Don't forget the BFG's secondary useful function - a plasma cell carrier. With its 100 capacity it's worth two inventory slots, not counting Backpack.
It's kinda sad that a BFG is better when just carried around rather than actually fired ...
Indeed, but it's not even the best at that role anymore because of the power cell batteries. =[
So what, beef it up to 10d10?
O.o
Well, as I see it, the BFG right now isn't so much a Big Fucking Gun as a Medium Explodes Bigger Then Missile Launcher Gun.
I don't know how hard some of these would be to program so i'll try to keep it as simple as possible. Here's my two cents:
-Keep the BFG as it is now and reduce the shot cost. As it stands now it's not even worth really shooting the BFG because of the high ammo cost. Looking at 10d6, this means that at the absolute max you're only barely killing Hell Knights - and on average, you won't even kill a cacodemon or a nightmare imp. With a reduced ammo cost it'd be much more viable for taking out groups of mobs - too much and we swing back over onto the side of it being unbalanced, however. Keep in mind that ammo for it stacks to 50 (without modifiers) - this puts a base BFG at a maximum of 75 damage per backpack slot, compared to say, a rocket launcher, which would top out at 360 damage per backpack slot. Obviously, the bigger the gun the less damage/inventory space you're going to recieve and you shouldn't use that as an indication of weapon power (or else the pistol/combat knife would win all), but the discrepancy seems too high at the moment.
-Make the BFG more doomish. Smaller AoE and/or put a max targets limit on the effect (To mimic the effect of the tracer rays, I think that'd be too hard to implement or it would have been considered ages ago), buff the damage to pull it in line with the Doom BFG (perhaps 10d8 with a 1.5s firing time), and make it only affect monsters and corpses, not items and barrels and stuff. Alternativly, make the initial hit target based and have it take 10d4 and then have everything in the explosion take 10d4 or something.
In the original doom, you'd either use the BFG for
speedrunning similar situations to taking out a arch-vile with a bunch of smaller mobs around it - one well-placed BFG could do that - killing a large amount of small mobs, or wounding/killing a group of harder mobs. As it is now, the only thing that the BFG does out of that is killing the large amount of small mobs at a very expensive price.
I get the feeling that making the BFG too powerful against a single target (For example how in the original doom you could take a mastermind down in 1-2 bfgs and a cyberdemon down in 2-3) would be a bad idea for balancing purposes.
But that's my two cents, feel free to start shooting me down. :D