Doom Roguelike Equipment Analysis: Non-Standard Weapons (Including BFGs)

These weapons don't fall inside the 'weapon families'; the assorted mechanics that care about 'weapon family' (eg Traits that apply to specific weapon categories, Assemblies that can work on anything inside a specific category) never work on any of these. Also, only two (out of seven) of these don't use Power Cells, and none of them use a different standard ammo type. This contributes to Power Cell ammo crunch: the only weapon groups that don't ever use Power Cells are melee weapons and rocket weapons! (No Pistol uses Power Cells as a baseline behavior, but there's an Assembly for switching a Pistol to using Power Cells)

BFG 9000

Damage: 10d6

Accuracy: +5

Fire Duration: 1 second

Reload Duration: 2 seconds

Clip: 100 (Uses 40 Power Cells per shot)

Alternate Reload: Overcharge. Can only be done when fully loaded, and destroys the BFG after firing. Fires a shot with doubled blast radius and twice as many damage dice. (ie by default a blast radius of 16 and 20d6 damage)

Alternate Fire: N/A

Ammo type: Power Cell

Damage type: BFG Plasma

Special: Automatically equipped to the Weapon slot the first time a BFG is picked up in a run. This weapon's splash damage can't hurt Doomguy, and instead of requiring 7 points of damage to produce a tile of knockback it requires 14 points of damage. Its splash damage also ignores normal damage drop-off rules, hitting everything in its entire radius for full damage. (Except Doomguy)

Blast radius: 8

Minimum floor: 20

Note that the BFG produces randomly-scattered secondary explosions... visually. According to the wiki they do matter due to a bug with explosions (Though I don't follow the wiki's explanation of this bug at all, honestly), but they don't do damage or the like.

The Overcharge secondary fire used to be pretty much useless: prior to 0.9.9.8, it added 2 damage dice, rather than the current doubling. It's still not exactly a good use of a BFG, mind, but if you're in a pinch it might actually be able to meaningfully help get you out of said pinch now.

The BFG itself is one of the main areas where I'm genuinely disappointed with Doom Roguelike's design. There's two layers to this: the first layer is the faithfulness layer, as the BFG's mechanics don't really have anything to do with the classic Doom BFG mechanics. (I can connect them a bit better to Doom 3's BFG mechanics, but Doom 3's BFG was a boring weapon) This is particularly strange to me since Doom Roguelike's Shotgun mechanics are actually meaningfully similar to the most reliably significant part of the classic BFG's damage: the 40 invisible projectiles it shoots out in a spread. Why not give the BFG an especially powerful variation on Shotgun mechanics? Sure, if possible, ideally also throw in a single-target projectile that hits pretty hard, but 'is a Rocket Launcher with no friendly fire' as the core mechanics is... weird and disappointing. (The 'no friendly fire' part is at least fully accurate to classic Doom)

This is also tied surprisingly closely to my other disappointment: how the BFG is pretty underwhelming within Doom Roguelike. It will almost never spawn naturally in a standard run, its minimum floor requirement being so demanding that you're nearly done with the run when it starts being allowed to appear, and while a standard run can reliably get one by completing a Special Level, it's still placed pretty late and also the Special Level pair in question are pretty brutal... and then the BFG is mostly any good for rapidly clearing corpses to prevent revives, most particularly in the Mortuary/Limbo. Its actual lethality is bizarrely low, especially when you take into account how brutal the drop-off for splash damage is.

If a BFG rolls max damage on every single tile (Because you're doing Angel of Max Carnage, say), then in the center 9 tiles it won't kill Archviles, most Nightmare enemies, nor even the weakest of 'boss' enemies. (It will kill Barons of Hell and Mancubi thanks to its BFG Plasma damage in this scenario, just barely) As such, even though the BFG's raw damage looks quite high, it's a poor solution to dangerous enemies. If you're not on Angel of Max Carnage, you expect to need 2 shots to kill most anything that's a real threat. (Which for one thing is 160% of an inventory slot in ammo eaten!)

This is a pretty big contrast with classic Doom, where a properly-aimed BFG blast will kill most any non-boss enemy in one hit pretty reliably. It's especially odd that the BFG is this weak given that its Power Cell-hungry nature is a much bigger limiter on the BFG's utility than in classic Doom, since ammo in Doom Roguelike uses inventory space and so a weapon being ammo-hungry globally competes with all other weapons: in classic Doom, the BFG being ammo-hungry only carried the design risk of it competing with the Plasma Rifle, where one of the two could theoretically be made irrelevant by the other through an ammo efficiency difference. The actual ammo was carried for free, and if you found more ammo while at max, you might as well spend some of what you have.

Whereas in Doom Roguelike, even if the BFG were noticeably more lethal, its ammo-hungry nature would often encourage reserving using it for specific situations, relying on more efficient weapons to do most of your fighting. The BFG would have to be outrageously more powerful than it currently is to have any chance of being a gamebreaker.

All of this is exacerbated by Traits: every class has Masteries for dragging up the power of a specific class of weapon, and the BFG is always outside those specializations. A Shottyhead Scout using an Assault Shotgun will fire it three times in the time the BFG fires once, with a base damage of 7d3 that's still striking an area: that's 21-60 damage in 1 second vs the BFG's 10-60 damage in 1 second! All while only spending 6% of an inventory slot on the shots, rather than 80% the way the BFG's one shot does!

That's just Masteries: in general, Traits provide poor support for boosting BFGs. BFGs barely benefit from Son of a Bitch, don't benefit from Eagle Eye, don't benefit from any Advanced Traits like Triggerhappy... it's basically just Finesse and Reloader that help a BFG's damage output.

This then gets further exacerbated by Assemblies, where the BFG is less cut out, but still gets poor support. It's arbitrarily excluded from the Nano-manufacture Ammo Assembly that would actually make it amazing (And unlike Shotguns it doesn't get a custom replacement that's even better), leaving only three Assemblies that work for it: High Power Weapon (Which is terrible in general, and the BFG doesn't somehow fit to it unusually well), VBFG (Which costs 3 Power Mod Packs, the overall highest-value common Mod Packs, and is a shaky trade rather than clear improvement), and Biggest FG. (Which is almost impossible to Assemble since it demands two Exotic Mod Packs, and once again is a trade rather than a clear improvement, albeit at least overall a good trade)

Non-Assembly Mod Pack use is less unhelpful, but partially for wonky reasons, where for example it can be worth slapping Bulk Mod Packs onto a BFG purely because its clip is a more inventory-efficient way to store Power Cells than actual inventory slots are. It's still the case it gets minor benefit from Power Mod Packs and no benefit from Agility Mod Packs. It does work decently as a recipient for a Nano Mod Pack, but only if either you can't make a good Nano Assembly (You don't expect to get Whizkid) or you've gotten so many Nano Mod Packs you're running out of good uses for the things.

In practice, the main job the BFG excels at is... corpse-clearing. Mostly in the context of the Mortuary/Limbo, specifically. Which is a notable use, to be clear, but... it feels very weird for classic Doom's ultimate weapon to be so limited in its appeal. Especially when Doom Roguelike secretly gave it a superior damage type, just... one whose superior qualities don't matter much? Ignoring more Protection than regular Plasma is generally just adding 1 point of damage (if that) to the BFG compared to if it was regular Plasma.

At least the superior gibbing rate on BFG Plasma damage props up its performance at negating revivals. In conjunction with its high base damage potential, most regular enemies can at least potentially be gibbed by it rolling high enough; anything a BFG can one-shot is something it can gib! So for example firing at a crowd of Former Humans/Sergeants/Captains hanging with Archviles tends to only need one shot to not only get rid of all the zombies but also get rid of their bodies. Do keep in mind that gibbing prevents enemies from dropping their loot, though; if you want ammo from those zombies, you should be using a Shotgun or something to get your mass-kills.

By a similar token, note that its superior gibbing potential has the awkward implication of making it able to deny you Power Cells from Arachnotrons. If you see a big blob of Arachnotrons, go 'hey, they'll cover the cost!' and fire into the crowd and instantly delete them... whoops, you've also deleted dozens of Power Cells. Arachnotrons have high enough HP this isn't a common result, but for one thing that's returning to the 'it's not really as lethal as you'd hope' issue.

All that said, the BFG isn't quite as awful as just looking at numbers and reading up on the wiki's explanation of splash damage and whatnot would suggest, because it has the entirely-unmentioned property of its splash damage doing full damage in its entire area, rather than losing damage against targets further from the center. This means its damage output is often better than a direct comparison to other area-of-effect weapons would suggest, and has some useful implications (If you're aware of it...) in terms of giving you more freedom in how you aim its shots. That is, you can do stuff like center the blast so the edge will catch a tough enemy, rather than feeling obligated to center the blast on that tough enemy, and so can potentially avoid destroying an item or knocking down a wall by having them entirely outside the blast radius.

Before I became aware of this particular detail I had a much lower opinion of the BFG. My 'Shottyhead Scout using an Assault Shotgun' example from earlier looks pretty unambiguously superior to firing a BFG outside corpse-clearing if you're not aware of this detail, but with knowing this detail suddenly you see that a BFG will pretty reliably be doing more damage per second if both weapons are hitting the same number of targets. (While being liable to actually be hitting more targets) That helps its assessment quite a bit!

I still consider it Weirdly Underwhelming overall, but now I suspect relatively modest bumps to its performance (eg bumping the damage up a little and lowering the ammo consumption to 30 or something) would be enough to make it a reliably nice tool, where I used to think it needed a complete overhaul or a significant boost to key numbers to make it something other than a niche tool.

I should also note that the BFG 10K has this same quality, though its much tighter blast radius makes its relevance much lower... and the BFG 10K being able to hurt Doomguy and having its shots scatter unpredictably means it's more of a tradeoff than with a 'regular' BFG. Be careful with it if you put a Firestorm Mod Pack on it!

Oh, and behold:

BFG base sprite

As the BFG is inherently an Exotic weapon, you'll normally never see just the base sprite.

On a different note, it's odd that the BFG claims to have really high Accuracy given it... completely ignores Accuracy. It always detonates exactly where you clicked without regard to intervening enemies or the like, and explosions just plain hit everything in their blast radius. So it's not exactly a lie to present it as highly accurate, but it's strange, carrying this incorrect connotation that it uses Accuracy in any meaningful way.

By a similar token, I should point out that the game will allow you to burn an Agility Mod Pack on a BFG, but this makes no sense to actually do. Same for Sniper Mod Packs: you're allowed to do it, but it gives no benefit.

Nuclear BFG 9000

Damage: 8d6

Accuracy: +5

Fire Duration: 1.5 seconds

Reload Duration: N/A

Clip: 40 (Uses 40 Power Cells per shot)

Alternate Reload: N/A

Alternate Fire: Nuclear Overcharge. Consumes the Nuclear BFG to set a nuke. This works exactly like using a nuke item.

Ammo type: N/A

Damage type: BFG Plasma

Special: While equipped, generates 1 ammo per action performed by Doomguy. Does not use standard ammunition and cannot be unloaded or manually reloaded. This weapon's splash damage can't hurt Doomguy, and instead of requiring 7 points of damage to produce a tile of knockback it requires 14 points of damage. Its splash damage also ignores normal damage drop-off rules, hitting everything in its entire radius for full damage. (Except Doomguy)

Blast radius: 8

Minimum floor: 22

The Nuclear BFG is thankfully much more reliably appealing. It still has a kind of underwhelming per-target impact (And in fact is weaker than a basic BFG, while also taking noticeably longer to fire), but it's an ammo-free way of applying that damage, where keeping it in the Prepared slot and swapping it in to fire before swapping back is a good amount of free damage. Much like the Nuclear Plasma Rifle, it's thus a good way to make your ammo go overall farther, but even better at that since it can clear corpses and readily knock down multiple wall segments. Just keep in mind the risk of it blowing up items.

Also like the Nuclear Plasma Rifle, Nuclear Overcharge gives it a specific utility that makes it nice that a standard run assures access to a Nuclear BFG. But that's for another post.

Tristar Blaster

Damage: 4d5*3

Accuracy: +5

Fire Duration: 1 second

Reload Duration: 1.5 seconds

Clip: 45 (Spends 5 Power Cells for each shot)

Alternate Reload: N/A

Alternate Fire: N/A

Ammo type: Power Cell

Damage type: Plasma

Special: Fires three shots. (Thus by default spending 15 Energy Cells when fired) Shots are fired in a spread, one straight toward your target, the other two to the sides.

Blast radius: 2

Minimum floor: 12

Note that while this uses a shotgun graphic, it isn't considered one by the game. It's a bit of a frustrating decision: an Exotic (regular) Shotgun graphic otherwise means either a Plasma Shotgun or a Super Shotgun, both of which are excellent finds. The Tristar Blaster is... not so great a find.

A good way of thinking of the Tristar Blaster is comparing it to a Rocket Launcher or Missile Launcher. All three are high-Accuracy weapons that launch exploding projectiles -and I've already been over a lot of the risks and other problems involved in using Rocket and Missile Launchers as combat tools- and the Tristar Blaster has several notable flaws in this comparison.

First of all, it's ammo usage is inventory-inefficient to an even greater extent than those: one pull of the trigger is 30% of an inventory slot in Power Cells. A Rocket or Missile Launcher is using 10% of an inventory slot per pull of the trigger.

On paper its ammo-to-damage efficiency helps make up for this: you're doing 12d5 per pull of the trigger since it fires three projectiles, right? 12-60 damage. A Rocket or Missile Launcher is 6-36 damage... but right there you might see the problem: a Rocket/Missile Launcher spending 30% of an inventory slot in shots is 6d6 three times: 18-108 damage. So... the Tristar Blaster massively loses on damage-per-inventory-slot. Looking at splash damage doesn't help, since the Tristar Blaster has a tighter blast radius: the Rocket/Missile Launcher will win more if you try to work through a splash damage comparison.

Also, that per-pull-of-the-trigger comparison is ignoring that the Tristar Blaster is hit three times by Protection. Its Plasma typing reduces this particular issue, but if we say you're firing into a naked Baron of Hell, we find its 2 Protection reduces a rocket attack to 4-34 damage, while the Tristar Blaster is knocked down to 9-57 damage. If we instead compare to three rocket shots, those 'merely' do 12-102 damage. (So still way better on ammo-to-damage efficiency)

This also all runs into the issue of its awkward projectile spread: if you actually are hitting a Baron with every shot from a Tristar Blaster, you're probably so close to it you're being shredded by your own shots! More generally, it's difficult to use it on a single target and land every shot without hurting yourself: the Tristar Blaster only hits its stride when dealing with hordes of enemies where you can just fire into the crowd and hit all of them. Which is running back into that issue of 'Rocket/Missile Launcher is more favored by firing into crowds'. It also means its tighter blast radius isn't much of an advantage: it doesn't let you safely fire it from closer range or something, not while being efficient.

The awkward spread furthermore makes the Tristar Blaster chaotic and very easy to accidentally destroy items you wanted to keep intact. For one thing, like every other multi-projectile attack, the game processes the hits sequentially rather than simultaneously. You may find an enemy getting hit twice and ending up shoved somewhere you would never have guessed because you didn't expect the Tristar Blaster to pingpong that enemy, and of course the game provides no indication on which shot is fired first and which last, and determining it through studying the knockback results is difficult and exacerbated by how rarely you see the thing.

Then there's the issue that the Tristar Blaster isn't part of a weapon family and doesn't receive any targeted Assembly recipes. Basic Rocket Launchers have three exclusive Assemblies as of 0.9.9.8 (And two Assemblies even in 0.9.9.7), while the Tristar Blaster can only receive High Power Weapon and Nanomanufacture Ammo as Assemblies. High Power Weapon isn't available to the rocket weapons, but it's also a really bad Assembly! A Nanomachic Tristar Blaster is at least fun/funny and usable enough, as you care a lot less about destroying valuables if you have a Nanomachic weapon of any kind (Ammo is unnecessary, and blind-fire killing enemies means you can more often clear floors without taking damage, making healing and Armor less necessary too), but that's in part commentary on how absurd Nanomanufacture Ammo is as an Assembly: it's not like the Tristar Blaster is a particularly great base for that Assembly.

A related point is Traits: just as Assemblies targeting weapon families necessarily don't include the Tristar Blaster, so too do Traits provide little benefit to it. Shottyman will let a Rocket Launcher reload on the move, but not a Tristar Blaster. Most egregiously, it 'benefits' from ranks in Triggerhappy, but only to the extent of increasing ammo consumption: with Triggerhappy 2, firing a Tristar Blaster will eat 25 Power Cells, but still only fire three shots!

It at least benefits more from Son of a Bitch than a Rocket Launcher?

But overall, it's a very awkward weapon I've never been able to find a clear use-case for., where I doubt I ever will find such a use-case unless it get seriously overhauled.

0.9.9.8 at least fixed a glitch where you were allowed to apply a Firestorm Mod to it but nothing would happen, but that bug wasn't exactly key to the Tristar Blaster struggling. And that's the only thing 0.9.9.8 did to help the Tristar Blaster...

Also, a janky bit of oddness to the Tristar Blaster is that it can be fired with full effect even if it doesn't have the ammo for all three shots. (No, 0.9.9.8 did not fix this bug) Say you drain it dry and have no Power Cells in inventory, then kill an Arachnotron and load the resulting 20 Power Cells into the Tristar Blaster: if you fire once, it will have 5 ammo left loaded in it. If you attempt to fire at that point, it will fire all three shots using just that 5 ammo! This isn't super-exploitable since you can't directly control ammo quantities as far as loading, dropping on the ground, etc, but it's pretty clearly not intended behavior. It also means you can potentially make it a bit less inefficient if you're willing to take Juggler and play games with ammo: if you're only ever picking up 20 Power Cells at a time to promptly load into an empty Tristar Blaster, then its average ammo drain is only 10 Cells. (Because you'll alternate expending 5 and 15 at a time) It'll still be very inefficient, mind, spending 20% of an inventory slot per shot on average, but if you really want to give the Tristar Blaster the best opportunity to shine, it's an option to keep in mind.

Combat Translocator

Damage: 0

Accuracy: +4

Fire Duration: 1.5 seconds

Reload Duration: 2 seconds

Clip: 60 (Consumes 5 Power Cells per shot)

Alternate Reload: N/A

Alternate Fire: N/A

Ammo type: Power Cell

Damage type: N/A

Special: Causes the first hit enemy to be teleported to a random location on the floor, as if they had used a Phase Device. Even though it's considered an Exotic and not a Unique, Mod Packs cannot be applied to it at all.

Minimum floor: 14

I genuinely have no idea what the use-case for this is imagined to be.

In theory, it could be used to buy time: zap an enemy to get it out of your hair while you deal with other enemies, or heal up, or whatever.

In practice, this is a dubious scenario. You're not going to be carting it around, ready to use on a moment's notice: you'll be using a weapon that can actually kill enemies, with the Combat Translocator at best in your Prepared slot. Which means you have to spend somewhere from 0.8 seconds to 1 second switching it in, which you can't necessarily spare in a real emergency...

... 0.9.9.8 props up this idea a bit by making Juggler work on any weapon swap, so that's something, but a key part of the problem is that Doom Roguelike is heavy on swarming the player to threaten them, especially as a run advances. And the Combat Translocator's minimum floor requirement is late: if you could find it on floor 2, it could potentially save a run that then descends right into an early Baron of Hell, or has an early Former Commando intrude on a fight that's otherwise not very concerning, or otherwise has a single mid-to-late-game enemy appear alarmingly early. As-is, it's not allowed to spawn until you're deep into Deimos, where it's increasingly normal to meet serious enemies in groups: zapping away one enemy with a firing time of 1.5 seconds is dubious in its utility if the problem is you have three Barons of Hell and a Revenant in sight.

In theory you could zap away an Archvile (Which is a linchpin enemy that often shows up with only a couple copies mixed in with other enemy types) to prevent it from reviving enemies, but this is often creating trouble for yourself: you don't want the Archvile to vanish off somewhere and potentially revive enemies behind you, you want its buddies to not be around to be revived! Which gets back to the 'not very helpful against groups' issue.

Its late placement also makes its usage of Power Cells extra-problematic: in a standard run, odds are pretty decent you already have a BFG when a Combat Translocator gets around to spawning! Even as inefficient as a BFG is, it's a much better emergency swap, not to mention more worth using as a store for Energy Cells: if you have the Backpack, the Combat Translocator is no longer more space-efficient than Power Cells stacking directly into an inventory slot, where the BFG remains superior. So few runs will have any chance for the Combat Translocator's theoretical value to be seriously worth considering.

You might think 'wait, it's a multi-use Phase Device! I can shoot myself with it!' Sadly, no: Doom Roguelike's general-purpose error message for targeting yourself will pop up and admonish you for thinking that it ever makes any sense to shoot yourself. Even though shooting yourself does make sense in this case.

'Wait!' I hear somebody frustrated by Angel of Pacificism thinking. 'It's perfect for Angel of Pacificism! A non-harmful way to get an enemy out of my way!'

Which is a great idea and if Angel of Pacificism started you with this thing and made all ammo generation produce Power Cells, that would be very cool!

... except oh wait, if you do find a Combat Translocator in an Angel of Pacifism run and pick it up and try to pull the trigger, you get its general-purpose error message about how your pacificist principles prevent you from doing this thing that can't hurt enemies. I know, because this happened to me.

Oh, and even though it's an Exotic and not a Unique, you can't use Mod Packs on it at all. So no fixing its slow firing time with Technical Mod Packs, or anything of the sort.

0.9.9.8 did make the Combat Translocator less stupendously awful, as for some reason it previously charged 10 Power Cells for the privilege of firing it once... but the high ammo drain really wasn't why it's very difficult to justify using it. It was an additional problem, but even if it drained one Power Cell per shot it would be very limited in its utility.

Here's hoping a later patch makes more relevant changes.

Acid Spitter

Damage: 10d10 (3 radius)

Accuracy: +5

Fire Duration: 0.8 seconds

Reload Duration: 1.2 seconds

Clip: 10 (Consumes 10 units per shot)

Alternate Reload: N/A

Alternate Fire: N/A

Ammo type: Special, see below

Damage type: Acid

Special: When first generated, the Acid Spitter has no ammunition loaded, unlike every other weapon that uses ammunition. Can only be reloaded when standing atop a tile filled with Acid; reloading adds 1 unit of ammo to the clip and converts the Acid tile into a Water tile. When fired, the Acid Spitter attempts to convert every tile in its blast radius to Acid, with high odds of success per tile. When equipped in the primary weapon slot, the Acid Spitter passively provides 75% Acid resistance, to both the body and the feet.

Minimum floor: 12

The Acid Spitter is a really neat idea that's... really hard to use. Like, at all. I don't simply mean 'it's bad such that using it doesn't make sense', I mean 'you loot it, are adamant about using it whenever possible if at all possible, and still never actually manage to fire it even once'.

The first problem is fluid generation rules intersecting with the Acid Spitter's high minimum floor and anomalous behavior of starting out empty: a lot of runs will see literally 0 Acid tiles on the floors the Acid Spitter is allowed to generate on. 0.9.9.8 made some changes to fluid generation rules so this is less true, but it's still completely possible to pick up the Acid Spitter and never see Acid Barrels or natural Acid tiles; among other points, Special Levels are still 100% consistent about not including Acid tiles past a fairly early point. Deimos Lab is the last Special Level to include Acid tiles, and occurs earlier than the Acid Spitter's minimum floor!

The second problem is that its quirky reload mechanics basically require having Acid immunity on your Boots to be able to regularly use it without taking a ton of damage. Even with it providing high Acid resistance so your Boots don't need to handle the job of reducing damage to 1, this is a problem: that's 10 damage taken from reloading every single time you fire the Acid Spitter, when 10 damage is 20% of Doomguy's base HP! And Acid immunity is actually bizarrely hard to get a hold of on Boots: the Exotic Acid-Proof Boots is the only way to specifically get Acid immunity on boots, rather than general fluid immunity, where a Unique can provide complete Fire immunity and there's a Basic Assembly for specifically getting Fire immunity on Boots. (It admittedly requires an Onyx Mod Pack you're unlikely to want to spend this way, but still) And the general fluid immunities are all Uniques or a Master Assembly; in a standard run, it's pretty rare to get passive immunity to Acid on the ground.

Such immunity is more expected in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, at least, and the sheer number of randomly-generated floors in those challenges makes it reasonably likely you'll also find Acid tiles at some point to fill up the Acid Spitter, but you're still likely to go a very long time with it sitting in your inventory, unable to be used.

The fact that it's uniquely hampered by starting out unloaded is particularly frustrating, as the Acid Spitter is mostly self-sustaining: since it hits 21 tiles and needs 10 to refill, it has to fail the Acidification test on more than 50% of the hit tiles to be unable to refill itself. If it just showed up full, you'd generally expect to get at least a few shots out of it before it became unusable.

I sort of get why the game is so cautious with the Acid Spitter: ammo management is one of the main challenges of the game, and the Acid Spitter substantially neuters the issue if you are able to sustainably and safely refuel it. Furthermore, for a Nightmare! or Angel of Darkness run it very obviously has significant utility, being a perfectly reliable way to clean up corpses so they can't respawn -which is still relevant in other runs anytime Archviles are about, by the by- and so potentially neutering one of the main challenges of such runs.

But I wish different solutions had been employed to prevent it from being a gamebreaker. It still is a gamebreaker if everything lines up right, for one, but most of the time it's a wasted Unique roll, frustratingly likely to be completely useless. I'd rather it had a larger clip relative to its ammo needs and was tuned to generally lose ammo over successive firings: if it could store 100 ammo, still used 10 ammo, but expected to generate about 8 Acid tiles when fired, then you couldn't just spam it (It would inevitably run out of ammo), but it could start loaded and be something you use carefully, rationing it out unless and until you get lucky with a floor generating with a lot of Acid.

It would also be nice if its reload pulled from, say, all tiles adjacent to Doomguy in addition to the one he's on top of: this would reduce tedium (fewer reload clicks to fill up) and mean it no longer demands Acid immunity to be practical to regularly reload it.

I hope some kind of overhaul happens, anyway, as currently the Acid Spitter feels like the game taunting the player with a cool idea that most people will never get a chance to use even once.

I will point out that the Acid Spitter has one counterintuitive case where it's great: in an Angel of Pacifism run! Its awkwardness as a weapon doesn't matter in such a run since you can't fire a weapon anyway, and it has the unique distinction of being a weapon that improves your defenses: carting around the Acid Spitter will let Doomguy shrug off Baron acidballs as he desperately runs for the stairs, with literally no competition for the slot!

(Okay, not quite no competition: the Butcher's Cleaver providing knockback resistance is also potentially nice for an Angel of Pacifism run. But probably very few people have had a run generate both these Uniques, so... most of the time? No competition)

Railgun

Damage: 8d8

Accuracy: +12

Fire Duration: 1.5 seconds

Reload Duration: 2 seconds

Clip: 40

Alternate Reload: N/A

Alternate Fire: N/A

Ammo type: Power Cell

Damage type: Bullet

Special: Shots penetrate enemies, but don't inflict knockback. Spends 5 ammo per shot.

Minimum floor: 15

The Railgun not counting as any core weapon category means it's not immediately obvious whether you should use it or not in a given run, and in particular means it can absolutely be surpassed by properly-supported Assemblies or Exotics that are inside a supported weapon category, but thankfully it's legitimately a very powerful Unique that easily justifies a slot in your inventory.

First of all, its damage per shot is actually pretty monstrous even if you only hit one target. A regular Plasma Rifle does 6-42 damage by default, to a single target: the Railgun does 8-64 damage, trending very heavily toward the middle, and in the form of one big hit so it's barely impacted by Protection. An unsupported Plasma Rifle thus spends 1 more Power Cell per pull of the trigger to output worse damage -especially since the Railgun's absolutely absurd Accuracy bonus means it will almost never miss unless firing into the darkness. And even when firing very long-range shots into the dark, it will still generally only miss due to the darkness-induced 50% fail rate: up to 20 tiles out, the Railgun is still at maximum Accuracy!

Between these two points, the Railgun is actually very reliable and efficient at dealing with most targets: it will almost always kill a Baron of Hell in 2-3 hits, for example. Its penetration is thus more a great bonus than an essential quality you must constantly leverage to justify using it: so long as you're not wasting Power Cells on deleting individual Imps or Former Humans or the like, it's usually going to be an efficient and reliable way to remove even lone targets.

To be clear, the penetration is a great bonus. It's much of the advantage of splash damage without the pesky problems with potentially destroying items on the ground that you want to pick up or vaporizing walls you'd like to remain intact, only even better than that sounds because you'll much more regularly get 'free damage' without realizing it by virtue of some enemy being beyond your target, in the darkness, potentially well beyond, but it gets hit anyway. It's not strictly better than regular splash -regular splash can hit enemies to the side of your target, and can potentially fail its Accuracy roll on a target but hit them anyway by detonating just beyond them- but it's a pretty favorable trade.

Do keep in mind its high fire duration and lack of knockback: firing on a target at the edge of your vision might result in them getting in two attacks before you get your next turn. (If they survived the shot, that is) You need 3 ranks in Finesse for this to stop being a concern with enemies hovering around regular speed, though just 2 ranks is enough to make it a rare event. (A Scout is free of this concern with just 2 ranks thanks to their inherent Energy generation advantage)

The main Mastery where the Railgun is generally on shaky ground is Ammo Chain, which will basically always spend those Power Cells more efficiently on a plain Plasma Rifle and is so ammo-efficient it can already blind-fire into the darkness with disturbing effectiveness off just a Chaingun. Other Masteries can potentially push the Railgun firmly aside with some luck; for example, a Shottyhead Scout who manages to Assemble a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun has basically no use for the Railgun, especially if the Scout managed to use a Super Shotgun as the base.

But most of the time, the Railgun is a very nice find that's at least worth carting around and breaking out intermittently, if nothing else when on a floor that's got a lot of Power Cells lying around.

Also, it's another Unique a Technician can limitedly mod. Like the BFG10K, this isn't new to 0.9.9.8. Also like the BFG10K, it's not hugely transformative: High Power Weapon is a horrible Assembly and the only one you can apply to the Railgun. But hey, you can give it a Power Mod or Technical Mod or Bulk Mod to make it a bit more useful.

Charch's Null Pointer

Damage: 10d1 (1 radius)

Accuracy: +6

Fire Duration: 1 second

Reload Duration: 2 seconds

Clip: 60 (Consumes 10 cells per shot)

Alternate Reload: N/A

Alternate Fire: N/A

Ammo type: Power Cell

Damage type: BFG Plasma

Special: Does nothing when hitting terrain. When hitting an enemy, the shot explodes, and all enemies in the blast radius take damage normally and additionally lose 1000 energy (Or 500 if they're a 'boss' monster), delaying their turn by 1 second if they have base speed. This cannot bring a given enemy to below 1000 Energy. (Units need 5000 Energy to act)

Minimum floor: 15

For some bizarre reason, when inspected in-game Charch's Null Pointer claims to do no damage (It lists a 0 in the damage field), but this is the game lying to you.

The game furthermore does a poor job of communicating its special mechanic; if you hit an enemy, you'll get a message about how "Suddenly the (monster name) crashes!", which if you already know what the effect is, this message makes some degree of sense, but on its own it doesn't really point you to the conclusion of what the effect does.

Anyway, on paper Charch's Null Pointer is kind of absurdly abusable... with the important qualifier that its dependence on Power Cells puts a fairly harsh time limit on usage of it. It also works at only half-strength on boss enemies, so without Finesse ranks it only eats every other turn a boss would otherwise take; given its very poor damage for the inventory slot (20% of an inventory slot for 10 damage is awful), it's not a way to cheese bosses. If you have plenty of Power Cells, it can be a way to push through an encounter you might otherwise not be able to handle for whatever reason (Insufficient Medpacks, not enough Armors in good condition, your combat kit being a bad fit to a specific Special Level.,.), but generally it's better to try to spend those Power Cells some other way, such as via a Plasma Rifle.

In general, Charch's Null Pointer is an interesting gimmick weapon, but a dubious use of inventory space. Its damage is too low to break walls without Son of a Bitch ranks, and it doesn't deliver damage to walls anyway unless an enemy to hit is next to such a wall, so it's not a wall-cutter. It's horribly slow at killing things, only becoming vaguely palatable if firing into a group. As a Unique, you can't mod it to improve its utility -not even Technicians can mod it, even in 0.9.9.8. If you could use it as a base for Nanomanufacture Ammo, that would be a disgusting gamebreaker, but you can't so... it's left being a weird curiosity that's dubious at practical performance.

It's kind of weird that Charch's Null Pointer does BFG Plasma damage. It means it does gib Former Humans and Former Captains reliably?

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Next time, we move on to Armors.

See you then.