tips for classic doom: general

[XBOX Doomer]

put in tips for playing classic doom in general

Edited November 15, 2023 by XBOX Doomer

[DoomGater]

Go frag!

[XBOX Doomer]

18 minutes ago, DoomGater said:

Go frag!

I'm new to classic doom what does that mean

Edited November 15, 2023 by XBOX Doomer

[Cutman 999]

- The doom arsenal is almost perfect, use it to its fullest extent, even if things like the slow weapon switch incentivizes you to stick with one weapon most of the time

- Learn how to dodge efficiently with enemy projectiles (especially important for nightmare and uv fast)

- The way you deal with monster depends in which encounter you are, some will require eliminating small, fodder enemies first, some you have to prioritize the big baddie first (example, the archvile, revenant, mancubus, etc) In the case of the iwads this isn't completely indispensable, just for plutonia

- Learn how to crowd control

- Use the bfg only when the situation REALLY requires it, if you don't, you are wasting 40 cells of absolutely ridiculous damage output

- Don't fear lower difficulties, UV is almost the standard, but that's mostly because of community tradition, there's nothing wrong in playing the iwads in HMP or HNTR, especially plutonia

[OniriA]

Press mouse button to shoot monster, because monster is smelly and bad.

 

Press space key to do "Umpf, umpf, umf" everywhere.

 

Thank me later.

[Amaruψ]

gun good

demon bad

 

there you go.

[DankMetal]

The berzerk pack lasts until the end of the level

[RataUnderground]

-Think at every moment how you can simplify the scenario in which you find yourself. This will help you to prioritize some enemies over others. Generally you will want to finish off hitscanners first if they have a shot at you, but pain elementals and archviles are also high priority monsters. As soon as you see them appear, be aggressive and finish them off as soon as possible.
-Use infigting to your advantage. Taking cover with other monsters or simply evade the fight with your movement and let them kill each other is a very useful strategy in many cases.
-If you have taken blue armor, don't take green armor until you are lower than 50 armor points, as it will replace 50% protection with 30% and the trade-off won't be worth it.
-Memorize how many shotgun shots or how many rockets it takes for an enemy to die. Generally revenants take two rockets, mancubi three, and archviles four.
-A point-blank super shotgun shot produces damage similar to a rocket.
-Memorize the firing pattern of cyberdemons. They usually fire three rockets and then move. Take advantage of this moment to get close and shoot them with the BFG.
-The first two shots of the chaingun have no dispersion, so to snipe distant enemies you can do it by quick clicks.
-You can close a door before it finishes opening, the monsters can see you through the crack, but they can't reach you, so they usually end up infighting.

Edited November 16, 2023 by RataUnderground

[Lila Feuer]

[Naarok0fkor]

Shotguns are stupid...

[Lila Feuer]

 

22 minutes ago, Naarok0fkor said:

Shotguns are stupid...

 

(Icon of) SIN TIP: Shotguns work best at extreme ranges.

[OniriA]

3 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

 

Daaamn, how did I never think of that before?

Edited November 16, 2023 by OniriA

[DoomGater]

On 11/15/2023 at 10:35 PM, XBOX Doomer said:

I'm new to classic doom what does that mean

 

The term frag originates from military slang, where it is short for fragmentation. In Doom and other FPS games, frag refers to the act of killing another player's character in the game. In cooperative mode, there is a frag count indicating how many times you killed your allies, accidentally or otherwise. When deathmatch mode was implemented, frags were used as a measure of score. Each kill of an opponent earns a frag, while suiciding subtracts one. When the frags are displayed at the end of the deathmatch, whoever has the most frags is the winner.

Frag is occasionally extended to mean killing monsters as well.

[Lucius Wooding]

I have a couple weird but good ones, since most of the obvious ones always get covered:

 

-The hitbox of every enemy is always a square, and it's always aligned to the level's grid, no matter where their sprite is facing. This means that you have a significantly wider target profile when shooting from a diagonal, since your target will effectively be a hypotenuse instead of a single side. 

Spoiler

Not only will your rockets and plasma be a lot less likely to miss a wiggling skinny enemy, but your shotgun blasts are a lot more likely to kill an imp and your chaingun and plasma are more likely to maintain a stunlock. You'll generally find that mappers make rectangular rooms along the grid, so even if you don't check the map it can be a good habit to try to shoot diagonally across rooms when possible. 

 

 

-The top portion of the revenant's sprite won't register a hit with your weapons. Their collision is shorter than their visible sprite, so if you only see their heads you can't reliably target them with auto aim and hitscan and projectiles will pass through.

Spoiler

If you see revenants high above you on a pillar or through a window but you only see their heads, you can't really hit them properly and it's generally a waste of ammo. Particularly with the SSG, with the vertical spread that will probably hit them with very few pellets with the rest vanishing or hitting the pillar. Ditto if you're on a platform shooting revenants beneath you. There's a high likelihood that between the auto aim jank and the high percentage of missed pellets per shot that you're better off jumping down to kill them faster. If you must target them, the regular shotgun or chaingun may well be a lot more effective since they'll always target the thin slice of their actual hitbox and have no vertical spread. Revenants are the only monster like this, generally every other monster has fairly accurate hitboxes unless you're using melee attacks. As long as you're aware of this, you can usually pay attention to blood spatter and bullet holes hitting the wall to determine whether you're hitting.

 

-Revenant projectiles can deal up to 80 damage which is a lot, though it varies a ton. Half of them will randomly be homing with a trail of smoke, while the other half flies straight. Experienced players can dance around in a cloud of missiles like second nature, once they understand how to predict them and maintain awareness of their surroundings. Luckily in the original games you rarely fight them in large numbers.

 

-Revenants also have a small radius where they won't shoot projectiles and instead go for a melee attack. If you stay within this radius and kite them, or they can't leave their spot such as a platform, you can turn your back to them. 

Spoiler

The only exception is if you hit them and cause them to go into a pain state, they'll always respond with a rocket (unless you're in extremely tight range where they immediately punch and you can bait them into missing just like pinkies). They're generally very high damage and threatening enemies, but with knowledge of their mechanics you can predict and deal with them a lot better.

 

 

-You can bump into walls and sometimes grab objects on a raised platform or through a solid linedef, like the key in E4M1 or dropped shotguns on a slightly raised platform that are normally just out of reach.

 

-This one is well known, but pinkies and revenants will miss their melee attack if you bait it out with good timing. You can generally exploit the hell out of this once you know the general idea. Comes in useful in E3M1 and E3M3 where you're likely to fight them with a pistol or regular fist. If you have a shotgun then pinkies will basically never be an immediate threat in the original games except by physically blocking your escape.

 

-Doors will crush dropped weapons from zombies, as well as any corpses that fall under them. You permanently lose the items this way if you let it close before grabbing them. This can also cause "ghost monsters" in vanilla accurate ports if a crushed corpse is resurrected, though this is generally rare in the original games. 

 

23 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

-A point-blank super shotgun shot produces damage similar to a rocket.

Yes, but shot for shot damage is a lot less relevant than other factors, such as:

 

Spoiler

-Rockets deal AOE damage to potentially multiple targets, which can make the overall damage per shot higher than the SSG in some cases. Particularly if you take advantage of an obscure vanilla bug where monsters take damage from the same rocket twice.

 

-Rockets also fire about 2.5 times faster than the SSG. Which is a pretty massive difference. You could kill 3 grouped Hell Knights in similar time it takes to SSG one.

 

-Rockets are much better at a distance, even a modest distance. The SSG's spread is still pretty effective at mid range, but any changes in elevation or obstructions like windows between you and the monster might also block pellets. Pretty soon that Hell Knight is taking 5 or 6 shots instead of 3. Granted, shells are not remotely scarce, but still nobody likes taking all day.

 

-If you have a chance to run up to a group of enemies, or you know where they'll appear, you can prefire or stack up rockets or BFG and take advantage of the travel time of the projectile. Fire, trigger the ambush, then clean up.

 

-Max rocket ammo also provides double the shots compared to the SSG with max shells, for higher overall killing capacity.

 

-Rockets are scarce in Doom 1 and 2 and there are few fights that can't be bullied by the SSG and circle strafing. For this reason, and the fact switching weapons is inconvenient, people tend to never use it even though it's one of the most important tools in harder maps and speedruns when the user is skilled with it.

 

-If you're in a fight against a crowd in an open area and you're spamming, the RL is leagues better in terms of overall DPS compared to the SSG, even against single targets. 

 

-The RL even outpaces the plasma by a decent margin, with the only exception being against boss monsters immune to splash damage. But the RL is still a decent bit better than the SSG in those cases, as long as you have abundant rockets. 

 

 

-The chaingun is also strictly better than the regular shotgun in terms of DPS. Granted it has poor ammo capacity but the shotgun does around 2/3 the damage per second assuming all pellets hit. 

 

-Your chaingun and plasma, as well as the chainsaw to a lesser extent, are very useful for stunlocking enemies. The chaingun in particular can be used as a defensive weapon if you are low on health, since it can be used from around cover without exposing yourself to enemy fire, as well as preventing the enemies from attacking. Remember that it's often possible to block enemy projectiles with a wall because they have width to them, but you may still be able to hit the monsters with hitscan because it only barely requires line of sight.