Hi. I'm new to the forum, but there's a snowball's chance in hell Kornel remembers my name because I emailed him like... a friggin' year ago with some suggestions. (Seriously, it was before the challenges or the player info or the trait prereqs. Old.) He told me to post them here, but I never got around to it. I figure this time I should do it right in the first place.
The new DoomRL is definitely sweet, very obviously an improvement over last time I played with it. (Though it seems much harder now. >_<) There are some things that I think need a bit more work though, primarily with traits. First though, a little weapons gripe: I hated the shotgun then, and I hate it now. Aside from the fact that it's kind of silly to have a weapon that's useless by level two unless you roll very poorly, it just seems weird to have three versions of it. Now, I sort of understand why it's like that, because it's supposed to parallel the progression of the other weapons. The trouble is that it's not really any good, it's not different enough from the other shotguns to be any fun (especially if you get Shottyman, then you basically carry around four fewer shells) and to top it all off, the progression for precision and splash weaponry is made uneven. P->C->PR, SG->CS->DS->RL->BFG. See what I mean? I think there should be another step in the precision weapons line. I suggest a plasma pistol, since you start getting plasma ammo well before you can actually use it, particularly if you take the red stairs. I like either 4d3 or 1d10, not sure which winds up giving the better balance.
That brings up another problem, that the split between the two classes of weaponry makes you do weird things with traits. Now most of the traits are decent enough, but the big bonuses of the specialist traits like Shottyman or Intuition just make the incremental bonuses of the other traits seem flat. Finesse, Ironman, Hellrunner, and Son of a Bitch basically exist to give you more time to find out whether or not you're going to pick up a double shotgun before it's time to run down EE->Int with your chaingun. This is made even worse by the fact that there are some traits you just don't touch outside of challenges; Son of a Gun is just no replacement for EE->Int unless you need Dualgunner to get through AoM, and I don't even need to mention the melee stuff.
The best fix for this is to restructure the traits with this specialization scheme in mind from the beginning. Have general traits unlock options for improvement with melee, precision, or splash, and those options in turn unlock further improvements for specific weapon classes. It seems inevitable to me that this come with some degree of power creep, since some of the options as they currently exist are subpar anyway. If it's that big a deal, just buff the monsters. :p
Intuition1 (as is) unlocks precision tree
Eagle Eye (combine with Cateye, cap 2 or 3) unlocks pistol and auto branches
Gun Kata (Dualgunner + SoaG, cap 2, first level gives move-fire,2 second level gives move-reload on empty mag)
Bullet Hose (shots per action for CG/PR increased to 10, mags doubled)
Son of a Bitch (die type and knockback +1, cap 2) unlocks splash tree
Reloader (reload time halved, cap 2) unlocks shotgun and explosive branches
Shottyman (number of dice +1, move reload, cap 1)
Demoman (explosion radius and number of dice +1, cap 1 or 2)
Hellrunner (speed/dodge +25%, cap 3) unlocks melee tree3
Tough as Nails (armor +1, health +10, cap 3) unlocks damage and stealth branches
Berserker (combine with Brute, cap 3)
Ninja (monster sight radius halved, gain extra attack from prepared slot, cap 1)
This all probably seems a bit overpowered, but I think that's curable in a rather simple fashion: get rid of weapon mods, which are already kind of annoying to use anyway. You either get your target weapon early enough to spec in it or you don't. Even if it does have some power creep, it is at least much more balanced than the current model, which I think is the most important part.
NOTES
1Why is Intuition before Eagle Eye? Because EE is useless to shotgunners, and not really of interest to demoguys either. The general idea with this tree structure was to place the generalist traits at the root.
2Yeah, that's right, move-fire. Basically with every step, your character asks for a target whenever one is in sight. Might seem like a bit much, but remember that you're restricted to a pair of pistols, here.
3The entire melee tree is a huge buff. That's okay as far as I'm concerned. The AoB challenge is damn near unplayable in its current form. I've never survived long enough to get to the Chained Court! :(