Plasma gun



The weapon is called the "plasma gun" only by in-game messages. It is referred to as the "plasma rifle" everywhere else, including the keyboard reference, instruction manuals, and Hank Leukart's FAQ. However, Quake III and Doom 3 go back to the name "plasma gun".

The plasma rifle is a weapon that fires blue-white balls of plasma. It shares the player's stock of plasma cells with the BFG 9000. Each plasma ball inflicts 5-40 points of damage.

The plasma rifle first appears in the level E2M1: Deimos Anomaly in a secret area, and in fact appears in all the levels of The Shores of Hell. It first appears in a non-secret area on E2M5: Command Center. When picked up, it contains 40 cells (80 on the I'm too young to die and Nightmare! skill levels).

Due to its high damage rate (three times that of the chaingun), the plasma rifle is effective against nearly any opponent. A continuous barrage will stop an Arachnotron in its tracks, and even reduce a Baron to about half his normal movement speed and attack frequency. Attacking flying monsters in open areas can be inefficient, however, as the first few hits push the enemy rapidly backward and to one side of the stream.

Although the plasma rifle does not inflict blast damage, firing it in close quarters demands a certain amount of concentration owing to its "auto-aiming" feature, which may steer the plasma a few degrees away from center, and possibly right into a wall, if the nearest monster is not directly in front of the player. For example, using the plasma rifle on the Cyberdemon in E4M2: Perfect Hatred, without placing oneself in his line of sight, requires aiming at a point slightly to his left.

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and muzzle lighting are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). It is also assumed that all projectiles are launched at nearly the same range, so that the various procedures call P_Random in the same sequence each time. Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.

Appearance statistics
The IWADs contain the following numbers of plasma rifles: