Doom Roguelike Class Analysis: Technician

The Technician's (non-Mastery) points of distinction are: firstly, all Item usage (Such as using a Medpack to heal) is much faster, completing in 0.1 second instead of 1 second. (Note that picking up Powerups does not count as using an Item; for a Technician, using a Medpack is vastly faster than using a Health Globe the Technician is standing right on top of. Unexpectedly, using a Lever inexplicably does benefit from this effect) Secondly, when picking up a Computer Map it behaves as a Tracking Map (ie it not only reveals the floor's terrain but also continuously displays all enemies even when they're out of sight), which is notable as Computer Maps are overall more common than Tracking Maps. Thirdly, they don't need points in Finesse to be able to put points into Whizkid. Fourthly, as of 0.9.9.8 they can take Whizkid to rank 3, which lets them put 2 Mods onto an Assembly, 4 Mods onto non-Assembly Armor and Boots and melee weapons, and 7 Mods onto non-Assembly ranged weapons.

Then there's points five and six; for whatever reason, the Technician has the most individual differences from the other classes. Point the fifth is that a Technician always starts a run with a Technical Mod Pack on top of whatever else they're supposed to start the run with. (Prior to 0.9.9.8, this was inconsistently applied in Angel Challenges: they got the Technical Mod Pack in some, but were missing it in others) Point the sixth is that normally Mod Packs cannot be used on Unique-tier gear at all, but in several cases the Technician is innately an exception. Specifically, Cybernetic Armor and Revenant's Launcher can be fully interacted with by the Mod Pack and Assembly system for a Technician, while the Railgun, BFG 10K, Butcher's Cleaver, Mjollnir, Trigun, Jackal, Jackhammer, Frag Shotgun, and Subtle Knife are restricted to what one can do with no ranks in Whizkid. (ie a Technician can put a single Mod Pack into them, or apply a Basic Assembly to them, and in the latter case will not be able to apply a Mod Pack to the Assembly, even if the Technician has 2 ranks in Whizkid)

Prior to 0.9.9.8, that above list was much smaller, making it much more rarely relevant. In the current version, the only Unique weapons a Technician can't mod are Charch's Null Pointer, the Grammaton Beretta, the Mega Buster, the Longinus Spear, Azrael's Scythe, and Dragonslayer. That's specifically weapons, mind: for Boots and Armor, the Cybernetic Armor remains the only Armor the Technician can use Mod Packs on. (Leaving 7 Unique Armors and 2 Unique Boots impossible to ever mod) I suspect the Grammaton Beretta and Mega Buster in particular remain immune to modification due to their mode-change behavior. Charch's Null Pointer is similarly likely unique because it has such bizarre, unique behavior. The melee weapons remaining unmoddable is a little more confusing to me, but ultimately not very important: among other points, only one Assembly works on Melee weapons as a class (Piercing Blade), and so you're not going 'oh, if only I could use the Ripper Assembly on the Longinus Spear!' Or, well, if you are, that's in the sense of complaining about the Ripper being Chainsaw-exclusive: even if every Unique melee weapon accepted Mod Packs from a Technician, you still wouldn't be able to make a Ripper Longinus Spear, is the point.

Overall, I wish Technicians had at least one more reliably relevant advantage, particularly from the early-game perspective. Their current list of advantages is a weird hodgepodge of specific bits that regularly spend a long time being collectively completely irrelevant: the ability to skip Finesse in pursuit of Whizkid is quite nice, but literally can't matter in the early game, since Whizkid ranks are 100% dependent on having at least 3 Mod Packs to have any possibility of benefitting you. Computer Maps spawn inconsistently, and even when one spawns on a floor, it's entirely possible to not find it until it's too late for the Tracking Map behavior to matter -especially as of 0.9.9.8, where all enemies are revealed as per a Tracking Map as soon as only 3 survivors remain on the floor. (This behavior doesn't activate on floors with fixed designs, but no Special Level has a Computer Map: the Military Base has a Tracking Map, but the Technician doesn't improve those!) Extra-fast usage of items can be amazing once the Technician has a solid supply of Medpacks in inventory, or has something more exotic like a Phase Device, but in the very early game it's often better to use Medpacks preemptively between fights, especially if playing on higher difficulties when taking on key challenges. (eg Hell's Arena having you fight 2 Barons of Hell on Ultraviolence means that staying at low HP risks one or both Barons splattering you before you have a chance to respond)

The ability to mod Uniques is more reliably relevant than it used to be, but it's still the case that a run will only rarely see a Unique before Deimos, so it takes a while to matter, and it's also the case that finding a given Unique could fail to matter because it's not moddable, or it is moddable but is a bad fit for your build such that you're not going to use it regardless. By a similar token, the starting Technical Mod Pack can end up not mattering for a long while because you're holding onto it for a specific Assembly. (eg a Tactical Shotgun) And of course the extended Whizkid rank exclusive to Technicians added by 0.9.9.8 takes a long time to be relevant, waiting until Level 12 to be possible.

All of this means the Technician spends a good chunk of the early game being largely inferior to a Marine or Scout... and kind of boring in his weakness! That is, I've played games where I felt a class/character/faction/whatever was pretty clearly understrength, but was a sufficiently distinct and interesting experience to be enjoyable to play even though it would've been nice for them to stronger, whereas the Technician... eventually diverges pretty noticeably, but the period before it happens often drags on for a while, and is boring in how inferior to a Marine or Scout's early game it is.

So more than 'balance', I wish Technicians had some immediate and continuously relevant advantage to more fully separate them out from the other classes even at the start of a run.

Though 'balance' is certainly a motive as well: the Technician is a very rough class on higher difficulties simply because they're so stacked toward only coming into their own fairly late, when higher difficulties most heavily increase difficulty through ramping pressure faster to start. It's easy to die a lot before you even reach your Mastery as a Technician while being skilled enough that your Marine and Scout runs at least reach the midgame before they die.

As for their 'character', Technicians have much the same problem as Scouts of having a 'theme' but not really a clear playstyle resulting from the theme. They're the technical wizard class, so they 'download tracking data' to a PDA, are advantaged when it comes to Mod Pack usage, use items faster for some reason (Why does being a technical wizard make them lightning-fast at patching their wounds with a medical kit?), etc, and then their Masteries don't do much to define a specific character: where the Marine's Masteries almost all block Hellrunner and every Scout Mastery blocks Tough As Nails, the closest things to a comparable reliable Trait rule for Technicians are that they are heavily pressed away from Dualgunner (It's blocked by multiple Masteries, and the ones that don't block it specialize away from it enough that even though it's possible to pursue it's a dubious idea to actually do so) and that Berserker isn't an easy fit to them. (It's blocked by two Masteries, one of which is their melee Mastery, and is clunky to fit into the remaining 3 Masteries)

They do always retain access to Hellrunner, I guess? Which is pretty strange, honestly, I'd expect Entrenchment to block it.

But the point is that this is another way the Technician's gameplay identity seems unclear in the devs' own heads.

But on to the Masteries themselves!

Malicious Blades

Requirements: 1 rank in Finesse, 1 rank in Dodgemaster (And thus 2 ranks in Hellrunner), 2 ranks in Brute, a total of 6 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Tough as Nails, Eagle Eye, Berserker.

Effect: If the Prepared slot currently contains a Combat Knife, Butcher's Cleaver, or Subtle Knife, Doomguy gains 75% resistance to Melee damage and 50% resistance to Bullet/Shrapnel/Fire damage. If both the Weapon slot and the Prepared slot contain examples of the prior weapons, attacking hits with both weapons at no additional time cost.

A recurring thing with the Technician is that their Masteries tend to be off-the-wall relative to the other two classes; Malicious Blades is a great example, in that this is a melee specialty Mastery that is actually very viable to leverage without ever performing a melee attack at all. Simply carting a Combat Knife in the Prepared slot and using your choice of ranged weapon is perfectly functional. It does in fact have the odd distinction of being a melee Mastery that's viable in an Angel of Shotgunnery run!

A lesser bit of oddness that's still relevant is the focus on 'blade' weapons. In a standard run a melee build expects to rely on the guaranteed Chainsaw in the Chained Court, and may not bother to pick up and use any Combat Knives found before that point, and if such a run does use a Combat Knife it's still going to be an interim solution that's rapidly displaced by the Chainsaw. A Malicious Blades run that goes full melee may never move past a pair of Combat Knives; the Butcher's Cleaver and Subtle Knife both count, yes, but they're also Uniques that can easily fail to show up many runs in a row, so you can't actually plan around the idea of moving up to them.

Even the Unholy Cathedral Uniques are something Malicious Blades is liable to turn its nose up to! Say you Assemble two Chainswords and then put a Power Mod Pack on each of them: in that case your damage is 8d3, twice, which is to say 16-48 damage in total. The Longinus Spear does 8d8: 8-64 damage. If you also add Bulk Mod Packs to your twin Chainswords because you got Whizkid 3, then it's 18-54 damage vs 8-64 damage.

That doesn't seem too favorable to the twin Chainswords, but that's because the above calcs are not accounting for Brute ranks, which affect Malicious Blades usage twice as much. Brute 3 changes the comparison for just the Power Mod Pack-backed Chainswords to 34-66 damage vs the Longinus Spear being 17-73 damage. If we say you also threw in Bulk Mod Packs and have Brute 5, now it's 46-78 vs 23-79: the twin Chainswords have twice the minimum damage and one point less maximum damage at that point!

Now, Azrael's Scythe is even stronger and this isn't accounting for Protection hitting Malicious Blades twice as hard, but still, this is pretty striking. And Son of a Bitch can be taken to slightly tilt things further toward the twin Chainswords, too! This is the only Mastery where 'I'll stick with my Combat Knives, thanks' isn't just an obviously insane response to finding the stronger melee weapons!

Malicious Blades itself has some clunkiness in practice. First is that not having access to Berserker is a big loss, enough so that there's a fair argument that a Technician wanting to lean hard into melee combat per se is better off just doing without a Mastery: those figures for comparing twin Chainswords to the Longinus Spear look pretty good if you just ignore Berserker, but if we're instead comparing 'twin Chainsword Malicious Blades Technician' to 'Mastery-less Berserker Technician', suddenly the Longinus Spear's damage has tripled: Berserking doubles melee damage outright, but also means you effectively do everything 50% faster! 46-78 DPS (Twin Chainswords) compared to 69-237 DPS? (Berserking Longinus Spear) That's not a competition at all. Even a regular Chainsaw with zero Mod Pack usage results in 57-117 DPS if we assume Berserking and Brute 5: again, the Malicious Blades twin Chainswords just lose the damage competition.

This isn't even getting into the part where the Berserking Energy generation modifier also means the Berserker gets into range to start attacking sooner.

By a similar token, Malicious Blades' defensive benefits aren't quite as great as they sound when looking at them in isolation. 50% or more resistance to 4 damage types passively is nice... but Berserk gives you 60% resistance to all six damage types. The fact that Malicious Blades gives 75% resistance to Melee damage is tempting to focus on as an advantage over Berserker, but the numbers don't support it: the absolute highest Melee-typed damage on any enemy is 1d3+15 damage, ie 16-18 damage. 60% resistance already knocks that down to 6-7 damage, and you probably have at least 4 Protection most of the time if you're fighting the relevant enemies. 75% knocking the damage on a high-roll down to 4.5 (Which I suspect rounds to 4, but it's not terribly important to this topic) is a pretty small increase in protection in such a context. And it gets worse when you look at things that aren't exactly and specifically the Cyberdemon and Angel of Death: the next-highest damage is 1d3+12, or 13-15 damage. 60% resistances already ensures that's at best 6 damage. Do you really need more resistance if you have 4 or more Protection? If you're in a Red Armor that has a Power Mod Pack attached, you have 6 Protection!

0.9.9.8 especially dragged down the relative advantage of having slightly higher Melee resistance with two changes: Ironman picking up 10% physical resistances per rank, and Technical Mod Packs adding 20% physical resistances to Armor now instead of providing knockback resistance. Berserking with a Technical Mod Pack attached to your Armor is already 80% resistance to Melee: in conjunction with even modest Protection, that's already enough to reduce all Melee damage to the minimum of 1. Same with Berserking with 2 ranks in Ironman.

Malicious Blades does have the advantage of getting to be 'always on': Berserker requires either getting a few melee attacks in or having a single incoming attack have its damage roll be 20 or more damage to get started on Berserking, and Berserk will eventually time out if a decent-sized gap in fighting occurs.

This advantage itself comes with a few caveats, though.

The big one is that Malicious Blades has no effect on the Plasma and Acid damage types. Berserker is never behind on that topic, and this means Malicious Blades is disproportionately vulnerable to Hell Knights, Barons of Hell, Bruiser Brothers, Shamblers, Former Commandos, Arachnotrons, and the more niche threats of Nightmare Imps, Nightmare Arachnotrons, Nightmare Archviles, and a portion of Elite Captains and Elite Former Commandos. This notably makes Containment Area/The Wall, the Spider's Lair, and Limbo/The Mortuary all much more deadly locations to enter: as a concrete example, I had a Malicious Blades Ultraviolence run reach The Mortuary with one Large Medpack, foolishly entered, and died... and then not too long after, did a Mastery-less Berserker Technician who reached The Mortuary with plenty of Large Medpacks, and full-cleared it using... one Large Medpack.

Crucially, the player has very limited ability to specifically patch those resistance holes. If Malicious Blades gave no Fire resistance but instead gave significant Plasma and Acid resistance, I'd be telling readers that it's really important to Assemble a Fireproof Armor, preferably a Red one. As-is... if you stumble over a Plasma Shield with a Malicious Blades run, you are more likely to appreciate the find than with basically any other possible build, but you can't really fix these gaps, not in any way that wouldn't be superseded by doing the same thing but as a Berserker. No Assemblies boost Plasma and/or Acid resistance in specific. No Armor is specifically strong against Acid. Blue Armor is a common find you should consider focusing on as a Malicious Blades character over usually-superior Armors thanks to its modest Plasma resistance, but the only item for getting Acid resistance without it being packaged as part of broader energy resistance is to find the Unique Acid Spitter. (Which is frustratingly bad in general and not exactly a great fit to Malicious Blades in specific, even aside its rarity meaning you shouldn't plan as if a run is liable to find it) The Plasma threats are mostly rapid-fire and so theoretically stacking Protection should heavily help against them, but Plasma ignores half your Protection so it requires pretty absurd Protection values for this to really be true.

This inability to patch the Plasma/Acid resistance gap is a problem, because Plasma and to a slightly lesser extent Acid threats are a heavy part of the late-game threat profile, and are in fact some of the most reliably threatening enemies. This is especially blunt in a standard run, where you get key encounters like The Wall/Containment Area pitting you against a horde of Plasma or Acid threats (Depending on difficulty), the Shambler(s) in Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory being a severe Plasma threat, the risk of a huge horde of Arachnotrons surrounding you in the Spider's Lair and the similar risk of the Abyssal Plains pitting you immediately against a bunch of Plasma or Acid threats...

... but even in an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run, there's still concerns like a regular Arachnotron cave... and eventually Nightmare Arachnotron caves... and otherwise getting a relatively open map generating with a bunch of Plasma and/or Acid threats spawning in view but at a distance from you.

As such, Malicious Blades is also on surprisingly shaky ground when it comes to a defensive comparison to a Berserker-

-if you focus on the idea of melee combat as your primary mechanism of defeating enemies.

This is why I opened with commenting on how Malicious Blades is a melee Mastery that's pretty viable to use primarily as a ranged-combat Mastery: because this is not only true, but in fact kind of necessary to justify actually running Malicious Blades. If you attempt to run it as a melee Mastery that virtually never uses a ranged weapon, you're perpetually haunted by the specter of 'but Mastery-less Berserker does that way better'. (To be clear: I have done both Malicious Blades Technicians who defaulted to melee combat and Mastery-less Berserker Technicians, and the latter is way easier. That Mortuary story I gave was very representative of how stark the contrast is, not anomalous) You should certainly be willing to break out melee attacks in various contexts -pretty much anytime you can bait an enemy into walking into your face around a corner, for one- but treating them as your sole offense is putting the Mastery in a bad position. (Outside the Unholy Cathedral, where you can't use non-melee attacks at all) Malicious Blades is in fact one of the Masteries that most appreciates Juggler, so you can readily swap a Combat Knife into the Weapon slot from inventory when you have a good opportunity to stab something.

Within the framework of being run as a ranged-focused Mastery, Malicious Blades is actually very respectable. The lack of Plasma and Acid resistance is still a set of relevant gaps to keep in mind, where ideally you Assemble Cerberus Armor to cover the gap, but no other Mastery (or non-Mastery Trait) really competes with Malicious Blades for enhancing Doomguy's survivability when exchanging ranged fire.

My main actual criticism here is that it gets dragged down by the Prepared Slot also being where the quick-reload ammo items go. This means that anytime you have one of those around, you can't take advantage of the reload speed without giving up the resistances: unless you're extremely confident in your corner-shooting skills and willing to put up with the tedious process of swapping a Combat Knife back into the Prepared slot as soon as it's time to move on, that trade is a dubious one. I really wish those had their own dedicated equip slot: not only would it make Malicious Blades more solid for supporting ranged combat, but it would also do away with a bunch of jank around managing the quick-reload ammo items with minimal secondary consequences.

Another painpoint for Malicious Blades is a learning curve issue: Doom Roguelike has a heavy preference for lumping Fire/Plasma/Acid resistances together, where most sources of protection against one of those damage types help against all of them, and in fact usually boost all of them by the same amount. As such, it's easy to end up internalizing rubrics like 'if Mancubi aren't scary to me, then none of the energy damage attackers is scary' because such a rule really is true the overwhelming majority of the time... but Malicious Blade is a big exception! This makes it easy to get yourself killed going into The Wall/Containment Area or the Spider's Lair because you're not properly accounting for the fact that Plasma and Acid damage are not reduced by Malicious Blades any. I don't necessarily mind this as far as Malicious Blades internal design goes: if the rest of the game got less consistent about lumping energy resistances together, I'd be fine with that. But it's pretty awkward how Malicious Blades is one of the most regularly-relevant and dramatic exceptions to this whole thing, especially since it shields against the physical damage types too: it's really easy to go multiple floors half-asleep because nothing can do serious harm to you, and then abruptly die because you got too used to having everything do chipping damage to you and forgot that Plasma and Acid threats still have to be fought carefully.

Malicious Blades is also hampered by a problem common to the Technician's Masteries: you can't actually get it at Level 6! It's kind of frustrating: if Malicious Blades replaced the Dodgemaster requirement with just needing Hellrunner 2, you could get it online at the earliest possible moment, and Dodgemaster is a sufficiently low-value Trait a lot of the time this would be basically a pure improvement. Heck, you could outright turn Dodgemaster into an incompatible Trait (maybe over Tough As Nails) and this would still probably be an overall improvement!

Incidentally, another reason Technician is a class that has a rough early game is they have a heavy tendency to get Masteries late: only one Mastery can actually be gotten at the actual minimum Level for a Mastery of 6... and it's Scavenger, which is even more directly focused on the late game.

It's... not ideal.

Sharpshooter

Requirements: 3 ranks in Son of a Gun, 3 ranks in Eagle Eye, a total of 6 points spent.

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

Effect: Pistol shots always roll their maximum damage.

Like Malicious Blades being an off-the-wall way to specialize in melee weapons, Sharpshooter is a bizarro way to specialize in Pistols; where Pistol play normally means Dualgunner play, with the Marine and Scout Masteries leaning into this, Sharpshooter actually forbids Dualgunner, replacing two Pistols rapid-firing shots with one Pistol that consistently hits pretty hard per shot.

Notably, since knockback is tied to damage rolled and Sharpshooter makes the roll consistent, it also makes knockback consistent, making it much more significant to cross a knockback damage threshold. A Pistol with a Power Mod Pack, for example, just barely hits the point of being able to do 10 damage and thus inflict 1 tile of knockback; normally this means such a Pistol will very occasionally knock a target back, but in a Sharpshooter's hands that Pistol will always knock a target back if it hits them. As such, applying Power Mod Packs can be disproportionately useful for, among other things, dealing with melee enemies. (By continuously knocking them back so they can't get into range to attack)

Unfortunately, in practice I'd say Sharpshooter is currently badly understrength, especially in the context of Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs. Its 'force high roll' effect is pretty straightforwardly mathematically weak in context, for a few reasons;

Firstly, Doom Roguelike's heavy usage of multiple dice per hit for non-rapid-fire weapons means attacks trend very heavily toward the middle of their damage range. A Pistol's 2d4 will do 5 damage 25% of the time, 4 and 6 damage 18.75% of the time apiece, 3 and 7 damage 12.5% of the time apiece, and 2 and 8 damage 6.25% of the time apiece: put another way, 62.5% of Pistol shots will do 4, 5, or 6 damage, where thus Sharpshooter is very often functionally adding 2, 3, or 4 damage. The only Pistol to by default not use multiple dice is the Unique Grammaton Beretta, specifically in its Semi-Auto and Full Auto modes; a Grammaton Berreta-wielding Sharpshooter actually is legitimately very solid, but most Sharpshooter runs will be making do with less favored types of Pistols.

This does come with the qualifier that the Storm Bolter Pistol Assembly rolling the damage into one die roll provides a more reliable way to maximize the Sharpshooter mechanic. A basic Pistol will switch to 1d8, for example, resulting in Sharpshooter adding 4 or more damage on 50% of all shots, which is noticeably better...

... but another big flaw with Sharpshooter's appeal is that Son of a Gun and Son of a Bitch add 'flat' damage, with Sharpshooter actively blocking off Son of a Bitch. 62.5% of your shots de-facto adding 2/3/4 damage doesn't really sound clearly superior to adding 3 damage to all hits, and once extended ranks come into play now it's competing with adding 5 damage to all hits, which is pretty clearly just plain better.

Then there's the issue that this is all magnified by blocking off Dualgunner: our Mastery-less Pistol-focused Technician isn't adding 3 damage per volley with 3 ranks of Son of a Bitch, he's adding 6 damage because he shoots twice. Also, we have to count the second Pistol's shots entirely as added damage, relative to Sharpshooter: at Level 7, our Mastery-less Technician grabs 3 ranks in Son of a Gun, 3 ranks in Son of a Bitch, and the 1 rank in Dualgunner, and fires their two Pistols in 0.5 seconds for 8-14 damage apiece (ie 16-28 damage total), vs our newly-minted Sharpshooter Technician fires one Pistol in 0.4 seconds for exactly 11 damage. You might notice that this is lower than the minimum damage of the Dualgunner Technician. That's a problem!

Now, one might argue that this is unfair because Sharpshooter demands Eagle Eye ranks and the prior numbers don't take into account Accuracy, but digging into that doesn't help much. For starters, Pistols trend accurate: the basic Pistol being +4 Accuracy is something of a 'floor' for Pistols, with only the Blaster (+3) and the Semi-Auto and Full Auto Modes on the Grammaton Beretta (+3 and +1, respectively) going lower. Basic Pistols hit 74.07% of the time at line of sight, and as I discussed when talking about Eagle Eye, Accuracy's benefits slow down as you move further from the middle: the first rank of Eagle Eye is a nice increase to 90.75% of shots hitting, the second rank is a mild bump from there to 98.14% of shots hitting, and the third rank that Sharpshooter demands you take does literally nothing unless you're either Running or use an Assembly that lowers Accuracy. (Such as the Storm Bolter Pistol Assembly)

If we just use hit rate as a multiplier and also take into account Dualgunner being slower than single-shooting, our Technician's DPS is 26.9885/s. That sounds pretty respectable; what about our Dualgunner given the same treatment? We get our low-roll DPS is 23.7024/s... and our high roll DPS is 41.4792/s.

You might notice that the Dualgunner, if cursed by a vengeful god to always roll minimum damage, has their DPS at around 87% of the Sharpshooter's DPS. You also might notice that this problem can be corrected in one direction but not the other: the Mastery-less Dualgunner can take an Eagle Eye rank to boost their DPS to be 100% ahead of the Sharpshooter's DPS, whereas the Sharpshooter is done improving their damage until extended ranks let them max Son of a Gun... at which point the Mastery-less Dualgunner pulls even more strongly ahead since they get to add more ranks to Son of a Bitch.

And, again, this generally gets worse if the run loots an Exotic or Unique Pistol, since those mostly make Eagle Eye ranks even less useful, and mostly don't strongly benefit from the auto-max-damage aspect of Sharpshooter.

One might argue this is all an oversimplification given Mod Packs and Assemblies exist; I did note the Storm Bolter Pistol Assembly earlier, for example, which is an Assembly that's a strong improvement for a Sharpshooter and iffy for any other build. One could similarly argue that High Power Weapon favors Sharpshooter (It prefers to increase max damage), but High Power Weapon is a terrible Assembly that is basically impossible to make sense to go for if you have any ranks in Whizkid, when easy access to Whizkid is one of the Technician's main draws! Similarly, Energy Pistol raises max damage in specific. These plus Speedloader Pistol, Demolition Ammo, and Nanomanufacture Ammo are in fact the only Assemblies that can be applied to Pistols: there's arguably no Assembly that favors Mastery-less Dualgunner more than Sharpshooter...

... but the Storm Bolter Pistol Assembly is the only case of strongly favoring a Sharpshooter's mechanics, enough to meaningfully offset not having Son of a Bitch and offset how wasteful a 3rd rank in Eagle Eye is for a Pistol specialty. And it's not actually an amazing super-Assembly that singlehandedly makes Sharpshooter a killing machine: it's probably the best Assembly a Sharpshooter can apply to their Pistol, but this isn't like how a Shottyhead Scout successfully Assembling a Nano-Shrapnel Super Shotgun is basically 'you've already won, and the remainder of the run is a formality'.

Similarly, Power Mod Pack stacking does favor Sharpshooter (A Basic Pistol you apply Power Mod Packs to will rise from 2d4 to 2d5, then to 2d6, then to 2d7: for a non-Sharpshooter, this raises the average damage from 5 to 7, where for a Sharpshooter this raises damage from 8 to 14), but not by enough to be an amazing swing that clearly makes up for Sharpshooter's flaws. (For one thing, your run might not find 3 Power Mods)

It's also tempting to focus on the consideration of reloads. After all, a Dualgunner has to Dualreload every 6 shots for 2.4 seconds, where a Sharpshooter has an empty Prepared slot and so can 'for free' pop in a 10mm ammo chain, shaving off 80% of the reload time, and thus spending 0.24 seconds on reloading every 6 shots. At Son of a Gun 3, the Dualgunner thus spends 3 seconds shooting followed by 2.4 seconds reloading, while the Sharpshooter spends 2.4 seconds followed by 0.24 seconds reloading. Within that framework, the Dualgunner reload time cuts their DPS by almost 50%, whereas the Sharpshooter is spending less than 10% of their time reloading. But there's several problems with this perspective.

First of all, 10mm ammo chains are an uncommon find in a run. In Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs especially your Sharpshooter really cannot count on having this advantage... but even in a standard run, it takes a while to actually happen: the only Phobos Special Level to be guaranteed to provide a 10mm ammo chain is the Military Base, and if it's displaced by the Phobos Lab, you're not getting a 10mm ammo chain. It's not until Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory that you're actually guaranteed to get a 10mm ammo chain. And standard runs don't provide enough guaranteed 10mm ammo chains to assure your Sharpshooter has reliable access to this advantage.

Second, the Dualgunner has the option of upgrading their Pistols to Speedloader Pistols: if they do so with both Pistols, they only spend 0.8 seconds on Dualreloading, and so cut the lost DPS to less than 33%. There's not really any clearly better Assembly for Pistols aside Nanomanufacture Ammo, and if a run manages Nanomanufacture Ammo that's even more bluntly substantially ablating this reload time advantage, since it entirely eliminates reloads. The Sharpshooter can also Assemble a Speedloader Pistol and in fact doesn't need as many Mod Packs to be done boosting their weaponry, mind, but this doesn't stack well with the 10mm ammo chain usage: you ram into the minimum time cap, wasting part of the benefits, and anyway the proportionate benefit would be small even if this weren't so. Your Sharpshooter is probably better off Assembling a Storm Bolter Pistol, doubling their damage per pull of the trigger. (Though also causing them to need to reload every 4 shots, or 5 if they don't mind the final shot being only 1 bullet; the average DPS increase is thus 156% if reloading every 4th firing, taking into account that Storm Bolter Pistol also reduces the fire duration by 15%)

Third, this is all ignoring the issue of Reloader existing. A couple ranks in it knocks the Dualreload time from 2.4 seconds to 0.96 seconds, dramatically reducing how much reloading cuts into their damage output. The Sharpshooter can also take Reloader, but this doesn't give as proportionately large an impact, and if you assume they're using a 10mm ammo chain then Reloader 2 actually runs into the minimum duration limit! One can reasonably point out that the Sharpshooter can invest those Trait points elsewhere, and this is true, but a big part of my current point is how lacking Sharpshooter DPS is, and how limited their ability to correct this is: a Sharpshooter wielding a 10mm ammo chain doesn't ignore Reloader in favor of Son of a Bitch. All they've really got at that point is Whizkid to invest in for trying to improve DPS. So for example our Dualgunner can grab Whizkid 2 and Reloader 2 by Level 11, perfectly within the Levels before extended ranks, whereas our Sharpshooter grabs Whizkid 2, hits Level 10, and has essentially nothing they can do to improve their damage.

Fourth, these numbers are all a bit misleading simply because only a portion of reloads are combat reloads. If your Dualgunner Technician kills the only enemy in sight, then Dualreloads and nothing pops in and attacks him, it usually doesn't matter that the Sharpshooter Technician would've needed less time to reload.

Fifth, by a similar token rolling reload duration into DPS draws attention away from how important 'time until kill' is: the sooner an enemy is dead, the sooner it stops attacking Doomguy. Even if a given Dualgunner does end up behind a given Sharpshooter in DPS under this number-crunching, in reality the Dualgunner ends up minimizing HP losses and Armor damage through killing targets faster up-front.

Sixth, this 10mm ammo chain usage doesn't prop up Sharpshooter relative to Gun Kata on the Scout: Gun Kata is simply a far superior solution to the issue of combat reloads. This isn't an issue in a 'local' sense -your Technician run that finds the Trigun can't decide to switch to being a Gun Kata Scout- but is relevant to the broader 'Sharpshooter is understrength' point, in that if you want to do a Pistol run you're better off picking a Scout to go Gun Kata.

On top of all these relatively straightforward math issues, Sharpshooter is hampered by how it embraces and exaggerates one of the default weaknesses of Pistol specialization: that crowds of enemies increasingly become one of the main ways the game threatens Doomguy (Especially in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666), and Pistols hit only one target at a time. Gun Kata and Bullet Dance each ablate this weakness: Bullet Dance outputting so many bullets at a time allows it to hit key targets (Mostly: Archviles) through meatshields by virtue of killing the meatshield with bullets to spare, while Gun Kata turns slain enemies into free reloads so the shooting never stops, so weak secondary targets actually improve its ability to put damage on the strong primary target. Sharpshooter can really struggle to fight through Archvile-backed mobs without turning to other weapons..

... especially since its 100%-reliable knockback from its high-roll shots often ensures a target enemy is getting knocked back into the darkness as it dies, which reduces the odds of an Archvile in back actually bothering to come into sight. Enemies that have 'locked on' to Doomguy (almost) always move closer if they decide to move, which normally results in eg a Baron of Hell you're shooting at getting further away from any Archvile lurking in back, eventually meaning the Archvile has to actually get closer before it can resurrect the Baron of Hell, or even resulting in the Baron of Hell putting cover between it and the Archvile so the Archvile has to move a lot more than one tile to resurrect the Baron of Hell. Sharpshooter's reliable knockback breaks this natural outcome of the game's systems, where Doomguy trying to kill things (So they stop killing him) ends up getting him bogged down by Archvile resurrections. There's behavioral things you can do to work around this, but depending on current conditions... those courses of action might not be available to you, or might have other flaws that make them a big problem to actually employ.

Oh, and when I said 'one of the weaknesses', I actually meant 'two of the weaknesses': one of the hazards with a Pistol build is that it has an extended period of notable weakness in the early game. When you have Son of a Gun at rank 1 or 2, it's often better to just ignore your Pistol entirely in favor of a Shotgun. Even at Son of a Gun 3, a basic Pistol is still often going to be pushed aside by a Shotgun: normally a Pistol build finally reaches the point of it reliably making sense to focus on Pistol usage at Level 4, when Dualgunner and Son of a Gun 3 are both online... and then Sharpshooter forces you to ignore that Level 4 checkpoint in favor of waiting for your Mastery. Your Mastery that isn't very good, and more pertinently to this current point you have to wait until Level seven to activate your Mastery. In conjunction with the Technician being the class with the weakest early game in general, it's very easy to go 'I wanna do a Sharpshooter!' and then die over and over and over before ever reaching Level 7 with a bunch of would-be Sharpshooters.

I like the idea of Sharpshooter, but its current mechanics aren't really adequate. It needs buffs: letting it take Son of a Bitch, reducing the Eagle Eye requirement so it's not forced to waste a point on the nearly-useless-in-context 3rd rank (Which also has the knock-on effect of making Sharpshooter's minimum Level 7, which as I just noted is A Problem), adding some bonus effect (Maybe give it the 'Pistol shots penetrate' idea I suggested for reworking Bullet Dance), or its current effect made into something stronger (Say that it forced damage to be twice the max roll), or even to be replaced entirely with a new effect. Something to make it not compare so poorly to a Mastery-less Dualgunner. And honestly, unless something is done like letting the player grab Masteries earlier than Level 6, I'm not sure anything can be done to fix its frustratingly weak early game.

Oh, and I should point out that Sharpshooter is unambiguously worthless in an Angel of Max Carnage run, doing literally nothing and forcing you to spend points into Eagle Eye, which is also basically completely useless in Angel of Max Carnage.

Conversely, I should point out that it's pretty uniquely good for Angel of Light Travel and to a lesser extent Archangel of Travel. For the most part, those Angel challenges are essentially impossible to complete without going to a melee Mastery, with the only two serious exceptions being Sharpshooter and Ammochain, for the same basic shared reason: Sharpshooter and Ammochain are extremely ammo-efficient, allowing them to mostly-reliably avoid ammo starvation even with a severely constricted inventory.

You might wonder why I'm bringing this up with Sharpshooter and not Ammochain when I presented Ammochain as absurdly great and have just spent a while saying Sharpshooter is terribly understrength. The core of this is that Ammochain is much more of a roulette to take into Angel of Light Travel: if your Marine manages to get Ammochain online, yeah, he's pretty well set for the run, and is probably a stronger, more reliable character than a Sharpshooter who got just as far... but that's a much bigger if for Ammochain than Sharpshooter. Sharpshooter's requirements are immediately boosting the reasonably ammo-efficient Pistol, making it more ammo-efficient, whereas Ammochain's requirements are primarily boosting the ammo-inefficient Chaingun/Plasma Rifle, and the Triggerhappy requirement is in fact reducing ammo efficiency prior to bringing Ammochain online. The Marine is liable to end up spending a while using a Shotgun, only switching to a Chaingun once Ammochain actually comes online, while only modestly boosting Shotgun performance. (Via Reloader) And with a pretty significant risk of dying to ammo starvation before actually getting Ammochain online!

Furthermore, Sharpshooter's biggest issue is its painful early game, when Angel of Light Travel is making the early game overall easier: crippling your inventory capacity in exchange for being effectively 20% faster at everything is a very favorable trade in the portion of the game where you can't fill most of your inventory slots. Since Angel of Light Travel has you start with a 10mm ammo chain, you even get to leverage that particular benefit reliably!

So if you do want to see Sharpshooter at its best, consider trying to clear Angel of Light Travel or Archangel of Travel with it: it's legitimately one of the best choices there, and clearly the best if you're wanting a non-melee option.

Oh, and I should clarify that I'm not saying Sharpshooter is inferior to Mastery-less Dualgunner as a theorycrafting thing. I've given both styles of Technician play a try, and outside the Travel Challenges I have in fact consistently found Mastery-less Dualgunner to be a much stronger and more reliable way of playing the Technician.

Fireangel

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

Incompatibilities: Son of a Bitch, Son of a Gun, Eagle Eye.

Effect: Damage to Doomguy from explosion splash damage is reduced to 0, without affecting knockback calculations.

Fireangel is the Technician's idea of a Shotgun specialty, and continues their trend of being unconventional by instead being a Rocket Launcher specialty, which admittedly do overlap some in specializations (eg Shottyman working on both), but even so, Fireangel does nothing for Shotguns, so that's pretty offbeat.

It's also offbeat in a similar manner to Malicious Blades, in that a Fireangel Technician can actually kind of ignore the apparent intention of what weapon type to use and still get substantial value out of the Mastery. After all, Fireangel's protection isn't restricted to your own explosions; negating huge amounts of damage from many late-game enemies is very valuable in its own right, even if you never try to leverage its Rocketjump utility or fire a Rocket Launcher at an enemy directly next to you. Indeed, I'd argue the protection from enemies is the actual main draw of Fireangel, with the Rocket Launcher benefits being a nice-to-have rather than the reason to pick Fireangel.

Oh, but I should explain the mechanics here, because they're not what you're liable to intuitively expect.

First of all, in spite of being named Fireangel, this is not immunity to Fire damage as a whole. It's immunity to explosion-inflicted damage, which includes the Acid damage from Barons of Hell and Bruiser Brothers, the Plasma damage from Cacodemons, Hellknights, Nightmare Imps, and Nightmare Archviles, and also certain splash damage effects the player can use that aren't necessarily Fire damage. (Such as the Mega Buster's Acid Mode shots) It also includes all three Barrel types, even though Barrels of Acid do Acid damage. I should also emphasize that it's specifically explosion splash damage: Fireangel leaves Doomguy fully susceptible to Shotgun blasts, even though those also hit an area.

Second, whether splash damage is blocked by Fireangel or not depends on the explosion's tile of origin, which is a distinction I'm zeroing in on because you might intuitively expect an attack's Accuracy check to be involved in deciding whether Doomguy gets to be immune to a given blast or not, but this is not so. To give a concrete example: if Doomguy is standing with his back to a wall east of him, and a Baron of Hell directly to the west throws an acid ball right at Doomguy, then it doesn't matter whether the acid ball passes or fails its Accuracy check on Doomguy: either it passes the check and detonates in his tile, or it fails, tries to advance into the wall behind Doomguy, and the game has it detonate next to the wall in Doomguy's tile, and either way Doomguy takes full damage from the acid ball.

As such, Fireangel makes it especially important to try to trigger Dodges and ideally to also not stand right next to terrain that can ensure shots detonate inside Doomguy's tile. Mancubi especially stand out in this regard, since Doomguy always passes his Dodge check against them, but Fireangel won't fully protect Doomguy if he's standing up against a wall and not moving, because the middle projectile is guaranteed to detonate in his tile in those circumstances.

It's also very relevant to Archviles and their variants: it's easy to think 'oh, they do purely explosion damage, so Fireangel is complete immunity!' but if you just sit there and let an Archvile channel on you, you will take full damage. You need to move enough to potentially trigger a Dodge if you want Fireangel to help against them, even more consistently than with most other enemies: with a Baron of Hell, Fireangel might protect you if the shot misses you but still detonates close enough beyond you for the explosion to catch you, even if you hold completely still. With an Archvile, no such possibility exists.

Slightly less extreme about this is Revenants, since their shots automatically stop and detonate on the tile they targeted, rather than continuing past in the event of a miss. Fireangel might still protect you from a Revenant by virtue of it trying to shoot through one of its buddies, or by virtue of it thinking it has a clean line of fire when it doesn't and hitting terrain, unlike an Archvile, but if you're not keeping on the move you're very unlikely to have Fireangel protect you from a Revenant.

This all comes with the qualifier that when lots of knockback-capable enemies are about Fireangel becomes a lot more reliable even if you do your best to avoid benefitting from it, as Dodges can in fact trigger when you chose to hold still but ended up being moved substantially by enemy knockback. When dealing with stuff like multiple Mancubi in reach, Fireangel is basically guaranteed to eliminate a ton of damage, even if a player has no idea about Fireangel's unintuitive details.

All this means that Fireangel requiring Shottyman and Dodgemaster is actually pretty natural, since you do in fact want to be moving a lot in combat and triggering Dodges to actually leverage Fireangel. (Albeit it's part of that frustrating trend of the Technician's Masteries mostly coming online late...)

Perhaps the most unexpected part of Fireangel's design is that there's a fair argument that it's good to tech into being a melee fighter: it blocks Son of a Gun so combining it with Pistol focus is non-viable, and it blocking both Son of a Bitch and Eagle Eye is a big strike against trying to combine it with rapid-fire weapons, but it doesn't block anything of relevance to melee combat! Certainly, Reloader and Shottyman don't provide value to melee weaponry, but that's just an argument for doing a weird parallel to Malicious Blades-style 'ranged and melee combat in tandem', not that melee makes no sense to ever tech into.

I do wish Fireangel was less... boring to actually play, though. The novelty value of being blasted all over the place by multiple Mancubi volleys and taking zero damage from it is neat and funny, but Fireangel's mechanics can easily end up leaving you playing pretty similarly to how you'd play without it... especially anytime you're dealing with the various enemies that don't do explosion damage at all. Being able to safely use a Rocket Launcher from up-close is similarly neat and funny, but it's actually a bit uncommon for it to be strongly practical of a plan. Notably, Vaults are one of the main times you expect to find a swarm of enemies in close-quarters, but Vaults generally have good loot you don't want to risk smashing!

But aside being a bit boring in execution, Fireangel is very viable and unlike some Masteries it isn't hampered by 'but this other thing you could do is basically the same thing but better'.

Entrenchment

Requirements: 1 rank in Badass (And thus 2 ranks in Tough as Nails), 1 rank in Triggerhappy (And thus 2 ranks in Son of a Bitch), a total of 6 points spent.

Incompatibilities: Finesse, Son of a Gun, Reloader.

Effect: Anytime the alternate fire mode of Chain Fire is active, Doomguy gains 30% resistance to all damage types.

This is possibly the most 'vanilla' of the Technician's Masteries. Being specialized in an alternate fire mode is unusual -no other Mastery actually does that unless one counts Fireangel's benefits implicitly supporting Rocketjumps- but it's not particularly counter to how other rapid-fire Masteries empower rapid-fire weapons. It's not like it turns your spray of bullets into one big hit, or into a shotgun blast, or some other wild mechanical change, and only one rapid-fire weapon in the game doesn't have Chain Fire. (The Megabuster)

It unfortunately is... very flawed. Chain Fire is a distinctly mediocre mechanic, enough so that completely ignoring it is normally not really a loss in options or effectiveness, and Entrenchment is only a partial fix to one of its flaws. (That of not being able to move and thus not being able to Dodge) Chain Fire is still hampered by...

1: Chain Fire initially reduces damage output, taking multiple turns of shooting to catch up to and then pull ahead of standard shooting. It's not until the fourth turn of consecutive shooting that more bullets have been fired than if you'd used standard fire!

2: Chain Fire 'walks' shots when aiming at a new target, even if this means spraying multiple bullets through empty space, and thus wastes a lot of ammo. In theory this quality can be a positive when fighting large crowds of enemies by 'walking' your fire back and forth and potentially killing multiple enemies in a single volley, but usually trying to do that will just let enemies survive longer to do damage to you, and regular shooting can be aimed at enemies who are lined up to potentially get multiple kills from a single turn of shooting, so it's not actually a unique edge.

3: Chain Fire is extremely sensitive, ending instantly if anything is done other than more shooting. It also automatically instantly ends if no enemies are visible when Domguy's turn rolls around, which means you can't ramp up in preparation for enemies you know are out there (Such as by having Tracking Map functionality active) by Chain Firing into the darkness, and also means that even if you're actively engaged with enemies it can abruptly break due to enemies ducking just out of sight as they try to close! And of course ammo running out instantly ends the Chain Fire state, which means it can't actually last very long unless you specifically have a Minigun, a fact that Entrenchment exacerbates by requiring a rank in Triggerhappy so you burn through your ammo even faster.

Notably, this last point directly undermines the survivability advantage offered by Entrenchment; it's easy to be shrugging off incoming damage because of Entrenchment being active and then whoops you run out of ammo or the last visible enemy dies or you get knocked out of vision of all enemies and still more damage promptly comes in and instead of being 1 damage per hit it's real damage that kills you immediately or at least puts you in a really bad position that can easily result in death in a few turns.

Altogether, this makes specializing in Chain Fire in particular a dubious prospect, so Entrenchment is starting 'behind' relative to Masteries that are focused on an already-solid style of play, and then its benefit is... surprisingly mild, given that point. I can contrast this with melee, where Brute, Berserker, and all three melee Masteries are significant improvements to melee combat's effectiveness (Even Malicious Blades is, just less so than the Berserker it blocks), precisely because by default melee combat is a really bad idea and so needs significant help to be viable at all, let alone strongly appealing.

Specializing in Chain Fire in particular really requires comparably high support to be viable due to Chain Fire's inherent weakness... or for Chain Fire to be reworked into something more inherently useful, which honestly would ideally happen regardless. (Chain Fire really is way too finicky and with no clear use-case in 0.9.9.7 and 0.9.9.8)

But just focusing on Entrenchment itself: say it incorporated Ammochain's benefit into its effect on Chain Fire. That is, Chain Fire would always spend 1 ammo per volley no matter how many shots went out: this would be kind of a lame solution as far as being a bit of a repeat, but it would mean the Chain Fire could be sustained longer and that the ramped-up higher-than-base number of shots would be all advantage, not to mention mean the 'walking' behavior would no longer be wasting ammunition in terms of carried resources. That would do a lot to prop it up.

Alternatively, maybe Entrenchment could enhance the shots themselves: make the shots do more damage, or penetrate through enemies, so the pure mathematical 'but Chain Fire reduces my initial damage output' issue isn't as true or isn't cleanly true. 

Or Entrenchment's benefit could be made less strictly tied to the Chain Fire channeled state: say Chain Fire initiated the Entrenchment bonus, but the bonus didn't end unless Doomguy moved out of the tile he initiated it in. Then he could reload in place, still benefitting from Entrenchment's defensive benefits, and even just fire regular shooting actions instead of needing to initiate Chain Fire again, not to mention be able to use Medpacks without instantly losing the Entrenchment protection. This would do a lot to ablate the problems with how Chain Fire shuts off too easily.

Personally, I'd rather the Technician got a different rapid-fire Mastery entirely: Entrenchment fits in better with the Marine's design (Especially now that 0.9.9.8 has given the Marine innate energy resistances!) than the Technician's design, and the Technician is the only class whose Pistol Mastery pushes Pistol usage heavily away from being like a rapid-fire weapon. The Technician could have a really 'vanilla' rapid-fire Mastery and -especially if Sharpshooter were buffed to be properly competitive with Dualgunner- this wouldn't run into that 'Pistol and rapid-fire Masteries are alike' issue at all!

But even replacing it with a different off-the-wall Mastery would likely be an improvement.

Indeed, in the current state, a Mastery-less rapid-fire focus is just... safer, easier, more powerful, more ammo-efficient. You get to skip Triggerhappy, ignore Chain Fire, and prioritize more useful Traits than Tough as Nails, such as Eagle Eye to get your hit rate way up. And Entrenchment isn't even interesting to play out, honestly; Technician Masteries tend to be bad in general, but Entrenchment is the only Technician Mastery I'd characterize as consistently boring. So that's another way its design is... not great.

And to be explicit again: I do mean that I've done Mastery-less Technician runs focused on rapid-fire weapons and Entrenchment runs, and found the former much easier than the latter.

Scavenger

Requirements: 1 rank in Intuition, 2 ranks in Whizkid, a total of 5 Trait points spent.

Incompatibilities: Berserker, Dualgunner, Triggerhappy.

Effect: Attempting to unload a Weapon, Armor, or pair of Boots that is either modded or not common tier will result in the item being destroyed and a Mod Pack is generated. (This doesn't work on other Exotics/Uniques, such as the Shockwave Pack and Exotic Mod Packs) For modded examples, randomly produces one of the Mod Packs used in that item. For Assemblies, randomly produces a basic Mod Pack with even chances for all 4 possibilities. (ie 25% chance per each) A modded Assembly will give back the Mod Pack installed in it. For Exotic weapons, adds in Sniper and Firestorm Mod Packs but remains an even chance of any given possibility. For most Unique weapons, always results in an Exotic Mod Pack, with 1/3 odds for Sniper, 1/3 odds for Firestorm, 1/6 odds for Onyx, and 1/6 odds for Nano. The BFG 10k, Malek's Armor, and Trigun will always produce a Nano Mod Pack, the Railgun and Revenant's Launcher will always produce a Sniper Mod Pack, the Anti-Freak Jackal and Lava Armor will always produce a Firestorm Mod Pack, while Shielded Armor and Mjollnir will always produce an Onyx Mod Pack.

Scavenger is an interesting idea with a clunky execution and with a poor fit to the game itself.

The thing is, Doom Roguelike isn't very heavy on 'tiering up' gear. I'll use an example it does have: a standard run will reliably get a Shotgun at the beginning of the game, will reliably be able to replace it with a Combat Shotgun no later than Phobos Lab/Military Base, and can then reliably replace that Combat Shotgun with an Assault Shotgun from Limbo/The Mortuary. If a run does this, it's often worth considering Assembling the Combat Shotgun into a Tactical Shotgun, as it's a fairly sizable performance boost and the delay before getting an Assault Shotgun is long enough that you'll still get plenty of value out of the Assembly even though you'll ultimately ditch it for the Assault Shotgun.

So for this progression, Scavenger letting you take apart the Tactical Shotgun to get a Mod Pack back out of it is a 'freebie': you were going to Assemble it, use it for a while, but ultimately ditch it regardless, after all.

But this is unusual, and with 0.9.9.8 making it so you don't need to have Whizkid 2 when you Assemble something to be able to slap on another Mod Pack, it's even rarer to do than in 0.9.9.7. (Where for example it was often worth Assembling Tactical Boots early in the run, and then making a new pair once you had Whizkid 2 so you could add an Agility Mod Pack to that) Most Assemblies you make have pretty good odds of being 'for life', where you either definitely won't replace them later or have to get pretty specific luck to do so. (eg if you Assemble a Chaingun, you have to find specifically a Minigun to be liable to actually abandon the Assembled Chaingun as no longer relevant)

The fact that Assemblies just give up a single common-tier Mod Pack regardless of what it took to Assemble them it is particularly awkward. It does mean you can try to convert excess Mod Packs into types you need more of -Assemble a Tactical Launcher with two Technical Mod Packs, and 75% of the time smashing it will give back a Power, Bulk, or Agility Mod- but mostly it cuts off a lot of theoretical utility. For example, Tower Shield is an Assembly that's pretty awful in part because it uses a precious Onyx Mod Pack: if smashing a Tower Shield reliably gave back the Onyx Mod Pack, you could repeatedly Assemble a Tower Shield, smashing your current one when it got low on Durability and swapping to another one, and suddenly Tower Shield's two biggest problems -needing an Onyx Mod Pack and not accepting repairs- would be substantially diminished as problems!

But in actuality, if you smash it you just get a single common-tier Mod Pack. So never mind that idea.

And of course this also means it's really dubious to Scavenge Advanced and Master Assemblies just in terms of the fact that you're getting back 33% or 25% of your investment rather than 50%.

So the ability to smash Assemblies for a refund is... not as useful as you might hope.

The ability to smash things you've modded but not Assembled is less clunky: you can in fact do stuff like slap a Power Mod Pack on a weapon you expect to not use long-term on the idea that you'll just smash it when it's time to replace it, for example. It will in fact even give back Exotic Mod Packs when used this way! Just make sure you only put on the one type of Mod Pack if you want to be sure you'll get that type back. (Most obviously: when it's an Exotic Mod Pack)

Overall, the most consistently useful part of Scavenger is the ability to trash unwanted Exotics and Uniques to generate extra Mod Packs. 0.9.9.8 is a particularly big boon to this behavior: in 0.9.9.7, Scavenger only worked on ranged weapons (Oversight: its description hasn't been updated by 0.9.9.8), and so it was entirely possible to have a fairly high number of Exotics and Uniques spawn and yet get little value out of this aspect of Scavenger because they were mostly Armors, Boots, and melee weapons. Aside the potential to be RNG-screwed, this behavior does a surprising amount to ensure your run had plenty of Mod Packs: among other points, Scavenger is by far the best way to try to make some of the Assemblies that require multiple Exotic Mod Packs, as even back in 0.9.9.7 Scavenger would reasonably often net you a couple of extra Exotic Mod Packs in a standard run. So for one thing if you're trying to complete your Assembly list so Schematics will stop preventing an Exotic Mod Pack from spawning in Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab, doing Scavenger runs is worth considering.

Unfortunately, Scavenger is a very egregious Mastery about taking a while to start paying off (Though 0.9.9.8 helps with this: the Chained Court's early Chainsaw is now a reliable early extra Mod Pack if you don't mind smashing it), and also has wonkiness in terms of it eventually becoming something of a dead Trait pick: once you've Assembled everything you care to Assemble and super-modded everything you care to do that to, you can technically keep on smashing things for more Mod Packs but what's the point? This especially drags it down in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, which is unfortunate given Technician's tendency to bloom late in a run is a lot less of a disadvantage in those modes: Angel of 100 runs often end the game running out of useful things to spend Mod Packs on even without Scavenger, and Archangel of 666 takes that from 'often' to 'almost impossible to be otherwise'. At that point Scavenger only maybe gets you to the Useful Saturation Point of Mod Packs earlier than not taking Scavenger, where other builds very much expect to catch up to Scavenger and so be better due to not having a Mastery purchase being currently useless.

This doesn't happen very often in runs that aren't Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666, so Scavenger holds up better in standard runs and various other challenges as far as peak potential concerns, but the tendency to take a while to become strongly beneficial is even more pertinent to such runs!

A more minor issue is that its requirements are somewhat at odds with its most significantly consistent benefit: that it drastically increases your odds of getting Sniper and Firestorm Mod Packs. Sniper packs inherently reduce the value of Accuracy boosts, and their only Assembly is for Shotguns, yet the Intuition 1 requirement means Scavenger has Eagle Eye 2. The Firestorm point is less consistently contrary to Eagle Eye ranks, but one of the most significant aspects to Scavenger is that the Biggest FG is far more likely to be possible to Assemble, and BFGs of any kind don't care about your Accuracy. So that's a bit of unfortunate wonkiness.

Also, a frustrating bit of inconvenience is that by default disassembling an item puts the Mod Pack that results into your inventory without actually telling you what you got. If you're carting around a lot of Mod Packs (Which is easy to have happen with Scavenger), it's easy to be unsure what you got at a glance and have to spend a minute figuring out if you got something you actually have a use for or if it's an extra copy of a Mod Pack type you've run out of ways to meaningfully benefit from more copies of.

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The Technician is unfortunately the overall weakest class with the worst Masteries, with three of their 5 Masteries being overall worse than playing the specialization 'conventionally'. (And Scavenger isn't some amazingly strong Mastery, either) This is sufficiently true I'd recommend dropping a difficulty level when trying a Technician if you've already gotten comfortable with Marine and/or Scout runs: Marines and Scouts play pretty differently and you can get quite good at one while not really 'getting' the other class, but overall I'd say they're about as strong as one another. The Technician, though they have some noteworthy strengths like not having to route through Finesse to get Whizkid, is simply not at the same level of quality as their peer classes.

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As an aside, the Mastery system is one area where I feel Jupiter Hell is genuinely a better-designed game.

In Doom Roguelike, the combination of Masteries having Traits you must invest in to be allowed to grab the Trait, plus Trait incompatibilities where you can be permanently locked out of a Mastery before you even start up the game, alongside Masteries being largely a big spike in Doomguy's power... altogether, this pressures the player to go into a run with a Mastery picked out before anything happens. This is not ideal in general, but intersects really awkwardly with the game's preference to have powerful random drops that aren't allowed to spawn until you're already several floors in: if you find a Unique weapon, you're probably already committed to a specific Mastery and simply can't swerve to better utilize the Unique. You just have to hope any cool drops happen to be supported by the Mastery you're already committed to. Even if the Unique actually drops before you lock in your Mastery, the incompatibility point can mean you can't change tack to the more relevant Mastery!

Exacerbating the issue is that most Masteries are specializing in a specific type of weapon: Shotguns, Pistols, Melee, or rapid-fire weapons. Only one Mastery per class isn't strongly tied to a weapon type in concept. The Technician's general weirdness gives arguably two more exceptions, as Fireangel and Malicious Blades can be taken for their defensive utility where you largely ignore the ostensible weapon specialty, but that still leaves the Marine and Scout in the lurch... especially since their non-weapon Masteries are really bad.

This all is especially killer to the appeal of weapons that don't fall inside those four primary specializations: a Scout finding a Railgun improbably early can't actually take a Mastery to back the Railgun properly, whereas taking Shottyhead and relying on the Combat Shotguns and Assault Shotguns a standard run reliably gets access to will supercharge those weapons. (And indeed, Basic and Advanced Traits contribute too, since several of them are explicitly focused on supercharging one of these core four weapon types, and no equivalent exists for specializing in non-standard weapons) So even when such non-standard weapons are pretty good, you end up with the problem that a maximally-supported non-standard weapon is worryingly likely to be eclipsed by a maximally-supported standard weapon even if the standard weapon's base values are noticeably weaker!

Jupiter Hell reworks the Mastery -and, secondarily, the general Trait system- in a few key ways to ablate these problems.

First of all, Jupiter Hell has much lighter requirements. In Doom Roguelike, many Masteries require literally every Level be spent on progressing toward them if you want to grab the Mastery at Level 6, and several Masteries are so demanding you have to wait until after Level 6 to actually grab the Mastery! Whereas in Jupiter Hell, Masteries just require one rank apiece in a couple of Traits: swerving to a Mastery can thus occur pretty quickly if you find a great weapon that justifies such a swerve.

Second, Jupiter Hell simply does away with Trait incompatibilities. You won't find some great melee weapon only to realize you locked off your melee Mastery before the game even started: it's only once you're committed to a Mastery that you can't switch tracks to a different Mastery. This is by far the most important of the changes.

Third, Traits in Jupiter Hell tend to be 'softer' in their specialization. For example, Shotguns return in Jupiter Hell, and they skip accuracy checks like in Doom Roguelike, and Eagle Eye returns as a Trait for improving your hit chance -but it also boosts Shotgun damage. So where in Doom Roguelike changing tracks from your original intended weapon type may mean multiple of your invested skill points are abruptly completely useless, in Jupiter Hell they might be less valuable, but they're usually still doing something, making switching to a cool and powerful weapon less likely to be a drop in your overall effectiveness.

A more subtle point is that Jupiter Hell has reworked class design in general: as I've noted before, Trait incompatibility in part serves the function of enforcing class 'character', where eg the Marine is The Slow Class in part by most of his Masteries blocking Hellrunner, whereas the Scout is The Fast Class in part by virtue of 4 of their Masteries outright requiring at least one rank in Hellrunner, vs the Technician being 'middle of the road' on speed by virtue of never blocking Hellrunner but only having 2 Masteries require it. Jupiter Hell pushes classes further apart in their design through other, baseline changes, such as how every class has a different resource meter that's filled up through different mechanisms and then gets spent on class-specific innate abilities.

Anyway, those first three points are important for how they then intersect with item generation: in Jupiter Hell, it's legitimately very practical to start out thinking you'll shoot for one Mastery, then change your mind when some super-cool rare drop shows up when you're Level 4, because Jupiter Hell's approach to item generation is different. After all, the final nail in the coffin for swerving almost never making sense in Doom Roguelike is that Uniques and to a lesser extent Exotics largely aren't allowed to spawn in until you're already pretty far in your build. There's exceptions -I once had an Angel of 100 run where the Butcher's Cleaver was in sight literally the instant the run started, and so that run became a melee run even though that hadn't been my plan- but the Butcher's Cleaver and the Unique Pistols are the only Uniques with a minimum floor lower than 10, and only the Assault Shotgun and Exotic Pistols are Exotics with a minimum floor lower than 10. Vault rooms are allowed to generate an item earlier than its minimum floor, but only by a little bit. Taken altogether, you tend to already have your Mastery purchased by the time something cool randomly spawns in Doom Roguelike; I don't know the details of Jupiter Hell's approach to item generation, but I had multiple runs find something noteworthy to focus on before Level 6 and thus before I was committed to a Mastery.

This ability to roll with the punches and run with something great that randomly dropped makes runs more naturally diverse in Jupiter Hell, gives especially unusual weapons an actual chance to shine, and notably makes RNG less purely 'good/bad': in Doom Roguelike, finding a powerful Unique can be an amazing power boost that all but ensures your run is going to win!... if it happens to be compatible with your precommitted build. If it's not compatible with your build, it's worryingly likely to be weaker than just using a regular weapon that your build actually supports. So you can pretty cleanly say that, for example, your Shottyhead Scout finding the Jackhammer had great luck, whereas your Bullet Dance Marine finding the Jackhammer... he might find it worth committing an inventory slot to for purposes like dealing more efficiently and safely with Pain Elemental blobs, but that Bullet Dance Marine would've been a lot happier finding a Combat Pistol, even though that's an Exotic vs the Jackhammer being a Unique and so rarer and cooler.

I do hope that Doom Roguelike resuming development will ultimately result in it backporting this particular piece of Jupiter Hell's design without compromising what's great about Doom Roguelike's current design.

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Next time, we start covering weapons, starting with Pistols.

See you then.