WAD's with really long, slow-ramping difficulty curves?

Hi. I decided to finally try DoomRL and of course had to fuck around a bit to see some of the weapons. I found out most of the early weapons are fairly weaksauce and most of the latter ones are batshit amazing.

Anyways long-story short think the best WAD's are those with really slow-ramping difficulty curves (ideally 60-70 monsters early maps, 100-200 mid, 200-600 mid-late with slaughtermaps as the last maps). Can anyone give me some ideas?

You need to keep in mind that just looking at monster count has no bearing on the difficulty of the map. I tried this for a while too, but realized that there are plenty of maps with 50 or fewer monsters that beat then hell out of me harder than maps with 500 monsters.

Try Memento Mori. It is not difficult but a difficulty curve is there.

Alien Vendetta, maybe Unholy Realms too.

Scythe 1 and 2 ramp up quite well with short and easy maps early on and some serious stuff towards the end.

General Rainbow Bacon said:

You need to keep in mind that just looking at monster count has no bearing on the difficulty of the map. I tried this for a while too, but realized that there are plenty of maps with 50 or fewer monsters that beat then hell out of me harder than maps with 500 monsters.

Yeah, this. Sunlust is a really good example.

Going Down and Resurgence might count as examples, although not the most distinct ones.

I agree about Memento Mori, but you should know that it's one of the oldest Megawads in existence and has a few really bad apples in it ("Cesspool"...what were they thinking).

The difficulty curve in both Scythe wads is indeed consistent, but it can be a little abrupt to say the least. This might sound like a contradiction at first, but it makes sense when you look at the final maps.

If you're going to play Resurgence, you might want to check out Speed of Doom first since they pretty much go hand in hand. In their case, they start out hard, but then they only get harder. They're also really, really, really good.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions guys. Time to get going.

scifista42 said:

Going Down and Resurgence might count as examples, although not the most distinct ones.

OP should keep in mind though that these mods have these forced "death exits" in them, which makes you lose all your weapons and armor upon entering them. which doesn't work well with DRLA, where the purpose is to be constantly building up your arsenal throughout the level.

Budoka said:

I agree about Memento Mori, but you should know that it's one of the oldest Megawads in existence and has a few really bad apples in it ("Cesspool"...what were they thinking).

The difficulty curve in both Scythe wads is indeed consistent, but it can be a little abrupt to say the least. This might sound like a contradiction at first, but it makes sense when you look at the final maps.

If you're going to play Resurgence, you might want to check out Speed of Doom first since they pretty much go hand in hand. In their case, they start out hard, but then they only get harder. They're also really, really, really good.

Yeah, Cesspool and Island of Death are too easy for how late they are in the game. The former is just dumb and ugly, but plays OK while the latter can be completed in < 30 seconds.

I can't say anything good about Cesspool, but Island of Death is quite a nice breather map after City of the Unavenged, even if you can get to the end in half a minute.

Besides, difficulty curves don't need to slowly and consistently raise throughout every map of the set. It's nice to have peaks and troughs.