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40oz

"Pray to God" Difficulty

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This old post recounts old doom launchers that featured "new difficulty" settings by altering maps, substituting lesser monsters with tougher ones.

The way its described in the thread sounds pretty sloppily put together, but the idea sounds like it could be very intriguing if implemented well. I suspect with enough testing there's a pretty safe universal way to boost difficulty up by swapping some imps here and there with revenants and a few hell knights with archviles or something, as long as smaller health and ammo items get kicked up to their larger counterparts.

I could see IWADs like Doom 2 and Final Doom being a breath of fresh air when the thing placement is a bit randomized and booted up from Ultra Violence. There might need to be some clever thinking to involved to figure out how to fairly swap some monsters out without making maps too messy.

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This is actually a pretty Interesting Idea.
A well made and well thought out mapset could implement this pretty well.

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In ZDaemon Thursday Night Survival we have a randomized monster placement mode. I don't know too much about its technical side but supposedly it is highly customizable. I think you can set probability for various monsters appearing (so that you don't get too many cyberdemons), you can divide monsters into classes so that for example imps can be only replaced by hell knights or revenants, etc. It is indeed a pretty fun way to spice things up a little bit, and even if it goes wrong and spawns a cyberdemon at the spawning spot or something like that, it's more funny than annoying. :) Maybe Eris Falling or rhinoduck can tell more about how it works.

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If i want really blow up my ass from difficulty - I'm playing in any wad with mod DoomRPG_V3.1.wad.
This mod on difficulty "Hell" is completely change the game:
Revenant and Mancubus shoots by rockets, Cyberdemon shoots by BFG9000 projectile, Lost Soul can shoot by IMP's projectile, Demons are flying, Archvile can teleport and so on.

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Azuruish said:

If i want really blow up my ass from difficulty - I'm playing in any wad with mod DoomRPG_V3.1.wad.
This mod on difficulty "Hell" is completely change the game:
Revenant and Mancubus shoots by rockets, Cyberdemon shoots by BFG9000 projectile, Lost Soul can shoot by IMP's projectile, Demons are flying, Archvile can teleport and so on.

I have my own dehacked patches to toughen up the challenge on early wads.

Best way to make demons and spectres tougher is to speed them up a lot.

That keeps you on your toes in a berserk fist fight ;)

Other things I've done that balance quite well is give floating monsters a high level of translucency (so you have to wait til a lost soul or fireball comes at you to target the enemy), double the speed of Hell Knight / Baron fireballs, and up the damage.

With the lower monsters, you don't really want to tank them up too much because there can be so many of them. You can end up ruining the gameplay. Just adding one or two hp to sergeants and imps has a notable effect over a long enough campaign.

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Azuruish said:

Exist any way to avoid random and to make every hit with maximum damage?


h4xx0r the RNG table, but at best that will cause only some things to deal maximum damage, depending on the modulo value they use (e.g. bullets from the player have 3 possible values, so modulo 2. Other projectiles have more variation).

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Azuruish said:

Exist any way to avoid random and to make every hit with maximum damage?

With ZDoom it's easy.

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IMX said:

Made with Bitmap Font Writer

Cool. Is there a Doom font that includes dripping "nightmare" versions of all the alphabet letters?

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I'd love an easily added PWAD that specifically had a 50/50 chance of replacing a monster with a higher-tier counterpart. The randomization element would keep people on their toes.

Replacing some zombiemen with shotgunners/chaingunners, some imps with revenants, some hellknights with barons, etc.. Would be a cool mod compatible with most mapsets.

Conversely, for people who really struggle with Doom, it'd be cool to have an "easy mode" implementer since most mapsets don't design around anything but UV. Replaces stimpacks with medikits, soulspheres with megaspheres, etc etc. The "I just want to kill" difficulty would finally be in all WADs :)

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Wow, people sure love to complain in that comment section.. Though, his implementation wasn't very good.

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For the enjoyment of thread readers, I have put together my own version of both the "Pray to God" and "I Just Want to Kill" difficulty settings in both WAD and DEH format. Tested and working in both Chocolate Doom and Zandronum.

Download: http://www.mediafire.com/download/lcaj67xpcxsk9e2/PRAY2G0D.zip

I think regardless of skill, you'll find these put a very interesting spin on Doom's difficulty. "Just Kill" is a Doom newbie's dream come true and "Pray to God" is surprisingly playable and fun - I made sure to rebalance things thoughtfully!

EDIT: I'm kind of ashamed to admit this, but I think that Justkill makes Plutonia a lot more fun in SP..

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