What are your "level up" runs?

[Decay]

After beating BourgDM 27 NM100S for demo month I took a step back and looked at the rest of Bourg's table, and tried beating some of the newer records. Though some I couldn't, Bourg 27 has always stood out to me as a particularly shitty run. My first pacifist submission for it being over 6 minutes long, and I never tried it again. For Bounty demo month it was beaten pretty handily in 1:20 by Tezuro at first, then improved by pseudonaut at 1:05, which at the time I thought was pretty good. Today, I wasn't able to beat @Andromeda's record for it, but came close at 57.11, which to me, signalled a huge improvement from when I started. I mostly filled Bourg's tables as a beginner to speedrunning, and I can see the improvement over time.

 

In this topic, I'm not asking for the runs you're most proud of, but I'd like to know which runs you think upped your game. They can be milestone runs for you, but also think about which runs helped you reach those milestones.

 

After I table filled Bourg, I went to MSCP in a pacifist table filling quest.  Map09 was my first real grind/road block, and was really my leaping point to getting into recording. Map16 would be an example of a run I'm proud of, but I don't feel like it was a "level up" like Map09 was.

 

After MSCP I switched to Eviternity, which was a completely new complevel to me with a new set of quirks to get used to. Studying the maps took on a whole new level to me, and I feel like my experiences on map04, 08, 09 really upped my game which allowed me to do much of the wad. Probably culminated in 24 and 30's runs.

 

I kind of started fucking around after that. Doom 2 Map01's stroller helped me a ton with understanding how critical every unit of movement is in a stroller run, and I've put that experience to use in every other stroller run I've done. Grinding out some spite runs (wow.wad, equinox, 1337) were probably helpful too, but in my mind nothing helped me as much as those other ones.

 

What are your most important runs in helping you get better?

Edited July 4, 2022 by Decay

[Maribo]

Great thread idea.

 

I'm definitely not what anyone would call a "movement runner", but I feel like grinding out Violence Map01's Pacifist run is what got me to a point where I would call "competent".

 

Italo-Doom Map04 Pacifist is a run that would also fit into my "most proud of" list, but also... it was a real learning experience for AVJs. Really forced me to get a feel for making tiny corrections in positioning and properly timing them as well.

 

ht Map 14 UV-Speed, I purposefully sought out this run after I learned how to do glides, because my original experience with it was giving up on beating it in my first demo month, because of the glide. Only felt appropriate to go back and conquer it.

 

I wanted to try and point out a single run that feels like leveling up in terms of my skill in UV-Max running, but I can't quite find one that I'm happy with... I think a general line of experience would be something like my pair of No Chance HMP Maxes -> 1klinecp Map 32 Max -> the recent string of Maxes I did for Cydonia, but none of them really feel like a concrete "level up" yet.

[aconfusedhuman]

A few runs of mine which I feel were defining milestones:

 

My first Ult. Doom E1M1 Pacifist in 8s. Probably a bit obvious.

 

Scythe Map31s NoMo in 7s. I dont even think ive jaded to this one, im still happy about the demo today unlike the others here

 

The Plutonia Experiment Episode 2 NM100s. Not a movement run, but as I had built an interest in survival NM, this was a really great demo to make in preparation for a d2all. Took quite a while, and I was a lot better when finishing the demo compared to my first attempts

 

Honestly, even the Ult. Doom E1M1 Pacifist Reality in 8.89 feels like a separate milestone, after that my 8 count kind of spiraled out of control and am no longer happy with any of my times yet :^)

[Dogmachine]

Well, maybe it was: 10 sectors Part 2; Map 01; UV-fast. Don't think i had completed a level with its difficulty and monster-count till then (excluding slaughter maps). Real test of patience and coordenation imo.

[xit-vono]

requiem map06 nightmare. It was the first demo I did that I had considered borderline impossible at some point.

[4shockblast]

For me, probably the entire Perdition's Gate pack was kinda this period. It gave me a chance to try a lot of different categories for a WAD that was very much neglected in terms of table filling, and it lasted well over a year, so it was interesting as it progressed to see the table fill up as I was completing runs I really didn't expect to be done at the start. The armor situation in the maps, hitscan, etc., all conspire to make it a rather unfriendly WAD for speedruns; even UV-Speed can be a challenge to survive on some maps, let alone NM or Tyson, but over time, thinking about those maps drove me to get creative with approaches to make stuff work. It's also heavy in the trick category, and yet had nearly empty tables for everything, and pretty much all of the tricks in the WAD were discovered as part of the demo pack.

 

The other run that comes to mind is Sunder map 1 NM; naively, that's one I tried very early on when I was doing nomo/speed on that map in like 2013, and I barely had any reasonable route and survived maybe like halfway once and felt like it was a miracle to get that far. Three years down the line, it took like 2 hours to get an exit, which felt like a very obvious measure of progress to me then. :D

[akolai]

my f&t08 demo means a lot to me, it forced me to learn a lot about platforming, and my skill improvement from start to finish was very noticeable. also, edie got me into this whole genre of movement / platforming / esoteric wads, so beating a time of his is symbolically special to me, even if his original time was pretty crap

my most recent, the mucus flow run, took somewhere on the order of 9 months to a year from inception to completion - i was just curious one night, so i decide to give it a shot with saves. i did it, but... jesus. miserable. over the next few weeks, i have a couple ideas that bring it into the realm of possibility, and a few months later i decide to work out a route. again, it was very cool to see how much i'd improved, this time at strat-finding and consistency. i'll spare the months of frustration and dread between then and now, but i can't overstate the planning that went into this - there are 940 bullets in the map, and 1350 are needed to kill all unreachable enemies with average rng, so the final run is the result of many layered strats and a level of consistency i'd dismissed as infeasible a few months prior

[Starduster]

Hmm, I always wondered if I was the only one who felt this way toward certain maps.

 

Going back to when I was newer to running Doom, Sunlust UV stood as the ultimate challenge for me. After watching El_Inferno take down Map 32 in 4m09 I was tempted to replay the level. As many of you know, this is how it usually begins... :). I got my first exit (2m45) and set out on an ambitious journey to break the 2 minute barrier. Nowadays I can get a sub 2 run of sl32 in 10 minutes compared to my previous time of three months. Fun map, and good for gauging my progression of various skills in the game. It checks all the boxes for movement, ammo usage, combat, nerves, and so on.

 

I went on to improve some more by recording demos of hard maps I liked, but nothing changed me quite as much as Dimensions. Eventually Map 02 grew of interest to me. I unironically loved it for what it was. At the time, I couldn't think of a single person who had anything nice to say about it. It was considered this bullshit RNG map with death pits, platforming, like the antithesis of fair and forgiving map design. After hours of training each fight I was able to prove to myself that this was not the case, that reasonable consistency could be achieved in each fight. And this practice paid off in my UV max attempts. Dimensions 02 was not a hopeless map. Recently I revisited dmn02m to lower the time some more. The new route pushed me to my absolute limit. I've noticed some slight improvements in my playing since grinding that map again, and for that I must thank David Asaad. Without him I would've never gone that far.

 

Playing Dimensions Map 03 also did wonders for my progression in the game. Surviving 18 minutes of increasingly difficult fights back-to-back calls for a level of skill that I can only say I've reached once in my time with this game. Over the year I spent practicing and attempting the map I learned countless skills that got me closer and closer to beating it. To name a few: It was where I learned how to dodge with my mouse and use the flow state to my advantage, thanks to Kinetic.

[Looper]

Movement wise:
Doom 2 Map31 nomonsters and Doom E2M1 nomonsters: The reason for the better movement was obvious though: better source port, but damn it felt good to be suddenly a 'better' player, especially because of read n2m13171.txt.

Doom 2 Map24 nomonsters. I tried this run for one attempt (that didn't completely fail the first jump) two days ago with a bad first jump, still got 35.11 (no ending jump).

 

I should probably visit Plutonia Map11 nomonsters again (the normal way). Getting 49 was crazy tough back in Dosbox, Sr40 only. I even used a notebook (good old pencil&paper) to keep track of my times against other runs to see where I lost a frame or two. Back then I struggled to understand what's going on with the game though, as some of the time was seemingly randomly lost for no reason. Now, I would guess the time loss came from not switching from strafe left to strafe right fast enough due to dosbox lagging (I didn't know DRE2 existed back then, there was no xdre).

 

UV-max wise:

Doom 2 Map12. I got 3:50 quite early in my Doom career. It was a decent record at that time, but damn it is easy to beat nowadays. Can't believe how much I sucked.

 

I should probably visit Doom2 Map24 UV-max again. That shit was tough. The run looks pretty good even today, I think, but I don't think it can stand the test of modern players and ports.

 

Consistency:

My newer Doom2 full run speedruns. Better computer, better monitor, better keybindings, better source port and better player. My consistency is heaps better than what it used to be. I remember playing playing Doom for the first time with my new (this) computer, and it felt like I had super precision over the doomguy. It felt like I had been drunk my whole Doom career, and then one day you play sober for the first time.