Am I the only person that finds Pain Elementals worse when they're infighting?

[RichardDS90]

I find them irritating enough to fight, but after fighting them a lot recently, I find them horrible when they're infighting, while I find you get some degree over how many Lost Souls there are around when you're fighting them, I dread it when they're infighting, even worse that no monster targets them in the first place.

[Alper002]

I'm not necessarily so irritated by them, but having pain elementals infighting is almost always bad news.

 

Monsters will usually only attack if they can "see" their target. When the pain elementals are focused on you, this allows you the luxury of determining whether or not they can spawn souls by hiding from them as if they were hitscanners or archviles.

However, if they're infighting, that control is taken away. They'll happily spawn their souls without a care about you. What doesn't help is that the monsters which agitated the pain elemental in the first place get distracted by the souls and will never bother with the pain elemental itself except by accident.

 

It's not just you, they are inherently more dangerous when infighting.

[Pirx]

duh. they fill the map with their annoying skulls, regardless if launched at you or at something else.

[idbeholdME]

Many a times did an infighting -fast Pain Elemental make me pull out a BFG to deal with the cloud of Lost Souls. And nothing makes me beeline towards a Pain Elemental faster than seeing it begin infighting. They can be an incredible ammo drain if left alone for too long.

 

And I would not have it any other way. The amazing dynamics of the possible combat scenarios is what keeps me coming back to Doom.

[SF.]

I pity the poor bastards who play gzdoom without the lost soul limit. 

[Jello]

Yeahp, just limit lost souls. The original engine limited lost souls being spawned by Pain Elementals, so it's fine to turn that option on in GZDoom, since its how the game was originally meant to be played.

[idbeholdME]

8 hours ago, Jello said:

Yeahp, just limit lost souls. The original engine limited lost souls being spawned by Pain Elementals, so it's fine to turn that option on in GZDoom, since its how the game was originally meant to be played.

It was in the original, yes, but I think the limitation was there to make sure PCs wouldn't catch fire at that time and not a specific gameplay reason. All it does is make Pain Elementals unusable in large maps. Even in the Doom 2 IWAD, you can easily stumble upon Pain Elementals which are sterile from the start (The Pit). I see no reason to not to play with unlimited Lost Souls these days since even ancient PCs can handle hundreds of Lost Souls easily now.

[leodoom85]

Worse indeed. Wouldn't like to see them populate the whole map with skulls, ready to chew the player AND themselves.

[OliveTree]

honestly i just dislike pain elementals in general, I'm not sure I've ever been thrilled or taken back by the presence of one, they're sort of a weightless enemy in my experience

[Gez]

Honestly the best would have been if they did like the Raven Software guys did with the pod spawers in Heretic: instead of a global limit, each spawner has its own local limit that applies only to the pods it spawned itself, not those already placed in the map or spawned by other generators.

 

If each PE had a limit of, say, 6 lost souls active at once but without a global limit so that 100 PEs can generate 600 LSs, it' be fine. The global limit of 21 either competely neuters them when it's on, or if off it allows them to spam skulls everywhere all day long.

[seed]

Nope, that's essentially when they tend to be the most dangerous, depending on the environment.

[CBM]

Pain Elementals infighting or not, are a pain on an elemental level

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Worst is if -fast is on. Then they are annoying as shit regardless of where they are targeting, those stupid souls are going to want a chomp the moment they see you. 

[galileo31dos01]

I find incidental lost soul cleanup usually tedious and boring, I don't like to spend any type of ammo on lost souls, generally speaking, regardless of how dangerous or not the setup could be, unless I really have to watch out for other things shooting, or if there are ways you can bunch them up and kill them quickly with rockets or BFG that can be fun. Most of the time if I can just ignore lost souls without negative consequences that's gonna be my move.

 

So that a pain elemental by default can generate that kind of scenarios instantly and occasionally far away from autoaim range is, not my favourite thing in the game, to put it that way, but that doesn't mean I won't inject that possibility in a map I make simply because I contradict myself all the time :p

[KeaganDunn]

Pain Elementals with -fast on... 👌

[Clippy]

On 11/19/2020 at 5:46 PM, paturn said:

I pity the poor bastards who play gzdoom without the lost soul limit. 

 

I do this

 

It's terrible

 

LOL

[KeaganDunn]

@paturn @Clippy Honestly, GZDoom (or any port) without the lost soul limit adds to the experience in my POV. Sunlust MAP30's final fight wouldn't be the same without that beautiful cloud of lost souls and Pain Elementals amongst the blackness and goth architecture. As idbeholdME said, I think the limit was only there to keep computers from blowing up.

 

Without a lost soul limit, there's a bit more urgency in my opinion. The limit kinda defeats the purpose of the monster(s), especially in IWAD maps that initially have 21+ lost souls.

 

The only thing I won't combine with that lack of a lost soul limit is infinitely-tall actors.