If you could rebalance Doom 2, what would you change?

Kamikaze Keen? :-P

1 hour ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

The actual problem is the size of that thing.

She has too much blank space in her sprite indeed. Ugh the only imaginary "female" monster in the club and she has to have a lot of flaws. 

17 minutes ago, geo said:

I'd make Commander Keen more of a threat.

Keen runs around shooting you with whatever he uses in the games.

A few thoughts...

Make the Spider Mastermind more of a real boss, rather than the pushover it is. (It can't even win a 1v1 with a Cyberdemon, and sticking a BFG in its face usually kills it in one hit). Maybe double its health, give it a super-plasma rifle instead of the chaingun and perhaps access to the BFG ball as well (Though yes, that's a little too OP, since taking a BFG to the face will kill you instantly). Or maybe give it a railgun as a sniping hitscan-type weapon instead?

Give wings to the Baron of Hell and turn it into a flight-capable monster? Maybe add the revenant projectile to turn it into more of a high-priority miniboss of sorts.

Nerf the Archvile health to 500, reduce running speed and fixed damage from flame attack from 82 to 61 on UV. Add in an invisible revival or damage counter so that the Arch-vile automatically dies after reviving X number of monsters if the player doesn't kill it first.

I could also agree with moving the Super Shotgun to a later level. Like Map 07 would be a good introduction, when you face off against the Mancs and Arachnotrons which can certainly tank the increased firepower

Personally, I always thought that the Bullet and Plasma ammo capacities should have been flipped, where you have up to 600 bullets and only 400 Plasma, because the Chaingun always burns through ammo a little too fast, and the Pistol isn't very useful.  Ammo adjustments so that the clip (7/15) and box (100) would provide a little more ammo, and the cell pack gives 80.

Change the BFG ammo use from 40 to 60 per shot (In addition to the 400 ammo cap) to make it more of a use-sparingly type of ultimate weapon.

Also, while the Icon of Sin is a classic boss fight, I'd like to see it turned into a REAL boss fight more along the lines of what I've seen from modern scripted doom boss fights. (Basically, turn the IoS into a giant monster with a hefty health pool and make a final boss-esque arena map of some sort out of it, and add in the boss cube spawners too~)

15 minutes ago, TootsyBowl said:

Keen runs around shooting you with whatever he uses in the games.

... or whatever gun you're currently using.

Just now, geo said:

... or whatever gun you're currently using.

Berserk duel.

28 minutes ago, TootsyBowl said:

Berserk duel.

I think Keen would win. He has a helmet on while Doomguy clearly has no helmet as evidenced by the photo at the bottom of the screen. Maybe that's a balance option. Doomguy needs more hats. Hats do different things like double jump!

Just now, geo said:

I think Keen would win. He has a helmet on while Doomguy clearly has no helmet as evidenced by the photo at the bottom of the screen. Maybe that's a balance option. Doomguy needs more hats. Hats do different things like double jump!

I don't think that his bare face showing up in the HUD means that he isn't actually wearing a helmet. And even if he doesn't have one, he is punching an 8 year old with 10 times his normal strength.

There is so much eww in this thread. I really feel like many of the proposed changes would butcher the game.

56 minutes ago, Traysandor said:

It can't even win a 1v1 with a Cyberdemon

Yes she can, but depending on the context.

This is just one example of all the times she wins in that map. Basically, face-to-face combat, SMM owns it, and the more distanced they are from each other, the more possibilities has the cyber to win. 

(Ignore the quality, I was holding my cellphone with one hand while using the other to kinda control doomguy)

5 hours ago, KVELLER said:

I don't think that his bare face showing up in the HUD means that he isn't actually wearing a helmet. And even if he doesn't have one, he is punching an 8 year old with 10 times his normal strength.

I am happy you understood the joke and didn't need it explained.

5 hours ago, MrGlide said:

There is so much eww in this thread. I really feel like many of the proposed changes would butcher the game.

Well, such threads predictably turn out like an ancient Navajo legend about the origins of Man: Coyote originally asked the other animals to "design" Man, but each animal essentially wanted Man to be exactly like themselves. ;-)

I see suggestions to change what map the SSG appear on pop a lot; Don't think those change anything especially when the maps are balanced for pistol start. 

SSG was not needed to be introduced as early as in the second level. There are Hellknight and Revenant encounters before map 7, but too sparse to merit a new gun. In contrast, map 7 has nothing but a set of relatively durable and newly introduced enemies. In my opinion, the gun works perfectly on its own in Dead Simple.

I'm fine with SS being introduced early, it's a gameplay changer weapon, IMO, and nothing is better than killing these bulky pinkies with only one shot.

• The pistol is overpowered.
• I'd replace demons with lemons.
• SSG and RL are too much fun, they can't be balanced right.
• There's a bug where sometimes maps are hard.
• The gameplay should be different and bad.

D2 is what i consider the best game in the world ever made so far! Pretty powerful statement , i know but to me its the perfect balance of action / puzzle / mystery / exploration. i would only change the pistol which is practically useless in the first few minutes. It needs a secondary ability like a zoom scope or charge shot or unlimited ammo or something that makes it possible (but not better) to be used throughout a level. 

Apart from that, DOOM II is perfect for me.

10 hours ago, galileo31dos01 said:

She has too much blank space in her sprite indeed.

The sprite is not the issue. The issue is how huge the hitbox of the SMM is, because the hitbox dictates how much space that thing has to have to be able move (even when turreted) and shoot for that matter. This huge hitbox also is one of the reasons you barely see that thing go up or down stairs.

The problems with the SMM aren't visual problems, they're mechanical problems. You could comfortably swap just about any loosely placed monster for another, except for the SMM.

To put this into perspective, the player is 32 map units wide, the mancubus is 96 map units wide, and the SMM is 256 map units wide.

3 hours ago, geo said:

I am happy you understood the joke and didn't need it explained.

I fucked up again, didn't I?... I seriously need to stop logging into Doomworld when I should be sleeping.

2 minutes ago, KVELLER said:

I fucked up again, didn't I?... I seriously need to stop logging into Doomworld when I should be sleeping.

Don't you know? Internet is serious business.

The best thing about the spider mastermind is that the game dictates that the largest thing is supposed to be no larger than 64 units in diameter in order to have reasonable, solid collisions, before things start breaking down. (though the source comments indicate they were fully aware of this and rationalized it as them not having "any moving sectors nearby"... sure, that's true on dis but other collisions are still messy)

So then we get a monster that's twice that and as a result they have a tendency to get stuck. heh.

I guess I'll add one more thing to my short list: Make the spider mastermind smaller.

It would be nice if taking a hit from an Archvile wasn't the equivalent of taking a hit from a flaming truck.

Why do many people seem to have a hard-on for the Revenant? It's like Serious Sam's Reptiloid, but faster and with much more persistent projectiles.

2 minutes ago, TootsyBowl said:

Why do many people seem to have a hard-on for the Revenant? It's like Serious Sam's Reptiloid, but faster and with much more persistent projectiles.

Rev, mancubi, and trons are the only things that make dodging projectiles remotely interesting in Doom, the revenant in particular is really important in that respect. You don't fix what isn't broken is what I'm saying.

1 hour ago, TootsyBowl said:

Why do many people seem to have a hard-on for the Revenant? It's like Serious Sam's Reptiloid, but faster and with much more persistent projectiles.

Well, I don't think they are comparable due to a common feature as a homing missile user... If you think the red robots (forget the name) in SS is comparable to Cyberdemons, that's also not right... just an analogy. Now I'm thinking because there isn't that much RNG in Serious Sam, these two games may be similar, but not the same type judging from the bases.

Reptiloids has relatively low damage (20 on Serious), and the projectiles can be destroyed. They are mostly annoying rather than the actual threat.

Echoing and expanding on what MrGlide said already, some people here aren't rebalancing the game, they're much rather completely revamping it in their own interest, which at times seems to end up as a means to compensate for their own shortcomings by way of nerfing enemies, or boosting their own firepower, and some of the suggestions here are nothing short of "mindbending" or "puzzling". This one for instance speaks volumes:

Quote

-Plasma rifle shots deal 7 damage instead of 5 and have +5 speed(I always thought the plasma rifle did crappy damage compared to the rocket launcher)

Plasma rifle rounds deal 5-40 damage, meaning 22.5 on average. What's more is that the PR and the RL are vastly different weapons for vastly different purposes, thus they excel at vastly different things. "Rebalancing" the PR so it deals as much dmg as the RL? In what situation? When and why? How many things are around?

Maybe it should be established that there's a ginormous difference between balancing and a total conversion mod that would break most, if not all decent to awesome megawads/maps.

• Lowering the Lost Soul's health, as previously mentioned.
• Making the Shotgun shoot 10 pellets instead of 7. This one is more of an OCD thing, because the Super shotgun shoots 20 pellets.
• Making it so the revenant fireball deals 8 base damage instead of 10. It seems a tad unfair that it deals the highest damage out of all enemy projectiles(except for the cyberdemon) on top of homing. Also, make they always home in.
• Make it so the Baron of Hell can shoot in 3 directions. That would make him more interesting than just being an Imp on steroids.
• Maaaybe make the Baron/HKnight fireball deal 10 base damage. It kind of makes sense that they would pack this much of a wallop.
• Make it so the Blursphere works like it does on ZDoom.

This thread in a nutshell:

"How would you like your Doom 2?"

"I would like it if..."

"Wrong."

Therefore I won't say much other than if the lost souls could be killed with one shot from the shotgun.

@MrGlideActually, because the thread makes me thinking about things a lot, may I have some of your opinions?

To be honest, it's difficult to get out of "personal interest(s)" when talking about "rebalancing". For example, I posted and said picking up an Armor with 99-% MegaArmor should blah blah. This is one thing that I don't really like about Classic Doom, in other word, one of my subjective opinion. However, if a map really force me to take an Armor after some fights with MegaArmor, I'll just try my best not to fall below 100% MegaArmor instead of saying this design sucks.

Then, I want to know whether the balance is about Single Player or Multi-Player or both. In my opinion, I don't think SP games need to be balanced. For instance, people like to propose changes in order to make Pistol useful, but for me, it doesn't matter if there's a useless (mostly) weapon. Judging a SP game by whether it's balanced is somewhat similar to judging a SP game by the graphics, which I guess quite some people like to do. Moving on, I assume that MP games usually involve competition, so players do want some balance. Back in the days, I heard some people said "games from Blizzard are good because they're balanced, other games are, meh", at least in my native country. I don't play MP PC games. If board games count as MP games, they're probably the only ones I would play. Sometimes I'll say a board game is not balanced because of competitive gameplay or such, so I think this may be a MP problem?

Well, I hope you understand my point here. I just think there's nothing wrong with Doom, and I just don't know how to make a point that's as objective as possible, I guess.

OP asked what would you change in Doom 2, Is it that surprising that people posted what they think? Didn't even ask people what are they basing their changes on.(Slaughters, Iwad, speedruns, beginner, logic, dislikes etc)