Starting Slaughter WAD

I'm going to preface this by saying that I heard the term "slaughter WAD" a while ago, but I don't know if it's a commonly recognized term.  What I mean by a slaughter map is a map that just throws way too many enemies at you at once and expects you to dance between waves of enemies and probably abuse your BFG like it owes you money.

I think I may have made a thread about this years ago, but I don't know how I could even attempt to find it, plus I'm sure tons of new wads have come out since then.  I've had a goal for a long time of playing through Sunder (which I'm sure is not the hardest slaughter wad out there, it's just the first one I was ever shown) while using the Brutal Doom mod.  I've been told that, due to the mechanical changes of Brutal Doom (like reloading, the AI changes such as their aggressions and damage outputs, etc) that Sunder will never be possible with the Brutal Doom mod.  I laugh, as I have always said that, with enough determination, wiling to reload, and abuse of the save game option, that any map can be beaten.  Despite this, I've only beaten the first level of Sunder before taking time away to get better at playing these types of maps, because lets face it, they're a major step up from vanilla Doom and Doom 2 maps.

I was playing some more creative maps that didn't have nearly the difficulty of a slaughter map, and I've quickly learned how much playing on Brutal can be, well, brutal.  On One Monster, for example, a map of nothing but Shotgun Guys shouldn't be too bad, but when a bunch of them spawn in at once, just mow them down with a chaingun without brutal, but with brutal... it's a lot harder.  Regardless of this spike in difficulty due to most of these wads being built without brutal in mind, I've gotten through them.  Recently I played through Scythe, which I've heard is "the original slaughter wad".  It was a lot of fun, and every level was small, cramped, but filled with monsters while still having the breathing room to dance around them.  It was a wad that forced me to be a lot more aggressive than most and I truly enjoyed it.  I also managed to beat the entire wad with the exception of the last level without saving mid-level (though the level with 666 enemies was far from easy) and I had heard that Scythe 2 was a much harder sequel.  Somewhere around map 23 or so I'm seeing what people were talking about, the difficulty spike is intense, especially given that I don't have a BFG due to the episodic structure of Scythe and Scythe 2, killing you at the exit every 5 levels of the latter.

I decided that I want to take a break from Scythe 2 and play some other slaughter wads that will bridge the gap between Scythe and Scythe 2's respective difficulties.  So, the long winded question here is: does anyone have suggestions for slaughter wads that will bridge that gap for me, so I can work my way up to Scythe 2?

First of all, to call the Scythe wads exclusive slaughterwads in their total length isn't really fair, as they contain all kinds of levels, just like most megawads they influenced that has been released since.

In order to learn how to play wads with lots of monsters and tight situations I would recommend playing hard wads without mods (vanilla rules) a lot, as most of the really well thought out, more difficult wads, are thoroughly designed with vanilla gameplay in mind. Play on UV difficulty, and learn how to develop effective strategies for each fight that can be reproduced reliably. When you understand the gameplay in this way it will be more intuitive to figure out which maps could be played in a fun way with mods like Brutal Doom.

There's this thread for wad recommendations:

Good luck.

I had the exact same question awhile back and I was told Hell Revealed 1 and 2 were great places to start. Right now I'm about a third of the way through the 1st HR and I love it so far. Starts off easy but works its way up quickly a couple levels in. Highly recommend it:)

13 hours ago, wintertowns said:

First of all, to call the Scythe wads exclusive slaughterwads in their total length isn't really fair, as they contain all kinds of levels, just like most megawads they influenced that has been released since.

 

In order to learn how to play wads with lots of monsters and tight situations I would recommend playing hard wads without mods (vanilla rules) a lot, as most of the really well thought out, more difficult wads, are thoroughly designed with vanilla gameplay in mind. Play on UV difficulty, and learn how to develop effective strategies for each fight that can be reproduced reliably. When you understand the gameplay in this way it will be more intuitive to figure out which maps could be played in a fun way with mods like Brutal Doom.

 

There's this thread for wad recommendations:

 

 

Good luck.

I'll look through this thread for a bunch of WADs.  I've found a few from scanning it quickly earlier.  Thank you!

6 hours ago, Beezle said:

I had the exact same question awhile back and I was told Hell Revealed 1 and 2 were great places to start. Right now I'm about a third of the way through the 1st HR and I love it so far. Starts off easy but works its way up quickly a couple levels in. Highly recommend it:)

It's strange you mention HR, because I could have sworn I've played through at least the first one, but I don't have it on my computer.  My only guess is that I started it before my last computer died, and I just never downloaded it on this one.  I'll check it out, thank you.