give me scenarios where stupid dumbass barons don't completely suck

[roadworx]

holy shit i forgot how forced and cringy this was, someone put me out of my misery

Edited May 2 by roadworx

[Ravendesk]

Ok, ok, but have you played Junkfood map 69?

[Xyzzу]

Absolutely Killed's first level. Also wow this has to be the first time someone's wished some absolutely horrible death on me. Who shat in your mouth this morning?

[Matt Eldrydge]

I find them to work well as moving walls, preferably with hellknights and sometimes extra fodder mixed in so you don't pull your hair out after firing like 20 rockets and seeing there's still like 5 or them ready to make you eat fireballs. See Machete's Lords of War. Good for putting the pressure on the player, but it's easy to overdo them.

 

They can also work as meatshields and decent enough infighters. Put a couple in the same room as a cyberdemon or a pack of revenants and watch it go down.

[roadworx]

46 minutes ago, Ravendesk said:

Ok, ok, but have you played Junkfood map 69?

that accursed map is what gave me this vile affliction to begin with. meowgi will pay for his crimes against doomkind

 

42 minutes ago, Χyzzy said:

Absolutely Killed's first level. Also wow this has to be the first time someone's wished some absolutely horrible death on me. Who shat in your mouth this morning?

i did.

 

 

don't ask how.

[Treehouseminis]

When you want good infighters but dont have lots of space, or dont want lots of monsters.  I use them very sparingly, I do like it when they are mixed in with HK's in Slaughter maps, at the very least for more visual variety.  In my recent maps Ive been using them a lot more because Im using the rocket launcher from NoSP and Balls of Steel and HK's die way to fast for it to be challenging sometimes.

[roadworx]

38 minutes ago, Matt Eldrydge said:

They can also work as meatshields and decent enough infighters. Put a couple in the same room as a cyberdemon or a pack of revenants and watch it go down.

7 minutes ago, Treehouseminis said:

When you want good infighters but dont have lots of space, or dont want lots of monsters.

):<

 

i said ways that aren't generic infighting and close quarters pressure!! UGH give me some actually interesting stuff like xyzzy did

[Treehouseminis]

12 minutes ago, roadworx said:

):<

 

i said ways that aren't generic infighting and close quarters pressure!! UGH give me some actually interesting stuff like xyzzy did

I mean it wasnt super specific, I dont remember what Map08 or whatever map you were talking about is like lol. 

 

Uh, Barons are a cool color, and their death sound is neat.  Is that a good enough reason?!?!?!  I guess if you dont like the kind of pressure a baron or 2 can give you in certain combat scenarios more than HKs can I cant help ya lol.  Just bury my body where someone can eventually find it. 

[roadworx]

4 minutes ago, Treehouseminis said:

I mean it wasnt super specific, I dont remember what Map08 or whatever map you were talking about is like lol. 

 

Uh, Barons are a cool color, and their death sound is neat.  Is that a good enough reason?!?!?!  I guess if you dont like the kind of pressure a baron or 2 can give you in certain combat scenarios more than HKs can I cant help ya lol.  Just bury my body where someone can eventually find it. 

map08 is tricks and traps lol

 

this thread was a very poorly executed attempt at having a really shitposty thread body that still brings about interesting discussion. you don't usually see barons used in ways that're really interesting and stuff, so it'd be cool to see bizarre encounters that they work well in. i didn't communicate that very well...at all....so rip

 

i should go to bed

[Stupid Bunny]

well in tight spaces they…oh wait
 

The baron’s only unique characteristic is its tankiness proportionate to its offensive power. Hell knights exist to fix this imbalance, one that only exists I think because we’re introduced as a boss enemy very early on. Because of this it’s kind of hard to name anything that isn’t obviously capitalizing on that. It’s a pretty lame superpower, but I guess that’s why we’re here isn’t it

[Treehouseminis]

4 minutes ago, roadworx said:

map08 is tricks and traps lol

 

this thread was a very poorly executed attempt at having a really shitposty thread body that still brings about interesting discussion. you don't usually see barons used in ways that're really interesting and stuff, so it'd be cool to see bizarre encounters that they work well in. i didn't communicate that very well...at all....so rip

 

i should go to bed

Idk why I was thinking of doom1, map08 of what episode?  Haha. 

 

I was also trying to shitpost with ya, get some sleep!

[Li'l devil]

Well maybe that's the whole point of barons: to annoy easily-annoyed players. In my next map I'll make sure to use them a lot, with mandatory invis spheres to make dodging their projectiles hard.

[Sonikkumania]

They're good semi bosses and when you have better firepower it doesn't matter to add more of them.

[Grain of Salt]

Barons are great, idk why anyone dislikes them. Sure they're not fun if a mapper tries to get you to kill multiple barons with a single shotgun, but in that context neither are cyberdemons, archviles... pretty much anything. Do you also think cyberdemons aren't fun??? Do you think that?????

 

32 minutes ago, roadworx said:

i said ways that aren't generic infighting and close quarters pressure!! UGH give me some actually interesting stuff like xyzzy did

 

What's so bad about infighting and close quarters pressure..... :(

[Lucius Wooding]

Doom 1 when you want a monster in between a cacodemon and a cyberdemon. Additionally, their health is less of a problem when the arena has abundant explosive barrels to whittle them down. I'd say most WADs as a whole suffer from lack of barrels a lot more than an overuse of barons.

 

They're a lot more fun if people don't immediately whine reflexively when they see them. Have a little patience people.

["JL" was too short]

I am legitimately wondering if people who complain about Barons have some sort of ADHD or ADHD-adjacent condition where needing to spend a few seconds longer fighting any given enemy sends them into an agony of boredom.  How much of your life do you spend shooting three rockets into a hell knight?  How much worse is it to shoot two more?  Are you really that miserable in Doom's admittedly simplistic player-vs-monster combat, to the point that spending slightly longer at a given encounter is some sort of punishment visited upon you by an angry god?

I'm not saying I've never seen Barons used poorly.  The places I've encountered where Barons were misused tend to be in situations that are so cramped or otherwise tightly tuned that a couple of extra seconds actually do make the difference between acceptable combat dynamics and unfun bullshit.  But the unfun is because the Baron's extra HP actually gets me unfairly killed, not because I have to wait for my weapon to cycle a few extra times.  Which ironically seems 180 degrees opposite to your implication that putting Barons in tight quarters would be a good use, which in turn makes it even harder for me to empathize with whatever point you have.

 

[TheHambourgeois]

linemen for an archvile

blocking a relatively safe position while fighting a horde elsewhere, making the player choose between fighting the immediate threat or spending resources to access a safe point

imo there are very few instances where 1 baron wouldn't be better replaced by 2 hell knights, but they have their uses

[Kwisior]

Hell Revealed ;)

[ebrl]

2 hours ago, Matt Eldrydge said:

I find them to work well as moving walls, preferably with hellknights and sometimes extra fodder mixed in so you don't pull your hair out after firing like 20 rockets and seeing there's still like 5 or them ready to make you eat fireballs. See Machete's Lords of War. Good for putting the pressure on the player, but it's easy to overdo them.

To expand on that: a wall of hell knights will be pushed back by rockets, a wall of barons won't, and a mix of the two allows you to adjust how much pressure you want to apply on the player.

[Pechudin]

5 minutes ago, ebrl said:

To expand on that: a wall of hell knights will be pushed back by rockets, a wall of barons won't, and a mix of the two allows you to adjust how much pressure you want to apply on the player.

 

Really? The rate at which they die is less than their advancing speed? Good to know. I wonder about Pinkies, the die faster but also move faster.

[DNSKILL5]

Wrong 

[suzerduzer]

I enjoy mixing in Barons within larger groups of Hell Knights, both to break things up visually but also because it creates a fun mindgame for the player to deal with. I've noticed players generally want to shoot the bigger, badder demons with more health, but really you should be shooting at the HK's who'll die faster, meaning less green shit is flying at you and you clear up space faster.

[thiccyosh]

Well I like to use them as meatshields sometimes. Especially for Revenant missiles.

 

 

Poor Barons, from fear-inducing boss of E1M8 they boil down to just "5 rocket/40 cell tax", "badly designed tank " and "Door with legs - Bouncers of Hell". Honestly I think you could just remove them and nobody would notice because I feel Mancubis do a better job of being the tank in Doom. To the point where Barons are rarely ever used in Doom 2 (31 in Doom 2 vs. 82 in Ultimate Doom), as if even Id knew Barons kill the pacing in maps. A shame, I really like the design of the Baron and the idea of a hellish miniboss like how they're used in Thy Flesh Consumed (See E4M6). 

[Kinetic]

In situations with limited ammo/weak firepower and little space, barons are good at redirecting your movement, since you can't bully them and their melee is very strong. Similarly, baron hordes are a powerful group of infighters and their melee power + high health makes them a huge deterrent to push through, even with BFG, a situation with 200/200 where the best option is to push through the middle of a baron horde with BFG, youll likely need to stack tracers to punch a hole through them if the thinnest part of the horde is like 8 deep.

 

I can also imagine a few scenarios where an increasingly large baron horde forces a player to operate on a time crunch to complete various objectives before the horde catches up to them.

 

Magnolia does barons better than any other wad in my opinion, turning off their counting to kill % is so versatile from the perspective of a mapper who maps with regards to players who 100%. Magnolia scratches the surface of what baron can do just by flipping that property imo.

[Wo0p]

As eye-candy... obviously. Look at that red chad dominating all those lesser BETA demons. The Baron TAKES what he wants, he doesn't ask permission. "OH PWEASE MR. PLAYER. PWEASE DIE FROM MY ATTACKS" says the simp Imp. Not the Baron. The Baron mercilessly thrusts his masculinity at you whether you like it or not. If you ignore him he slides into your dms when you least expect it and makes you his bitch and if you focus him he laughs at your emasculated attempts at damaging his perfect physique. He's in no rush to destroy you. Like the powerful villain he is, he can afford to WALK at you with confidence; muscles bulging, horns sharpened and demonfire set to maximum roast. 

 

Spoiler

Too much???  :^)

 

[Lucius Wooding]

53 minutes ago, thiccyosh said:

Honestly I think you could just remove them and nobody would notice because I feel Mancubis do a better job of being the tank in Doom. 

 

Mancs (and revenants and cacos and arachnotrons) have a much higher pain chance, so if you have a chaingun they're basically toast 1v1. Even using the chainsaw can be viable against revenants and cacos, though it's a bit risky. Obviously mancs have collision issues in vanilla preventing melee from being effective but they'd be stunlocked if they weren't so fat. The baron on the other hand won't give a fuck if you shoot them, which is a big reason why they're so effective at close range pressure. Most Doom 1 maps are built around a bestiary that can easily be held at bay if you have enough chaingun ammo, but the baron is really the sole exception. And even in Doom 2, most of the added monsters either have no melee or a high pain chance which makes the chaingun a viable, if boring way to kill them. A tank that flinches after every shot isn't intimidating, it's just a bullet sponge. Other weapons exist besides the SSG which make different monsters actually play differently.

 

Also, in terms of infighting, barons are not only extremely durable but their dps in melee range is insane. Mancs and arachnotrons will often get stunlocked to death by a baron if it manages to track them down. If you want to guarantee a boss monster to die from infighting, barons are really the reliable choice and they do it very efficiently. Even a lone chaingunner can be enough to kill most monsters if they get stunlocked, but a baron would shrug off their shots unlike a mancubus or arachnotron. Who's the better tank now?

 

Additionally, the effective mobility of barons is significantly higher than mancs. Mancs really don't move through rooms with any kind of obstacles such as pillars while barons can fit into narrower gaps and don't block other enemies as much. This means that they can actually perform their best role of close range pressure while being way more durable than revenants or hell knights. Hiding in a narrow hallway will often work against mancs, who can be easily sniped from behind cover due to their girth. A baron however will punish you in that situation like no other, and cause terror as it stalks you and rips you apart in style.

 

As a final example, many fights that use hurtfloors in combination with barons can be extremely effective. Their health pool wastes your time as you either need to take forced damage or make good use of your radsuit before your time runs out. Optionally, make the player retreat onto limited safe platforms once the suit runs out or they're low on health where the barons can fight in close quarters and the player has very limited room to dodge. I have to imagine The Path from Hell Revealed might have been going for something like this but just executed it miserably throughout most of the map.

[roadworx]

4 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

What's so bad about infighting and close quarters pressure..... :(

4 hours ago, Lucius Wooding said:

They're a lot more fun if people don't immediately whine reflexively when they see them. Have a little patience people.

9 minutes ago, Kinetic said:

Similarly, baron hordes are a powerful group of infighters

5 minutes ago, Lucius Wooding said:

Also, in terms of infighting, barons are not only extremely durable but their dps in melee range is insane. Mancs and arachnotrons will often get stunlocked to death by a baron if it manages to track them down. If you want to guarantee a boss monster to die from infighting, barons are really the reliable choice and they do it very efficiently. Even a lone chaingunner can be enough to kill most monsters if they get stunlocked, but a baron would shrug off their shots unlike a mancubus or arachnotron. Who's the better tank now?

NO!!!!! BAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Cutman 999]

6 hours ago, roadworx said:

 

barons are the most useless, annoying enemy in the entire game. forget lost souls, forget pain elementals (which are a great enemy btw, no shut up don't argue with me)

 

 

compalints about barons, but the enemy they literally had to invent A FUCKING CAP IN THE GAME to limit, is a "great enemy".

 

Well, barons are imps but harder to kill, but at least it's not badly designed. 

[DankMetal]

If the barons of hell have 1 million fans, i'm one of them

If the barons of hell have 1 hundred fans, i'm one of them

If the barons of hell have 1 fan, that's me

If there's no barons of hell fans, that means i'm no longer alive

[Lucius Wooding]

Much like a baron of hell, I'm not flinching when sprayed and holding my ground.

 

What's the point of this thread if you're just going to disregard some of the most important reasons to use them? Your next thread should be "How much of a threat are cyberdemons really, if you put aside their ability to shoot rockets?". At least my last post had 3 entire other paragraphs with their own distinct points to try and contribute to the conversation.