I was kind of curious to see what everyone felt was considered "optimized" for DoomRL. I don't mean in general; I'd like to look at things one by one specifically.
For an example, the pistol. If you were going to use the pistol and only the pistol and no other weapon (not even other types of pistols), what would be the "best" mods to put on your pistol? I'll explain a little more...
AlterAsc raised an interesting point when he was explaining his choice of mods/traits when using rapid-fire weapons, and it basically boiled down to the notion that an optimized version of any particular weapon would be the version that provides you the most DPS (there are possibly only two exceptions to that rule as far as I could see, rocket jumping and wall breaking), since most of the time in DoomRL, you're aiming to kill something and to kill it as quickly as possible.
It's true that there are many different playstyles and builds in DoomRL, but I think it should be possible to hash out some rough "optimized builds" for specific weapons based with maximizing DPS. I've recently gotten hooked on the Wiki and am in the middle of doing a huge overhaul to the weapons sections, but I lack the technical knowledge to do it successfully on my own. I've already templated all the weapons, all the weapon families, set up game data/strategy tabs, updated the front page, and have organized strategy sections for the weapons based on family and individual weapon. Most of those however, are empty. There were a few existing articles that I moved/incorporated. This is where everyone else comes in!
As AlterAsc also pointed out, making the DPS too high (I believe 12 for most ranged) will cause knock back, which at the moment is triggered before damage, meaning that multiple shots will push the enemy back and cause them to avoid the damage from subsequent rounds. I assume this is not intentional and will be amended in a later version, so assuming this is the case, there's two things I'd be looking at doing.
1) Optimization of the Pistol for 0996
2) Theoretical optimization of the Pistol.
I only want to focus on the Pistol right now because the boards have been a little quiet lately and I'd like to do things one at a time if I can. I intend to either spark enough interest in this idea that people will help put stuff on the wiki, or if they're not interested in editing the wiki themselves (as I know some people don't want to bother learning wiki syntax or are busy with other projects), at least post your knowledge here and I'll gladly crib what I can and credit the poster in the talk remarks for that section.
Again, I'd like to make it very clear that I know and understand part of the fun to DoomRL is playing how you want, and that there are tons of options and builds available. By no way shape or form am I claiming that using an 'optimized' build aiming to do the most DPS is 'the best', or 'the right way' -- I'm not trying to start or enforce that kind of thinking. What I am trying to do is present it at least as an option and to make use the wiki. The strategy section is woefully barren and I'd like to do whatever I can to help that.
So, if you actually read all of that, thank you, and secondly, heeelp meee dooo thiiiis.
That being said, I open the floor for general chicanery, and hopefully some discussion on specifically the Pistol. Once that's done, I'll move on to the next, and the next, and the next...