Pistol



The pistol is the player's default weapon, and fires bullets. Each player enters the game with a pistol, fifty bullets, and their fists, with the pistol selected as the active weapon. None of the monsters carry a pistol, though the trooper appears to be armed with a rifle that fires pistol bullets.

"Pistol is your standard military-issued weapon. It will stay with you, so don't forget about it if things get rough."

- Doom instruction manual

Combat characteristics
The pistol fires individual bullets, each inflicting 5-15 points of damage. If the player holds the fire button down, the marine fires the pistol repeatedly. As with the chaingun, the initial shot accurately strikes the object in the centre of the screen, but if the trigger is held down, subsequent shots have a dispersal (standard deviation around 2°, to a maximum of ±5.5°).

Tactical analysis
The pistol is a weak weapon, doing damage at a rate barely 10% greater than the fists and generally should not be used if any better weapon is available. However, if the player is low on shotgun shells and doesn't have the chaingun in his possession, the pistol can be used to take down individual or small groups of zombies or imps and save shells for pinkies or stronger enemies that may be encountered later. Owing to its perfect accuracy when fired once, the pistol is also a dependable weapon for killing low-tier monsters over long distances prior to finding the chaingun. This situation is most commonly suffered at the first levels of an episode or megawad especially on Ultra-Violence difficulty when the player is looking desperately for the shotgun, but still has to face great quantities of monsters.

The pistol is capable of 100% accurate fire if the player carefully taps the fire button slightly after the first shot rather than hold it down. It's also the most economical way to shoot hitscan-activated switches, because unlike the chaingun, the pistol only fires one bullet per cycle rather than two (however when playing the original executable, the player may have to use the Super Shotgun as it is the only weapon with vertical spread to hit switches that may be on a higher level than the one the player is currently on).

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, blood splats, and bullet dispersal 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). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) The target must be close enough to compensate for the weapon's recoil.
 * 3) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.