i named it after this really funny picture of a floater who got stuck in a pipe in a green foggy level and its tentacles all went taut and it looked like a funny sea urchin meat blob but i lost the picture i think D:
If you want to use the new Sentry Guns, perform your first launch then immediately close the game! Then launch it a second time and actually play. This is so that ExtraToolCustomization can generate the configs necessary to allow the new sentries to exist.
Thloatere Gear Mod is another mod that focuses on re-statting the game's existing arsenal into a more interesting state. VanillaReloaded already does this, so Thloatere tries to do something a bit more dramatic just to see how it plays out.
This time, the mod brings all the primary weapons down to the level of the Assault Rifle while making all the special weapons a lot more powerful and generally making tools and melees slightly stronger to make the power dynamic between the prisoners and the Sleepers swing more wildly each mission.
Additionally, changes are made so that each weapon feels decently unique to fire with their own identities when stacked up against each other. The mod also adds a few weapons to explore how far GTFO's weapon design space can be explored while still feeling vanilla-esque.
Thloatere categorises most of the weapons into one of a few distinct categories, mostly based off the theming, reload time spreads, and ammopack mechanics in vanilla GTFO where special weapons have longer reload times and refill more ammo per use of ammopack.
In the Primary category, automatic weapons focus on staggering enemies and holding a position over time with high downtime between magazines, while burst-fire weapons focus on quickly eliminating single targets with long-range precision fire and quick reloads to keep killing. The Primary weapons were made weaker to induce moments of tension while the Special weapon needs to reload or is out of ammo.
In the Special category, most weapons fit into one of four roles: crowd control such as the assault rifles or machineguns, small target removal such as the Revolver or Precision Rifle, big target removal such as the Sniper Rifle or Burst Cannon, and the shotgun class which serves mostly as a high-power panic button that can be shot at anything with different drawbacks based on the weapon. Power is concentrated into the Special weapons, making management of their uptime and leveraging of their respective strengths high priority.
Weapon changes are generally made according to this philosophy.
This one came from the DRG enthusiasts in one of the units I tested this mod with, who wanted to see what a new melee could look like. While the initial concept of having a pickaxe that instantly breaks doors was too far beyond my skills to make, I still decided to try my hand at making it. Since it's quite pointless to make a melee lighter than the Knife, I instead chose to see if we could get heavier than the Spear. This instantly kills a Charger. It's also really good at wrecking bigs, but so far we've found it's super impractical for actually fighting enemies, but maybe someone out there can make it work...
Originated as a meme request by one of the units I tested this with to 'add a semi-auto drum mag pistol' and I tried to make it work. What the mod ends up with is a simultaneous alternative to the Pistol and HEL Autopistol, which performs poorly for dealing damage but is able to continuously stagger big groups if the prisoner can aim well, while allowing them finer control over their rounds than using the Autopistol.
tru0067 once pointed out there's no weapon that kills Strikers in 1 headshot or 3 bodyshots in an ancient post somewhere, comparing such an idea to the PUBG Winchester, so this reference-overdosed abomination was born. The name's from Nova Drift, the general function is comparable to the eponymous PUBG weapon, the idea of it being an armour-piercing stake launcher brings Warhammer 40,000 to mind... I like how it turned out. Perhaps the most challenging part of designing the Boltthrower was actually how to make it not suck completely into Chargers... which is where it got the overpenetration plus insanely high stagger counterbalanced by low ammo for a DMR-type weapon from. It might be Warhammer on principle, sure, but the design was changed from a Boltgun to something vaguely resembling every lever-action rifle ever made.
An attempt to make a non-gimmicky primary shotgun for enjoyers of the weapon class. It's pretty basic but at least gets to call slightly higher effective range and slightly slow fire rate its own. Actually, this is sort of an attempt to reintroduce the vanilla Slug Shotgun but without the complications of not being a pellet weapon. Is a port of the Maven Auto Shotgun from Fortnite, sort of. This one's way more accurate...
I have at least three versions of this weapon sitting around in my various test mods, so clearly I want to make this thing work. Various inspirations were tried, which I scrapped for being too clunky to use. There's a Fortnite one, a Doom 2016 one, a completely original one... Then I remembered Thloatere has anti-tank primaries and realised it would fit that slot perfectly. So, close-range AT primary to contrast the long-range of the Slug Shotgun. More forgiving with scoring hits and reload, but you need to basically press yourself up against your target and its reload isn't really instant either. Should have worse performance against normal Bigs than Slug but better performance into Big Chargers, hopefully.
This started off as a meme weapon to see how a musket would work, but it turns out that it's really good for a multitude of purposes. It wrecks Chargers, it allows autogun users to get a shot off on a key target between reloads, and it's a backup big target killer in a pinch. Sort of a cross between the Hunting Rifle and Ranger Shotgun from Fortnite, but doesn't really play like either...
After defining the auto/burst dichotomy, a burst counterpart of the Heavy Assault Rifle obviously seemed in order. It combines the slower long-range playstyle of the Burst Rifle with the 4-burst of the Carbine and the slow burst of the Double-Tap Rifle to represent the entire category as its own unique thing that stands up to the HAR.
The Heavy SMG provides a submachine gun in the Special category, albeit focusing on unusual attributes for a submachine gun. This introduces a more conventional high ammo focus SMG into the category.
This one came to me during a fever dream while I was sick with COVID-19 and it shows. I don't even know what use a weapon that burst-fires its entire magazine could have. I guess you can output a lot of damage into truly massive crowds on levels matching HEL weapons really quickly??? Maybe?????
An attempt to put a full-powered automatic rifle in a videogame, which can be somewhat uncommon compared to assault rifles. This should fill a role between the assault rifles and revolver-like weapons, outputting generally useful high-caliber firepower while requiring some care in using it.
Rather conveniently, the same comment that inspired the Boltthrower also suggested the idea of a low RoF high damage machinegun-type weapon with an agonizingly slow charge-up time. Fullauto'ing the Boltthrower and upscaling the stats made this one pretty easy to make, but the cursed 1+1 or 2 breakpoint on Strikers from the Battle Rifle had to be kept to avoid completely overshadowing the Specialist weapons... The magazine size and Striker two-shot are a resurrection of the Alpha 1 Machinegun, and the design is just a GTFO'd Heavy Bolter...
Killzone fans rejoice! The Accelerator Rifle is the vanilla Burst Cannon brought back as a more specialised weapon that demands the user flick a burst over crowds to annihilate them en masse, while also being able to provide ammo-hungry but time-efficient emergency removal of big enemies.
A big and bulky weapon to stand with the machineguns. The Autocannon is an attempt to make a generalist weapon on par with the Heavy Assault Rifle. It's not particularly good at anything, nor is it particularly bad at anything. Definitely not a Helldivers thing, I don't know what you're talking about. Though I think more games should have autocannons.
All GTFO is really missing burst weapons-wise is a shotgun. So, here's a burst-fire shotgun without a charge-up gimmick. It's pretty uninspired, honestly, but at least it feels distinct to shoot...
An in-between of shotguns and snipers, the Combat Sniper requires at least two shots to down big enemies but still softens them up for teammates to dump lead into and also has enough ammo to make rationed shooting of any target at long range occasionally worth it.
An attempt to cross the single shot style with the general utility of the vanilla HEL Rifle, only a bit more reined in to make sure it doesn't get too out of hand. This used to be a 1:1 port of Fortnite's Railgun, but turning it into this played a lot better, and the High Caliber Rifle's gimmick was just way too fun to not also go in the Special slot.
This must have come to me in an insanity-induced frenzy because I don't know where else the idea for "ultimate ability in GTFO" would have come from. Anyway, this one requires a ton of coordination with your Bio Tracker buddy to use, or maybe just a bot holding it. Deploy it, it'll do 200 damage to everything in a line the moment it smells a marked target, and then go dormant until you pack it up and deploy it again. So, it's intended to be used once to react to a shit situation, but you can also pre-place it and only mark your target when you want it to fire... possibilities. Use sparingly!
catasstrophy's suggestion to add a sentry that works at ranges between Shotgun and Sniper. The Boltthrower Sentry contrasts the Burst Sentry by being a more traditional single-shot-kill style turret, but with the rather infuriating gimmick that it aims at the body and does almost no bodyshot damage... the trick is to place it at mid range because sentries fire angled slightly up, so hopefully it'll penetrate the target and headshot something behind it, which should deliver an instant kill. And if the map is big on Chargers, this admittedly isn't the best pick, but it'll at least stagger up to 3 Chargers with every shot.
The Sledgehammer continues to offer a well-rounded balance of heavy damage and stagger, so it's only received a very minor usability upgrade to keep pace with the rest of Thloatere's melees. The light attack has gained a (small) stamina cost to add a feel difference between light and heavy melee.
The Knife is really fun to use, especially when chain-killing a sequence of Sleepers as a risky but satisfying move in the middle of a fight. This attribute has been enhanced.
VanillaReloaded's Bat damage change was a very nice change that fit sthe vision of Thloatere well, accentuating a unique strength to set it apart from the Sledgehammer and Knife. In addition, its stamina cost was removed to better compete with the super-fast Knife of Thloatere.
Another case where VanillaReloaded really knows how to accentuate a weapon's strengths. Just as in that mod, these changes also help this iteration of the Spear gain a defensive advantage over the Sleepers while also providing a skilled prisoner with a way to take on multiple big enemies at once and readily win. Much like the Sledgehammer, the light attack now has a stamina cost to make the weapon's weight more perceptible.
The Assault Rifle was the primary everyone in this unit ran with when we were still new to the game and the balancing of its weak power with the power of the strong special weapons we used at the time was the basis for Thloatere's power balance. Thus, the Assault Rifle is set as the baseline and receives very minimal changes.
The Burst Rifle is heavily changed according to the general design philosophy of the mod to act as a baseline for burst-fire weapons.
The Submachine Gun has always traded off range for increased damaging power, and this stays the tradition in Thloatere with additional emphasis on an easy-to-use automatic weapon with very high ammo reserves as a pair for a weapon such as the Sniper Rifle.
The Carbine has received similar changes to the Burst Rifle, only calibrated against the Submachine Gun instead.
It was felt that the PDW could be differentiated more from the SMG by leaning into its role as a "personal defense weapon", so it now mainly focuses around quick and responsive high-DPS defense against all manners of threats while heavily losing out on uptime as a tradeoff. Its damage is already impressive enough.
The Bullpup Rifle fits into the mod nicely as a long-range alternative to the PDW. To emphasise its range and controllability compared to the PDW, its reload time has been reduced again to act as a disadvantage.
Really, the logical decision is to make the Machine Pistol escalate the SMG's design even further.
The idea of a crowd staggerer primary is very cool, but the HEL Autopistol was too good at doing that and having damage output competitive with other weapons. Thloatere chooses to lean more in the former direction. Also, at some critical mass of firepower, it becomes increasingly harder for a person to tell different rates of fire apart properly without some seriously dramatic changes, so the HEL Autopistol now fires at the speed of the Machine Pistol to feel more distinct from the rest of the guns and feel more like a proper alternative to it.
Put in the new environment, the Pistol keeps its own identity as a generalist leaning towards precision shots and staggering at the cost of fire rate, but is overall too strong. No particular stand-out stats here, just a general toning down to fit Thloatere.
Same rationale as the Assault and Burst Rifles, but for the Pistol this time.
The Rifle has always been this strange not-Pistol and needed more of its own identity. Thloatere also aims to give people more gameplay options and trying to give both weapon slots a short- and long-range thermal option was one such consideration. Crossing these two points, it felt right to make the Rifle into a long-range precision thermal weapon.
In vanilla, the HEL Revolver is overtuned, in part because it has efficiency stats that probably should have been put on the DMR and vice-versa. So Thloatere mostly makes those swaps.
The Double-Tap Rifle in vanilla has a really fun and challenging gimmick, but feels a bit too restrictive on what it can do. By applying the usual assault vs burst stat spread to the DTR, its damage stat increases enough such that it gains the ability to put down Chargers in short order while keeping its Striker double-tap gimmick.
Swapping some stats with the DMR, but also giving the HEL Revolver a Shooter one-shot makes it compete with the DMR and DTR on more even grounds, while reducing its magazine size and reload time make it feel more unique to shoot compared to the DMR.
I don't even know what to make of the vanilla HEL Shotgun, but as far as I can tell it's just meant to disintegrate everything within a short cone of the user and that it's far too strong. This version of the HEL Shotgun is less extreme, focusing mainly on sustained wide-area crowd stagger with a bit of damage and range as a bonus.
The Sawed-Off Shotgun is way too strong even in vanilla, so imagine how powerful it would be in Thloatere. Reducing the magazine size to 3 is an obvious change but it needs something more to stay relevant, and it looked like an ideal candidate for a PDW alternative in the realm of "instant self-defense".
The Slug Shotgun is another one of those weapons which is in a confusing spot; if you make it too good it boxes out the High Caliber Pistol and vice-versa. So instead it's been completely reworked to provide an anti-tank option if you hit your crits in the Primary slot to increase build variety, or just act as a long-range panic button.
Much like the Primary weapons, the Heavy Assault Rifle is intended to be the bread-and-butter Special weapon. However, the HAR is too weak for Thloatere in the base game, so it's been heavily buffed to set a proper standard with a slightly slower rate of fire to not feel exactly like firing the basic Assault Rifle.
Having two Machineguns always felt a bit silly, and restrictive on what could potentially be done with distinct weapon models and design spaces. The decision was made to roll the rough average effectiveness of both Machineguns into one weapon, then buff it accordingly. The Arbalest was used as a base here.
There was popular demand among the units I played with for a HEL Machinegun and I agreed that it was unexplored design space that the Veruta very easily converted to. The HEL Machinegun is now a crowd suppressor that works over long, long periods of time but demands team support to be most effective.
The Primary category was overloaded with automatic weapons, and a heavier counterpart to the submachine guns felt like obvious design space to explore that hadn't been hit yet, which also presents an opportunity to return the "high damage high recoil" fantasy of the vanilla HAR. To this end, the goal is to offer comically large damage for those who can master the recoil while keeping an ammo economy downside on standby to prevent it from outshining all the other guns with good play. ...there's some DNA of the Chapter 1 Tactical SMG from Fortnite in there, but that thing didn't have nearly as much recoil as this one...
The Short Rifle has always been a puzzling item, in that I can see the vision behind a super fast firing semi-automatic weapon, but its current stats simply don't come together to make a cohesive weapon that feels good to shoot. I figured that making it a sort of beefed up Pistol would both be a good way to do the uncapped semi-auto concept and also allow for a short-range thermal option in Special.
Revolvers in general are basically always a gunslinger's option, and while GTFO's take on it is already a fine weapon, it could still be pushed further into that archetype while then further changing the other small enemy clearing weapons to play differently. The Revolver has been made more reliable into maps containing Chargers.
The HEL Gun is another example of a gun with a strong baseline attribute and very strong stats combining to make something generally too powerful. By using the Precision Rifle as a baseline, it can then be scaled down to make a balanced take on a HEL mini-killer.
To contrast the Revolver's fast bullet-slinging quick-reloading low magazine size nature with high upfront damage, the Precision Rifle is clumsy to use but offers a long-term strategic advantage over long periods of consistently hitting weakpoints thanks to its thermal scope and ammo reserves. Like the Revolver, this should be better into Chargers now.
The Shotgun is a pretty fine weapon already and just needs a slight adjustment upwards in power to match the general doctrine of Thloatere. Worth noting is the new headshot breakpoint that lets it 3-hit-kill Big Strikers, which is applied to all the 30 damage shotguns from this point forward to really sell their power.
The Choke Mod Shotgun, by comparison, sees little use due to being an awkward hybrid of the Shotgun and High Caliber Pistol that combines the wrong ups and downs, having neither the sustained punch of the HCP nor the spread pellet crowd control of the Shotgun. However, it still fires pellets, so it's not impossible to crowd control with it; rather Thloatere opens up players' abilities to target what they want by making its ammo expenditure a lot less stringent, and the new Big Striker breakpoint should be easier to hit with its concentrated spread.
This is just a slug shotgun in disguise, so it gets the same treatment as the shotguns. Thloatere aims to make it a more sustained-damage counterpart to the Choke Mod Shotgun, at the upside/expense of firing slugs instead of a spread of shells.
This gun is oppressively strong in vanilla but also just plain fun, so its out-of-place strengths have been reined in while its fun attributes have been further exaggerated. It's now a damage hose that can dump so much lead into a wave if needed, while also having respectable ammo economy for clearing out minis outside of that application. There's totally some Doom Eternal DNA baked into this one...
The Sniper Rifle's damage profile was never the problem, rather it was just that 10C always either overshot or undershot its ammo count. This is yet another attempt to find the balance.
I joined GTFO as a squad sniper, but got burned out on sniping eventually, but still needed to kill bigs, and then that's when I noticed there aren't really many alternative sniper rifle-type weapons in the game. So, rather than having the super-generalist HEL Rifle, Thloatere puts that impressive frame and weapon design to use as an alternative marksman weapon to the Sniper Rifle.
The old Burst Cannon had a lot more of an identity as a REALLY unique take on a "big kill" weapon that I still want to praise this game's creativity for. With that in mind, the Burst Cannon has been reverted to a 5-burst and focus put on that identity (the mod's new weapons section is used instead to bring in a more focused big 3-burst weapon). The Thloatere take on the Burst Cannon gains a one-burst breakpoint on Big Strikers using the headshot while no longer being able to one-shot Strikers, to prevent it from treading common ground with the revolver-types.
The Scattergun is one of those problematic weapons where it either needs to be good by just bulldozing things with up-front non-critical damage, or it's not good at all. This rework keeps the identity of the Scattergun as a brute force high spread damage bucket alive while allowing prisoners to use it in a wider variety of damage-bucket-related scenarios and maybe multikill a LOT of big enemies if the Complex aligns.
Even if I could change this, changing this would be the GTFO version of heresy. No changes.
From VanillaReloaded: "The C-Foam Launcher is incredibly difficult to balance. Perma-foaming doors and ladder-foam can trivialize some of the hardest content in the game, but without such environmental advantages it struggles to find value. We believe that the only way to address its power would be to change how it interacts with doors and ladders in a major way." I agree with this and also lack the skill to implement such changes.
Even if I could change it, this is the one non-Bio Tracker thing from vanilla that I would call absolutely perfect, so I wouldn't. No changes.
The Burst Sentry is already pretty good, but it notably doesn't benefit from Bio Tracker Symbiosis, which is a missed opportunity to introduce more teamplay into the game. By allowing it this benefit, it better fits Thloatere's power level in a better way than just increasing all its stats.
The HEL Auto Sentry currently consumes a lot of ammo for relatively little output without incredibly high maintenance, but it is also really funny to see it firing at maximum RPM for prolonged periods of time. Thloatere addresses both sides by usually making it a slow-firing stagger machine that will barely help damage the enemies, only to massively ramp up in fire rate with appropriately reduced ammo consumption once Bio Tracker marked enemies enter the area.
The Shotgun Sentry has so many things going on. Its short range prevents it from swiftly responding to threats, its high fire rate makes it tend to dump shots into freshly-created corpses, and it doesn't attack ideal elevations for its pellet spread pattern. This is basically a complete performance overhaul of the device to hopefully make it the lord of corners.
The Sniper Sentry has high damage potential but just doesn't really get to fire all that often due to how sluggish it is, and even when it does, it tends to not have that much impact. This general improvement to the turret's stats should alleviate this.
A massive thanks to tru0067, for helping define the direction the mod should go in and settle the initial balancing pass for me to work off of. Thanks to MacCad for holding the HEL Revolver's flashlight in place and to Dinorush for allowing me to unleash the Portable Railcannon on the world (oh and also the Bolter Sentry I guess). Thanks also to Rayalot72 and D4RKEVA for teaching me how the game is played at levels far beyond my comprehension. Thank you to catasstrophy and co. for most of the post-release item suggestions and occasional balancing assistance. And finally, thank you to the units I've been diving with over the years and using as test subjects for these changes <3
