What's the most annoying thing in the classic DOOM games?

[The_SloVinator]

- Infinite height (understandable, limitations)

- Massive-damage-taken red screen lasts way too long

- Collision bouncing when doing wall hugging

- Hit detection (sometimes bullets go through enemies)

 

Of course, I meant this for vanilla.

[Hypnotik]

Revenant rocket's and Chaingunners.

[NoXion]

Getting trapped by a horde of pinkies. It's not something that's completely inescapable once it starts happening, if you're quick and alert you can get out in time... usually.

When that happens I usually remember that I have jump enabled and just walk over their heads to escape. Still annoying when it happens though.

[Doomkid]

4 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Fuck this stupid "safety pin", that is always engaged when you switch to RL or BFG.

4 hours ago, Tango said:

having time to watch a feature length film while my weapon switches

3 hours ago, Solmyr said:

Several low damage rolls in sucession while berserk punching pinkies, imps and revenants SSGing other players

 

The leading causes of salt in Doom FFA!

[idbeholdME]

5 hours ago, Doomkid said:

This is a godsend, who the hell wants 100+ lost souls wandering around? They're my least favorite enemy, but that may just be me.

It makes the game easier, yes, but is it a good thing that an enemy gives off the first impression of being bugged? I wouldn't say so. I like my Pain Elementals ripe and fertile, so thanks for ports that allow infinite Lost Souls.

 

No limit also puts a lot of pressure on you. If you let it get out of hand and a few Lost Souls get behind you and start attacking you from multiple angles while you are dealing with other threats, it may be very tough to salvage the situation. BFG is often the only way out once critical mass is reached and the more situations that force me to use the BFG, the better I say.

[Doomkid]

4 minutes ago, idbeholdME said:

It makes the game easier, yes, but is it a good thing that an enemy gives off the first impression of being bugged? I wouldn't say so.

To be fair, the reason this limit was ever implemented was to reduce strain on old hardware. Crashes or lag due to too many objects being in the map are definitely worse choices than having some gimped enemies. Although I will say the way they're used on maps that already have 20+ Lost Souls, like The Pit or Refueling Base, is extremely dumb - they should have known not to place PEs in Lost Soul heavy maps.. Those PEs going around opening their big dumb mouths while nothing comes out is pretty lame.

 

I also see the fun of making sure you kill the PE before he spawns too much bullshit, but when another monster somehow grazes him early on and he just sits there spawning 9 billion of the little fuckers in an area I haven't gotten to yet (or simply can't see) on a map with nowhere near enough ammo in the first place, that crap grinds my gears.

[plums]

Elastic collisions and other rough movement when moving against a non-orthogonal wall.

[idbeholdME]

10 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

To be fair, the reason this limit was ever implemented was to reduce strain on old hardware. Crashes or lag due to too many objects being in the map are definitely worse choices than having some gimped enemies.

 

I also see the fun of making sure you kill the PE before he spawns too much bullshit, but when another monster somehow grazes him early on and he just sits there spawning 9 billion of the little fuckers in an area I haven't gotten to yet (or simply can't see) on a map with nowhere near enoughammo in the first place, that crap grinds my gears.

I am aware that the limit was there for technical reasons but 21 still seems quite low. The Pit is the prime example where it gives off a terrible impression.

 

And making desperate rushes at Pain Elementals that some other monster literally "triggered" is pretty fun and can completely change the flow of battle. It changes from "you vs them" into "everyone against the swarm". I've had some pretty crazy situations with PEs over the years. + killing actual clouds of Lost Souls with the BFG is pretty satisfying.

 

Bonus points if you are playing with -fast :P That will make PEs the #1 priority no matter what, if they weren't already.

 

And if you have no ammo, large numbers of Lost Souls are pretty prone to fighting among each other. But in open spaces and from multiple angles, it is deadly.

[plums]

36 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Although I will say the way they're used on maps that already have 20+ Lost Souls, like The Pit or Refueling Base, is extremely dumb - they should have known not to place PEs in Lost Soul heavy maps.

To me this suggests that the limit was added, or at least reduced from a higher number, sometime in the middle of development, after some maps had already been made. Especially The Pit since on HMP and lower, the PEs can shoot lost souls since there aren't enough in the map to limit them, but they can't on UV.

[Roofi]

Mancubus projectiles which go through walls.

 

Dead-Simple's style arena maps. Doom 2 map 07 is boring and uninteresting for me. I'm always happy when a wad gets rid of this trope or remix it in a more interesting way.

[frag enabler]

The Cyberdemon bitchslapping me with a 288 damage rocket while comfortably eating a 3rd BFG blast. Or maybe Cacodemons easily sponging up 4-5 SSG shots of because bullet/damage spread.

[Vermil]

Probably infinite height.

[seed]

6 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Fuck this stupid "safety pin", that is always engaged when you switch to RL or BFG. Nobody needs that "child security", nobody wants it, either. Nobody likes spam clicking in decisive moments only to make sure they get their rocket or BFG round out as early as possible.

 

Actually this, the safety lock has started to bother me recently as well, to the point I found myself spamming fire a few times to make sure the weapon actually does do something once I've switched to it.

 

Apart from this, the only other thing that bothers me sometimes is how the RNG is all over the place for some weapons. The Berserk fist is the best example here, the damage it deals is anywhere between 20 to 200 if I recall correctly, nice variation.

[idbeholdME]

17 minutes ago, seed said:

 

Apart from this, the only other thing that bothers me sometimes is how the RNG is all over the place for some weapons. The Berserk fist is the best example here, the damage it deals is anywhere between 20 to 200 if I recall correctly, nice variation.

The RNG is definitely way too wild in Doom, especially for some things.

 

Like the Berserk you mentioned or things like Rocket Launcher rocket impact (20-160) or BFG main projectile hit (100-800).

Same goes for enemies. Most of them can either tickle you or take away half your health. I really feel like narrowing the RNG spread in Doom would be really beneficial for smoother gameplay. Random damage spikes are usually not that fun.

[seed]

1 minute ago, idbeholdME said:

The RNG is definitely way too wild in Doom, especially for some things.

 

Like the Berserk you mentioned or things like Rocket Launcher rocket impact (20-160) or BFG main projectile hit (100-800).

Same goes for enemies. Most of them can either tickle you or take away half your health. I really feel like narrowing the RNG spread in Doom would be really beneficial for smoother gameplay. Random damage spikes are usually not that fun.

 

Yeah, pretty much.

 

I like RNG insofar as it the one feature that added so much replayability to Doom, ensuring that no two playthroughs will ever be the same, but it went way too far with the randomness in some cases. I mean holy shit man, that's how big the variation of the BFG projectile is, 700? Lol.

[Pirx]

i  wonder how many perfect speedruns have been ruined by this. minumum damage at the worst possible moment because the game rolled the wrong dice for you.

[Hisymak]

Patrial invisibility sphere being practically useless. It can help when there are hitscanners, but makes fight against projectile-firing monsters much more difficult. I also hated and did not understand why monsters could still see me while having partial invisibility. The invisibility ring in Quake or Shadowsphere in Heretic works much better.

If for example partial invisibility made Revenant's homing missiles unable to trace you, it would become quite useful and valuable item.

And by the way, I hate Revenant's homing missiles, too.

[DynamiteKaitorn]

- Personally, now that I've played DooM 2 a good amount I never realised how dull and slow killing enemies with the default shotgun is. Quite often I burn through my bullets using the chaingun on cacodemons, pinky's and rarely a baron or two, just so that I'm at least able to stun-lock them.

 

- The entirety of Episode 4 (More like episode flawed am I right? ;) )

 

- E3M7.

 

- Definitely more of a me thing but I think At DooM's gate is overrated. I'll forever defend Running From Evil as the superior first level theme.

 

- A R S E V I L E

 

- The chaingunner's stupidly high accuracy on HMP difficulty. Aim-bot Mc Gee is a better name.

 

- Mount Pain(in the arse) and Antichrist from Final Doot

 

- Not enough locations for the plasma rifle. :,c

 

- Trying to load custom WADs in literal vanilla for some reason is way harder than using Chocolate DooM (And chocolate DooM is still "Unstable" sometimes).

[xdarkmasterx]

Dying because I got stuck inside a monster's collision box >_<

 

2 hours ago, idbeholdME said:

 I really feel like narrowing the RNG spread in Doom would be really beneficial for smoother gameplay. Random damage spikes are usually not that fun.

 

I don't see why it needs to be in the game at all. Most games have static damage, and nobody notices the absence of randomness, but they sure as hell notice when a pinky survives a direct rocket or a revenant takes off like 5 HP, then 70 HP both with the same attack.

 

Quake has less absurd RNG damage than Doom does, and I still think it's dumb when an Ogre takes 3 grenades instead of 2, or I need 5 to kill a Vore. In my mind, enemies not dying when they should makes the game flow feel worse, even when it doesn't have much bearing to the difficulty of game.

[plums]

The idea of random damage comes directly from D&D, they even use the same XdY style that you use when rolling dice, e.g. the plasma gun does 8d5 damage (though the distribution isn't as even in vanilla because of how the RNG is done).

 

I actually like random damage (unpopular opinion I know), though it could stand to have less spread, like @idbeholdME said.

[idbeholdME]

47 minutes ago, xdarkmasterx said:

I don't see why it needs to be in the game at all. Most games have static damage, and nobody notices the absence of randomness, but they sure as hell notice when a pinky survives a direct rocket or a revenant takes off like 5 HP, then 70 HP both with the same attack.

 

Quake has less absurd RNG damage than Doom does, and I still think it's dumb when an Ogre takes 3 grenades instead of 2, or I need 5 to kill a Vore. In my mind, enemies not dying when they should makes the game flow feel worse, even when it doesn't have much bearing to the difficulty of game.

A small-moderate amount RNG is fine and helps prevent the game from becoming monotonous when everything would always happen the exact same way. But Doom did go pretty overboard with it. My idea at a fix would be to average the min and max values so Revenant (6+60)/2 = 33 and add like a ~30% variation to that. So he would deal 23-43 damage instead of 6-60.

 

Other examples:

Hitscan attack - 7 - 13 instead of 5-15.

Direct rocket hit - 63 - 117 instead of 20-160.

Direct BFG hit - 315 - 585 instead of 100-800.

 

Could even be a 40% spread instead of 30% and it would still hugely help improve consistency and eliminate the spikes while remaining basically the same in terms of kill time, required shots etc.

 

I absolutely agree with the statement of things not dying when they should and it is the main reason I dislike the new Dooms because of the forced stagger state before enemies actually die.

Edited June 22, 2020 by idbeholdME

[FireballCaco]

I really hate how cheap the level design can be. Like E4M1 having just 9 health bonuses.

[seed]

1 hour ago, FireballCaco said:

I really hate how cheap the level design can be. Like E4M1 having just 9 health bonuses.

 

Sounds more like unforgiving to mistakes and tactical to me, requiring more strategic gameplay and planning rather than auto-piloting and thoughtless shooting.

 

4 hours ago, Pirx said:

i  wonder how many perfect speedruns have been ruined by this. minumum damage at the worst possible moment because the game rolled the wrong dice for you.

 

Lol too many I think.

 

But the thing is, as with most things in life, with experience and greater skill it becomes easier to deal with the RNG's randomness. In fact, I am yet to see a demo recorder or speedrunner unironically bashing Doom's RNG "because it ruined my perfect run. This game is not fair".

 

1 hour ago, idbeholdME said:

Other examples:

Hitscan attack - 7 - 13 instead of 5-15.

Direct rocket hit - 63 - 117 instead of 20-160.

Direct BFG hit - 315 - 585 instead of 100-800.

 

Those sound like some nice values honestly.

 

Now the question is, how would this actually play out in practice? Would it actually work or does it only sound nice on paper?

[idbeholdME]

25 minutes ago, seed said:

 

Now the question is, how would this actually play out in practice? Would it actually work or does it only sound nice on paper?

The gameplay should remain mostly the same, since the average damage stays the same and you just reduce the total range. Which would also eliminate the edge cases like Demon surviving a rocket hit or 2 shotting a Hell Knight occasionally

 

Technically, it would probably require some work.

 

IIRC, the original RNG works with a base number for damage and then randomly multiplies it so an easy solution would probably be to cut out the edge numbers.

 

Like base 6 in the case of Revenant, let it be multiplied by 4-7 only and cut out the 1-3 and 8-10 from the possible options.

 

Mancubus has 8, multiplied by 1-8, so similarly, his 8 would only be able to be multiplied by 3-6.

 

You can check the base number for each monster easily on the wiki.

 

Anything else would probably require a complete rework of how the RNG in the game functions. But I am not really that deep into Doom modding so not sure what all the possible options are. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in.

[GarrettChan]

12 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Nobody likes spam clicking in decisive moments only to make sure they get their rocket or BFG round out as early as possible.

Do you mean you can't buffer input for RL and BFG? Or maybe I read this wrong? They can be buffered so you don't need to click, or even maybe buffering is not a thing in vanilla.

[FireballCaco]

Typically, Doom's levels are challenging, but fair. But other times, they just fuck you up and make you wanna throw your keyboard straight at the monitor.

[_bruce_]

4 hours ago, Hisymak said:

Patrial invisibility sphere being practically useless. It can help when there are hitscanners, but makes fight against projectile-firing monsters much more difficult. I also hated and did not understand why monsters could still see me while having partial invisibility. The invisibility ring in Quake or Shadowsphere in Heretic works much better.

If for example partial invisibility made Revenant's homing missiles unable to trace you, it would become quite useful and valuable item.

And by the way, I hate Revenant's homing missiles, too.

 

Yep, Partial Invisibilty, albeit the orb is totally cool looking, seems a bit thin from a practical perspective. Maybe a better powerup would have been a sort of death orb which caused the monster to erratically attack each other and temporarily disabling the none attacking agreement of same species. But who knows what decisions and time limits played into the final powerup... guess they liked the effect and the fact that the pinky was wearing one too.

[Beginner]

For me it's three-way split between blockmap bug, elastic collision and dealing with random infinite tall monsters somewhere above/below player but also out of sight.

[LateToDOOM2020]

Just reading I see many people dislike the infinite height.
When I realize the original doom couldn't aim upwards or downwards I thought it was a pretty cool design as the creators of doom were clever in how they designed it to automatically aim. What about it is annoying to people is there a specific thing about it that causes issues i don't understand?

[Roofi]

I'm answering a few things. Consider my response as unpopular opinion !

 

- I don't quite understand this hatred toward the Arch-viles. In Doom 2 maps, they are used very occasionally and even in general, their attacks are relatively easy to dodge. For my part, I understand more the disgust for revenants. Revenants often do similar damage to AVs and are way more heavily used.

 

- I also don't understand the rejection of "infinity heights". It's true that it's quite annoying in some badly designed maps. On the other hand, I find it really fun to kill monsters at the bottom of the map thanks to the splash damage of the RL and it can really benefit the player in some situations. I've always seen that as an acceptable limitation of the game. On the contrary, playing without infinity height is much weirder in my opinion. I'm not an inveterate modern port player...

 

- About the RNG. It's pretty cruel sometimes but it never really bothered me. I think the very variable RNG is one of the components that makes Doom so interesting. The strategy to adopt often changes and rush is equivalent to taking a big risk in some maps.