incredible increase in efficiency.

But then there's how this all intersects with inventory management: rapid-fire weapons being so ammo-hungry by default means Doomguy has to commit a lot of inventory space to ammo for them so that a brief dry spell doesn't result in him running out of ammo entirely and resultantly dying from being basically helpless. In my own Shotgun-focused runs, I tend to try to keep a minimum of 4 inventory slots committed to ammo: that's 200 shots, and it's usually enough to ensure that I don't run out. (But not always!) Normally the equivalent number of volleys for a Chaingun requires 2-3 times as many inventory slots committed (So 8+ inventory slots!) to have a comparable buffer of ammo, and forget ever having an adequate safety net for Plasma Rifles: you'd need 32 inventory slots to have that much of a buffer for a Triggerhappy-backed Plasma Rifle! That's more than twice your maximum inventory slots!

Ammo Chain thus doesn't simply stave off ammo starvation, it so drastically improves ammo efficiency that an Ammochain Marine actually has more 'free' space to commit to Medpacks, Mod Packs, alternate weapons for specific situations, etc, than a Shotgun Marine. For one thing, I've been implicitly ignoring the ammo loaded in a weapon: rapid-fire weapons by default have more generous internal carrying capacity than Shotguns. For example, a Basic Shotgun fires once and immediately needs a reload, whereas a Basic Chaingun can fire 10 times before needing a reload, and Ammochain makes this much more favorable: your Chaingun goes from having enough ammo to fire 6-10 times (Depending on Triggerhappy ranks) to having enough to fire 40 times. Your Plasma Rifle goes from 6-8 full volleys to 50. That's the equivalent of an entire Shotgun Shell inventory slot worth of ammo just sitting in the Plasma Rifle!

A similar point is the consideration of Shell Boxes/Ammo Chains/Power Batteries: all of these are more inventory-slot-efficient than their regular ammo counterpart, but the exact numbers vary: a Shell Box is 100% more ammo per inventory than regular Shotgun Shells, an Ammo Chain is 150% more ammo per inventory slot than regular 10mm ammo, and a Power Battery is 140% more ammo per inventory slot than Power Cells. By default, the Shell Box works out to more shots added (100 shots per inventory slot for a Shell Box, 41.66~ to 62.5 volleys per inventory slot for an Ammo Chain, 15 to 20 volleys per inventory slot for a Power Battery), but with Ammo Chain this firmly reverses: an Ammochain Marine finding 4 Ammo Chains in the early game may complete the game without running through all four! (As in, I've done exactly this on multiple occasions)

All of this makes an Ammochain Marine much better at survivability and general preparedness than any other non-melee build. (Melee builds don't need ammo and so free up those slots... with the caveat that they tend to burn through Armor and Medpacks more than ranged builds, so unless they get a good indestructible Armor built they have less space freed up than you might assume) Which is a set of benefits you're not liable to expect just looking at its explicit effect!

Similarly, Ammochain is really the only build that can truly 'main' Plasma Rifles: Plasma Rifles are very powerful, pretty clearly the most powerful weapon the game doesn't class as Exotic or Unique, but normally they have to be reserved for targets worthy of their deadly attention. If you just spray Plasma Rifle shots at every enemy you encounter, you will run out of Power Cells, often within a single floor!... unless you're an Ammochain Marine, in which case you might run out a couple of times if you try to 'main' a Plasma Rifle before Power Cells are properly a common find, but past a certain point most floors will provide more ammo than you spend unless you're really careless with your fire.

Which ties nicely into another way Ammochain is way more powerful than you're liable to intuit: normally, firing Accuracy-dependent weapons into the darkness is a really bad idea. The darkness effect will eat your shots regularly (50% of the time), and at really long ranges your shots will be basically guaranteed to pass through every enemy they encounter without actually hitting them due to accumulating Accuracy penalties, and all this means that firing into the darkness will pretty regularly be a complete waste of ammo, even if you have a Tracking Map to ensure you're actually aiming at enemies. All of this means you're pressured to prefer letting enemies into your sight before you shoot at them, thus potentially letting them actually fire back and hit you...

... but Ammochain is so absurdly ammo-efficient with 10mm ammo that you can fire blindly into the dark without worrying that you'll resultantly run through too much ammo and be unable to fight at all in a few floors: if you fire blindly 50 times into the shadows, and all you do is kill a single Former Captain, you're 50 ammo ahead! This gives Ammochain Marines the ability to provoke and kill enemies from complete safety quite often, for one thing stretching their stocks of Medpacks and Armor: you don't need healing or replacement Armor if nothing attacks you in the first place!

There's also the fact that Ammochain means you'll basically never need to reload mid-combat, making it largely irrelevant that rapid-fire weapons have long reload times. No need to wonder whether you should reload after firing 4 volleys, risking an enemy walking into sight and attacking you twice, among other dangers Ammochain almost completely bypasses.

Ammochain's only actual flaw is that it blocks Eagle Eye while rapid-fire weapons are mostly on the lower end of Accuracy, making it a bit unreliable in the moment, and having the side effect of blocking Intuition, preventing you from using Intuition 2 to targetedly fire on enemies in the dark on a reliable basis. This is a very mild flaw in general, and it can be ablated substantially with Mod Packs/Assemblies. An Ammochain run lucky enough to find a Laser Rifle largely stops caring about the lack of Eagle Eye, too.

Also, Angel of Max Carnage runs render this one flaw completely irrelevant.

Survivalist

Requirements: 2 ranks in Ironman, 2 ranks in Tough as Nails, 1 rank in Badass, which is a total of 6 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Hellrunner, Son of a Bitch, Berserker.

Effect: If Doomguy's total damage reduction is enough that an attack's damage against them is reduced to zero before 'pity damage' kicks in, there is a 50% chance that the attack's final damage will be zero instead of being raised to 1. Additionally, Medpack healing is now able to take Doomguy above 100% base HP; in the case of Large Medpacks, they will add 50% of base HP if used while above 50% of base HP. Finally, Small Medpacks and Small Health Globes provide twice as much healing. (ie Small Medpacks heal 50% of max HP plus 4 HP, and Small Health Globes heal 20 HP)

Survivalist is our first example of a Mastery concept I don't necessarily mind the idea of, but which Doom Roguelike consistently drops the ball on: 'generalist' Masteries that don't focus on a specific weapon type.

It's kind of odd how consistently it drops the ball with this concept, especially the ways it does so; I'm very used to seeing a game have one or more generalist styles plus a bunch of specialist styles, and the specialist styles are all too weak or unreliable compared to the generalist styles. Doom Roguelike has the opposite problem, where the non-specialized Masteries are just... bad.

Survivalist was especially bad in 0.9.9.7: it required three ranks in Ironman, rather than the current two, and so couldn't be grabbed until Level 7, and of course Ironman was a really bad Trait in 0.9.9.7 so mandatory ranks in it was bad just for that reason.

But even in 0.9.9.8, Survivalist struggles.

The biggest issue is that it's a defensive Mastery at all: in Doom Roguelike, it's very feasible to achieve stellar offenses that keep Doomguy alive by virtue of killing enemies so fast they get few or no opportunities to actually attack, whereas nearly-invulnerable defenses is generally harder to achieve and is less helpful at actually helping you win the game. Among other points, unless you're doing a melee build, improving the strength of your offenses improves your ammo efficiency and so reduces the odds of you running out of ammo entirely at some point and being in big trouble as a result: it's a very real danger to a Survivalist run that you might die by virtue of being perpetually insufficiently ammo-efficient!

"Well, I'll play my Survivalist as a melee character," you might be thinking, but there's two problems with this idea. The first one is the 'why aren't you playing Vampyre, then?' issue: Vampyre also improves your survivability as its core benefit! The second issue is that Survivalist blocks Berserker, crippling your melee damage output. Oh, and just like Vampyre it blocks Hellrunner, so it's not like it's any better at reaching melee range than a Vampyre.

Another problem with Survivalist is that its benefits are noticeably backloaded and at odds with the game's overall design. The 50% chance to negate pity damage hits requires successfully constructing significant defenses (A task made harder by Berserker being blocked) to have come up relatively reliably, and so tends to matter little if at all until a run is decently far past having taken Survivalist. The ability to overheal with Medpacks similarly takes a while to be particularly beneficial: you need to be reaching the point of regularly leaving Medpacks behind due to lack of inventory space for the overhealing to be a reliable benefit...

... and eventually it gets noticeably neutered by the fact that Supercharges, Megaspheres, and Invulnerability Globes all get pretty common. In Hell floors, it's pretty common to see 1-2 Supercharges per floor multiple floors in a row! Why blow a Medpack on overhealing if you can just grab a Supercharge or Megasphere? Invulnerability Globes don't set you to 200% HP, of course, but they do ensure you can't lose HP for a while, making healing less necessary. This particular aspect is especially problematic for Survivalist in Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 runs -it eventually becomes regular to see 2-3 Supercharges on floors!- but even in a regular run it means one of Survivalist's key benefits falls off in relevance very hard.

The backloadedness is particularly bad for standard runs, which have early dangers that are frankly designed in expectation of an offensive Mastery providing an early power spikes that lets Doomguy power through them: entering Deimos Lab with Survivalist is often distressingly similar to entering Deimos Lab with no Mastery at all, which is to say that if you actually fight the Shamblers you're worryingly likely to straight-up die.

But as I just said, in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 the proliferation of super-heal Powerups hits Survivalist hard!

0.9.9.8 did also tack on a new benefit where Small Medpacks and Health Globes give twice as much healing: this at least ablates the 'too backloaded' issue, providing a reliable early benefit... but it stays within the 'also falls off in relevancy later' issue, as Small Medpacks and Health Globes largely stop generating by the time you're in Hell floors. It also has some odd jank to it, in that it makes Small Medpacks a slightly superior heal to Large Medpacks unless Doomguy is below 50% HP, and similarly makes Small Health Globes much better than Large Health Globes unless Doomguy is more than 20 HP below 100%. (Nightmare! difficulty makes this jank worse, since it doubles healing values!)

So even though Survivalist is less bad than in 0.9.9.7, it's still fundamentally flawed, and frankly will probably never be an Interestingly Good Mastery while staying close to the current concept and attached mechanics.

If you are going to give Survivalist a try, it's probably best to play it as basically a Shotgun/Rocket Launcher Mastery with perhaps a willingness to use Plasma Rifles and/or some non-standard weapons. Its incompatibilities are crippling to melee, and very bad for rapid-fire weapons (Particularly Chainguns) and to a lesser extent Pistols, while being much more mild in their impact on Shotguns and Rocket Launchers.

Of course, this raises the question 'why didn't you go for Army of the Dead, then?'...

... which is a good example of why generalist Masteries don't work very well as a concept: the other four Mastery types cover all the main weapon types you can expect to make stable use of! Only some of the weird Exotics and Uniques that don't count as a Pistol, Shotgun/Rocket Launcher, rapid-fire weapon, or melee weapon don't inevitably raise the specter of 'but you'd be way more effective using the Mastery specialized in this weapon type'.

The sad thing is, Survivalist is arguably the most functional of the generalist Masteries.

The closest to a nice thing I have to say about Survivalist is that it's the only Mastery in the game that doesn't include requirements that are useless to an Angel of Pacificism run... and this comes with the two huge qualifiers that, firstly, it takes forever to get a Mastery in Angel of Pacifism, and secondly, Survivalist blocking Hellrunner is killer to its viability there given Hellrunner is inarguably the single most important Trait for an Angel of Pacifism run.

I wish Survivalist provided Backpack-esque advantages. A big part of its problem is the ammo inefficiency caused by investing in defenses instead of offenses, and more specifically the high danger of hitting complete ammo starvation. If Survivalist let the Marine carry more ammo (With this stacking with the Backpack), that would let Survivalist retain its defensive character while being less susceptible to ammo starvation. It would even be on-theme of a benefit!

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Overall, the Marine is characterized pretty heavily by their defensive capacity letting them substantially ignore what their enemies are doing, bulling through damage and literally ignoring knockback. This works decently well at making them the basic class for easing the player into the game, especially since they're not strongly susceptible to sudden damage spikes killing them when a player might think they're safe, and is also noteworthy for the fact that the Marine has by far the clearest 'class identity' of the game's three classes, in terms of starting from a 'feel' and translating it into a distinct gameplay experience.

I'll be talking about this more with the other two class posts, but while the Scout and Technician both have 'themes', they don't really translate clearly into specific styles of play. (Notably, Jupiter Hell repeats this trifecta of classes and still struggles heavily to give the non-Marine classes mechanical identities that are distinct and functional)

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Next time, we cover the Scout and their Masteries.

See you then.