Daerik

Map20 UV-Max in 6:47 - sl20m647.zip yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_niNhS8wRoY

Ancient Aliens Map13 UV-Speed in 1:04.80 - aa13-104.zip

Ancient Aliens Map13 UV-Speed in 1:05.54 - aa13-105.zip

Ancient Aliens Map13 UV-Speed in 1:05.89 - aa13-105.zip

Sunlust Map27 UV-Max in 5:21.43 - sl27m521.zip

Map31 UV-Max in 8:43 - aa31m843.zip yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcmou1B2SOw

Map02 UV-Max in 2:10 - aa02m210.zip yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PImk7fssV8 Definitely a lot more room left to optimize this if someone wants to grind it.

A pretty notorious fight for how rough it can be. I gave it a few attempts first then watched both Decino's run through it and your attempts. As a whole I get the feeling you're trying to too rigidly stick to the strategy you're copying from Decino. You also struggle a bit with vile management. On the first demo, you run straight back into the wall where the Vile that's targeting you from behind the megasphere has LoS. You could easily dodge this by just continuing to stay along the left wall. On the second attempt, you charge both viles as they start targeting you and I feel there may be enough time to backpedal to the corner as soon as you see them both start attacking. You also steal aggro from one of the viles mid attack by spamming plasma (fyi if you're not aware but Viles are always aggressive to the last thing that damages them, and will even switch targets mid attack, so if you see one attacking and it's not facing you, just let it finish attacking before you start shooting). After you make it to the corner after getting the SSG, you can see one of the two stuck viles start targeting you, but you pop back out before it's had enough time to finish attacking and die to it. On the third demo, getting zapped sort of throws you off entirely and you're slow to kill most of the threats before you get overwhelmed. Try and be a bit more fluid with a strategy, once you're at the SSG you should be mostly set to freeform it from there, you don't necessarily have to continue sticking to a route. More importantly though, try and dedicate more of your mental stack to tracking Viles, where they are, where they're attacking, where they have LoS to you, and try and play around them accordingly. Rewatch your own three attempts and pay attention to when you're getting zapped each time, use third person camera and rewinds to really understand what's happening, because they seem to be the biggest contributor to your deaths.

If you'd like some actual advice with this one scenario, post both the video you watched and a recording/demo of your own gameplay. Saveless isn't the end all of getting good. There's some merit to using it as a way to build consistency over longer periods of gameplay but it just as easily can make someone defer to safe easy strats/cheesing encounters outright. I think a better avenue to improve is only using saves before difficult segments and then repeating those segments until it feels like you have a solid understanding of it.

Toad D2All UV-Speed in 15:27 - toadall-1527.zip yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsponsJKW_A

Sorry, more accurately, an average bfg shot is 3120~ damage for 40 cells, plasma is 900~ damage for the same amount of ammo. So, about 3.5x the damage. It gets even worse when you look at their average dps, 2730~ and 262.5~ respectively, which is an actually relevant metric. You could shoot the plasma for 10 seconds and still not do as much damage as a single bfg shot, which definitely doesn't take 10 seconds. But sure, lets pretend that how long it takes to "recover" from shooting one shot is ever the determining factor in what weapon you want to use.

This isn't a fighting game, your nonsense about frame data and recovery time is meaningless because you're not locked out of moving while you're shooting like you would be in a fighting game. BFG deals more than double the damage of the plasma gun for the same amount of ammo spent.

I use saves quite often in casual playthroughs, most often before starting a new encounter, granted I tend to play maps where encounters are more defined and there's less incidental exploration > filler combat. Repeating the same segment over and over doesn't really make you improve, it's more time efficient to analyze the mistakes you're making in difficult fights and fixing them. You're not alone in thinking this, and there's some truth to it imo. People use it way to liberally to rewind when they eat a max damage rev missile and the like.

Stardate 20x7 Map08 UV-Max in 7:21 - st708m721.zip yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88uW4yqH2xw

What is there to even discuss? For every possible facet of the game, there are going to be things some people like and others don’t like. Anyone is capable of downloading the map making tools and creating the kind of content they enjoy, so it’s almost always wasted effort to complain about other peoples works not being tailored to what you enjoy when you can just do it yourself. By posting “I don’t like x” there’s not much to say other than “haha yeah x sucks” or “actually here’s why x is fine”. The former response leads to nothing of substance, and the latter almost always turns into people shouting past one another until the thread is locked because very few people ever post with the intent of having their mind changed.