Doom Roguelike Equipment Analysis: Rapid-Fire Weapons
Rapid-fire is kind of an odd category. I wouldn't consider it a single 'weapon family' myself just looking at the weapons, but the game itself insists they're one category, with every class having a Mastery (ostensibly) specialized in rapid-fire weapons, an Advanced Trait specializing in rapid-fire weapons, there being a Mod Pack type that specifically interacts with rapid-fire weapons, and there being cases of Assemblies drawing a distinction between rapid-fire weapons and everything else. So it functionally is a single family, even though it's really more like two families smushed awkwardly together.
I kind of wish it was two families on all those layers: Chainguns, and Plasma Rifles. There's a lot of design awkwardness around them being one category, where for example the Marine's Ammochain Mastery is hilarious overkill on Chainguns but trying to use a Plasma Rifle as your primary weapon can absolutely suffer ammo starvation even late in a run even with Ammochain! If they were broken up into two categories, Ammochain could be focused on Plasma Rifles (Where it's Interestingly Powerful but doesn't reliably solve ammo as a problem forever and so neuter one of the main strategic dangers of the game) and some other Mastery make Chainguns powerful in some other way that's not so absurd.
The current state is awkward.
(Basic) Chaingun
Damage: 1d6*4 Bullet
Accuracy: +2
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 2.5 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 40
Alternate Reload: None.
Alternate Fire: Chain Fire. Begins an alternate fire mode in which the player shoots continuously, 'panning' to new fire locations with shots made on tiles in between instead of making a complete, instant switch. Additionally, the first turn spent in this mode fires 2/3rds of normal shots, the second normal shot count, and all future turns fire 50% more shots than normal. This mode ends if any action aside shooting is undertaken, including reloading.
Minimum floor: 6
The main 10mm ammo weapon you'll use if you're not a Pistol build and don't find a Minigun.
Without boosting Accuracy, the Chaingun is an unreliable weapon. It can theoretically do up to 24 damage per pull of the trigger, but at line of sight it misses 50% of the time by default, and its shots using a single large die means its damage is inconsistent even with shots that don't miss their target. The fact that it fires 4 shots ablates these issues some, where it usually hits at least once per pull of the trigger, but it's still very inconsistent. Ranks in Son of a Bitch are necessary to make its damage less swingy (With 2 ranks of Son of a Bitch, you go from 1-6 to 3-8: instead of a low roll being 16.66~% of a high roll, a low roll is about 38~% of a high roll), and Eagle Eye 3 (Or at least 2) is necessary to make it consistent about hitting at line of sight. As such, while a Chaingun is more serviceable than a Pistol if you have no Trait support for either, it's poor at competing with a basic Shotgun if Traits aren't skewing things. It benefits from not needing to reload after every shot, but you have to be careful about that 2.5 second-long reload: it's easy to take unnecessary damage because you kill the last visible thing and just reload in place, and then one or more enemies walk into sight and attack -possibly twice!- before the reload completes. It's important with a Chaingun to do things like back up to a door and reload there if feasible to minimize this hazard. (Unless you have Reloader 2 and/or have a 10mm Ammo Chain equipped: these both reduce reload times enough to make reloading in place only have to worry about faster enemies for the possibility of them walking in and immediately attacking)
Once heavily supported, the Chaingun turns very powerful and reliable: Shotguns will still be worth considering breaking out to deal with crowds (Especially of Lost Souls), but a well-supported Chaingun tends to be way more lethal than a well-supported Shotgun when dealing with individuals, or widely-spaced groups, and even against clustered small groups they have the advantage of tending to get the first kill faster, reducing incoming damage.
This gets particularly obvious in Angel of Max Carnage runs, where Former Captains become some of the deadliest enemies about and Chainguns become a great out-the-box weapon, since of course Max Carnage does away with their reliability problems, leaving their only serious flaw that they have a long reload time. Even their ammo-hungry nature gets ablated by the reliability problems being done away with!
Also, Chainguns have Chain Fire. I've been over this some with talking about the Technician's Entrenchment Mastery, but Chain Fire is a mechanic I think is a cool idea as far as the target behavior, but where the execution really doesn't work. The mode is incredibly sensitive and the tuning is all wrong for it to be mathematically worthwhile: it takes 3 turns to be even arguably ahead of just shooting things normally, and then you'll get not even 6 full rounds of 'boosted' fire. And firing more rounds per shot is inherently risking ammo wastage, even before the 'panning' behavior inevitably sprays shots through empty space, so the 'benefit' isn't even clearly positive.
I wish Chain Fire was implemented as a passive quality (Rather than as an alternate fire mode), and in particular wish the ramp-up benefit was a reduction in time taken to fire, not an increase in shots fired per pull of the trigger. That is, imagine if each time a Chaingun was fired, you gained a stack of 'momentum' (Or whatever it would be called), with each stack reducing fire time by a percentage up to whatever the stack limit was: say it was 10% off per stack to a limit of 3 stacks. At that point, a ramped Chaingun would spit out bullets about 42% faster than a Chaingun just starting out, but without ammo wastage and without being based on a fiddly Alternate Fire mode: if stacks decayed at a rate of 1 stack lost every couple of in-game seconds or so, Doomguy stepping forward once everything is dead to resume shooting would still have most of his stacks if he almost immediately encountered another enemy.
The current state is only arguably good for Ammochain Marines (Because they can sustain Chain Fire for 40 turns, and extra bullets are free) and of course the current mechanics are what Entrenchment is built around, but Entrenchment needs to be reworked and/or Chain Fire reworked for Entrenchment to not be underwhelming regardless, so that's not much of an argument against reworking Chain Fire.
Minigun
Damage: 1d6*8 Bullet
Accuracy: +1
Fire Duration: 1.2 seconds
Reload Duration: 3.5 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 200
Alternate Reload: None.
Alternate Fire: Chain Fire. Begins an alternate fire mode in which the player shoots continuously, 'panning' to new fire locations with shots made on tiles in between instead of making a complete, instant switch. Additionally, the first turn spent in this mode fires 2/3rds of normal shots, the second normal shot count, and all future turns fire 50% more shots than normal. This mode ends if any action aside shooting is undertaken, including reloading.
Minimum floor: 10
The Minigun is also thankfully pretty common: you shouldn't assume you'll find a Minigun, but out of the Exotics that a standard run doesn't guarantee, it's one of the most common to find. An Angel of 100 run finding multiple Miniguns happens relatively often, for example.
The Minigun is also your best opportunity to try to get real use out of Chain Fire without just playing an Ammochain Marine. Chain Fire is still very flawed even with a Minigun, but the effect might be worth taking advantage of against tough foes, and even with Triggerhappy 2 you'll get 11~ full rounds of enhanced shooting before you run out of ammo.
Even for a run that isn't interested in firing the Minigun, it's worth picking up just to store 10mm ammo if you're using such, storing twice as much 10mm ammo as you can normally cram into an inventory slot. Even with a Backpack, it's still storing nearly 50% more. And slapping Bulk Mod packs extends this utility yet further: given Bulk Mod Packs are overall the least valuable Mod Pack type, being able to go 'I have three Bulk Mods I have no Assembly uses for: let's slap them on this Minigun' genuinely can make sense to do. With 3 Bulk Mods, the Minigun stores over 400 10mm ammo, which is crazy-efficient! So for Pistol runs, even Angel of Marksmanship Pistol runs, the Minigun is a very nice find.
(Basic) Plasma Rifle
Damage: 1d7*6 Plasma
Accuracy: +2
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 2 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 40
Alternate Reload: Overcharge. Next attempt to fire will fire double the normal shots with +1 to the size of the dice, but after firing completes the weapon is immediately destroyed.
Alternate Fire: Chain Fire. Begins an alternate fire mode in which the player shoots continuously, 'panning' to new fire locations with shots made on tiles in between instead of making a complete, instant switch. Additionally, the first turn spent in this mode fires 2/3rds of normal shots, the second normal shot count, and all future turns fire 50% more shots than normal. This mode ends if any action aside shooting is undertaken, including reloading.
Minimum floor: 7
Your 'advanced' rapid-fire weapon, on paper a Plasma Rifle is simply a better Chaingun: more damage per shot, more shots per pull of the trigger, same Accuracy, same firing time, less reload duration, same clip size, and a bonus alt-reload effect. (A really bad one that only makes sense to do if you've got spare Plasma Rifles on hand, and is a terrible idea to do if you've applied any Mod Packs. Note that while 0.9.9.8 buffed the Overcharge on a BFG, it did not do so for the Plasma Rifle)
But we need to talk about two things here to properly contextualize it.
First is its damage type -Plasma. This is, for player purposes, another way a Plasma Rifle is better than a Chaingun, as no enemy in the game has Plasma resistance innately (vs a few having innate Bullet resistance) and Plasma damage's behavior is also superior: instead of being Baseline Damage Mechanics, Plasma damage treats enemies as having half the Protection stat they actually have. Even better, the game rounds down: 1 Protection becomes 0 Protection. 3 Protection becomes 1 Protection. Etc. As such, against any enemy with even 1 point of Protection (Which is plenty of enemy types), a Plasma Rifle will average better damage than a Chaingun per shot even if their damage is on paper the same for some reason. (You're comparing a Plasma Rifle to a Chaingun you've slapped a Power Mod Pack on, for example)
Second is the big, big qualifier of ammo type:
Power Cells
50 cells at most per tile or inventory slot. When generated on the floor, spawns in a stack of 40/20/25/30/40 units of ammo. (Difficulty-dependent)
Minimum floor: 8
Using Power Cells sharply limits Plasma Rifles. Since the inventory space efficiency of Power Cells is half that of 10mm ammo, a Plasma Rifle will tear through inventory-stored ammo more than twice as fast as a Chaingun! (Since it specifically fires 50% more shots at base, it will in fact tear through ammo three times as fast as a Chaingun) Not obvious when looking at floor-spawning is that Power Cells also generate much less generously than 10mm ammo: floor-spawning suggests 10mm ammo is something you get 20% more of than Power Cells, which doesn't sound like that stark a difference, but in actuality enemies skew things way toward 10mm ammo.
Ignoring Nightmare/Elite enemies for the moment because they're irrelevant to plenty of runs and a complicated nuisance to accurately describe, each ammo type can be spawned by two different enemies: Former Humans and Former Captains for 10mm ammo, and Former Commandos and Arachnotrons for Power Cells.
In terms of raw drops, this skews heavily toward 10mm ammo: a Former Human drops up to 40 shots of 10mm ammo. A Former Captain drops up to 140! A Former Commando drops up to 40 Power Cells... and an Arachnotron drops 20.
But wait, it's worse than that, because the Danger values differ! Former Humans are 1 Danger, Former Captains are 3 Danger, Former Commandos are 7 Danger, and Arachnotrons are 9 Danger. If we combine this information with ammo amounts, we find...
Former Human: Up to 40 units of 10mm ammo per Danger.
Former Captain: Up to 46.66~ units of 10mm ammo per Danger.
Former Commando: Up to 5.7~ Power Cells per Danger.
Arachnotron: 2.22~ Power Cells per Danger.
... that the Danger-to-ammo payout is over seven times better for 10mm ammo when comparing the better Power Cell drop rate to the worse 10mm ammo drop rate! As such, if the game spends 50 Danger on a floor on Former Humans and/or Former Captains and another 50 Danger on Former Commandos and/or Arachnotrons, the 10mm ammo payout will be vastly larger than the Power Cell payout.
Now, enemy generation is random and Former Humans and Former Captains stop being allowed to spawn 'directly' (The game can spawn them as attendants to Archviles in a big pack), so this isn't the full picture, but it is a big factor in why 10mm ammo-using weapons almost always have less fear of ammo starvation than Power Cell weapons: even a run that overall skews toward generating enemies that drop Power Cells over enemies that drop 10mm ammo will probably still find more 10mm ammo over the course of the run than Power Cells.
Before 0.9.9.8, this was ablated some by ammo rooms: in 0.9.9.7, any ammo rooms that spawned past the 11th floor were guaranteed to be filled with Power Cells. In 0.9.9.8, though, this is no longer true, making Power Cells a little less common in the later stages of a run.
All this means that by default Plasma Rifles can't actually displace Chainguns as a primary weapon: if you ditch your Chaingun and 10mm ammo on the idea that your shiny new Plasma Rifle can be the only weapon you bother with, you'll hit ammo starvation basically instantly.
This is so drastically true that even an Ammochain Marine should be wary of committing fully to a Plasma Rifle switch: their absurd ammo efficiency means it can work out, but there is still a notable risk of running out of Power Cells, exacerbated by...
Power Battery
120 cells per battery.
A Power Battery saves 4.8 seconds of reloading on a basic Plasma Rifle over its lifetime.
Minimum floor: 10
... this thing.
Power Batteries are of course the same thing as Shell Boxes and 10mm Ammo Chains: slot-efficient ammo storage that also reloads in 20% of normal time if put in the Prepared slot. Like 10mm Ammo Chains, they're more than twice as efficient compared to regular ammo for the space.
But I suggested Power Batteries contribute to the problem, and what I was referring to is the 'weight' stat of items that determines how often they appear: Power Batteries have an absurdly low 'weight' at 3, which is a value primarily reserved for Uniques. It's thus pretty normal to complete multiple standard runs in a row without ever seeing a Power Battery generate 'naturally'.
Special Levels don't help. There is exactly one Special Level that provides a Power Cell, and when I say 'exactly one', I don't mean 'one slot', I mean just the Spider's Lair. If you instead get the Halls of Carnage, no Power Battery for you! (Okay, as of 0.9.9.8, the House of Pain exists and contains a Power Battery, but still, the point remains that even if you visit every Special Level in your run, you may never see a Power Battery: Hall of Carnage and Vaults means no Power Battery from Special Levels)
This is kind of frustrating, because Power Batteries are in context probably the weakest of the super-ammo items:
It saves 1.6 seconds for one BFG reload, and then you do a partial reload, wasting a lot of the benefit.
It saves 3.6 seconds of reloading a Laser Rifle over its lifetime.
It saves 3.2 seconds of reloading a BFG 10K and then does a partial reload, wasting a lot of the benefit.
It saves 3.6 seconds of reloading a Tristar Blaster... with the third reload not being a full reload.
It saves 4.8 seconds of reloading a Railgun over its lifetime.
It saves 6.4 seconds of reloading a Plasma Shotgun over its lifetime.
The primary value is in practice that they're a space-efficient injection of Power Cells, not the rapid reload part. So I don't get why they're so absurdly rare. It's not like Power Cell weapons uniformly have long reload times...
Regardless, the point is that other ammo types are, in a standard run, reliably supplemented by these space-efficient ammo sources, and in fact it's not that weird to find 5-6 10mm Ammo Chains as 'natural' spawns across a standard run, whereas for Power Cells you may never get a space-efficient ammo injection, and it's quite rare to see more than 2 in a single run, contributing to the ammo starvation issues.
Nuclear Plasma Rifle
Damage: 1d7*6 Plasma
Accuracy: +2
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: N/A
Clip: 24
Alternate Reload: Nuclear Overcharge. Spends 0.1 seconds to convert the weapon into an active thermonuclear bomb on the ground with a 10 second timer.
Alternate Fire: Chain Fire. Begins an alternate fire mode in which the player shoots continuously, 'panning' to new fire locations with shots made on tiles in between instead of making a complete, instant switch. Additionally, the first turn spent in this mode fires 2/3rds of normal shots, the second normal shot count, and all future turns fire 50% more shots than normal. This mode ends if any action aside shooting is undertaken, including reloading.
Special: After 4 actions of not being fired, will regenerate 4 ammo per further action. This behavior only functions while equipped in the Weapon or Prepared slots.
Minimum floor: 15
It's a regular Plasma Rifle, except it generates its own ammo instead of running on Power Cells, and replaces Overcharge with Nuclear Overcharge. This latter point has specific utility (And should be kept in mind in Angel Challenges that limit your weapon options: you can still use Nuclear Overcharge even when you can't fire the Nuclear Plasma Rifle), but is mostly not important.
Do note that it only has enough ammo for 4 pulls of the trigger. If you have Triggerhappy 2, it drops to 3 pulls of the trigger.
Overall, a Nuclear Plasma Rifle is a pretty nice find for a lot of runs: much of the power of a plain Plasma Rifle, but replacing 'outrageous ammo hog' with 'way to do damage at range without spending carried ammo'. Using it to open fights and then swapping to something in the Prepared slot so it can recharge while you keep fighting with the other weapon can noticeably extend ammo reserves and help kill key targets your preferred weapon might be bad against: a Shottyhead Scout often struggles against enemies with high Protection, for example, and having a Nuclear Plasma Rifle to help take down foes like the Cyberdemon can be a big help... especially if something happens like a Baron of Hell picks up a Gothic Armor and so is borderline immune to Shotgun blasts but only modestly protected from a Nuclear Plasma Rifle.
Making it your 'main' weapon is impractical, but I've already been over how that's true of a plain Plasma Rifle: the Nuclear Plasma Rifle is actually less bad about this since you don't have to commit a bunch of inventory slots to ammo that vanishes in no time flat.
The fact that it doesn't require ammo makes its use as a swap especially easy to take a chance on: even if it doesn't really work out for your run, you only spent one inventory slot on having the option available. That's a lot less likely to backfire than, say, carting around a regular Plasma Rifle and multiple inventory slots of Power Cells.
One of the more straightforward lucky finds in the pool of Exotic weapons.
For an Ammochain Marine, it's an even better find, able to be slotted in as your primary weapon and free up even more slots you might otherwise spend on ammo: you'll only rarely fire it enough times in a row to actually zero it out, and even walking forward just a few steps before you encounter another enemy can be 4, 8, 12 additional volleys generated. Only very extended fights will require a swap to something else, and you can easily be carrying eg a regular Plasma Rifle and 100 Power Cells for such situations.
Laser Rifle
Damage: 1d7*5 Plasma
Accuracy: +8
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 1.5 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 40
Alternate Reload: None.
Alternate Fire: Chain Fire. Begins an alternate fire mode in which the player shoots continuously, 'panning' to new fire locations with shots made on tiles in between instead of making a complete, instant switch. Additionally, the first turn spent in this mode fires 2/3rds of normal shots, the second normal shot count, and all future turns fire 50% more shots than normal. This mode ends if any action aside shooting is undertaken, including reloading.
Minimum floor: 12
Technically slightly less lethal than a plain Plasma Rifle, firing one less shot per burst, but in exchange it's always going to be capped on hit chance on anything you can actually see, making its average lethality better in practice (Instead of expecting to land 3 shots, you expect to land 5 shots) unless you've been taking ranks in Eagle Eye. This superior reliability with fewer shots per burst also makes a Laser Rifle noticeably more ammo-efficient: it'll still tear through Power Cells too fast to make it your main weapon (Unless you're an Ammochain Marine), but it's a lot less prone to running out of ammo midfight with enemies still about that you urgently need dead. It even has the nice benefit of reloading slightly faster!
It technically 'loses' Overcharge, but why would you want to Overcharge your Laser Rifle?
It's difficult to overstate what a strong improvement over a plain Plasma Rifle this is: trading one shot per burst for a big Accuracy bump is a tremendously positive trade, much more so than you might expect given that 'on paper' it's a damage loss.
Mega Buster
Damage: See below.
Accuracy: See below.
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 3.5 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 60 (Consumes 3 10mm ammo per shot)
Alternate Reload: None
Alternate Fire: None
Minimum floor: 15
The Mega Buster is a janky gimmick weapon that is frustratingly bad for anything except maybe an Ammochain Marine. Its core behavior is to riff on the classic 'Mega Man copies the powers of the enemies he defeats' notion: the Mega Buster has 4 different firing modes, which it switches between upon killing an enemy based on the damage type of the slain enemy's ranged attack. (Unless they don't have one, in which case their melee damage type is checked)
The modes in question are...
Bullet Mode
Damage: 1d8*3 Bullet
Accuracy: +2
Fire Mode
Damage: 4d2*3 Fire (Radius: 2)
Accuracy: +0
Plasma Mode
Damage: 1d10*3 Plasma
Accuracy: +1
Acid Mode
Damage: 4d2*3 Acid (Radius: 2)
Accuracy: +0
... the above. These mostly match to the obvious damage types -you kill an Arachnotron, which does Plasma damage, you get Plasma Mode- except that Bullet Mode is additionally activated when killing Shrapnel damage attackers (ie Former Sergeants and some portion of Elite Former Sergeants) and enemies that lack ranged attacks, like Lost Souls.
Unfortunately, the Mega Buster is bizarrely undertuned for a Unique that you thus can't modify (Not even as a Technician) with multiple layers of jank inherent to it.
For a straightforward example of being undertuned, let's just compare Bullet Mode directly to a Chaingun. A Chaingun fires 4 times for 1d6 Bullet damage (ie it does 4-24 damage per volley), expending 4 ammo in the process, with +2 Accuracy. The Mega Buster fires 3 times for 1d8 damage (ie it does 3-24 damage per volley), expending nine ammo in the process, with +2 Accuracy. Notice that the Mega Buster is more than twice as ammo-hungry, while its damage is actually slightly lower (Before accounting for Protection, but this really doesn't help the Mega Buster) and it's not even any more accurate! In 0.9.9.7, this comparison was even worse, because it actually used 5 ammo per shot and so spent 15 ammo per volley! This also meant it could only fire 4 times before needing to reload, vs a Chaingun firing 10 times before needing a reload -and for some reason the Mega Buster takes a full second longer to reload than a Chaingun- vs its current state of doing 6 full volleys plus a partial volley before needing to reload. (Which is still inferior to a Chaingun, mind)
Plasma Mode can similarly be compared pretty directly to a Plasma Rifle and found wanting. 3 shots of 1d10 (ie 3-30 damage per volley) at +1 Accuracy from the Mega Buster, vs a plain Plasma Rifle doing 6 shots of 1d7 (ie 6-42 damage) at +2 Accuracy: the Plasma Rifle will hit more often and do more damage! This does come with the caveat that the Mega Buster always spends 10mm ammo while the Plasma Rifle spends Power Cells, and I've been over the problems caused by a weapon relying on Power Cells, but the Mega Buster being so ammo-hungry ablates this advantage: spending 9 bullets per volley means an inventory slot of 10mm ammo feeds slightly more than 11 volleys from the Mega Buster, where a Plasma Rifle gets 8.33 volleys out of an inventory slot of Power Cells. And then the Mega Buster's inferior damage means you'll need to spend more ammo on a given enemy to actually kill it!
The Fire and Acid Modes are not really directly comparable to any standard weapons, so they aren't blatantly humiliated by more basic competition like Bullet and Plasma Mode are; you can sort of compare Fire Mode to a Rocket Launcher, but it would be really misleading, and Acid damage is largely not given to the player, so you'd be comparing Acid Mode to, what, the Acid Spitter? But they're still not exactly great: for one thing, these fire modes have the dubious distinction of being the only ranged attacks in the game to have an Accuracy below +1, making them very unreliable if you're not leveraging their splash behavior to sidestep accuracy problems. (By which I mean firing on targets up against walls, or who are clumped together) At line of sight, you'll only hit 37.5% of the time!
The weakness of the Megabuster is in turn exacerbated by the jank issues. First is a broad design point that's mostly mildly cute but for the Megabuster is A Problem: when enemies have resistances in the first place, they tend to resist their own damage type! As Doom Roguelike is prone, in both regular floor generation and in Special Level design, to having groups of enemies skew toward being heavy on a single enemy type, this means the Mega Buster regularly runs into situations where you encounter a group of Barons, or a group of Imps, or whatever, and the second you actually kill one the Mega Buster is now slamming into a 50% resistance, making it even weaker. As a bonus, Lost Souls really shouldn't produce this problem, but dedicated melee produces Bullet Mode so Lost Soul swarms do in fact produce this problem. (Because they have 50% Bullet resistance)
Then there's the jank issue of its transformation behavior's timing: if a shot kills a target, the Mega Buster transforms mid-volley and fires its remaining shots in the new mode! This adds a frustrating chaotic element to the Mega Buster, where it can unexpectedly smash items on the floor because it switched to Fire or Acid mode on the first shot, or have the splash damage of Fire or Acid Mode kill a target you weren't expecting to die and so switch to a mode you don't want right now (eg switching to Bullet Mode while trying to kill a Revenant), or even have shots miss your intended target and kill something behind it and so transform in a way that messes up your plans. Which that last scenario is pretty likely given how bizarrely bad the Mega Buster's Accuracy is across modes!
The transformation being obligate is also very harmful to a lot of potential utility to the Mega Buster. Its Acid Mode is actually unique enough to be meaningfully worth considering holding onto the Mega Buster to use it, but the problem is you can only get it by killing Barons of Hell and Bruiser Brothers, and will lose it if you ever kill anything else with the Mega Buster! If the Mega Buster worked like the Grammaton Beretta, where you used Alternate Reload to cycle through modes on command, the Mega Buster would still be a really weak ammo-hog, but you could at least reliably leverage any mode you felt was noteworthy for any reason.
As-is, the Mega Buster is so bad you generally shouldn't bother to pick it up at all, ever. It's literally worse than unmodded basic weapons!
I don't get why this Unique is so blatantly bad. It's probably the most confusingly-undertuned Unique in the game...
BFG 10K
Damage: 6d4*5 BFG Plasma
Accuracy: +3
Fire Duration: 1 second
Reload Duration: 2 seconds (Reloads entire clip)
Clip: 50 (Consumes 5 Power Cells per 'bullet')
Alternate Reload: None.
Alternate Fire: Chain Fire. Begins an alternate fire mode in which the player shoots continuously, 'panning' to new fire locations with shots made on tiles in between instead of making a complete, instant switch. Additionally, the first turn spent in this mode fires 2/3rds of normal shots, the second normal shot count, and all future turns fire 50% more shots than normal. This mode ends if any action aside shooting is undertaken, including reloading.
Special: Shots scatter randomly to tiles nearby the targeted tile and detonate without need to impact a unit or terrain, potentially catching Doomguy in their blasts. Its splash damage also ignores normal damage drop-off rules, hitting everything in its entire radius for full damage.
Blast radius: 2
Minimum floor: 20
Time to explain BFG Plasma damage! Before actually getting to 'regular' BFGs!
BFG Plasma damage is a damage type the game itself doesn't reference existing at all (Weapons that do it have the same Plasma label as weapons that do regular Plasma damage), and which is... kind of pointless? It respects Plasma resistance just like regular Plasma damage, and has most of the same implications as far as things like 'enables non-melee weapons to destroy walls, corpses, and items on the ground'; the only actual differences are that it's technically better at ignoring Protection (It shaves off 2/3rds of the victim's Protection for calculating damage) and that it has the best ratio for gibbing: it gibs an enemy if the damage roll is 100% or more of the victim's max HP.
The superior Protection-bypassing is a neat idea, but not very consequential. Most weapons that use BFG Plasma are generally doing high damage per hit so they don't care much about Protection in the first place, and enemy Protection only sometimes goes above 2 in the first place. Because the game rounds down, this does mean that for example a Baron of Hell's 2 Protection gets dropped to 1 by regular Plasma and to 0 by BFG Plasma, but... pretty mild.
The gibbing part is more neat, though not super-relevant to the BFG 10K in specific since it's already firing a stream of damaging explosions: stuff that dies to anything except the last shot has pretty good odds of its corpse and loot being vaporized even if it wasn't gibbed when killed. (Though I'll be explaining gibbing next post) It matters more to the other weapons that have BFG Plasma damage.
Anyway, the BFG 10K is very rare to find, between its low item 'weight' (0.9.9.8 doubled its 'weight', so that helps a bit) and its high minimum floor: in a standard run, you only have three floors it can spawn in normally. (Vaults mean it can potentially spawn earlier) That's just not much opportunity to see it at all.
Unfortunately, it's... not great.
The first problem is that it's outrageously ammo-hungry. 25 Power Cells per pull of the trigger? That's 50% of an inventory slot! You can't use the BFG 10K casually: you need to reserve it for times it's particularly worthwhile.
The problem is, it doesn't give all that good a performance for said cost. Let's say you're firing on a single target: the BFG 10K will use 25 Power Cells to do 6d4 5 times, or 30-120 damage. That sounds pretty high...
... but a basic Plasma Rifle does 6-42 damage per pull of the trigger at the cost of 6 Power Cells. Multiply that by 4 (24 Power Cells spent), and you end up with 24-168 damage. That's noticeably better on average!
This is with basic numbers, mind, when a Plasma Rifle can be modded and benefits more from Traits overall. For example, ranks in Son of a Bitch tilt things more toward the Plasma Rifle: 2 ranks in Son of a Bitch raises our BFG 10K's damage to 35-125 for 25 Power Cells, while our Plasma Rifle spending 24 Power Cells jolts up to 72-216 damage! That's just two ranks, when Son of a Bitch goes up to 3 and then 5 ranks max!
Now of course that's a simplification, leaving out other details. The Plasma Rifle will miss 50% of its shots at the edge of vision if no Accuracy boosting is involved, where the BFG 10K's targeting behavior makes Accuracy pretty irrelevant... but the Plasma Rifle's Accuracy problem goes away with Eagle Eye ranks. The BFG 10K's shots scatter up to 3~ tiles away from the target tile, which is not fixable and means the BFG 10K often does worse damage than the above numbers suggest. So I'd argue by default this comparison is still bad for the BFG 10K.
Okay, but the BFG 10K does splash damage, so that gives it an important edge, right?...
... the problem there is that the BFG 10K is having to compare itself against a regular BFG. In a standard run, a regular BFG is an assured find, and noticeably before a BFG 10K has any possibility of spawning! And a regular BFG can be modded, and even has Assemblies specific to it. And a regular BFG's shots always land exactly where you need them, can't hurt Doomguy even when fired point-blank, and have a massive blast radius so it benefits a lot more from firing into a big crowd and is way better at clearing corpses. (Especially in Limbo/The Mortuary)
So lets compare two BFG 10K shots (50 Power Cells spent) to 1 regular BFG shot. (40 Power Cells spent) That's 60-240 damage from the BFG 10K vs 10-60 damage from the BFG: it cleanly favors the BFG 10K, right? Even if I multiply the BFG 10K's damage by 0.8 to represent difference in Power Cell usage, I get 48-192, which is way better than 10-60...
... but the regular BFG has a blast radius of 8 vs the blast radius of 2 on the BFG 10K. Against a very large group of enemies, the BFG may well be hitting 12+ enemies in one shot, up to 9 of which will assuredly take full damage. That 10-60 is suddenly 90-600 if fired into 9 enemies packed together perfectly. The BFG 10K will basically never do that: though its shots stop near where you targeted, they also make Accuracy checks and stop as soon as they impact something. Our perfect clump of 9 enemies will have over 50% of the shots catch on an enemy and 'waste' the portion of the blast radius closer to Doomguy: our 60-240 damage is never going to actually be multiplied by 9. (Raising Accuracy makes this problem worse: if you have Eagle Eye 3, the BFG 10K's shots will pass through a target less than 2% of the time!) And some of the shots will scatter wrong and waste even more damage.
Now, this isn't properly realistic numbers. The above conditions will sometimes crop up via descending stairs and there being a big enemy group spawned in a clump, or by opening a door into a tight room filled with enemies who can't open doors (eg Pinkie Demons, Cacodemons), or by enemies spawning on a small island surrounded by hostile fluids they refuse to walk through, but most of the time if you're fighting a big group of enemies all at once, they end up spread out...
... but not only is that more of a nuisance to calc, but it favors the regular BFG more. A spread-out group might mean the regular BFG hits 12 enemies (Even if most of them will be taking 50% or less of base damage) vs the BFG 10K having each shot hit 1-3 enemies.
As an additional bonus issue, the BFG 10K has an unexpected disadvantage, in that 'regular' BFGs cannot hurt Doomguy with their explosions, whereas the BFG 10K absolutely can hurt Doomguy! Less frustrating it does share with other BFGs reduced knockback, needing 14 damage per tile of knockback. Since the BFG 10K's maximum damage is 24, it's nearly impossible for a given hit to do more than 1 tile of knockback, minimizing the odds of an enemy being shoved out of the way of later shots by earlier shots.
So overall, I find the BFG 10K a frustrating ammo hog that's largely caught between a plain Plasma Rifle and a regular BFG: a Plasma Rifle can easily outperform it by an enormous margin when not fighting mobs (With no risk of blowing up items!), and the use-cases where the BFG 10K has notable edges over the Plasma Rifle (eg corpse-clearing) overlap with a regular BFG, only the regular BFG is more predictable in multiple senses and can potentially be substantially improved through modding.
The main qualifier to this is that an Ammochain Marine should find it to be far superior to a regular BFG, and given they can't take Eagle Eye they may also prefer it to a Plasma Rifle regularly. I've yet to get that opportunity myself, though, so this is speculation.
Oh, and the BFG10K is slightly more useful for a Technician, being limitedly moddable. This is not 'as of 0.9.9.8' -0.9.9.7 already had this behavior existent, it just only came up with three Uniques, the BFG10K being one of those three. In any event, it's not a huge difference, as for one thing High Power Weapon is the only Assembly a Technician can build out of it, but it's something to keep in mind if you find it with a Technician. It's arguably one of the better recipients of a Firestorm mod, for one.
Also, the above is its base sprite, pulled right out of the sprite sheet. In-game you can't really see a lot of its details since this sprite is used only for it and always has the Unique glow.
--------------------------------------------------------
Next time, we move on to the last category of weapons that has a clear associated ammo type: rocket launchers.
See you then.
Comments
Post a Comment