Doom Roguelike Equipment Analysis: Advanced Assemblies

Advanced Assemblies regularly suffer awkwardness from the fact that being able to build them means Master Assemblies are at most one Level off. A few Advanced Assemblies can be directly compared to a Master Assembly -both tiers have a 'improve a Chainsaw' Assembly, for example- and are of course generally inferior aside that they only require Whizkid 1 (But who cares?) and require 1 less Mod Pack. (Which isn't much)

This is part of why I previously brought up the notion that it might make more sense to decouple Whizkid's benefits from the Trait system: say the current Whizkid 1 benefits kicked in for free at Level 7, and the Whizkid 2 benefits kicked in at Level 14. That's a sufficiently huge gap that you might go for an Advanced Assembly right away simply because its superior Master Assembly is so far off. As-is, the wait is too short to be consequential outside knifes-edge stuff like 'I'm about to enter a specific Special Level and really want a power boost right now and have Whizkid 1'.

Double Chainsaw

Mods Needed:  (Power*2, Bulk)

Base: Chainsaw.

Result: Lowers Accuracy from +0 to -1, but raises damage from 4d6 to 4d12.

With extended Trait ranks, this disadvantage doesn't matter: Brute 4 is perfectly accurate with a Double Chainsaw.

As I just covered, though, the bigger issue is that if you can Assemble a Double Chainsaw, you can probably go for its Master equivalent in short order: the Ripper. The Ripper's only recipe difference is that it adds a Technical Mod Pack. That's it.

It is possible to get RNG-screwed and just... not have a Technical Mod Pack generate in time to complete the Ripper. I actually had a run where I Assembled the Double Chainsaw right at the very end because I got one Technical Mod Pack in the entire run and committed it to a Fireproof Red Armor in expectation I'd still get at least one more to Assemble the Ripper with.

But this is very much anomalous: most runs get a minimum of 2 copies of every basic Mod Pack type, and I only occasionally get less than 3 copies of any given type. So the majority of runs aren't going to Assemble the Double Chainsaw, because if the option is on the table they're just going to make the Ripper instead.

This is probably the most egregious example of this dynamic: there aren't very many Master Assemblies that are directly 'an Advanced Assembly's clear equivalent'.

Tactical Rocket Launcher

Mods Needed:  (Bulk*3)

Base: Basic Rocket Launcher.

Result: Lowers blast radius from 4 to 2, but raises clip size from 1 to 5 and reduces reload time from 1.5 seconds to 0.8 seconds. Reloading fills the entire clip in one go.

Like Micro Rocket Launcher, it's worth pointing out that the benefits from this have noticeable overlap with a Missile Launcher, and in a standard run you're guaranteed to get multiple Missile Launchers if you're hitting most of the Special Levels. The Tactical Launcher reloading the entire clip is a notable advantage over a Missile Launcher, and Tactical Rocket Launcher has a tighter blast radius and so is less prone to smashing items...

... but if you've got other things you need Bulk Mods for, don't be in a hurry to Assemble a Tactical Rocket Launcher.

On the plus side, plenty of runs will end up with an excess of Bulk Mods. Shotgun-focused runs especially have little use for Bulk Mods for their primary weapon -and conveniently Shottyman applies to Rocket Launchers. So for Shotgun-focused runs, this can be a pretty easy Assembly to slip in.

Storm Bolter Pistol

Mods Needed:  (Bulk*2, Technical)

Base: Any Pistol.

Result: Increases clip size by 50%, reduces firing time by 15%, reduces Accuracy by 2, and damage rolls together the base sides and dice into one big die but now the pistol fires two shots at a time.

For a Technician running Sharpshooter, this is a nearly flawless Assembly. You have Eagle Eye 3 anyway, so the Accuracy penalty is a joke (Your Accuracy at line of sight is perfect even with a Storm Bolter Pistol), and your shots always roll max damage, so the change to damage dice doesn't affect you at all. The only thing that might be an issue is that you're burning through ammo twice as fast... but Pistols are ludicrously ammo-efficient, so that's not much of an issue.

At that point, the only reason to consider not performing this Assembly is that you might prefer a different Assembly, or possibly to skip Assemblies entirely in favor of piling on the mods.

Naturally, this all means it's a very solid Assembly in Angel of Max Carnage runs, because that's even more thorough about erasing the disadvantages.

Outside those two contexts, it's a bit iffy. The fire speed advantage is unappealing; Son of a Gun already provides a significant a fire speed advantage, and separate sources of speed modification stack unfavorably: Sun of a Gun 3 puts you to 40% normal firing speed. If the Storm Bolster speed modification was considered to be the same source as Son of a Gun, you'd end up at 25%, nearly doubling your firing speed. Instead, they're multiplied separately, so you end up taking 34% of base firing time.

Once you get into extended ranks, it straight-up stops mattering: Son of a Gun singlehandedly brings you to 0.1 seconds per pull of the trigger, and Doom Roguelike absolutely refuses to have an action go any faster than that. (Outside the rare 'truly instant' actions)

Meanwhile, the clip size increase is actually less than two Bulk Mods naturally provide, since Bulk Mods chain off each other, the minus to Accuracy can actually matter, the damage per hit becomes less reliable (Admittedly less than you might think thanks to Son of a Gun boosting minimum damage), and firing two shots at a time isn't that amazing a benefit. A Bullet Dance Marine already ends up firing 3 shots per pull of the trigger; one more shot is only a 33% boost to damage potential, not doubling, and Bullet Dance Marines already have issues from how rapidly ammo is pulled out of their Pistols. A Gun Kata Scout doesn't mind the ammo drain as much as far as reloads goes, but they do mind the Accuracy lost as it can deny you a kill-derived-reload at a crucial moment, among other issues. Gun Kata Scouts also resent it increasing your overall ammo drain, as there'll be plenty of times where it means you're firing more shots than necessary, wasting them if no other enemy happens to be behind your target, undermining a Pistol build's big advantage of ammo efficiency. This can be lethal in the late game of a standard run, where 10mm ammo is unreliable to find.

There's a pretty solid argument that, by default, a Storm Bolter Pistol is worse than just piling mods onto a Pistol; Bulk to space out reloads, and Power to bolster damage. It's one of the better examples of Advanced Assemblies often having design problems.

Assault Rifle

Mods Needed:  (Agility*3)

Base: Any rapid-fire weapon.

Result: Halves reload time, raises Accuracy by 3, adds an additional die to the damage, but lowers max roll on all dice by 1, halves the number of shots fired at a time, and causes the weapon to spend 2 ammo per shot.

Here's the effect on all its valid bases...

Chaingun: 1d6 becomes 2d5. Accuracy rises from +2 to +5. Shots fired drops from 4 to 2.

Minigun: 1d6 becomes 2d5. Accuracy rises from +1 to +4. Shots fired drops from 8 to 4.

Plasma Rifle: 1d7 becomes 2d6. Accuracy rises from +2 to +5. Shots fired drops from 6 to 3.

Nuclear Plasma Rifle: 1d7 becomes 2d6. Accuracy rises from +2 to +5. Shots fired drops from 6 to 3.

Laser Rifle: 1d7 becomes 2d6. Accuracy rises from +8 to +11. Shots fired drops from 5 to 3.

... the above is what you get. Notice that the dice overhaul is consistently favorable, raising maximum damage either from 6 to 10 or from 7 to 12 while raising the minimum damage from 1 to 2 and of course raising the average damage.

Overall, Assault Rifle is a pretty targeted 'fix' to rapid-fire weapon problems: it bumps up their mediocre Accuracy and improves their damage output all-around, making them more reliable at killing things when you need those things killed. It's a better trade when actually leaning into rapid-fire weapons, since just as I noted with Gatling Gun you don't have Triggerhappy interacting with Assemblies: applying Assault Rifle to a Chaingun when you have Triggerhappy 2 reduces your shot count from 6 to 4, so you're more clearly having your DPS go up.

Unfortunately, it's got a bit of an anti-synergy with Son of a Bitch. If you have Son of a Bitch 3 and Triggerhappy 2, a Chaingun is switching from 6 shots that do 4-10 damage apiece (24-60 damage per pull of the trigger) to 4 shots that do 5-14 damage apiece. (20-56 damage per pull of the trigger) Notice that the minimum and maximum damage goes down. This is especially awkward since Triggerhappy requires 2 ranks in Son of a Bitch, undermining Assault Rifle's synergy with Triggerhappy completely reliably. Assault Rifle includes an Accuracy increase so these numbers aren't quite as bad as they seem unless you've also got ranks in Eagle Eye, but ouch.

Assault Rifle is also narrower in real terms than you might assume. You can apply it to a Laser Rifle (And it even rounds the shot count modification favorably), but that wastes the Accuracy boost, and the damage boost isn't clearly better than just supermodding it. (Imagine you have Son of a Bitch 3 and Triggerhappy 2: the Assault Laser Rifle becomes 5 shots of 2d6+3 spending 10 ammo, or 25-75 damage per pull of the trigger. 3 Power Mods would give you 7 shots of 1d10+3 spending 7 ammo, or 28-91 damage!)

Similarly, you can apply it to a basic Plasma Rifle, but the Hyperblaster is another Advanced Assembly that is specific to basic Plasma Rifles and gives overall better results. You need to be specifically drowning in Agility Mod Packs and/or starving for Technical Mod Packs for applying Assault Rifle to a basic Plasma Rifle to be liable to make any sense.

So in real terms Assault Rifle is mostly worth keeping in mind for basic Chainguns, Miniguns, and Nuclear Plasma Rifles. For Nuclear Plasma Rifles, you're missing out on the reduced reload time, so that's a bit of design awkwardness, though not too bad of one. But even for those, it's not particularly great. If it didn't double the ammo spent per shot, it would be clearly an improvement to ammo efficiency, but it does double ammo spent, so it risks eating ammo pretty quickly, and there's a mild anti-synergy with Triggerhappy here: with Triggerhappy 2, a Chaingun goes from spending 6 ammo per pull of the trigger to spending 8!

For an Ammochain Marine, Assault Rifle holds up better, as ammo is a solved problem and so the questions of ammo efficiency aren't terribly pertinent. But even there, it has awkwardness: first of all, it does lower ammo efficiency even with Ammochain, because an Assault Rifle still spends 2 ammo per pull of the trigger with Ammochain. Second, for applying to a Chaingun, it's in awkward competition with the cheaper and more basic Gatling Gun: a Son of a Bitch 3/Triggerhappy 2 Gatling Gun is 8 shots of 4-10 damage apiece (So 32-80 damage) vs the Assault Rifle ending up at 4 shots doing 5-14 damage apiece. (So 20-56 damage) The Assault Rifle at least boosts the Accuracy, which is a problem Ammo Chain can't solve with Traits (Since it blocks Eagle Eye), but the damage difference is so stark that even accounting for the Accuracy difference the Gatling Gun's average damage is pretty comparable! (At line of sight, your Gatling Gun effectively averages 16-40 damage. Your Assault Rifle effectively averages 16.6-46.48 damage!)

It was worse off in 0.9.9.7, mind, as it provided 1 less Accuracy than it does now. That Gatling Gun/Assault Rifle comparison resulted in average 14.8-41.44 damage at line of sight from the Assault Rifle, which you'll notice I'm giving a lower 'minimum roll' result and an only marginally higher 'maximum roll' result. And Whizkid 2 to add another Mod Pack only maybe favored the Assault Rifle if you had a Firestorm Mod Pack: other Mods were neutral or favored the Gatling Gun.

Overall, Assault Rifle is a weirdly underwhelming Assembly. I at least can't say a Master Assembly exists that directly competes with it, as there's no Master Assembly using only basic Mod Packs that can be applied to rapid-fire weapons (Or, indeed, to ranged weapons of any kind), and it's not clearly worse than supermodding the relevant weapons, but it's one of the more stand-out examples of Assemblies throwing in notable disadvantages that seriously hold back the Assembly.

Energy Pistol

Mods Needed:  (Power*2, Technical)

Base: Any Pistol.

Result: Raises maximum roll per die by 1 point, reduces firing time by 20%, changes the damage type to Plasma, and changes the required ammo type to Energy Cells.

An odd side effect is that the Pistol will convert any loaded ammo into Energy Cells, allowing you to expensively turn a few units of 10mm ammo into a few Power Cells.

I should also point out that the main benefits here are the switch to Plasma damage and the switch to using Power Cells. If you don't accept the Assembly, you'll end up with more damage just off the involved Mod Packs alone, and only need one more Technical Mod Pack to get comparable-or-better fire rate improvement. Put another way, if you switched the second Power Mod Pack to a second Technical Mod Pack, you'd get the same damage/fire rate results using the same Mod Pack total, with more room to add further Mod Packs for improvement.

As for the results with all valid bases...

Basic Pistol: 2d4 becomes 2d5. Firing time reduces from 1 second to 0.8 seconds.

Combat Pistol: 3d3 becomes 3d4. Firing time reduces from 1 second to 0.8 seconds.

Blaster: 2d4 becomes 2d5. Firing time reduces from 0.9 seconds to 0.72 seconds.

Anyway, a Pistol run greatly appreciates having 1-2 Energy Pistols if you have enough Power Mod Packs to make it practical.

First of all, the switch to Plasma damage is greatly helpful against the Bullet-resistant Lost Souls and Revenants (And by extension helps a lot when fighting Pain Elementals), and also can be a big help against some of the higher-Protection enemies of the game like the Cyberdemon, since Plasma damage ignores half the target's Protection, rounding down. Having one as a switch is great if you're hearing lots of Revenants running about, or if you've just entered the Tower of Babel. Notably, no enemy in the game has innate Plasma resistance, so the only time the damage type switch can backfire is if an enemy picks up an Armor that has more Plasma resistance than Bullet resistance.

Second, while Pistol builds are mostly very ammo-efficient, one flaw they have is that 10mm ammo becomes very unreliable about spawning in the late game. I've had runs where I exited Deimos with 800+ 10mm ammo on my person, yet ended up dying late in Hell because I got unlucky and no Former Humans/Former Captains got dropped into any Hell floors. Power Cells stack less efficiently than 10mm ammo, but they become a more reliable sight in the late game, with Arachnotrons dropping 20 Power Cells when killed and random rooms periodically spawning with up to 100 Power Cells lying on the floor. (Though this latter point is less true as of 0.9.9.8) Having an Energy Pistol or two can help avoid running out of ammo entirely by supplementing 10mm ammo usage with Power Cell usage if you're not fully replacing your 10mm ammo. (Caveat: if you get a Nano Mod, Nanomanufacture Ammo should be doable and is a much better solution to this problem)

Third, and very important to Angel of Marksmanship runs, is that a Plasma damage Pistol can potentially cut through walls. It'll be slow to do so since they need to overcome the 10 Protection walls have, but even a basic Pistol as the base just needs a single rank of Son of a Gun to start having the ability to damage walls given Energy Pistol already raises the maximum damage of a Basic Pistol to 10. With Son of a Gun 3, you have decent odds of any given shot making progress.

For non-Pistol runs, Energy Pistol is a pretty irrelevant Assembly. You'll often be better off just picking up a Plasma Rifle if you want to use Power Cells and/or do Plasma damage. So this part is straightforward.

From a design perspective, Energy Pistol is one of my favorite Assemblies... with the caveat that it's a bit awkward how non-Technicians have to route through Finesse to access it, when Finesse is exceptionally dubious for Pistol builds. Aside that, though, it has a clear niche it fills perfectly fine, where I can't crunch numbers and go 'maybe you should just supermod the weapon' because damage numbers aren't the point of the Assembly. I wish more weapon Assemblies hit this kind of note.

Burst Cannon

Mods Needed:  (Power, Bulk*2)

Base: Any rapid-fire weapon.

Result: Doubles the clip size, raises the maximum roll per die by 2, and causes the weapon to fire 2 more shots at a time, but also lowers Accuracy by 2 and raises reload duration by 50%.

The specific effects for all valid bases are...

Chaingun: 1d6 becomes 1d8. Accuracy drops from +2 to +0. Shots fired rises from 4 to 6.

Minigun: 1d6 becomes 1d8. Accuracy drops from +1 to -1. Shots fired rises from 8 to 10.

Plasma Rifle: 1d7 becomes 1d9. Accuracy drops from +2 to +0. Shots fired rises from 6 to 8.

Nuclear Plasma Rifle: 1d7 becomes 1d9. Accuracy drops from +2 to +0. Shots fired rises from 6 to 8.

Laser Rifle: 1d7 becomes 1d9. Accuracy drops from +8 to +6. Shots fired rises from 5 to 7.

The Laser Rifle is the obvious winner here, especially for an Ammochain Marine: hit rate at line of sight drops by less than 10% while shots fired goes up by 40% (Well, about 28% if you have Triggerhappy 2), so ammo efficiency goes down only slightly (And not at all for an Ammochain Marine) while damage per pull of the trigger improves quite a bit.

Overall, though, this is another weirdly-undertuned Assembly. The damage boost is equivalent to 2 Power Mods, and the ammo size increase is almost as good as 3 Bulk Mods (Which due to chain modification increase ammo by about 120%), so that part is pretty directly competitive with supermodding, but then it's all dragged down by the additional shots, the reduction to Accuracy, and the increase in reload duration. The supermodded counterpart will be much more ammo-efficient, in real terms will have better damage per pull of the trigger if not backed by Eagle Eye ranks or specifically Assembled out of a Laser Rifle (At line of sight, the Chaingun/Plasma Rifle/Nuclear Plasma Rifle have a 50% hit rate if not made into Burst Cannons, and a 26% hit rate if made into a Burst Cannon: that's losing almost half your DPS to misses! The Minigun drops from a 37.5% hit rate to 16.2% hit rate, which is more than half of damage being lost), and if you can Assemble a Burst Cannon you're at most one Level away from being able to apply 5 Mod Packs, making the comparison very pertinent.

In a Max Carnage run it holds up better, as its Accuracy penalty is irrelevant; an Ammochain Marine in particular actually has it as probably the best thing to do with your ranged weapon in that case, but even for Cateye Scouts and Entrenchment Technicians it holds up okay in a Max Carnage run.

But overall, I just don't get the design of the Burst Cannon.

VBFG9000

Mods Needed:  (Power*3)

Base: A BFG or Nuclear BFG. ('Any' BFG)

Result: Maximum damage per die goes up by 2, blast radius goes up by 2, maximum clip size increased by 50%, but also consumes 50% more ammo per shot.

The valid bases result in...

BFG goes from 10d6 to 10d8. (ie 10-60 damage becomes 10-80 damage)

Nuclear BFG goes from 8d6 to 8d8. (ie 8-48 damage becomes 8-64 damage)

... dubious gains. (Angel of Max Carnage makes it slightly better, but only slightly)

The damage boost on its own is dubious. If you apply three Power Mod Packs without accepting the Assembly, a regular BFG becomes 13d6 (13-78 damage) while a Nuclear BFG becomes 11d6. (11-66 damage) So the Nuclear BFG gets just plain less damage from the Assembly than from its component parts (And if you have a Firestorm Mod you can replicate the radius boost while still having a Mod slot remaining for a Bulk or Technical boost!), and the regular BFG gets only slightly higher maximum damage and worse minimum damage compared to not doing the Assembly. (And in its case the increase in ammo requirement is hurtful to your ammo efficiency, in addition to the Firestorm point I just covered)

The VBFG is one of the only Assemblies you can apply to BFGs, with the most immediately-relevant 'competition' being the awful High Power Weapon. The only other BFG-valid Assembly is a Master Assembly that requires two Exotic Mod Packs, so even though said Assembly is much better it doesn't reliably force the VBFG out of relevancy...

... but supermodding does reliably hurt the VBFG's case. Like... really badly.

The only argument in the VBFG's favor is that it's a way to improve corpse-clearing ability for Limbo/The Mortuary, and this... isn't much of an argument.

I really don't get why the VBFG is so bad. Just looking at the damage numbers makes it obvious you're basically boosting radius at the cost of spending more Power Cells, relative to not accepting the Assembly when you slot in the third Power Mod Pack. I don't understand what thought process would think a 50% increase in ammo expenditure in exchange for considerably less than a 50% increase in blast radius would be appealing.

That BFGs don't suffer drop-off to their explosion damage helps some, but... seriously, I don't get the tuning here.

Environmental Boots

Mods Needed:  (Bulk*2, Technical)

Base: Any Boots.

Result: +95% Fire and Acid resistance, capping at 95%, and sets movement modifier to -25%.

In 0.9.9.7, this required a Power Mod Pack instead of a second Bulk Mod Pack. It also had a bug where it was optimal to add the Technical Mod Pack last because the Assembly would get the Power and Bulk benefits, but if a Power or Bulk Mod was added last then the benefit of whichever one was added last wouldn't apply. It also just gave less benefits at the time: it was +75% resistance, capping at 90%.

It's technically been further buffed by the probably-accidental behavior of Armor and Boots Assemblies inheriting Technical Mod Pack resistance, though I'm not aware of a way for this to meaningfully benefit it.

Conversely, it's now reliably a nuisance to Assemble, because you must go through the prompt for 'do you want to Assemble Fireproof Boots?' (Which are Technical+Bulk, and you can't apply Bulk twice first to bypass this because Boots won't accept duplicates) and say 'no' to get a chance to Assemble Environmental Boots. It also no longer gets the Bulk benefits even though it's now impossible to trigger the prior glitch, which is not ideal.

Overall, the biggest buff here is the switch from a Power Mod Pack to another Bulk Mod Pack: for a lot of builds, Bulk Mod Packs are low in value, where you can easily find yourself Assembling everything you care about that requires Bulk Mods and finding yet more Bulk Mod Packs that you can't think of a good use for, whereas Power Mod Packs are so reliably good you're only likely to stop caring about further copies if your gear is outright 'perfected' such that you stop caring about Mod Packs in general. Being able to go 'I have a pile of useless Bulk Mods and still don't have fluid immunity, so sure, let's assemble Environmental Boots' is a big boost to their relevancy: in 0.9.9.7, they suffered heavily from the fact that they overlapped too much with the superior Cerberus Boots, where you were at most 1 Level away from Whizkid 2 and definitively had more than half the components for assembling Cerberus Boots, so why bother assembling Environmental Boots? If you waited a bit, you'd probably be able to do much better.

This isn't to say Environmental Boots are good now or anything. You still take 1 damage every action from Acid and Lava while wearing them, they're not indestructible or regenerative so long walks through hostile fluids will eventually destroy them at which point you're in trouble (So for example they're shaky at letting you complete Mount Erebus/The Lava Pits), and they don't even try to fill a distinct niche from Cerberus Boots. If they didn't hamper speed at all, or even raised it some, they might be a good idea to Assemble and then wear when fighting knockback-heavy enemies nearby Acid or Lava, reducing how lethal being shunted into such fluids is without seriously impinging on your combat mobility the way Cerberus Boots do. As-is, they're still largely Bad Cerberus Boots.

If they were a Basic Assembly, a run slow to get Whizkid online -or ignoring it outright- would have cause to consider Assembling them, but they're another case of an Advanced Assembly being heavily dragged down by being an Advanced Assembly.

Fireshield

Mods Needed:  (Bulk, Technical, Onyx)

Base: Red Armor.

Result: Sets Fire resistance to 95%, raises maximum durability from 100 points to 200 points, but forbids repairs and further modding even with Whizkid 2.

I honestly don't understand why this Assembly exists. Why on Earth would a player want to spend their Exotic Mod Pack that makes gear indestructible on making a Red Armor impossible to repair? And this is an Advanced Assembly, so if you can perform it you're at most one level away from being able to mod Assemblies; I'd rather build a Fireproof Red Armor and then slap the Onyx Mod Pack on it so it's indestructible. 50% Fire resistance on top of 4 Protection already heavily trivializes Fire threats: you end up only taking 6 damage from Archviles, Revenants will frequently do 1-2 damage (They average 12~ damage, which then gets halved to 6~ and then 4 Protection kicks in), and Mancubi do less per shot. (That they fire more shots isn't a point in the Fireshield's favor)

Or a Fireproof Red with a Power Mod Pack attached is a better choice, knocking Archviles to 4 damage and ensuring Revenants and Mancubi will only rarely do more than 1 damage per shot, all while having only spent common Mod Packs. A lot of runs will be able to make their most essential Assemblies and still have enough Mod Packs left over to build one or two of these.

This isn't even touching on trait stuff. Tough as Nails 3 will turn that Power Modded Fireproof Red into 'Archviles do 1 damage'. Berserker or the Technician's Malicious Blades Mastery provide enough resistances that a Fireproof Red is nearly immunity to Fire damage, returning to 'use this Onyx Mod to make your Fireproof Red indestructible'.

Or you can build Cerberus Armor and Onyx mod that, so now you've got significant resistances to the most important damage types from indestructible Armor. It's not like Cerberus Armor is hard to assemble.

I really just don't understand why this Assembly exists.

Oh, and 0.9.9.8 accidentally buffed it so long as the Technical Mod isn't the last one slotted in, due to the inheritance of resistances. Thos doesn't exactly make it great, but it's slightly less terrible than it used to be.

Nanofiber Skin Armor

Mods Needed:  (Power*2, Nano)

Base: Any Armor.

Result: +25% to all damage resistances, Armor regenerates 1 durability per action after 5 actions of taking no damage, but the Armor cannot be unequipped and is not destroyed by reaching 0 durability.

For a Technician, this is especially worth considering using on the Cybernetic Armor, since both the Assembly and the Armor lock you in and refuse to be destroyed: technically having this disadvantage twice doesn't exactly hurt you more. 45% resistance to everything is pretty great, too! It's not as good as just slapping an Onyx Mod on, but you usually don't get the opportunity to directly choose between 'Nano solution' and 'Onyx solution' so it doesn't matter very often. And if you do have the opportunity, you've got the option to make Cybernano Armor, which is largely better.

Outside that specific scenario, Nanofiber Skin Armor is awkward. Trapping yourself permanently in an Armor that can in fact still hit 0 durability is deeply problematic: you're permanently denying yourself the ability to make contextually-appropriate Armor switches, you can't respond to combat shredding your Armor by swapping in a fresh Armor, you can't Assemble any other Armors of use, and Cybernetic Armor is the only Armor that's innately resistant to all damage types, so it's the only base that can theoretically be sufficiently widely relevant as to make swaps unnecessary.

It's generally better to Assemble something else -such as Cerberus Armor- and then apply Nano to that if you want to use a Nano Mod on your Armor. Since this is an Advanced Assembly, you are by definition in easy reach of being able to do that. The result won't be indestructible, but it's better to have destructible Armor you can swap out of than to have indestructible Armor you can't swap out of. Notably, Cerberus Armor can often be used to give yourself better resistances than Nanofiber Skin Armor can give: so long as you get a base with decent physical resistances, the result will be a better combination of resistances than any possible Nanofiber Skin Armor result. Notably, Cerberus Armor heavily overlaps with Nanofiber Skin Armor in requirements: they both require two Power Mod Packs! So if you can Assemble Nanofiber Skin Armor, the odds are pretty good you can Assemble Cerberus Armor and then put the Nano Mod Pack on that.

0.9.9.8 buffing Ironman makes this that bit more true, incidentally, as you can now cover physical resistances with Ironman ranks even if you don't find a physically-resistant base to use for your Cerberus Armor. Mind, Cerberus Armor zeroes out Protection, while Nanofiber Skin Armor leaves Protection intact, but Protection's value to Doomguy gets notably eroded as a run progresses, with Plasma damage ignoring half (or more, if rounding is necessary) of Doomguy's Protection and the late game involving enemies with extremely high per-hit damage, so this specific advantage gets eroded as a run goes on.

I wouldn't say Nanofiber Skin Armor is a trap Assembly outright -it can legitimately be a sensible choice for a run- but it's dubious on its own and hampered heavily by directly competing with Nano-shrapnel and Nanomanufacture Ammo. Nano-shrapnel in particular is the exact same Mod Pack recipe, so if you can make Nanofiber Skin Armor you can for-sure make Nano-shrapnel. For Shottyhead Scouts this makes Nanofiber Skin Armor almost impossible to justify ever Assembling, but any non-melee run that's allowed to use Shotguns can find this cropping up: the (non-Shottyhead) Traits most focused on benefitting Shotguns don't actually benefit a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun at all, so 'My build is invested wrong for that' isn't a strong argument against Assembling Nano-shrapnel!

Antigrav Boots

Mods Needed:  (Agility*2, Nano)

Base: Any Boots.

Result: Raises move speed modifier by +50% (But not above a total of +50%), Boots regenerate 2 durability per action after 5 actions of not taking damage, and durability reaching 0 does not destroy the Boots.

Tactical Boots, but even better!

The main flaw with Tactical Boots is their dependence on a Nano Mod, particularly in conjunction with them being an Advanced Assembly. Ranged builds will virtually always get more value out of spending the Nano Mod on either Nano-shrapnel or Nanomanufacture Ammo, and unlike Power Armor there is no 'but what if I don't have/want Whizkid?' scenario. If you can make Antigrav Boots, you've got Whizkid. At most you're waiting a level for Whizkid 2 so you can make Nanomanufacture Ammo.

For melee runs, this issue is moot and Antigrav Boots only have to worry about competition from Armor Assemblies like Nanofiber Skin Armor. This competition is relevant, but said Armor Assemblies all have important considerations that mean you might not want to mindlessly Assemble one of them, like how Nanofiber Skin Armor traps you in the resulting Armor permanently, or how Cybernano up in the Master tier requires an Onyx Mod Pack on top of the Nano Mod Pack, and so most runs that can build Antigrav Boots don't actually have the option of Cybernano. So for melee runs, Antigrav Boots is often the best use of a Nano Mod Pack!

Do keep in mind that any non-Unique Boots are a valid base, unlike how Tactical Boots are locked to Steel Boots. Antigrav Acidproof Boots is a useful thing you can do, and more generally it's better to use a tough Boots as your base. Also keep in mind that you can technically apply it to Phaseshift Boots, but since those already have +15% movement speed, you're substantially wasting the benefits. An interesting option is Gothic Boots, which end up at +35% movement speed while having massive knockback resistance and near-immunity to fluids: you won't be as fast as you could be with a different base (But for one thing you can slap another Agility Mod on to bump yourself up to +45%; Onyx is the only other valid addition that makes sense), but you'll still be very fast while being basically immune to knockback and able to wade through fluids in a pinch with minimal danger. The only tradeoff of note is that Gothic Armor will still immobilize you if combined with the Gothic Boots, which can be awkward given Gothic Armor is arguably the best base for Cerberus Armor, but if that's not an issue to your run, then Gothic Boots make for really nifty Antigrav Boots.

If you don't have any Exotic Boots, Plasteel is the best base.

One unfortunate difficulty with Antigrav Boots is that it's easy to end up Assembly Tactical Boots before you get a Nano Mod Pack and then just... not get enough Agility Mod Packs to actually Assemble Antigrav Boots, even though enough did generate in your run for it to be possible to Assemble. This is one case where I really wish the game had some support for upgrading Assemblies into other Assemblies: if you could Assemble Tactical Boots, find a Nano Mod Pack, and convert the Tactical Boots into Antigrav Boots, this issue would go away. There aren't too many Assemblies where such functionality would make sense to implement, but still. It'd be nice.

Nano-shrapnel

Mods Needed:  (Power*2, Nano)

Base: Any Shotgun.

Result: Damage type changes to Piercing, weapon no longer needs ammo or to reload between shots, but loses 3 damage dice.

All valid bases:

Shotgun: 8d3 becomes 5d3

Double Shotgun: 9d3*2 becomes 6d3*2

Combat Shotgun: 7d3 becomes 4d3

Assault Shotgun: 7d3 becomes 4d3

Super Shotgun: 8d4*2 becomes 5d4*2

Plasma Shotgun: 7d3 becomes 4d3

Note that the above numbers are somewhat misleading in practice because of the variable range profiles of Shotguns: on paper the Double Shotgun is second only to the Super Shotgun for damage output, but it uses the Wide profile and so its maximum range is less than all other Shotguns and it loses damage faster than all other Shotguns. Similarly, the basic Shotgun looks superior to Combat, Assault, and Plasma Shotguns, but it uses the Normal range profile and so loses damage faster than them, only coming out ahead when firing on fairly close targets. By a similar token, a Nano-shrapnel Plasma Shotgun has a larger blast radius than Combat and Assault Shotguns, making it arguably a superior choice.

Overall the Super Shotgun is just plain the best base, but if you don't have one a Combat or Assault Shotgun is generally the best option, not least because they're common enough finds and outright guaranteed in standard runs. A Plasma Shotgun is a better base than those two, but it's rarer and it resents the switch to the Piercing damage type, as it loses its ability to clear corpses and demolish walls. (And gets less benefit from switching to Piercing, since Plasma damage is only lightly affected by Protection in the first place) This is especially important to an Angel of Shotgunnery run, where you can't handle those duties with BFGs and Rocket Launchers.

The switch to Piercing itself makes the apparent big loss in damage very misleading. Against enemies with no Protection (eg Imps) you really are just losing damage (Before accounting for the part where you don't need to reload, mind), but every point of Protection a target has is 2 points of damage in Nano-shrapnel's favor: say you fire a Combat Shotgun at range 6 in Angel of Max Carnage on a Baron of Hell. For an unmodified Combat Shotgun, you roll 21 damage, then lose 30% of your damage (14.7), then round up (15), then lose 4 damage to the Baron of Hell's 2 Protection. (11 damage) If your Combat Shotgun is a Nano-shrapnel Combat Shotgun, instead you roll 12 damage, lose 30% to range (8.4), round down (8), and you're done: 11 damage vs 8 damage. That is a loss, but the base numbers (21 max vs 12 max) suggest you're dropping to about 57% of what you had, while 11 vs 8 is you dropping to about 73% of what you had...

... and picking high rolls to illustrate the point gives unfavorable results to Nano-shrapnel. Say you instead rolled exactly in the middle: every die rolls 2. Now your base damage numbers are 14 vs 8, range drop-off knocks you to 10 and 6, then Protection knocks the unmodified hit to 6, and suddenly they have equal damage!... per shot, when the Nano-shrapnel version will never need to reload, and so will always be able to fire immediately after, and so will have superior damage per second.

Furthermore, the fact that ammo is no longer a limiter means that radar-shooting goes from 'a useful trick that careless use of can get your run killed through ammo starvation' to 'infinite free damage you can abuse forever'. This all by itself is amazing, and of course ignoring ammo means you no longer need to commit inventory space to ammo -or at least can reduce your inventory commitment, if you're using non-Shotguns and/or want to hold onto other Shotguns for specific purposes. Freed-up inventory slots is pretty much impossible to overstate the benefits of, as there's so many facets to how it helps.

Also, I already commented on this, but it's worth restating that Nano-shrapnel can be great even for runs focused on other weapons, and in fact in some sense is more great than for a Shotgun-focused Marine or Technician: Reloader and Shottyman provide no benefit to a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun, after all! Indeed, the only traits that benefit Nano-shrapnel Shotguns are Finesse, Son of a Bitch, and Shottyhead; outside Shottyhead (Which is absurdly beneficial to Nano-shrapnel), sensible-for-Shotguns Trait choices don't actually improve Nano-shrapnel, so for Marines and Technicians the main reason a non-Shotgun-focused build might turn its nose up on Nano-shrapnel is that they might prefer Nanomanufacture Ammo to leverage their build's strengths.

Notably, Ammochain Marines don't actually care that much about Nanomanufacture Ammo. They're so absurdly ammo-efficient with rapid-fire weapons that eliminating ammo entirely for a chosen rapid-fire weapon has a negligible effect on performance. A Nano-shrapnel Shotgun is worth considering to permanently trivialize Lost Soul hordes, and to a lesser extent help with hordes of other sorts.

Mod Pack access is also important to this calculus. Bulk is mostly the lowest-value Mod Pack type, but some builds value Bulk Mods enough they may be burning through their supply too much to be able to Assemble Nanomanufacture Ammo, and runs do sometimes have very skewed Mod Pack generation. If you're sitting on three Power Mods and have found only one Bulk Mod in your entire run when you find a Nano Mod Pack randomly in late Deimos, trying to commit to Nanomanufacture Ammo might be a doomed endeavor, whereas Nano-shrapnel can be Assembled immediately in those conditions.

Overall, Nano-shrapnel is one of my favorite Assemblies from a design perspective, aside the odd quirk that it's... weirdly unoptimized for Shotgun builds. Army of the Dead is particularly egregious about this, since its entire selling point is directly covered by Nano-shrapnel, but all three Shotgun Masteries demand Shottyman and by extension demand Reloader 2, so all of them demand Trait investment that becomes 'dead' levels if one gets Nano-shrapnel. It'd be nice if things were somehow redesigned so Shotgun specialization Traits are broadly beneficial to Nano-shrapnel Shotguns.

Hyperblaster

Mods Needed:  (Technical*2, Agility)

Base: Basic Plasma Rifle.

Result: Halves base firing time to 0.5 seconds, raises Accuracy by 2 points, raises damage per shot from 1d7 to 2d4, but slows reload time from 2 seconds to 2.5 seconds, and halves base number of shots fired to 3.

Keep in mind that Triggerhappy is not affected by this, and so if you have 2 ranks in Triggerhappy you're actually dropping from 8 shots fired to 5 shots fired.

Hyperblaster itself is a pretty great Assembly, massively improving the responsiveness of your Plasma Rifle and notably improving its ammo efficiency, which is a big deal given that ammo inefficiency is by far the biggest problem with Plasma Rifles. Say you have Son of a Bitch 3, Triggerhappy 2, and no ranks in Eagle Eye: that takes you from 8 shots of 4-10 damage that hit 50% of the time at line of sight (So 32-80 damage... half of which doesn't actually happen) to 5 shots of 5-11 damage that hit 74% of the time at line of sight. (So 25-55 damage, of which only 26% doesn't actually happen) And since it halves firing time, it still increases raw DPS! (32-80 damage in 1 second vs 50-110 damage in 1 second, using the prior numbers and just pretending all shots hit) 

The ammo efficiency point is threefold. The first is that you are in fact getting better damage per Power Cell on a raw level: with the above numbers, an unmodified Plasma Rifle spends 8 Power Cells for 32-80 damage, meaning 1 Power Cell converts into 3.2 to 8 damage, whereas the Hyperblaster spends 10 Power Cells for 50-110 damage, meaning 1 Power Cell converts into 5 to 10.1 damage. Second is the Accuracy point: unless you've got ranks in Eagle Eye, the above numbers shift even more in favor of the Hyperblaster, since the unmodified Plasma Rifle misses 50% of the time at line of sight range while the Hyperblaster only misses 26% of the time. (3.2 to 8 damage becomes 1.6 to 4 damage vs 5 to 10.1 damage becomes 3.7 to 7.474 damage) The third and most subtle point, though, is the consideration of greater control of shot distribution: the unmodified Plasma Rifle is expending 8 Power Cells every time you want to kill anything, even if that's overkill damage. (eg you fire on an Imp, which has 12 HP and so will die to 2-3 shots hitting it: you expect 1-2 shots to be wasted even if you write off the misses) The Hyperblaster will only expend 5 Power Cells for more trivial threats, and only occasionally will the numbers line up so it needs to fire a second time in a way that wastes more Power Cells than an unmodified Plasma Rifle.

Now, the proper comparison here is to a supermodded Plasma Rifle, but the Hyperblaster is, atypically, pretty reliably coming out ahead. Its only downsides are shot count reduction (Which isn't actually a clean disadvantage) and that it provides a mild increase in reload time, whereas its fire time reduction is better than you can possibly get out of supermodding (3 Technical Mod Packs results in a fire time of 0.6 seconds, which is slower than the Hyperblaster's 0.5 seconds), its Accuracy payoff is efficient for the Mod Pack usage (+2 Accuracy for 1 Agility Mod Pack? When they normally give +1? And you can only get up to +3 out of supermodding? That's really good!), and its damage is pretty favorable. (3 Power Mods would raise base damage to 1d10, which isn't cleanly worse than 2d4, but isn't cleanly better) And this supermodding comparison is ignoring that you can mod the Hyperblaster itself: say our supermodded Plasma Rifle is 3 Power Mods and 2 Agility Mods. If we just put a Power Mod on the Hyperblaster, it is cleanly better than the supermodded Plasma Rifle at damage (2d5 vs 1d10 is the same max roll and a better minimum roll), just as Accurate, while firing twice as fast and in fact if you consider shot count better it delivers more shots per second. (Again: 10 shots per second from a Triggerhappy 2 Hyperblaster, vs 8 shots per second with a no-Technical-Mods Plasma Rifle)

The Hyperblaster is great! Rapid-fire runs should make it! Outside Nanomanufacture Ammo, it's pretty clearly the best thing you can do with a Plasma Rifle and Mod Packs!

In part because Nanomanufacture Ammo is the closest thing to a Master-tier equivalent to potentially push it out, and relies on a Nano Mod Pack, which you cannot count on getting.

I'm honestly weirded out that the Hyperblaster so cleanly escapes the Advanced Assembly Vortex Of Suckiness...

Focused Double Shotgun

Mods Needed:  (Power, Technical, Agility)

Base: Double Shotgun.

Result: Raises damage from 9d3 per shot to 8d4 per shot (ie damage changes from 9-27 to 8-32), and changes the blast behavior from 'wide' to 'normal'.

Note that it makes zero sense to build this if you have a Super Shotgun: the Super Shotgun has every parameter the same as a Focused Double Shotgun except its reload time (Which the Super Shotgun is superior on, taking 1.5 seconds to reload instead of 2 seconds) while of course being fully moddable.

That said, Super Shotguns are rare, so being able to build one yourself out of common tools seems sensible enough of an idea.

I don't really feel it works out in practice, unfortunately, as an Elephant Gun has substantially the same utility but doesn't require waiting for Whizkid, uses fewer Mod Packs, results in a more ammo-efficient weapon, and the Double Focused Shotgun's damage advantage isn't as great as it seems due to the previously-covered point that the game processes the two shots sequentially instead of simultaneously. If it actually resulted in a Super Shotgun that wasn't treated as a completed Assembly, it would be a way to somewhat expensively ensure you have a Super Shotgun to then use as a base for Nano-shrapnel, or for supermodding, but since it's an Assembly with a statline in the vein on the Super Shotgun, it doesn't open up such options.

Supermodding is also relevant. An Assault Shotgun (Which standard runs can get completely reliably in Hell) with 3 Power Mod Packs is 10d3 (ie 10-30 damage) with less damage drop-off and the ability to be fired 6 times in a row before needing to reload, for example. Its actual DPS will thus be much higher than the Focused Double Shotgun in most conditions even though its damage per pull of the trigger is around half, especially if you're doing manual reloads, since the Focused Double Shotgun is using the base reload time of 2 seconds an unmodified Double Shotgun uses. And then you hit Whizkid 2, and you can add 2 more Mod Packs to the supermodded Assault Shotgun vs 1 more for the Focused Double Shotgun: 1 Technical and 1 Bulk results in your Assault Shotgun firing in 0.8 seconds while having 8 shots before needing to reload. Technicians with Whizkid 3 extend the comparison, letting you add 2 Mod Packs total to the Focused Double Shotgun but 7 Mod Packs total to the Assault Shotgun you're supermodding.

The Focused Double Shotgun does have notable qualities where I can't say it never makes sense to Assemble, but I'd argue it's in an awkward place and could use a bump, or a pretty significant reworking of mechanics. (Again: if it literally converted the Double Shotgun into a Super Shotgun that was not hampered by Assembly limitations, it would be way more appealing)

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Next time, we wrap up this Mod Pack stuff with Master Assemblies.

See you then.