Specific Things in Doom that annoy you

[HorrorMovieRei]

We've had a thread for specific things in Doom that amuse you before. Let's now share some things that annoy you. Please, do not talk about single monsters you hate, because we have that discussion all the time. I'm talking about small moments that frustrate or just annoy you in general. For example:

• When you shoot an Imp point blank with your shotgun and he survives.
  
• When you're sawing a Pinky and he manages to land a single bite on you because you didn't feel like backing away slightly, like you should when sawing a Pinky.
  
• When you're running away from a homing Revenant rocket and you run into a non-homing rocket like a fucking idiot.
  
• When you berserker punch a Sargent and he not only survives, but retaliates immediately with a point-blank, full damage shotgun blast.
  
• When you're playing Deathmatch and someone frags you in the same tic where you grab the BFG.
  

Anything goes. It could be something you could have easily avoided and didn't, or just being unlucky in general, etc.

[Bashe]

I run into these a lot, or at least it seems that way (good confirmation bias).

• Hitting a switch and it doesn't work, and doing it multiple more times before it finally decides to work, because clearly I wasn't within the exact PIXEL of a spot the first five times
  
• When the strips that mark keycard-locked doors are used for anything other than "this door is locked" or "this switch needs a key to activate"
  
• When powerups or even just basic items are placed in a way that you must pick them up, but I don't actually want to because it'd be a waste. I see this with armor most frequently
  
• 80 damage revenant rockets, ever
  
• Map sets that insist on using hell knights in place of imps, especially when rockets aren't widely available. This is the sloggiest thing ever and ruined my playthrough of Crimson Canyon, which I was enjoying up to that point
  
• Single maps or sets that don't start on map01 or E*M1. I never understood this, because if the author was just aiming to use the music and/or sky of a certain level, why not just include those assets in the wad?
  
• Narrow shafts you must drop down to progress the level that have become occupied by a cacodemon or pain elemental, who then refuses to leave. This was a big problem on a Memento Mori II map, I recall, especially since I was playing in Chocolate Doom
  
• The blockmap bug eating half of my super shotgun blast and allowing a pinky to survive
  
• Teleporters that place you so close to enemies that you inevitably get hit in that half-second you're unable to move
  
• Maps with close-wait-open doors that can be triggered more than once, making you wait multiple times
  
• Doors that are controlled with S* linedefs rather than D* linedefs. Not being able to manipulate doors to my liking drives me up the wall
  
• Trying to take out a barrel to kill a group of dudes, only to kill all the guys first and therefore waste the barrel
  
• Forced damage via hurt floors, ever
  

Just some that came to mind. I could probably think of a ton more, but this is all for now.

[Gez]

Shooting at a barrel to kill nearby monsters, except the hitbox for one of them intercepts the hitscan traces so it dies to protect the barrel and then the rest of the monsters move away from it.

[Xaser]

Punching a barrel or point-blanking a wall with a rocket and not dying. :(


Jokes aside, one thing that tends to randomly drive me bonkers is being forced to fight a cybie/spidey with the rocket launcher. They're immune to the explosion damage so it feels so wasteful... D:

[Tracer]

•The fact that spectres are easily seen
•Hitting a lost soul I didn't see with a rocket

[Doomkid]

Doomguys dead corpse somehow saying "oomph" when he hits the ground. Happens all the time in DM. I can see why it was overlooked, but a pointer that prevents dsoof from playing after 'death' is called woulda been a nice touch. This happens all the time in vertical DM maps, I didn't even notice it til a few years ago.

Also my ping but I guess that doesn't really count as an element of the game. Still, I can think of hardly any games where .1 of a second delay is enough to have a notable impact on your ability.

[BluePineapple72]

Reused music in episode 3

[Gez]

Reused music in episode 4
No fancy intermap for episode 4

(Also, for Heretic: no fancy intermap for episodes 4 and 5, no new skies for episodes 4 and 5, no new music tracks for episodes 4 and 5.)


Echoing map sections that force you to take damage from damaging floors. Also when they try to make you take armor bonuses before an armor is available. Like, they put 99 armor bonuses around, and then you get a green armor, gee thanks, couldn't have you started with that?

Bashe said:

Single maps or sets that don't start on map01 or E*M1. I never understood this, because if the author was just aiming to use the music and/or sky of a certain level, why not just include those assets in the wad?

Way back in the days, lump editors were quite a bit more complex than map editors. Just look at DEUTEX and how you have to write script files to tell it what to pack. It could be intimidating. (It's not actually hard, though.)

[MrGlide]

• That once you get the BFG the Plasma Rifle is mainly useless.
  
• The pistol is useless once you get the ChainGun
  
• That you spawn with said pistol in deathmatch XD.
  
  
  
  

[antares031]

• When I was blocked by a lost soul million miles above my head, thanks to the infinite tall actor option.
  
• When I jump into the teleporter, and I'm surrounded by chaingunners without a single escape route.
  
• When my opponent has latency advantage in deathmatch. At this moment, the best ping I can get from ZDaemon is 170.
  
• Getting respawned right to the spot that one player is spamming rockets or plasma shots.
  
• Whenever I fall into the deadly pit without any escape teleporters or stairs whatsoever.
  
• Whenever I grab a medikit, even if I had 99% health.
  
• Whenever I face an arch-vile.
  
• Whenever I face two arch-viles.
  
• Whenever I face three, or even more arch-viles.
  

[scifista42]

Monsters forming huge crowds.
Secrets becoming permanently inaccessible if you miss your chance.
Unpredictable certain-death traps.

[Tristan]

Effective use of spectres. Oh it's fucking effective alright -_-

[Ichor]

• You have 98 shells, and there in front of you is a box of shells that you cannot avoid.
  
• When you run out of ammo due to the aforementioned box of shells. Those 18 shells would have come in handy.
  
• Picking up a soulsphere, which sets off a trap and leaves you in worse shape than if you simply ignored it.
  
• Pain elementals leaving behind losts souls on the outside of the map.
  
• Bumping into a solid decoration while trying to dodge something, especially revenant rockets.
  
• Switch hunts.
  
• Successfully dodging a large group of revenant rockets by hiding behind a wall and waiting for the impacts to stop. When you go back out agMISSED ONE!
  
• Enemies that won't stay dead because there's an unreachable arch-vile continually reviving them.
  
• Discovering an invulnerability after the big battle is over.
  
• Invisibility and mancubus, arachnotrons, or cyberdemons do not mix.
  
• An unreachable (at the time) pain elemental which is trying to attack another monster the only way it knows how. And then later on you have to clean up the mess.
  

[Evolution]

Being 'snagged' on vertices and walls, particularly ones not on easy 90/180 angles

Classic RNG in competitve modes

[koren]

• Getting clipped by a mancubus projectile through a wall or corner.
  
• 'Tough Chaingunner' style situations due to doom's less than perfect collision detection.
  
• Missing the occasional punch on demons and being unable to punch mancs and cacodemons reliably in non-zdoom ports.
  
• Putting the only SSG in a secret somewhere near the beginning of a map.
  
• Hanging decorations and ground decorations placed in a way that frustrate the player's smooth movement in an environment.
  
• When infinite height monsters block a mandatory drop to a lower level of the map and I have no rockets or wall to splash them off.

[Unf]

Lost souls taking 2 shotgun blasts to kill
Being able to trick Revenants into melee effectively making them harmless
Having almost full ammo and having a shell box/clip box/plasma something big ammo and being unable to avoid grabbing said ammo
Being completely unable to go back to previous parts of the level, secret ways to go back dont count
The brown water texture. Is it supposed to hurt? Is it just brown water full of waste? Why is there a version of it that kinda glows?
The chaingun being mostly useless, even if one uses it to snipe, as the shotgun is mostly if not better at sniping. Using the chaingun is still fun

[Bashe]

That's another thing - the damaging floors in general. Part of me kind of wish certain ones were hard-coded to do damage, or not to do damage. Generally the lava and nukage textures are a safe bet for damage, but blood and brown sludge are always a gamble and I hate having to take damage to know for sure, especially when it ends up being the max damage variant. If there was a de facto consistency between all of them it wouldn't be so bad, but there isn't.

[Shadow Hog]

The secret exits are always going to be in MAP15 and MAP31.

I mean, they won't be if the level pack targets a source port with MAPINFO - but the vast majority that make a buzz will be Boom-compatible, and that means accommodating all the source ports that don't support MAPINFO or similar, so the secret exits will always be in MAP15 and MAP31.

It's a minor annoyance, I suppose (maybe even a boon, since this knowledge tends to make it easier to know when to go secret-exit-hunting), but it'd really be nice if we could move beyond this at some point.

[Zapzop]

Getting save-stuck when quicksaving at low health and monster projectile/hitscan hitting you right after saving,killing you. So, you will be instantly killed everytime you load that save. Bonus points if you chose to overwrite your autosave file.

[Angry Saint]

HorrorMovieGuy said:

When you shoot an Imp point blank with your shotgun and he survives.

I hate it the double when I reload a savegame and shoot him. And he survives. And I reaload the savegame, and he survives again. Forever...

[MFG38]

When I randomly discover a cool trick and try to replicate it with no success.

[Edward850]

Angry Saint said:

I hate it the double when I reload a savegame and shoot him. And he survives. And I reaload the savegame, and he survives again. Forever...

In most ports, the RNG table is maintained in saved games. Sounds like you are repeating the same moment and action over and over by doing that.
Some people call that a form of insanity.

[Memfis]

When you pick up an important item and get ambushed. Wooow dude, you totally got me there!

[Jimmy]

When my gun's shots defer stubbornly to a non-threatening enemy like a caco while I've got a chaingunner right there peppering the hell out of me. :<

[joe-ilya]

Doom 2 E3 mountains not being red because of the light, but the one's in Udoom's E3 sky are coloured red.
Adrian Carmack, get your shit together!

Stupid crushers out of nowhere.

[Angry Saint]

Edward850 said:

In most ports, the RNG table is maintained in saved games. Sounds like you are repeating the same moment and action over and over by doing that.
Some people call that a form of insanity.

Well, I actually stop and the third our fourth iteration, take the rocket launcher and bast it from the map.

But thank you for the explanation. Now I know why. Maybe exiting the port and restarting it may help?

[Ichor]

joe-ilya said:

Doom 2 E3 mountains not being red because of the light, but the one's in Udoom's E3 sky are coloured red.
Adrian Carmack, get your shit together!

Stupid crushers out of nowhere.

Speaking of crushers...

• Getting stuck in a rising floor crusher, but not dying.

[Gez]

Angry Saint said:

Well, I actually stop and the third our fourth iteration, take the rocket launcher and bast it from the map.

But thank you for the explanation. Now I know why. Maybe exiting the port and restarting it may help?

Another thing you can do, if the circumstances in your save allow: switch to fist, punch a wall, then go back to the shotgun and shoot the imp.

[Maes]

For stuff that relates to the Doom engine itself, there is an ongoing thread which pretty much has the same meaning: Things id got wrong. I'm pretty sure there was a recent thread with this one's precise wording in the title, but what the Hell...

• A zombie managing to finish you off from the other side of the map with a single bullet when low on health (bonus points if you have exactly 15 HP, no armor, and it deals exactly 15 HP)
  
• Inescapable and non-damaging pits (though that's a more common design flaw in PWADs)
  
• One-time/irreversible actions (doors, platforms etc.) that cut you off from a portion of the map or make progress impossible if you miss them once. Again, more common in PWADs.
  
• Fixed per-level duration of invulnerability, radsuit etc. bonuses. I don't know if any thought went into determining a reasonable value for those times in actual IWAD levels (and were they ever changed for e.g. Plutonia and TNT IWADs?), but in many PWADs they may result in ridiculously short durations, given the situations encountered.
  
• Infinitely tall monsters. 'Nuff said.
  

antares031 said:

• When my opponent has latency advantage in deathmatch. At this moment, the best ping I can get from ZDaemon is 170.
  

You can still play a decent "Brit10" style game as a BFG spammer/camper and even come on top more often than not. But don't expect to be able to win 1-on-1 vs players of your own skill level when you have a severe ping disadvantage. No wonder many players prefer the "BFG spammer" or "camper" route: it's far less demanding of connection quality, for one.

[Edward850]

Angry Saint said:

But thank you for the explanation. Now I know why. Maybe exiting the port and restarting it may help?

If it's stored in the save, what would exiting change?