Doom Roguelike Class Analysis: Scout

The Scout's three non-Mastery points of distinction are: he's faster at everything, he passively sees regular exit stairs (In 0.9.9.7 he also saw Special Level stairs, but for some reason he lost this in 0.9.9.8) on regular levels without any need to get line of sight, and he can take ranks in Intuition without needing ranks in Eagle Eye first.

Note that the reveal of exit stairs doesn't occur in fixed levels. (ie Special Levels, the Phobos Anomaly, etc). As those maps are (mostly) fixed, this doesn't really matter if you're experienced at the game, but for a player early in the learning curve it can be confusing to notice that you sometimes can't see the exit stairs.

The speed point is shockingly general and not implemented the way you might assume: it's not a decrease to time spent on actions, but rather is, like Berserk, a change to Doomguy's baseline Energy regeneration, specifically that he generates 10% more Energy per game tick. This stacks additively with Berserk's modifier, so a Berserking Scout generates 160 Energy every 0.1 seconds, rather than the 100 Energy a Marine or Technician generates when not Berserking.

Anyway, since the Scout is changing his Energy generation rather than his Energy expenditures, he really does do everything faster. Including that he benefits from the thing I mentioned with Berserk of partially bypassing the minimum turn duration by virtue of stockpiling Energy that pays forward into future turns: say your Scout has an Assault Shotgun and Shell Box equipped. We'll just say he starts out with no ammo loaded and 5000 Energy: if he proceeds to reload the Assault Shotgun to full, 0.6 seconds will pass, but he'll have generated 660 Energy while only spending 600 Energy over the course of that, and so have 60 Energy stockpiled. That's not significant on its own, but if you iterate this, the Scout will at some point get a turn earlier than a non-Scout doing the same thing would do: fully depleting the Shell Box of its 100 shells leaves the Scout with 1000 more Energy than a Marine or Technician, which is an entire second of advantage!

Effectively doing everything slightly faster is a surprisingly general edge, where the Scout gets attacked less often, period, has overhealing stick slightly longer relative to their turns, is put under slightly less pressure by time pressure situations ("You feel the need to run!"), and regularly creates juuuust enough of a time advantage that eg Shotgunning an enemy keeps knocking them out of sight, or out of melee when dealing with melee enemies, so they never quite manage an attack.

That said, the Scout is noticeably frailer than a Marine (Especially in 0.9.9.8), a point exacerbated by their Masteries: every Scout Master blocks Tough as Nails and by extension blocks Badass. Oddly, the Scout also has sub-par damage output: except for Cateye, which requires Son of a Bitch and Triggerhappy (Because it's conceptualized as a rapid-fire Mastery), every Scout Mastery blocks Son of a Bitch and by extension blocks Triggerhappy.

Conversely, a Scout is reliably a fast runner, accurate shooter, and swift shooter: no Mastery blocks Hellrunner or Finesse, and in fact only 2 Masteries don't require Hellrunner, while exactly one Mastery blocks Eagle Eye... and it's the Shotgun Mastery, when Shotguns don't care about Accuracy.

As for the specific Masteries themselves...

Blademaster

Requirements: 2 ranks in Hellrunner, 2 ranks in Brute, 1 rank in Berserker, which is a total of 5 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Tough as Nails, Son of a Gun, Son of a Bitch.

Effect: If a melee attack kills its target, Doomguy's Energy is set to 5001, causing him to immediately take another turn.

The game will tell you that lethal melee attacks occur 'instantly', which is an attempt to communicate that lethal melee kills always let the Scout immediately act again, without enemies getting a chance to act. I've provided the more technically-correct explanation, as Blademaster can functionally slow the player down thanks especially to Berserk and Scout 'speed modifiers' being instead Energy generation modifiers: if you do a bunch of swift actions so you stockpile Energy and then kill a target with an attack that should leave you with over 5001 Energy, Blademaster will set your Energy to 5001 instead, erasing your stockpiled Energy and so negating the possibility of some action occurring faster than it's 'printed' speed suggests.

Regardless, Blademaster tends to have a smoother pre-Trait period than Vampyre on the Marine does simply because Hellrunner is actually a great Trait to prioritize out the box, but once the Mastery is online it's a lot more important that the player have good awareness and some ability to plan ahead than with Vampyre. The inability to take ranks in Badass means a Blademaster Scout is perpetually at risk of being knocked away by attacks if moving poorly, making it important to dodge and weave as you approach your enemies, and preferably to use terrain or other enemies as cover from attackers with strong potential for knockback, such as Mancubi. You can potentially get away with ignoring such points if you heavily prioritize movement speed in general, such as prioritizing getting Tactical Boots online, preferring Armors that have lesser speed penalties, and grabbing Hellrunner 3 as soon as you're Level 12, but it's more reliable to think things through and plan your charge, where a Vampyre Marine can just bullheadedly walk through enemy fire and so long as he doesn't actually die he will get to melee and start healing off his kills.

Also non-obvious in mastering Blademaster is stopping to think whether you should kill an enemy next to you right now: quite often the answer is 'yes', and it's tempting to think that the answer will always be 'yes', but sometimes it should hold for a turn. Say a Lost Soul is hovering between you and a bunch of enemies, and you're low on HP: on the one hand, you can just slice the Lost Soul apart and immediately use a Large Medpack to fully heal. On the other hand, if you instead use the Large Medpack, then kill the Lost Soul, probably the only attack you'll suffer is the Lost Soul nibbling on you, and you'll get a chance to walk toward your enemies and potentially Dodge shots, where the first scenario lets your enemies slam you for a bunch of damage right after you used your Large Medpack, noticeably negating its benefits.

Contributing to the importance of planning ahead is Berserker's interaction with Blademaster: ideally you arrange to open a brawl by slicing enough enemies to trigger Berserker before much of anything gets a chance to attack you. As such, it can be better to do things like charge low-threat melee mobs (Such as a Pain Elemental that's summoning Lost Souls) that aren't really a priority in terms of threat level, purely so you can get Berserk triggered before you have to start exchanging blows with Barons of Hell or the like. Alternatively, it can make sense to deliberately bait out an Archvile attack from a safe distance before trying to charge into view of their attendant minions.

In general, Blademaster is an unexpectedly cerebral melee Mastery, and indeed is possibly the most cerebral Mastery, period. No other Mastery puts so much emphasis on studying the field and having a plan of action multiple turns out before you start doing things!

It's also a very fun Mastery that plays very differently from Vampyre even though they're both melee Masteries; my only significant complaint is that the Butcher's Cleaver has literally the same effect, which both slightly undercuts Blademaster on the Scout (A Vampyre Marine carrying the Butcher's Cleaver is largely better than a Blademaster Scout carrying it) and means finding the Butcher's Cleaver with a Scout can be kind of frustrating, in a 'why couldn't this have spawned in a different run?' way.

Gun Kata

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

Incompatibilities: Tough as Nails, Son of a Bitch, Brute.

Effect: If the player targets an enemy while their primary weapon is a Pistol, and the enemy then dies to any of the resulting shots, Doomguy reloads their currently-equipped Pistols at no time cost. Additionally, if Doomguy fires while his primary weapon is a Pistol and he performed a Dodge between this action and their immediately previous action, the attack takes only 10% of the time it would otherwise take.

Note that you do in fact have to have been targeting a specific enemy. When using mouse controls, it's normally perfectly fine to click in front of or past a target, so long as the line of fire being drawn will actually intersect with your desired target, but with Gun Kata it actually matters whether you clicked on an enemy or right next to that enemy: in the latter scenario, you won't get the free reload if they die!

This intersects awkwardly with the previously-covered point that Dodge checks are made on Doomguy's attacks when expressly targeting an enemy: since Gun Kata demands you expressly target enemies to trigger its reload-on-kill effect, Gun Kata cannot continuously avoid Dodge triggers. This isn't too big a deal since enemies don't try to Dodge and in fact prefer to advance on the player in roughly a straight line if they can, especially because Gun Kata by definition results in lots of quick turns so you will usually have a minority of your turns at risk of Dodge checks anyway, but in edge cases this can be very important to be aware of: if you're low on HP and are trying to finish off a single low-HP enemy who just moved, doing the normally-correct thing of targeting them directly may result in them Dodging enough shots to survive and then attacking you and killing you!

Conversely, note that while the Dodge-trigger effect where you shoot real fast afterward sounds kind of amazing, it's actually pretty minor. At Son of a Gun 3 a Scout already fires their two Pistols in roughly 0.436 seconds, so triggering the Dodge-boosting shooting is ramming right into the hard minimum of 0.1 seconds passing per Doomguy action; instead of taking 0.0436~ seconds on such a shot, you're taking more than twice that long! And once you hit extended ranks and grab Son of a Gun 5, it does literally nothing. This is most pertinent to Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs, but even a standard run can get to Son of a Gun 5 if you're being thorough and playing on Ultraviolence. (Or playing on Nightmare! at all, even if you're pretty un-thorough on kills)

That said, Gun Kata is legitimately amazing purely through the power of getting free reloads on kills: by default, Pistol specialization has an increasingly large proportion of its time spent on reloading as fire times get extremely low, and increasingly resents time spent reloading. Son of a Gun 5 can fire 12 shots in the time it takes a standard Pistol to reload! (With Dualgunner, you're instead firing 20 shots in the time it takes your two Pistols to reload) Replacing 1.2 seconds (2.4 seconds with Dualgunner) of sitting there, reloading, with spending 0.1 or 0.12 seconds killing a low-HP enemy is a massive increase in the Scout's ability to output damage. Even at just Son of a Gun 3 plus Dualgunner, 0.5 seconds or 1 second spent killing something for a free reload is quite a bit more time-efficient than 2.4 seconds spent not killing things.

I would in fact firmly argue that Gun Kata is pretty clearly the best of the Pistol Masteries. It's certainly the most straightforwardly, unambiguously good, even with it blocking Son of a Bitch: the DPS increase from never needing to manually reload is simply too advantageous out of a few specific situations. (Such as the Cyberdemon confrontation, which is legitimately notable a problem for eg Angel of Marksmanship runs)

(A modest asterisk to all this is that Gun Kata is unambiguously the Pistol Mastery that is worst off in a run that gets the opportunity to Assemble a Nanomanufacture Pistol. In the improbable event that your Scout gets two such Pistols, as soon as they have Son of a Gun 5 Gun Kata becomes completely worthless. But just as I don't consider Nanomanufacture Ammo's greatness with Bullet Dance to truly salvage Bullet Dance's viability, I don't consider its anti-synergy with Gun Kata to be a big strike against Gun Kata's viability. It would be nice if the game would figure out a way to neutralize this oddity, but unless Nano Mod Packs are made to appear much more reliably or something, it's far too unreliable in mattering to seriously affect Gun Kata's relative competency)

Something to keep in mind is that 10mm ammo chains (Or Power Batteries, when using Energy Pistols) in inventory are not pulled from by Gun Kata even if you're out of regular ammo. Gun Kata is thus one of the Masteries where it's important to keep in mind the ability to set down the quick-reload items and break them down into regular ammo. (By using the 'Unload' command while sitting on them) If you're not aware of this functionality, you might mistakenly think those items are useless to Gun Kata, but they're still more efficient ammo storage than regular ammo types, and thus useful for minimizing the odds of ammo starvation.

Shottyhead

Requirements: 1 rank in Hellrunner, 1 rank in Juggler (And thus 1 rank in Finesse), 1 rank in Shottyman (And thus 2 ranks in Reloader), which is a total of 6 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Tough as Nails, Son of a Bitch, Eagle Eye.

Effect: Shotgun weapons take 1/3rd the time to fire than they would otherwise take.

With a basic Shotgun, Double Shotgun, or Super Shotgun, Shottyhead is obviously a solid boost but is easy to expect to be not that great, as those all alternate firing with reloading and so Shottyhead doesn't actually triple Doomguy's damage output. With a basic Shotgun, Doomguy will be alternating firing in 0.3 seconds with reloading in 0.36 seconds (Since you're forced to take 2 ranks in Reloader; alternatively, if you have Hellrunner 2, a Shottyman reload will take 0.63 seconds), meaning a total firing cycle of 0.66 seconds instead of roughly 1.36 seconds and thus a damage increase of slightly over 100%.

And it was less dramatic before 0.9.9.8 buffed Reloader: there, it was more like a 65% increase in DPS to have Shottyhead come online.

But either way, that still is quite dramatic, and it gets a lot more dramatic if the Scout gets a hold of a Tactical Shotgun, Assault Shotgun, Plasma Shotgun, Frag Shotgun, or Jackhammer, since those all allow for at least 3 shots in a row before needing to reload.

Special mention for the Nano-shrapnel Shotgun Assembly: since it completely removes ammo as a consideration, Shottyhead is simply tripling your damage output if you manage to Assemble a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun. This is amazingly absurd: in the event that you manage to Assemble a Nano-shrapnel Super Shotgun, the remainder of the game is basically a formality: you can blind-fire into the darkness continuously for monstrous damage until you stop hearing things scream, never in any danger, without even bothering with Intuition 2.

Anyway, I should explicitly point out that Shottyhead is classed as a 'separate source' from Finesse and so they chain-multiply instead of being additive. eg say you went Finesse 2, putting your Shotgun at taking 0.7 seconds to fire: Shottyhead doesn't shave off 0.667 seconds and ram into the minimum duration of 0.1 seconds, but instead shaves off 2/3rds of 0.7, resulting in 0.233~ seconds to fire. (These are not quite the correct numbers given the Scout's innate, universal speed modifier, but it doesn't affect the actual point and the Scout's modifier is a nuisance to constantly include)

I should also point out that Shottyhead makes the difference between a plain Combat Shotgun and one you've Assembled into being a Tactical Shotgun much starker: when you're firing in 0.3~ seconds, an extra 0.18~ seconds between shots is a 60~% increase in how long it takes you to work through your clip! Tactical Shotgun is always a pretty solid bump in performance over a plain Combat Shotgun, but for Shottyhead in particular it's much more important to get the Assembly done as soon as you can. (Unless you get lucky and can replace the Combat Shotgun with an Assault Shotgun before you complete the Assembly)

As an aside, the Juggler requirement also means it's worth considering having a Shotgun swap or two in inventory and switching the swap in rather than reloading in combat. Swapping in a second Tactical Shotgun and firing will result in you getting off two more shots in the time it would take to load one shell into the empty Tactical Shotgun! (Assuming you Assembled two Tactical Shotguns, mind) Juggler is useful for this in general, but Juggler isn't required for many Masteries and is in fact often a bit out of the way for them, so Shottyhead is one of the Masteries it comes up with most readily.

Overall, Shottyhead is straightforwardly good and effective, with surprisingly minimal jank. It's 'boring' in a mechanics sense, but works surprisingly well as a distinct and fun Mastery regardless.

Cateye

Requirements: 1 rank in Intuition, 1 rank in Triggerhappy (And thus 2 ranks of Son of a Bitch), which is a total of 4 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Tough as Nails, Reloader, Brute.

Effect: The player's maximum vision range is raised by 2, taking it from a base of 8 tiles of vision to a base of 10 tiles of vision.

It should be emphasized that Intuition 2 marking unseen enemies has its maximum range defined by vision range and so Cateye extends Intuition 2's tracking by 2 more tiles. As you already need Intuition 1 to even have Cateye, grabbing Intuition 2 is trivial: you can in fact have it before having Cateye without delaying Cateye any, thanks to the 'free' point. I should also point out that the maximum range on Double Shotguns in specific is 2 tiles less than Cateye's vision range, making them particularly dubious for a Cateye run, outside the possibility of Assembling one into a Focused Double Shotgun. (Which switches the range type to 'Normal', letting the Focused Double Shotgun hit out to 15 tiles)

Cateye itself is non-obviously very, very powerful. Excepting the Cyberdemon, Pinkie Demons, and Nightmare Pinkie Demons (Also I'm pretty sure a secret enemy is another exception, but I'll talk about that when we get there), all enemies have the same sight range as Doomguy's default sight, and except for the Cyberdemon all enemies must personally see Doomguy to be able to launch an attack. (Well, Mancubi and Nightmare Arachnotrons have a 'followup' attack, and all Archvile variants have their channeled attack, and so those are all enemies that can fire while not currently seeing Doomguy, but they still have to have seen Doomguy at least once before they can attack) Cateye thus means that in open environments Doomguy will always get the first opportunity to attack unless he's very slow for some reason (When the Scout is excellent at being fast), and indeed often has significant control over when and how to start a fight because enemies normally have to spot Doomguy, take damage from Doomguy, or see another enemy take damage from Doomguy (While Doomguy is in vision of the enemy that isn't being hit) before they will attempt a pursuit: among other points, a Cateye Scout can deliberately walk into sight of a specific enemy to try to bait them into pursuit.

Cateye also means you regularly get proper warning of big groups: instead of spotting a single Baron of Hell, opening fire, and having three more Barons of Hell step into sight, Cateye Doomguy will have all that occur but with the important difference that none of those enemies are in a position to immediately attack, giving the Cateye more options for responding to the situation safely. As most enemies in Doom Roguelike will eventually lose track of Doomguy if they don't manage to spot him for long enough, the Cateye's sight advantage can let them do things like stalk one enemy until the group starts breaking up, and then ambush and kill that one enemy. This is especially useful a trick when Archviles are about, making it easier to prevent continuous resurrections from occurring by virtue of killing enemies away from the Archvile.

All this would normally come with the qualifier that Doom Roguelike's floor generation only occasionally produces wide-open spaces, but Intuition 2 existing and running its enemy detection effect off Doomguy's sight range means that even in cramped quarters Cateye provides superior ability to control engagements, albeit with less precision than in open environments. (Since your only clues to enemy types will be intermittent audio and potentially the apparent movement speeds of different Intuition markers)

If you're something of a habitually incautious player, Cateye gets even better, as it will often save you from your own carelessness. Instead of excitedly running toward a valuable item on the ground, only to walk right into sight of a Mancubus with such perfectly awful timing that it instantly fires, annihilating the valuable item, ripping off much of your HP, and shredding your Armor, Cateye causes you to spot the Mancubus and automatically stop (If using mouse-input for movement) while still outside its range, and so hopefully clear the area before trying to approach the valuable item. Cateye will save you from many variations on this scenario (Barons of Hell, Revenants, Hellknights...) surprisingly regularly if you're not already diligently careful to avoid walking right into such a problem.

Cateye is also more versatile than you might expect from being a rapid-fire-specialized Mastery: it doesn't actually block Son of a Gun, making it possible to pivot to a Pistol focus with minimal waste (Only the mandatory Triggerhappy rank is wasted), and while it interferes with optimizing Shotguns by blocking Reloader and in turn Shottyman, it can still get a decent amount of use out of them, such as by provoking enemies with Shotgun blasts to get them to come to you 100% reliably. Cateye is also actually one of the best Masteries for fairly heavy Rocket Launcher use, making it possible to engage enemies with enough vision past them to assess whether blasting an enemy risks destroying anything you care about, without having to be attacked before you fire your Rocket Launcher. Only melee weaponry is strongly at odds with Cateye!

This is pretty important, because where Ammochain solves ammo problems forever, Cateye exacerbates ammo shortages: firing at your new line of sight means operating at a total penalty of -3 Accuracy, which will drag a Chaingun or Plasma Rifle down to -1 Accuracy, meaning only landing 37.5% of your shots! Eagle Eye investment is practically mandatory if you don't luck into a Laser Rifle or leverage Mod Packs to resolve Accuracy at the equipment level. (Such as by Assembling a Hyperblaster or Assault Rifle) Or you could Assemble a Nanomanufacture weapon of some kind and stop caring about ammo in general, but that relies on actually finding a Nano Mod Pack, not to mention requires teching into Whizkid, which is a pretty significant Trait investment to actually reach: your run might run out of ammo and die before getting there if that's your entire plan.

Cateye does unfortunately have one of the shakier early-to-midgame experiences. Focusing on meeting the Trait requirements immediately means not correcting the Accuracy problem until after getting Cateye, and trying to fix the Accuracy problem first means either delaying Cateye itself or delaying Intuition 2, both of which are awkward. It's often easier to just make do with a Shotgun (And then Combat Shotgun) for the early game, largely ignoring your rapid-fire specialty until you have at least 1 rank in Eagle Eye. Even once you can use a Chaingun competently at max range, Cateye is still worryingly susceptible to ammo problems, especially since it mandates Triggerhappy 1. The midgame Special Levels also tend to minimize Cateye's utility with their design: the Abyssal Plain, for example, has the major confrontation with the Agony Elemental occur in cramped quarters where Cateye doesn't help much if at all. The Spider's Lair similarly drops you surrounded by Arachnotrons, once again minimizing Cateye's value. These issues don't apply to Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, so Cateye tends to be a bit better in such runs, but it still is susceptible to running out of ammo.

The fact that it's pretty Trait-hungry and really shouldn't prioritize Finesse also makes for an awkward transition to endgame gear, which is especially unfortunate given the Assemblies it most appreciates all require Whizkid ranks. The period where you're working through Finesse to Whizkid can be tense, and if you're on a low enough difficulty you may beat the game before actually getting Whizkid online at all!

Cateye is strong, to be clear, just with notable weaknesses and concerns, where failure to maintain awareness of these considerations can result in your run dying, whether dying slowly from ammo starvation or dying abruptly by going into a Special Level it doesn't help much in and you're not otherwise well-prepared for. I generally rate it as one of the stronger Masteries, just with the caveat that its strength is a bit frail, unlike the robust, absurd Ammochain.

Gunrunner

Requirements: 1 rank in Juggler (And thus 1 rank in Finesse), 1 rank in Dodgemaster (And thus 2 ranks in Hellrunner), which is a total of 5 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Tough as Nails, Son of a Bitch, Brute.

Effect: Running's maximum duration is raised from 30 actions to 45 actions. Each time Doomguy moves while Running is active and Doomguy is equipped with a ranged weapon that fires fewer than three shots per pull of the trigger, he will automatically fire directly at the closest visible enemy. This spends ammo but has no additional time cost.

Gunrunner is conceptually interesting but in practice is probably worse than skipping taking a Mastery entirely.

Before we talk about Gunrunner, though, we should cover Running itself.

Doom Roguelike has a 'tactics' mechanic, with three modes: Cautious, Running, and Tired. Cautious is the default mode you start every floor in and that most healing resets you to, and has no special modifiers. Tired is just as boring, being distinguished from Cautious only by virtue of various effects being impossible to activate when Tired -such as Running. Activating Running itself takes 0.1 seconds: since this is the minimum time an action can take, even the Scout's general speed modifier doesn't make it faster. I should also point out that Running cannot be activated while Berserking.

Running itself has four benefits and two penalties. Firstly, it increases movement speed by 30% -this is a separate source from other movement speed boosts (eg Hellrunner) and so the only time the ratio of improvement is different is if you're fast enough to be running into the minimum action duration of 0.1 second. Second, Running increases your Dodge chance by 20 points, meaning enemies have a decent chance of mis-targeting you so long as you keep moving. Third, it actually lowers enemy Accuracy against Doomguy by 4 points, substantially reducing their chance to hit: in most situations this is making at least a third of their shots miss. And fourth, Running halves damage dealt by Acid and Lava on the ground, occurring before other defensive modifiers come into play.

As for the penalties, they're both offensive: ranged attacks suffer -2 to Accuracy, while melee attacks have their damage halved. (Before enemy Protection is applied, I should point out, so melee attack performance is really dropping by more than half against many enemies)

So with that covered, what about Gunrunner itself?

Well, first of all, it should be explicitly pointed out that Gunrunner does not negate the accuracy penalty Running imposes, and so Running to get free shots isn't necessarily a clear improvement over standing still and shooting.

Of course, Shotguns don't perform accuracy checks, so you could focus on Shotguns to maximize the power of Gunrunner...

... but this raises the question of why you're not just going Shottyhead at that point. Shottyhead+Shottyman backed by Hellrunner and the Scout's innate speed is already moving and shooting between enemy turns on the regular, but Shottyhead isn't dependent on a temporary condition that requires healing or descending a floor to regain the charge of, has much higher damage output if you get a hold of one of the Shotguns that can fire multiple times in a row before needing to reload (Note that in a standard run you will get a Combat Shotgun before the Phobos Anomaly if you are diligent about hitting Special Levels), and... well, 0.9.9.8 helps Gunrunner helps a bit in that it used to block Whizkid in 0.9.9.7, whereas now it blocks Brute, but blocking Whizkid wasn't the clincher for Gunrunner being weak. (Also, if you luck into the Jackhammer, sorry, Gunrunner won't fire it!)

It also is dubious competition with Gun Kata when it comes to Pistol use; why fire for free as part of moving when you could make moving regularly result in almost-free shots while also getting free reloads out of kill-shots?

In practice the only regular weapon types that Gunrunner isn't clearly outclassed at supporting are Rocket Launchers and BFGs, and there are serious problems with trying to actually lean into one of those.

It could potentially shine a bit with certain Unique weapons, such as the Railgun. (Not the Tristar Blaster) In that case it at least doesn't have to worry about being outclassed by another Scout Mastery. (Also, the Railgun's high fire time gets bypassed by Gunrunner, so that's a small plus) This has the problem that you're unlikely to find such a Unique early enough to go 'yeah, let's go Gunrunner!' in response, but it's something.

Also not helping is the strange decision to make Gunrunner require Finesse, even though using Gunrunner means ignoring your weapon's base fire speed. It at least means it's easier to make the jump to Whizkid, but I don't get why the secondary requirement isn't Eagle Eye: you'll want Eagle Eye so you reliably hit things unless you're specifically using Shotguns.

Gunrunner itself is probably the clearest examples of the Scout having a theme ("Speed! MORE SPEED!!!") but struggling a bit to translate this into a coherent playstyle. Gunrunner isn't a clear playstyle and doesn't have a clear use-case: it's a weird buff to a speed mechanic that the Scout's innate speediness actually makes less relevant than with other classes. A Marine may have to Run in the mid-early game to put distance between them and Pinkie Demons: a Scout can have 2 ranks in Hellrunner and just leisurely walk away faster than the Demons can chase. So Running is actually a lower-value mechanic for the Scout! (It used to be worse: at some point before I discovered the game, Gunrunner only increased the duration of Running, rather than having the shoot-while-Running behavior)

Also awkward is that Cateye has taken the 'slot' of rapid-fire Mastery. Cateye frankly makes way more sense as the Scout's 'general' Mastery: the only fighting style it's actively opposed to is melee, and it would make perfect sense to rework it into requiring Eagle Eye 3 and Intuition 2 and have it function as a generic Mastery that's slightly awkward for Shotguns. Or make it Intuition 2 and Hellrunner 2 and leave a point to spare so it's less awkward for Shotguns, whatever. Cateye being a rapid-fire Mastery is honestly just weird: shoving Cateye into the generic slot and inventing an actual rapid-fire Mastery while removing Gunrunner would make way more design sense.

-------------------------------------------

Next time, we cover the Technician and their Masteries.

See you then.