What are your Doom Habits

whats this thread about again? I can't think of any Doom habits. I kill everything I see, I pick up ammo and health even when I don't need it because I doubt I'm going to come back to it, I check skulls and lion/satyr/gargoyle heads for secrets, I aim at monsters with the Super Shotgun at 45 degree angles to maximize damage. Do those qualify as habits?

40oz said:

I aim at monsters with the Super Shotgun at 45 degree angles to maximize damage.

??? Why and how does this help?

I think he means the hitbox appears larger then, and possibly more pellets will hit the target.

I read about it in a thread about SSG "swingshots" here a year or two ago, but someone used pythagoreon theorem and found it has something to do with the distance between opposite corners of the hitbox is longer than any one of the faces of the hit box, so you if you face a monsters hitbox from the corners with the super shotgun, you can hit it with 100% accuracy from a little longer distance than if you were to shoot it head on. I get Cacodemons in two shots and Mancubi in three every time.

I tend to headshot smaller enemies despite knowing it makes no difference, which is purely a pointless habit but feels natural as I'm using mouselook. Bigger ones tend to either get hosed up and down or just have their centre-mass focussed on. I also try and "balance" my ammo whenever I'm faced with a lot of hitpoints but minimal threat (say a horde of Knights and/or Barons) by rounding out my ammo for various guns to numbers that work well with pickups and switching between weapons frequently. I tend to take my finger off of the trigger on the chaingun when switching targets, leading to a fair bit of chaingun-sniping even in close quarters with a densely packed crowd of enemies. Plasma gun having the recoil/cooling animation puts me off doing that for it though, so there's some spray going on there usually.

Like others, I try not to waste ammo, health or armour pickups by leaving them until I've got space for roughly the amount they'd give and I also save scum. Key cards, obvious traps or arenas, the aftermath of a big battle, low health - they're all checkpoints to me. The low health one tends to mix in with my previously stated belief that my skill is inversely proportional to my health, so from that save I tend to fight my way up to full health and a comfortable position, but it can lead to tiresome trial-and-error sessions (when I'm not lazy enough to just use "resurrect" in the console).


Weirdest habit though? At any real distance with the shotgun (particularly when bullets aren't as plentiful as I'd prefer) I aim slightly off-centre to my target as I'm convinced the randomisation makes directly hitting the crosshair less likely than hitting just near it.


Most unhelpful? I seem to compulsively bring up the map briefly every now and then, even in a firefight, despite not really looking at it and still attempting to play as though it's not there. Maybe I'm subconsciously getting a bit of awareness of my immediate area from it, but I doubt it.

Avoozl said:

Soldier of Fortune 2 Double Helix had a pretty good pumpaction shotgun.

I remember it being quite fun blasting peoples limbs off with it after obtaining it for the first time in the hotel map.

I knew there was another one. The hotel map (or is it like some rich dudes house? Was easily one of my favorite maps in a game. Like when the grenade goes off and throws glass all over the dudes standing next to te window haha.
I'm gonna say max Payne two had killer shot gunning too actually.

It's a shame games need the shotgun so hard. A game with a good shotgun will pretty make make me play it. Like...MAKE me haha.

Oh yeah, I forgot about chaingun sniping. I've made that a staple of my Doom techniques... such to the point that I sometimes have a habit of doing so at close range as well, when it is nearly useless (there is one advantage: I tend to waste less ammo because I'm not still shooting after the enemy dies)

In fact, I've found an expected number of chaingun bursts per enemy (smaller enemies only) that I often adhere to:

Zombieman: 1 burst
Shotgun Guy: 2 bursts
Chaingunner: 3 bursts or so?
Imp: 4 bursts or so?
Pinky Demon: I forgot. Better to use shotgun, chainsaw, or berserk (FIST-ING) anyway.
Lost Soul: 5 bursts

Anything else, as far as I can remember, I use heavier ordinance, which usually means the super shotgun. Trying to use more rockets on Barons

i like to explore maps when i play them for the first time. if i reach the exit, but there are areas i have not seen, i save here, go back and try to find every secret and kill every monster...

...if the map is not overly large and requires much backtracking. it's frustrating to stand in some hallway littered with corpses and have no clue how to get back to that door.

i tend to use mostly ssg and save cells for "the next big fight" until i stand loaded with them at the exit. also love berserk and blowing up weak monsters with rockets and barrels, especially with gore mods.

what's with this savegame mania, saving less makes the game more interesting. except when there are parts of the map i don't want to play again, mostly related to acid / lava and narrow ledges.

BaronOfStuff said:

Doom 3's shotgun is so fucking horrible that it's not even funny. I have to edit the weapon's definition every time I reinstall Doom 3 now; a shotgun should have a more effective range than 'point blank'.

this. seriously, i often had the shotgun literally in an imp's face and still didn't kill it.

I try to find every single secret and kill every single monster

Huh, I found it easy to kill an Imp at close range with a shotgun in Doom 3, even when they were halfway through spawning.

Avoozl said:

Huh, I found it easy to kill an Imp at close range with a shotgun in Doom 3, even when they were halfway through spawning.

Yeah, the shotty was awesome in D3 precisely because to use it most effectively you had to run up to someone, putting yourself in more danger. There were plenty of weapons for long range, I dunno why anyone'd want the shotty to also be that. What point would there be anyways? It's not like you could kill several zombies in one shot anyways, enemies are tougher in D3. Having it be a short range weapon made it much more interesting to use, and not the one weapon you always default to like in D1-2.

Enzo03 said:

Chaingunner: 3 bursts or so?
Imp: 4 bursts or so?

You should do 3 on imps and 4 on chaingunners, since chaingunners have 10 more hp than imps.

i always count* the number of sg/ssg/rl shots against the "mid tier" monsters like cacos and hellknights and barons, and i have an impeccable intuition on how much plasmarifle pain each monster can take :D :)

*and it's fun to keep track when you've fired say 8 sg shots against a baron, and you need to switch target and keep track of two separate counts..

40oz said:

I read about it in a thread about SSG "swingshots" here a year or two ago, but someone used pythagoreon theorem and found it has something to do with the distance between opposite corners of the hitbox is longer than any one of the faces of the hit box, so you if you face a monsters hitbox from the corners with the super shotgun, you can hit it with 100% accuracy from a little longer distance than if you were to shoot it head on. I get Cacodemons in two shots and Mancubi in three every time.

I guess I do little the same because I try to avoid shooting directly north, south, west and east because of the block map bug, especially with the ssg and chaingun.

I always shove my weapons up the different demon faces when I can.

I'm usually turned off by most WADs if their first/second map is too easy. I just like getting into things right off the bat, since I find those easy first maps to be tedious.

Use only doom weapons in doom2 (seeya ssg) unless I really need to

>bind z resurrect
>never save again

This has ruined how I play in co-op.

Ragnor said:

The only modern FPS shotgun ive ever really enjoyed was Halo's one, and only against the Flood. It actually felt useful then. I loved some of Mass Effect 3's shotguns, but yeah, not an FPS

Ugh, the Halo shotgun. Immensely powerful in Halo Reach but crippled by limited ammo capacity, scarcity of reload, limited effective range, slow rate of fire, slow reload speed, very powerful enemy melee attacks... I almost never use the Halo shotgun. Kudos for being brave enough to use on in multiplayer, but I'd stick to battle rifles and plasma guns. :)

Doom habits? I tend to charge straight in, taking lots of damage and aggravating lots of monsters, quite often killing the minions in droves and using them as meat-shields against the more powerful enemies. My approach is very aggressive and leads to me getting killed even on easier maps. Ironically, when playing on the PSX I am the total opposite: nervous, easily spooked, moving slower and more cautiously, being more aware of the environment, knowing my escape route and so wired that the slightest sound will cause me to open fire.

I always find all the secrets and kill all monsters before exit the level, each map.
Also, if I can, I would use chainsaw to melee with pinkydemon for not wasting bullets.

Fellowzdoomer said:

Use only doom weapons in doom2 (seeya ssg) unless I really need to

Is this a self imposed challenge or do you simply not like the ssg? Also, you are bound to find yourself out of ammo on ammo-tight maps if you do that.

killer2 said:

1: Is this a self imposed challenge or do you simply not like the ssg?

2: Also, you are bound to find yourself out of ammo on ammo-tight maps if you do that.

1: Kinda both. I just like the shotguns long range and accuracy (insert corny "I <3 shotgun" tshirt here)

2: The SSG takes 2 shells. The Shotgun takes 1. I find it easier to conserve ammo. If I use the SSG, I use it only for slaughter maps (heck, sometimes not even!)

Fellowzdoomer said:

2: The SSG takes 2 shells. The Shotgun takes 1. I find it easier to conserve ammo.

SSG has a 20 hitscan attack. SG only has a 7 hitscan attack. You're conserving jack shit except monster health.

How accurate?

I used to savewhore with the best worst of them, until it stopped being fun to be able to load whenever you want. I wish there was a mod or port that allowed you to add save things to maps that when you pick 'em up it saves the game. That, or walk over linedefs that save the game for you, so that you don't have to redo the entire map, but also don't have complete free reign to ruin the game with scum saving.

Unless you mean disabling manual saving as well, there's various ways to do checkpoints in ZDoom ports. On the player side it should be as simple as a decorate file adding an autosave on pickup on select key items, i.e. keys and/or weapons. On the modder side I'm relatively sure you can do everything you listed.

Fellowzdoomer said:

2: The SSG takes 2 shells. The Shotgun takes 1. I find it easier to conserve ammo. If I use the SSG, I use it only for slaughter maps (heck, sometimes not even!)

The shotguns spread is only scattered in a horizontal line, while the super shotgun is scattered almost every where.

Hellbent said:

I used to savewhore with the best worst of them, until it stopped being fun to be able to load whenever you want. I wish there was a mod or port that allowed you to add save things to maps that when you pick 'em up it saves the game. That, or walk over linedefs that save the game for you, so that you don't have to redo the entire map, but also don't have complete free reign to ruin the game with scum saving.

I totally agree with that, a checkpoint system (without allowing saves) would work very nicely in Doom.