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Lila Feuer

Playing Doom II games without the SSG

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Has anyone ever tried it? And if so, how did it go? I thought of it as a sort of "challenge" by relying on the regular shotgun more, had there not been another one. This would make some battles more tough, or more tedious, depending on the circumstances. I know the new D2 monsters, whose health ranges 500-700 would be annoying to gun down with it, but it's an interesting "challenge" no less. It wouldn't be too fun on a map that heavily emphasizes the SSG. Which could be argued is every map in D2 games, they often group a lot of battles together tightly and there's many more monsters, which just demands an SSG blast or two. But what if you tried picking them off with just the single barrel, had there never been an SSG in D2?

The shotgun isn't necessarily a bad weapon (it's speed and accuracy is an advantage over the SSG) but it's definitely underused when you acquire the SSG, as you'd rely more on the chaingun for accuracy and speed (at least that's what I do in D2). Whereas IMO the chaingun in D1 feels "boring" the shotgun is THE default weapon of D1.

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I tend to use the shotgun pretty often, especially because of the abundance of shells in most wads that expect SSG combat. I'll otherwise use it for tedious stuff like armies of hell knights or fleets of cacodemons. AV type stuff.

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I've never been a fan of the SSG. I hate waiting for it to reload. But with the way lots of maps are that throw so many monsters at you, the regular shotgun seems too slow. Also I can't help feeling I'm wasting 3 pellets per shell, though since I play on skill 1 I shouldn't really care. I might try it for a while anyway.

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It's kind of a pain to use the regular shotgun in Doom II, because both it and the SSG are bound to the same key. So you have to hit "3" twice, which slows you down quite a bit. And every source port I tried (chocolate, odamex, prboom and its ancestors) makes no provisions for binding different keys for these two weapons.

I guess you could get around that by purposefully avoiding SSG pickups.

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I wrote a dehacked patch a while ago that replaced the SSG with the standard shotgun, and reduced the health of some of the tougher monsters by 10%-40% to compensate. It was kind of fun to play that way, but it was still a tad tedious.

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DuckReconMajor said:

I've never been a fan of the SSG. I hate waiting for it to reload.

This was never an issue for me. The reload gives me time to strafe to avoid surrounding demons projectiles and dive back into the monster for a second point-blank hit.

The SSG needs to be treated like one would treat a jousting lance.

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SSG denial can also be a difficulty inflation tactic, exactly because the lack of it makes facing all those new mid-tier monsters in Doom II so tedious and hazardous, and also because suddenly, your 50 or so shells suddenly don't pack the punch of 75 anymore.

Jodwin is well known for using this tactic in most of the maps, where the player is required to go through an initial "tribulation" period with the regular shotty (which also proves ammo-consuming because of the many shells required to kill Knight, Revvies etc.) before being permitted to grab a SSG, which is treated as a "luxury" weapon for the latter parts of the map.

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I hate tackling numerous barons or swarms of say cacos with the regular shotgun. There were two maps in memento mori 2 that I can recall quite painfully because in either map, the only SSG(s) were hidden, making the maps sans secrets either incredibly tedious or nearly impossible for me to complete before I gave up and divined their locations.

I'm not opposed to using the single shotty. One of my favorite maps from Heroes started the player in a cramped room with four doors, one of which had a shotty, another containing a baron; the ensuing dogfight was pretty intense for me at the time. And part of the thrill of the original Doom for me was taking on multiple toughs, like demons and cacodemons, with say a single shotty. You can plink away at an advancing horde but they would almost always advance faster than you can kill them, whereas with a super shotgun, you can deal with them pretty handily.

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Not using the SSG in doom 2? Oh don't joke lol. I really like the SSG a lot, it's so powerful and useful, especially against tough monsters like barons and archviles. Anyway sometimes I may try to use the shotgun for safety use, for example Vile Flesh map11 I use it against the first archvile.

I like the SSG, I always like to use it at all times! :D

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Seeing that not using the regular shotgun against the barons is tedium incarnate, I see NO reason why I should not stick with the SSG. (By the way, the only way I would ever use the regular shotgun in Scoredoom is that if I have a quad damage powerup when playing with the add-on pack... except if I'm up against those quad-digit hp enemies.)

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The SSG is very satisfying to use and it adds a lot to Doom 2. That said not every map ever made should rely on it. What's wrong with building a challenging map that doesn't have Revenant spam for example? It would be nice to see maps that rely more on the other weapons. I loved the PSX tribute wad with the Unmaker, ripping zombies and Imps apart at long range in a single shot.

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Mithran Denizen said:

I wrote a dehacked patch a while ago that replaced the SSG with the standard shotgun, and reduced the health of some of the tougher monsters by 10%-40% to compensate. It was kind of fun to play that way, but it was still a tad tedious.


That's a cool idea. Actually, is it possible with DEH/vanilla to take this even further and replace most Doom II monsters with some Doom equivalent? For example:

pain elemental -> cacodemon
archvile -> baron of hell
arachnotron, mancubus, revenant -> hell knight
wolfenstein ss -> sergeant

I guess chaingunner can stay as himeself. And yeah, the hell knight also (he's just a weaker version of the baron).

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I made a simple patch which replaces SSGs with a Shotgun pickup that provides extra ammo. I found out the shotgun is effective against Mancubi and Arachnotrons, due to the higher ROF causing them to flinch more often, usually cancelling their attack phases.

I managed to play through the entire game with it and had fun doing it, so I imagine there's many WADs where you could do it. That said, after this much time people have carefully balanced their maps to account for the SSG so some levels will probably be substantially more difficult, if not brokenly so.

pain elemental -> cacodemon
archvile -> baron of hell
arachnotron, mancubus, revenant -> hell knight
wolfenstein ss -> sergeant


This on the other hand is a bad idea, monsters behave quite differently from each other, and have different stats. This would change how levels are played significantly and not in a good way because it's affecting the monsters and therefore the level, rather than the player.

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I was also thinking it would be a way to get a more "classic" feel when playing Doom II wads. And sure, I could limit myself to just Doom wads, but that's not necessary if a simple DEH patch can do the trick.

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I won't deny that I had my fun for using the SSG in D1, if not for sheer overkill. Mithran's DEH sounds pretty awesome though.

I tend to have this habit of using "impractical" weapons on otherwise tough enemies (chaingunning a Vile, just because I can). Then the other way around (SSG'ing a Zombieman?!) when I get lazy/have ammo to spare. Rocketing Lost Souls is a horrible habit though and should not be done. The shotgun can be effective on HKs, Arachnotrons, Pain Elementals, Revenants, Mancubi and Viles, granted you have the maneuverability and cover to work with.

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