Doom Roguelike Equipment Analysis: Pistols

Most Pistols do Bullet damage by default, ie the boring damage type with no special mechanics attached.

So! Time to talk about baseline weapon damage mechanics, since they're pretty broadly accurate to Pistols!

First of all, damage in Doom Roguelike is always constructed first and foremost as virtual dice. The game can add non-dice damage, such as how Son of a Bitch just adds 1 point of damage per rank, but all attacks use dice. (Even the handful of enemies who reliably do a specific damage number are technically rolling dice, it's just they roll a large number of dice that have exactly 1 side apiece)

Using a basic Pistol as our starting example, its damage is formatted as 2d4. That means 'you have 2 dice, which each have 4 sides', which results in a minimum damage of 2 and a maximum damage of 8. Note that a given weapon (or enemy attack) always has all virtual dice the same size; there are no cases of 'roll one 10-sided dice and roll one 5-sided dice' or whatever.

I imagine a lot of players interpret this virtual dice mechanic as essentially the same as the usual damage range mechanics a lot of games employ. I further imagine some players feel like it's dumb to format the damage this way instead of just clearly saying that eg a basic Pistol's damage is 2-8.

But! The usage of multiple virtual dice actually is meaningful, as it has a noticeable impact on where the results tend to land. That is, in a lot of games, a damage range of 2-8 would mean that all 7 possible numbers have an equal chance of happening, but in Doom Roguelike your basic Pistol's damage is weighted toward the center of that range, because there are more possible dice combinations that can produce the middle results than there are combinations that can produce the results at the edges.

For example, 4 damage can result from both dice rolling 2, but can also result from one rolling 1 and the other 3, for a total of 3 roll sets that can produce 4 damage. (Because 1/3 and 3/1 are distinct outcomes for the purposes of thinking through odds) By contrast, 2 damage can only happen if both dice roll 1; this means 4 damage occurs literally three times as often as 2 damage. (Or 8 damage, for that matter) Similarly, 3 damage has exactly two possible combinations for producing it (1/2 and 2/1), so it occurs twice as often as 2 damage but only 66% as often as 4 damage.

This gets noticeably more true as the dice count goes up, it should be pointed out. For example, a Combat Pistol is 3d3, giving us 3-9 damage; the minimum damage of 3 still has exactly one combination that can produce it (Three 1s, of course), whereas the middle damage of 5 can be produced by two 2s and one 1 (Which is three exact configurations), or two 1s and a single 3. (Which is another 3 exact configurations) So now a middle damage result occurs six times as often as minimum or maximum damage results!

Doom Roguelike has a pretty strong preference for raising dice count as overall damage goes up, so this means that as you're looking at more and more lethal attacks they also tend to be more stable of attacks. This makes Doom Roguelike unusually 'clockwork' of a Roguelike, as improbable possibilities occur way less often than in a typical Roguelike; say you have a 9d9 attack. That can of course roll as little as 9 damage, which is low enough that the frailest enemies in Doom Roguelike will survive (Enemies in Doom Roguelike start from 10 HP), but this is stupendously unlikely, as all 9 dice rolling a 1 simultaneously is a 1-in-9 event 'telescoped' to a depth of 9 -that is, the odds of it happening are that you divide by 9, then divide the result by 9, and you do that a total of 9 times to arrive at your odds of this actually happening. This is considerably less than a 1% chance of occurring. It is in fact less than a 1 in a hundred million chance of happening! (About 1 in four hundred million, specifically)

You do have to still be ready for low-odds events happening, of course, leading to risk management actually being part of the game (As in basically any Roguelike), but compared to some Roguelikes I've played the RNG isn't so oppressively in control of success or failure. If you've got a weapon that has its 'center of gravity' noticeably above a given enemy's max HP while still being able to roll low enough to not instantly kill that enemy, rolling low enough they survive is a possibility you have to be ready for, but you don't really have to worry about long streaks of modestly unlucky RNG results just ruining you the way a lot of more classic Roguelike designs can have happen.

Anyway, that's just the initial step of damage calculation. Then you add any fixed damage modifiers (eg Son of a Bitch adding 1 point per rank) to whatever was rolled, then it's time to check resistances!

By default, resistance is 0%, by which I mean by default resistance doesn't modify the damage any and you just move on to the next step. If something does have resistance, and the resistance is actually applicable to the incoming attack, it's time to modify damage by a percentage. Say a would-be victim has 50% Bullet resistance; in that case, whatever our damage number from the previous step was, we shave off 50% of it. In the event that this results in a non-whole number, the game rounds the damage down to the nearest whole number; if our attack did 7 damage base, that gets halved to 3.5, and then rounded down to just 3. This is more important to the player resistances than to the enemy resistances as enemies that have resistances at all tend to have pretty high numbers, but this ensures resistance actually does lower the damage in most cases, even with low resistance amounts like 10% against low damage values.

After all that's done, the target's Protection comes into play, in the form of simple subtraction. ie 1 Protection will subtract 1 damage from the final number, 3 Protection will subtract 3 damage, etc. The only general qualifier here is that damage cannot be reduced to 0 by all these damage reduction effects; an attack that hits will always do at least 1 point of damage. (Unless the target is a Marine with Survivalist, in which case damage that is supposed to be forced up to 1 damage has a 50% chance to be 0)

This qualifier itself has a qualifier: if a target's resistance erases 100% of the incoming damage by itself, then it does in fact reduce the damage to zero. This requires the resistance be exactly 100%, though; even a resistance of 95% will result in the game rounding the final damage back up to 1. This immunity qualifier mostly matters to Boots protecting the player from dangerous fluids, though; no enemy has immunity to a damage type, and the player has only a tiny handful of ways to get immunity from incoming damage that isn't specifically immunity to fluids on the floor.

Aside covering how knockback intersects with this whole thing (Which is for next post), the above really is everything that applies to Bullet damage attacks, and thus the entirety of what applies to non-Unique, non-Assembly Pistols.

But before we get into specific Pistols, I should in fact explain Doom Roguelike's item rarity system, as it has some amount of mechanical meaning.

Items broadly come in three tiers: common, Exotic, and Unique.

Common items are just your basic common items. They're basic weapons, the three most common Armor types, the three most common Boot types, and the majority of non-equipment items you can actually hold in your inventory. (eg Medpacks, Phase Devices) They don't have any notable rules for me to point out.

Exotic items are a weird category to talk about because they have limited mechanical meaning (Scavenger being able to disassemble Exotic items but not common items is a rare example of the distinction having mechanical meaning) and are conceptually vague or inconsistent. For example, I said common items are 'basic' weapons, but the most basic form of BFG is classed as Exotic rather than a common item. Some items that are a superior version of a common weapon are Exotic (eg Combat Pistols), while others are common. (eg Tactical Shotguns) And some Exotic items are just plain weird, either not fitting into the weapon families at all or having a clear weapon family whose default rules they significantly deviate from. So Exotics is a bit of a mess.

Uniques are much more mechanically significant. First, as their name suggests, the game does not like multiple copies existing: if you enter a floor with a Unique in your inventory, the game will not generate that Unique on that floor. (The wiki says that picking up a Unique prevents it from ever spawning in that run again, but this is incorrect: I have picked up, used, and subsequently abandoned a Unique, only to be frustrated when that exact Unique generates again later in the run and I still don't want it. I've had this happen in multiple runs, in both 0.9.9.7 and 0.9.9.8) Second, Uniques normally refuse to accept Mod Packs of any kind: the Technician is allowed to apply Mod Packs to varying extents to various Uniques, but for Marines and Scouts they cannot be modified.

Third, Uniques are not subject to item-on-floor destruction rules: explosions cannot annihilate them the way they can destroy other items, and in fact even a Nuke detonating won't destroy a Unique. 0.9.9.8 quietly improved this protection: in 0.9.9.7, Uniques could still melt by being dropped into Acid or Lava (Which was infuriating with Lava Armor and Boots that were immune to Acid and/or Lava), but as of 0.9.9.8 as far as I'm aware the only way for a Unique to be destroyed while on the ground is for a Scavenger Technician to disassemble it: now all Uniques will float peacefully on an Acid or Lava tile forever.

The wiki also claims only one Unique can spawn on a given floor, but if that's intended to be a limitation, it's not one the game actually holds itself to. I don't see multiple Uniques on a floor often, but that makes perfect sense given how rare they are in general. Hell's Armory is particularly blatant about this, as it has a room full of weapons and Armor that have much better odds than usual of being Exotics or Uniques, and so every once in a while you'll find two Uniques in view of each other in said room.

Anyway, overall, these three categories are pretty clearly meant to be something of a quality tier system, where Exotics are generally better than common items, and Uniques are generally better than common items. In practice the game is... pretty uneven about this actually being true, with Uniques particularly often suffering heavily from their immunity to modding meaning they look pretty good when you compare them to an unmodded common or Exotic equivalent but suddenly they look pretty bad if you compare them to a modded equivalent. Exotics are at least usually better than common equivalents in cases where there is a clear equivalent: the Exotics that are arguably worse than common-tier gear are mostly the Exotics that don't fit into a weapon family at all, so they at least don't have a lesser version to be the greater version of.

Also, Doom Roguelike has an item 'weight' system that determines how commonly a given item spawns. I'll not be including this stat in these posts, partly because the wiki has a page that lists all item weights if you care, but mostly because I don't actually understand how this 'item weight' system connects to the in-game reality. For example, as of this post going up it lists Combat Knives as having a weight of 640, which is fairly high, only exceeded by some ammo types and the more common Powerups, which fits at a glance to how most standard runs find 1-3 Combat Knives on the second floor and usually see 4+ total over the first three floors that actually use procedural generation (ie floors 2, 3, and 4), but... then Combat Knives rapidly become absurdly rare, where if you don't grab one of these early Combat Knives you may never see another one in the run! (Which is very important to be aware of with a Malicious Blades run)

Similarly, the wiki lists Armor Shards as having a weight of 700, indicating they should be even more common than Combat Knives and indeed should be one of the most commonly-appearing items in general (Only Small Health Globes have a higher weight, at 900, and only Shotgun Shells tie with Armor Shards on weight), and that's absolutely never been my experience. I generally see more Supercharges (Weight: 150) than I do Armor Shards, and I've had multiple Angel of 100 runs where I saw more Megaspheres (Weight: 60) than Armor Shards.

I don't see much point in listing a hidden stat the player can't engage with in terms of decision-making and whose stated rules don't fit my actual experience. I do occasionally make references to the item weight numbers in these posts (Such as mentioning cases where 0.9.9.8 made an item more common), but... not often.

Anyway, finally getting into Pistols in specific...

(Basic) Pistol

Damage: 2d4

Accuracy: +4

Fire Duration: 1 second

Reload Duration: 1.2 seconds (Reloads entire clip)

Clip: 6

Alternate Reload: Dual Reload (Requires two Pistol-class weapons equipped)

Alternate Fire: Aimed Shot. Takes a shot with an additional +3 to accuracy, but the shot takes twice as long. This doubling occurs after the game forces the 0.1/s minimum, and so this shot will take at least 0.2 seconds.

Minimum floor: 2

In true Doom fashion, the Pistol is your default starting weapon. Certain Angel Challenges will change your initial kit, but for most runs a Pistol is what you'll start out shooting enemies with.

Also appropriate to Doom, the Pistol is, by default, a lackluster weapon you will wish to move on from as fast as possible... unless you're going for a Pistol build, of course, in which case it will rapidly become a very good general-purpose weapon that you'll use in most situations unless and until you have an even better class of Pistol.

Of course, we're also seeing a couple Doom Roguelike-specific concepts here: 'alternate reload', and 'alternate fire'. Most non-melee weapons have one or both of this type of concept, and they're... mostly not very relevant, actually. A few Uniques do interesting and worthwhile things with them, but for the most part if you never figure out the inputs for them you're really not missing out on much.

Dual Reload is one of a handful of exceptions to this point, as by default Pistol builds are going to wield two Pistols and you want to be using Dual Reload to get ammo loaded into both Pistols simultaneously, as opposed to using a standard reload, swapping weapons, and using a standard reload again. If you do a lot of Pistol runs, you're going to get very familiar with using Dual Reload. Note that Dual Reload takes the full amount of time as reloading both weapons manually, and so can give enemies a lot of time to attack; it's still faster than doing the reload->swap->reload sequence, though, because Dual Reload doesn't spend time swapping the weapons.

Dual Reload's behavior is straightforward enough to understand when you're talking just 'two Pistols' or 'two Combat Pistols'; you just need one in your main weapon slot and one in the Prepared slot and there you go. But if you start mixing weapons there's wrinkles you might not expect. Thing is, Dual Reload only cares about two things: if the weapon in the main slot has Dual Reload, and if the weapon in the Prepared slot is also a Pistol-class weapon. (Okay, and also whether reloading is currently possible, but shhh) By that I mean that two of the Unique Pistols lack Dual Reload, but if you put them in the Prepared slot they'll still be reloaded when you use Dual Reload.

It is restricted to Pistols, though. No doing shenanigans with using Dual Reload to reload a Rocket Launcher or whatever.

Anyway, the Pistol's Alternate Fire of Aimed Shot is more representative of how ignorable these mechanics tend to be. Aimed Shot is just terrible; a Pistol's +4 Accuracy already hits just over 74% of the time at the edge of line of sight, and +3 Accuracy raises that to a 95.37% chance to hit. Spending twice the time to fire is largely a terrible trade for that degree of accuracy boost: if you fired twice, you'd have a 93.24~% chance of hitting at least once, and would have around a 50% chance of hitting twice and so doubling-ish your damage output. In theory Aimed Shot could be good for ammo efficiency, but by default Pistol builds are very ammo-efficient: the main use-case for Aimed Shot is when running Bullet Dance, as Aimed Shot actually overrules Bullet Dance, so if you want to finish a near-dead target without wasting 5 bullets you can use Aimed Shot. (Aimed Shot also doesn't trigger Dualgunner)

Notably, shots in Doom Roguelike can always miss. If Aimed Shot was able to actually ensure a shot would hit, there'd be cases where it would guarantee you finished a nearly-dead target, where it would potentially be worth the doubled time spent.

Aimed Shot is particularly sad for a Technician going for Sharpshooter since that requires Eagle Eye 3 and so you'll already have max Accuracy against anything you can see, but even for other Pistol Masteries you can (and probably should) grab a rank or two in Eagle Eye for the general performance boost, further eroding Aimed Shot's value.

If you're not doing a Pistol build... you're going to try to drop the Pistol as soon as possible. The first floor of a standard run ensures you will get a Shotgun, which is a far superior weapon when Trait points are not involved, so in a standard run that's not specializing in Pistols there is an extremely short window in which it's at all feasible for Aimed Shot to be maybe worth using. I wouldn't be surprised if players have determined it does in fact make sense to use Aimed Shot a few times in that very first floor, but honestly, unless you're trying to do challenges like 'clear the game without ever taking damage', you can afford to be technically sub-optimal for the extremely tiny window of 'the short and relatively safe first floor of a run'.

Anyway, it should be pointed out that the reload duration on a Pistol is not only innately longer than the fire duration but that ranks in Son of a Gun hugely exaggerate this. If you don't have the Scout's Gun Kata Mastery for free reloads on kills, it's a good idea to develop a habit of stepping out of sight of enemies to reload, so you minimize opportunities for enemies to attack you, and in turn to plan out your engagements so that's possible to do quickly and safely.

Also, I should talk about ammo, starting with the ammo used by most Pistols:

10mm ammo

100 bullets at most per tile or inventory slot. When generated on the floor, spawns in a stack of 48/24/30/36/48. (Difficulty-dependent)

Minimum floor: 1

10mm ammo is overall the most common and numerous ammo in Doom Roguelike, particularly in the early game: it generates decently often, when it spawns on the floor it spawns in a larger stack than any other ammo type, and Former Humans and especially Former Captains will reliably provide even more ammo when killed. (Up to 30 bullets from Former Humans, up to 140 bullets for Former Captains) On the other hand, the default preferred way to spend 10mm ammo is Chainguns, which spend ammo very aggressively: 10mm ammo often doesn't last as long as you might expect just looking at the numbers on ammunition.

Note that ammo spawning on the floor is the only case of ammo being (directly) affected by difficulty. As such, the difficulty multiplier to ammo is very much not representative of how much ammo you'll find, because quite a lot of your ammo comes from enemies dropping ammo when killed, and you've got a few other sources of ammo that also aren't affected by this effect, like unloading ammo from weapons. Also note that it's dynamically applied as multipliers (2/1/1.25/1.5/2) but most ammo has their base value such that these multipliers all cleanly result in whole numbers. (I'll point out the exception when we get to it)

A qualifier to this 'difficulty affects ammo on the floor' is that fixed floors (eg Special Levels, the Phobos Anomaly) that have ammo generate on the floor do not have that ammo affected by difficulty: they always use the base (And thus the lowest) value for ammo. This includes that if a Special Level generates ammo partway through (As Hell's Arena does), ammo generated this way still only ever uses the base amount. I suspect this is an oversight.

Also note that the limit of ammo in a tile is handled kind of oddly by Doom Roguelike, in that it is actually possible for more ammo to be in a tile than is normally legal. If you pick up the Backpack, making your inventory ammo storage more efficient, dropping a full stack of ammo from inventory (140 units of 10mm ammo, in this case) will set the full thing on the ground. If you instead stand on, say, 50 units of 10mm ammo and drop 90 units into that tile, 50 of the units of ammo will merge into that tile and then the other 40 units will be dropped into an adjacent tile, even though that's also a total of 140 bullets. There's also a handful of enemies that can drop extra-huge stacks of ammo into a tile in exactly the same way: picking up these extra-huge stacks will automatically split them up into stacks matching your max for inventory slots.

10mm ammo itself is largely correlated to the Bullet damage type and is mostly used by Pistols and the non-energy rapid-fire weapons. As a few enemies are heavily resistant to Bullet damage, it's usually not ideal to rely solely on 10mm ammo-fed weapons: if you don't have alternatives, Revenants and Lost Souls (More specifically: Pain Elementals) can be nightmares to fight. Notably, these enemies also all resist Fire damage, making rocket weapons less good a supplement than you might expect.

Before 0.9.9.8, 10mm ammo-reliant weapons had a worrying tendency to suffer ammo starvation in the late game. 'Regular' floor ammo isn't very common: most 10mm ammo comes from enemies and 'ammo rooms', and in 0.9.9.7 ammo rooms stopped being willing to generate ammo rooms with 10mm ammo starting on floor 4: in conjunction with the 10mm ammo-dropping enemies being concentrated in the early game, it was pretty easy for a run relying on 10mm ammo to have a solid stockpile of ammo only for three floors to provide no replacement ammo, running out entirely and subsequently dying. 0.9.9.8 reworked ammo rooms, so this isn't as common as before... still a risk, mind.

In addition to 'plain' ammo, every ammo type has its own version of the following: 

10mm Ammo Chain

250 bullets per chain.

Minimum floor: 3

A 10mm Ammo Chain can be used in two ways: the first way is to just use it as space-efficient ammo storage, as you can use the Unload command on it and this will destroy it and produce regular 10mm ammo equivalent to how much was in the chain. In this duty, it is quite efficient: with no Backpack, it stores 2.5 inventory slots of ammo in one inventory slot, and even with a Backpack it's still almost 1.8 inventory slots of ammo in one inventory slot.

The intended way to use it is to equip it: it goes into the Prepared slot in that case. (It and its cousins for other ammo types cannot be put in the Weapon slot, which is unique to them: anything else that can go in the Prepared slot can also go into the Weapon slot) At that point, if you reload a weapon that requires 10mm ammo, the ammo will be pulled from the Ammo Chain, and the reload action will take 20% of the time it would otherwise take. This stacks multiplicatively with other reload modifiers, not additively, for reference, and so the only time it doesn't take 20% of the time an equivalent regular reload takes is when you're bumping into the 0.1 second minimum duration for all time-using actions. (eg a Speedloader Pistol takes 0.4 seconds to reload, 20% of that is 0.08, which gets bumped up to 0.1, and so your Ammo Chain is reducing time taken to 25% of base rather than 20% of base)

Note that the game will not pull ammo from a 10mm Ammo Chain unless it's in your Prepared slot. If the only 10mm ammo you have is Ammo Chains sitting in inventory, attempting a reload that requires 10mm ammo will give you an error message about not having ammo at all.

As for roughly how effective a 10mm Ammo Chain is in terms of time efficiency...

For a basic Pistol where you reload when you run out of ammo, this saves about 49 seconds over the 41~ reloads you'll do.

For a Combat Pistol you'll do 16 full reloads (Plus a 2/3rds reload) and save 24 seconds.

For the Anti-Freak Jackal and the Trigun, you'll save about 65.6 seconds over your 41~ reloads.

For the Grammaton Beretta, you'll do not quite 14 full reloads and save about 22 seconds.

For a basic Chaingun, you'll do 6 full reloads and so save 12 seconds.

For a Minigun, one full reload will eat almost the entirety of the Ammo Chain, saving you 2.8 seconds of reload time in that case.

For the Mega Buster, you'll reload slightly over 4 times and save 11.2~ seconds.

Lastly, the Frag Shotgun will get 15 full reloads (And a 2/3rds reload) and so save you 30 seconds on those full reloads.

You might notice that the time savings tends to go down as weapon clip size goes up. This generalizes pretty consistently across weapon types, because clip size is given much more variation than reload duration: reloading's base duration is always at least one second, most weapons stay somewhere within 1-2 seconds, and the most extreme outliers are 3.5 seconds, meaning the slowest reloads take less than 4 times as long as the fastest reloads. Base clip size, meanwhile, varies from 1 unit to 200 units. Even just looking at 10mm ammo-using weapons, it varies from 6 to 200: a Minigun has 33.33 times as much ammo in its clip as a basic Pistol!

10mm Ammo Chain and its cousins for other ammo types are thus generally most impactful for supporting weapons with low clip sizes that end up needing to be reloaded in combat conditions a lot.

Also, a point of awkwardness is that as far as I'm aware there's no quick-and-easy way to tell the game 'I want to reload from my general ammo pool instead of from my equipped 10mm Ammo Chain'. You just have to unequip it, which is itself awkward if your inventory is full because you can't directly swap a weapon into the Prepared slot over it: the only quick-and-easy way to remove an ammo item of this sort is to have a different ammo item you swap in over it. So if you want to not waste the quick-reload value, you end up having to drop your Prepared ammo item on the ground, reload, and then equip it from the ground... which can potentially risk it being blown up if any enemies with explosive attacks are in your vicinity without you realizing it.

I said when talking about Malicious Blades that I wish ammo items didn't use the Prepared slot and instead had their own dedicated slot, and this isn't fully correct: I would like that scenario, but I'd also be okay with ammo items just enabling the quick-reload behavior while in your Prepared slot but pulling ammo in your inventory instead of having an internal supply. This solution wouldn't help Malicious Blades any and would require retuning in general (It would reduce Doomguy's ability to stockpile ammo and make it wonky how most of these ammo items are guaranteed to be found in multiple Special Levels: only the Power Battery doesn't have multiple guaranteed copies), but it would do away with a lot of the wonkiness I laid out in the above paragraph and smooth out various lesser bits of jank.

For example, when you have a 10mm Ammo Chain that has less than 100 units left, it becomes an inefficient use of an inventory slot for ammo storage, where you can find yourself wanting to break it down so you can actually get 100 units of 10mm ammo in that inventory slot. Similarly, when an ammo item currently has less ammo than what's needed to reload your currently-equipped weapon and you want to get to full ammo right away, its time efficiency ceases to be true: you'll do the quick reload, then another reload at normal speed!

I do very much like the idea of these ammo items, but it would be nice if their mechanics were smoothed out.

Combat Pistol

Damage: 3d3

Accuracy: +5

Fire Duration: 1 second

Reload Duration: 1.8 seconds (Reloads entire clip)

Clip: 15

Alternate Reload: Dual Reload (Requires two pistol-class weapons equipped)

Alternate Fire: Aimed Shot. Takes a shot with an additional +3 to accuracy, but the shot takes twice as long. This doubling occurs after the game forces the 0.1/s minimum, and so this shot will take at least 0.2 seconds.

Minimum floor: 7

Almost directly superior to a basic Pistol, with its only disadvantage being that it takes 50% longer to reload... but its clip is 2-and-a-half times larger, so you don't have to reload as often in the first place. It does mean it's more dangerous to reload with enemies in sight, but that's it: it hits harder, more accurately, with a larger clip, and it even has both of the Pistol's special actions. You can't turn it into a Speedloader Pistol, but again, the superior clip size substantially offsets this. If you're using a basic Pistol and find a Combat Pistol, there's basically no reason to not immediately switch in the Combat Pistol. The only real qualifier to this is that it's technically possible for you to have applied a more advanced Assembly to the basic Pistol so the Combat Pistol is less clear an improvement... but for most runs, even if this has happened what's going on is that you have two Pistols, and you just swap the Combat Pistol in over the regular Pistol you didn't apply an Assembly to.

The Combat Pistol is especially appreciated if you were running a Pistol as a secondary weapon you were breaking out for specific purposes (Such as shooting an enemy near a Barrel without detonating the Barrel), as its damage advantage is made less substantial by ranks in Son of a Gun. (3 ranks in Son of a Gun raises the minimum damage from 2 on the Pistol and 3 on the Combat Pistol to 5 on the Pistol and 6 on the Combat Pistol, for example) It's least appreciated for a Scout running Gun Kata, as once that build gets going it's often getting free reloads triggered in 6 volleys or less anyway, even against late-game enemies. It's still a clear improvement for a Gun Kata Scout, mind, but less impressive of one.

I should note that the Combat Pistol is an uncommon find. No Special Level has a guaranteed copy, unlike a number of other Exotic weapons, and it doesn't generate 'naturally' very often, exacerbated by its strangely high minimum floor. This is a good example of what I described at the end of the Technician post of difficulty having lucky finds result in pivots: by the time a Combat Pistol is even allowed to spawn, on Ultraviolence you're closing in on your Mastery!

That frustrating point aside, the Combat Pistol is pretty straightforward: if you find it in a Pistol-focused run, it's a nice upgrade, and if you find it outside such a run you probably won't use it much but it is still a clear improvement over using a regular Pistol.

Blaster

Damage: 2d4

Accuracy: +3

Fire Duration: 0.9 seconds

Reload Duration: 1 second (I'm not aware of this mattering)

Clip: 10

Alternate Reload: None.

Alternate Fire: Aimed Shot. Takes a shot with an additional +3 to accuracy, but the shot takes twice as long. This doubling occurs after the game forces the 0.1/s minimum, and so this shot will take at least 0.2 seconds.

Minimum floor: 4

Special: If the Blaster is in the Weapon or Prepared slot and hasn't been fired for at least 2 actions, its clip restores 1 point of ammo for each action the player takes. It cannot be reloaded manually. Additionally, it does Plasma damage.

The Blaster is in an awkward place.

You might expect it to be really appreciated by a Pistol build, since Blasters having self-generating ammo means you don't have to worry about running out of ammo entirely, which is a concern for most ranged combat builds, but in practice... this is only maybe accurate to a Technician running Sharpshooter.

For a Scout, Blasters are hampered by not working with Gun Kata; Gun Kata's kill-triggered free reload doesn't work on weapons that can't be reloaded normally! If Gun Kata caused a Blaster to be set to max ammo on a kill, a Blaster would be an incredible addition, but as-is slotting a Blaster in over a regular Pistol will give a minor initial improvement in damage output and then once it runs out of ammo it will rapidly fall behind compared to a regular Pistol. Swapping it in and out to get some use out of it is maybe an option, but leaving aside the part where that would be a huge nuisance it also means committing in-game time to not fighting. In Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 runs it's not at all unusual in the late game to descend a floor and immediately end up in an extended combat against dozens of enemies where there just plain is not a 'free' moment; that's the kind of situation where spending an action on swapping an empty Blaster for another Pistol can be costly. (And, to be clear, where not doing so and just letting it be a semi-dead slot just changes how it's costly)

For a Marine, a Blaster is hampered by being a poor fit to Bullet Dance tearing through ammo extremely quickly. You'll get 3 volleys of 3 shots, then 1 volley of 1 shot, and then you're out. There's arguments for holding onto a Blaster for utilities like 'detonate an explosive barrel without spending ammo', but as a primary attacking tool?... not great.

For a Technician going Sharpshooter, a Blaster is actually pretty okay. Since a Sharpshooter isn't dual-wielding Pistols anyway, maintaining a swap in the Prepared slot is an option at all, unlike other Pistol Masteries, and Sharpshooter's mechanics don't have any anti-synergies with a Blaster. Easy access to Whizkid also means a Sharpshooter can readily ablate the Blaster's ammo issues by stacking Bulk Mod Packs, and since Sharpshooter makes Power Mod Pack damage boosts completely reliable there's a disproportionate benefit to applying them; 3 Power Mod Packs will raise the Blaster's damage from 8 to 14, completely reliably. Ranks in Son of a Gun means that's less drastic an increase in damage than it sounds, mind; Son of a Gun 3 makes it an increase from 11 to 17, while Son of a Gun 5 makes it an increase from 13 to 19, but even that latter scenario is still almost a 50% increase in damage and so going to shave off ammo spent here and there.

Altogether, these aspects ablate the issues with running out of ammo mid-combat enough for the Blaster to actually be an okay option in a Sharpshooter's hands, making it less likely to happen in a given combat and less drastic an interruption in firepower output when it does happen. As 10mm ammo sometimes entirely fails to generate for long stretches of the late game in a standard run, having a tool for reducing one's reliance on 10mm ammo is potentially worth the difficulties involved in relying on a Blaster as your primary weapon.

Nanomanufacture Ammo can be applied to a Blaster to do away with the awkwardness of its recharge mechanics, but... Nanomanufacture Ammo removes the concern of ammo in general, undermining one of the Blaster's main notable qualities. A Nanomachic Blaster's only differences from a Nanomachic basic Pistol are the damage type and technically the base fire speed. (Which is completely irrelevant if you have Son of a Gun at rank 5) A Combat Pistol is probably a better base for a Nanomachic pistol thanks to its better base damage unless you're specifically wanting a better answer to Revenants and Lost Souls. (Which have strong Bullet resistance and no Plasma resistance)

I'd argue none of the other Assemblies you can apply to a Blaster do a lot to help it. (Partly because Pistol-valid Assemblies are, on average, not very good) Turning it into a Storm Bolter actually worsens the issues with it rapidly running out of ammo in combat situations, for example.

As a final bit of awkwardness, for some reason the Blaster is absurdly rare, having the kind of low 'weight' normally reserved for Uniques! You can easily complete a dozen full standard runs without ever seeing a Blaster: this all makes its underwhelming nature extra-frustrating, where if your run is 'blessed' with a Blaster it... probably gets left on the ground, not even picked up. (I dunno, maybe you personally obsessively play Sharpshooter Technicians and so are nearly guaranteed to actually appreciate finding a Blaster?) If it was, say, a Unique Pistol that simply ignored ammo as a limitation entirely, I'd get it, but as-is it's just confusing.

The one thing it has going for it is that its Plasma damage typing allows it to cut through walls. This largely isn't very useful -it's really bad at this job and there's plenty of other options, including a Pistol Assembly that gives Plasma damage to other Pistols- but means it can potentially be a nice find in an Angel of Marksmanship run if it happens to spawn before the Containment Area/The Wall. (Which is possible, albeit very unlikely) So do keep that in mind if you do an Angel of Marksmanship run.

Anti-Freak Jackal

Damage: 5d3

Accuracy: +4

Fire Duration: 1 second

Reload Duration: 2 seconds (Reloads entire clip)

Clip: 6

Alternate Reload: Dual Reload (Requires two pistol-class weapons equipped)

Alternate Fire: Aimed Shot. Takes a shot with an additional +3 to accuracy, but the shot takes twice as long. This doubling occurs after the game forces the 0.1/s minimum, and so this shot will take at least 0.2 seconds.

Minimum floor: 10

Special: Damage is Fire, and shots explode 1 tile out from impact point.

The Anti-Freak Jackal is conceptually interesting, being a Pistol that fires exploding shots, but awkward in practice.

In the first place, its shots being explosive means that using it as a general-purpose weapon carries the usual risks of explosive attacks; it can readily destroy items on the floor, detonate Barrels you might not even realize are present, smash open doors or destroy weak terrain that you want sticking around to  interfere with enemy movement and/or sight/line of fire, outright hurt Doomguy because you fired on too close a target or attempted to corner-shoot and were wrong about the firing angle, and since it does Fire damage it will also regularly-but-unpredictably cause knockback, adding further chaos to using it, and especially making it clunky to actually try to dual-wield Pistols with the Anti-Freak Jackal as one of them. As dual-wielding Pistols is very much the default way to use Pistols, this last bit of awkwardness is pretty significant of a flaw.

A Technician going Sharpshooter at least minimizes these flaws, making the knockback reliable and so predictable instead of maximally chaotic, and blocking Dualgunner off so the dual-wielding awkwardness is irrelevant, but the issues with spraying around explosive shots remain pertinent; it can be a good swap in the Prepared slot, but I'd very much not recommend using it as a first-choice weapon, not even as a Sharpshooter Technician.

Its status as a Unique is also unfortunate, as it takes away a lot of options for making it more appealing. I'd personally argue that it's less powerful than just a Combat Pistol that you either apply key Assemblies to or just stack Mod Packs onto. Among other points, its small ammo count and attendant need to reload regularly can't be fixed by turning it into a Speedloader Pistol or by slapping Bulk Mod Packs on to reduce how often it needs reloads.

To the Anti-Freak Jackal's credit, it is overall better than a Pistol or Combat Pistol that the Demolition Ammo Assembly has been applied to; a Demolition Ammo Combat Pistol does 5-10 damage (6-12 if we assume a Power Mod is applied) vs the Anti-Freak Jackal doing 5-15 damage, with both having the same properties as far as blast radius and all. (And a Demolition Ammo basic Pistol is even weaker; 4-8 damage) The Demolition Ammo Combat Pistol won't need to reload as often and technically has slightly higher base accuracy, but the Demolition Ammo Assembly also demands significant Trait investment and having found at least one Firestorm Mod Pack, whereas the Anti-Freak Jackal can just randomly appear somewhere and you can promptly take advantage. 

Unfortunately, I don't think Demolition Ammo is a particularly great Assembly, so the Anti-Freak Jackal being better than that Assembly isn't really a suggestion that the Anti-Freak Jackal is appealing.

Again, there's notable uses for the Anti-Freak Jackal, but for non-Pistol runs it's generally an unappealing curiosity, and even for Pistol runs it tends to be less useful than you might hope given that 'my pistol fires exploding bullets' sounds like it should be just plain excellent.

For a Technician, the Anti-Freak Jackal is a bit better as of 0.9.9.8, as you can limitedly mod it. You've only got one Assembly option -High Power Weapon- but if you don't mind devastating its clip size it is a decent bump to damage, raising it from 5d3 (5-15) to 7d3. (7-21) This... still doesn't help it much...

Grammaton Cleric Beretta

Damage: See below.

Accuracy: See below.

Fire Duration: 1 second.

Reload Duration: 2 seconds. (Reloads entire clip)

Clip: 18

Alternate Reload: Change firing mode, cycling as Single->Semi-Auto->Full Auto->Single. Switching modes takes 0.2 seconds. Starts in Single mode.

Alternate Fire: N/A

Minimum floor: 6

The Grammaton's damage and accuracy for its firing modes are thus:

Single

Damage: 2d6

Accuracy: +5

Semi-Auto

Damage: 1d8x3

Accuracy: +3

Full Auto

Damage: 1d7x6

Accuracy: +1

Semi-Auto and Full Auto have the unusual quality of causing the Trigger Happy Trait to apply. Unfortunately, the Marine's Ammochain Master Trait does not work with these modes.

In single-shot mode, the Grammaton is essentially a small upgrade over a Combat Pistol, aside the qualifier that its minimum damage is lower and its damage is less consistent about trending toward the middle. For a Technician with Sharpshooter, those mild negatives go away entirely -and same for any character in Angel of Max Carnage. It does have a slightly longer reload duration than a Combat Pistol, but its increased clip size once again means you reload less often, so it tends to be ahead regardless.

Notably, while the Grammaton itself lacks access to Dual Reload, if your primary weapon slot has Dual Reload, using Alternate Reload will still reload both pistols. Since it's a Unique and thus you can't have two copies of it, its lack of access to Dual Reload barely matters in practice. Its lack of Aimed Shot is also pretty unimportant, since Aimed Shot isn't particularly useful in the first place.

Masteries further exaggerate how little you care about the Grammaton's losses. A Technician with Sharpshooter can't dual-fire pistols in the first place, making Dual Reload unimportant. A Gun Kata Scout performs a free full reload anytime they land a kill, making Dual Reload less useful than a larger clip size in most situations. Only the Marine's Bullet Dance actually cares particularly... and that returns to the 'just put a Pistol or Combat Pistol in the Weapon slot'. This is only an issue if you also find the Trigun, which is the only other Pistol you can manually reload but doesn't have Dual Reload itself. Finding both while being exactly a Bullet Dance Marine is a pretty unlikely intersection of possibilities: I would be surprised if it's never happened to a real person at some point, but for the most part this is so improbable it's pretty reasonable to call it irrelevant.

Semi-Auto is sort of a compromise between a Chaingun and a Pistol, firing one fewer shot than a Chaingun, but at 1 more Accuracy and with maximum dice size two points higher. This makes it a nice backup weapon for outputting accurate damage in a pinch, but only if your character hasn't been biased toward one of the other modes by their Trait choices.

Full Auto is comparable to a Minigun; same accuracy, trades away a couple shots per volley for dice being 1 point higher on max damage, slightly faster base fire rate... though Miniguns can be Modded and have a much larger clip size, so in practice Full Auto is only particularly appealing if you're a Pistol specialist in the first place. Notably, a Technician with Sharpshooter is forced to take 3 ranks of Eagle Eye, and therefore still ends up at a 95~% chance to hit at line of sight ranges when using Full Auto. This is technically worse than a 98~% chance to hit, but you're unlikely to care. It matters more if you're trying to fire while Running, admittedly, as Full Auto crashes to a 62.5% chance to hit at LoS range where Single shot mode is merely down to 95~% accuracy in those conditions, but overall there's a decent argument that a Sharpshooter Technician should just stick to Full Auto. If for some reason you care about making accurate fire while Running, you can always take Eagle Eye's extended ranks to rise back up to 95~% accuracy, I suppose...

Overall, in spite of its mode-changing gimmick being pretty conceptually weird, the Grammaton Beretta is probably the most straightforwardly good of the Unique Pistols, easy to sub in over a regular Pistol (Or a Combat Pistol, if you were lucky enough to find two before you found the Grammaton) without having to change how you play much.

Do note that it's one of the few Unique weapons that Technicians still cannot mod at all as of 0.9.9.8. I suspect its mode-changing isn't coded to accommodate modding and Assembly behavior.

Trigun

Damage: 3d6

Accuracy: +6

Fire Duration: 0.7 seconds

Reload Duration: 2 seconds. (Reloads entire clip)

Clip: 6

Alternate Reload: Angel Arm. Instantly detonates a nuke. Doomguy only loses 5 max HP (As opposed to being instantly killed), but this loss cannot be undone.

Alternate Fire: Aimed Shot. Takes a shot with an additional +3 to accuracy, but the shot takes twice as long. This doubling occurs after the game forces the 0.1/s minimum, and so this shot will take at least 0.2 seconds.

Minimum floor: 8

Better than a regular Pistol, but debatable whether it's even an improvement over a Combat Pistol: the Trigun has its dice twice as large, but it has to reload more than twice as often and those reloads take slightly longer than with a Combat Pistol, and the Combat Pistol can be modded: 3 Power Mod Packs will result in a Combat Pistol having exactly the same damage dice! Son of a Gun ranks also tilt things away from the Trigun twice over: once you have Son of a Gun 5, its fire speed advantage no longer matters, and the damage from Son of a Gun ablates how significant its damage advantage is anyway: at Son of a Gun 3, your Combat Pistol is 6-12 damage while your Trigun is 6-21. Better, yes, but not as much as comparing 3-9 against 3-18.

For a Gun Kata Scout, the Trigun is easy to just slap into the Prepared slot: its reload-related flaws don't matter when you're reloading for free on kills. Just don't accidentally activate Angel Arm when you meant to do a Dual Reload!

For a Bullet Dance Marine, the 'a Combat Pistol might be better' issue looms especially large... assuming you've found two Combat Pistols. It also is at risk of being displaced by a Nanomachic Pistol of some kind if you get one or especially two Nano Mod Packs. If neither of those happen, it's generally better than even a modded regular Pistol, so it's not actually likely to be displaced if found.

For a Sharpshooter Technician, its high damage potential consistently catapults it to being a great Pistol, albeit probably inferior to the Grammaton Beretta in the event you find both. The reload awkwardness is still awkward, but for one thing it can be ablated with a 10mm Ammo Chain. (An option not available to Bullet Dance without giving up firepower) and/or with ranks in Reloader. It's unfortunate a Sharpshooter gets basically zero value out of its high base Accuracy, though...

Also helping it in Technician hands is that as of 0.9.9.8 a Technician can limitedly mod it. Just like the Anti-Freak Jackal your options are pretty limited (High Power Weapon, ruining its ammo supply, or settling for just a Power or Bulk Mod Pack), so it doesn't help it much, still. It's too bad it isn't fully moddable: if you had the potential to apply Nanomanufacture Ammo to it, that would be genuinely incredible, and being able to turn it into a Storm Bolter Trigun would also be great. (Among other points making its high base Accuracy and Sharpshooter being forced to grab Eagle Eye 3 less anti-synergistic)

Angel Arm means that even if you have no interest in firing the Trigun normally in your run, it's worth considering picking up if you're trying to get a complete victory, especially if you're not confident in your ability to take on Mt. Erebus/the Lava Pits. Just having the Trigun is enough to get a complete victory, no other tools needed!

Though explaining that is for a much later post.

Overall, while the Trigun isn't the worst offender, it is one of the clearer examples of how Uniques are often not tuned to fully account for how they're competing with Exotics that are moddable.

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Next time, we cover the Shotgun family of weapons.

See you then.