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Hisymak

The biggest flaws of Heretic (as compared to Doom)

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I disliked how that torch power up was essentially useless in game unless you turn brightness all the way down. It could have been used as a necessary item for progression, or at least made darkened areas much much easier to fight in and navigate, but all of the levels are lightened enough any way, so there's no point in using it.

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Most of these complains come from either having less meat on it's bones than Doom with less monsters,textures and vanilla linedefs or that it doesn't have doom monsters,the first can be explained by the people at Raven not needing them,they only needed those linedefs,monsters and those 99 textures and 66 flats.Yes, it's significantly less than Doom's but it's consistent whereas the Doom textures are a mess of different styles.They probably didn't think that it would gain a modding scene because Doom was the king at the time and no one could stand up to it,they just wanted to make a little sister game to Doom for all the fans of sword and sorcery and Gothic stuff :D

The second can be answered with...why does it need it?Why do you want to Doom-ify Heretic?If you want a to mod a game and want particular stuff from another game then why not mod the other game?From the little bit of experience I got from making 5 Heretic maps (I am working in my 6th right now :D) I understood that it's combat is very different from Doom's one,it's more akin to Serious Sam because you have the most fun when you have a ton of ammo and a ton of different monsters all around you!It's basically the opposite of Quake which had you face off against small groups of 5 or less monsters.

 

Edit:Also even if I played it as a joke in one of my replied I must say using Affrits,Bishops and Wendigos in my Serious Sidhe mappack made me realize that using Hexen monsters in Heretic can make for an amazing experience!Affrits are fire gargoyles but actually good,Bishops are great for big clusters because they damage enemies around them when they die by exploding and Wendigos are basically the Hitscanners of the Heretic/Hexen series with their fast attack that can easily damage you in smaller enviourments.

 

(I hope I didn't fuck up and make the text wall unreadable since English is my third language and I seem to strugle with it a bit :) )

Edited by SOSU

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10 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

The Shadowsphere makes the tornadoes unable to track you, which effectively makes you immune to them. That's the main purpose of the item, imo. I've brainstormed ghost mechanics a bit and haven't come up with any way to solidly improve the Shadowsphere, but it does give you near immunity to two monsters, one a common horde monster and the other a miniboss that can totally mess up your combat abilities. Not too bad, really.

I actually didn't know this. Its not something often noticed.

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Corvus kills heretic monsters faster than doomguy can kill doom ones. The weapons feel weak but they are op as shit. Same with the dumbass op shield and carrying more inventory items than a mule. 

 

Unpowered firemace is RNG city but once it is tomed that thing is like using a cheat code.

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I almost never use powered mace because it steers projectiles sideways whenever you're strafing. I wonder whose bright idea it was.

 

Same with powered phoenix rod.

 

2 hours ago, SOSU said:

Why do you want to Doom-ify Heretic?

Make better ≠ doomify, although these things can overlap.

 

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The big difference between tomed firemace and BFG is that the BFG is a perfect weapon to either kill bosses quickly or exercise crowd-control on thick hordes (can kill up to 41 monsters at once). The tomed firemace, on the other hand, can instakill precisely one non-boss monsters. So it's useless against bosses, and it's not very useful against crowds. What it's good at is carving a path through strong enemies like weredragons or ophidians, so it's decent as a panic weapon for when you get boxed in.

 

The biggest drawback of the firemace (tomed or not) however, is that its projectiles disappear if they bounce on water.

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15 hours ago, Grain of Salt said:

1. Melee doesn't work properly (face it)

How could it be fixed?

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34 minutes ago, Gez said:

The biggest drawback of the firemace (tomed or not) however, is that its projectiles disappear if they bounce on water.

It also doesn't work on ghosts.

 

Now I also wonder who was responisible for putting such a thing in the last slot.

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I don't think it's fair to compare Doom and Heretic in this way. I look at them as two separate games with two different design philosophies that happen to use the same engine. Doom is about fast-paced action in an abstract high-tech environment while Heretic is slower with slightly more palpable locations in mind.

 

As someone who just released their first custom map, which is for Heretic, I honestly think that the limited number of resources encourages mappers to be more creative. Only two switch variants forces you to blend them into the environment more creatively, you have to try a lot harder with the architecture if you don't want it to look generic or monotonous, the limited monster variety makes you more thoughtful in their placement and skill balancing, etc.

 

Of course, those probably mainly apply to mappers who approach their map designs in the same way I do. But I managed to have created a map that I, for the first time ever, didn't feel disappointed in when near completion. This map just so happened to be made for Heretic, I don't consider that to be a mere coincidence.

 

However, the one thing I will admit that is quite disappointing in Heretic is the firemace; the fact that it only has a certain chance of spawning once in any map it's placed in would suggest that it is quite powerful and should be on par with the BFG, but it's actual functionality proves to be so underwhelming and underpowered that there is very little reason to actually use it.

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4 hours ago, Skeletonpatch said:

But I managed to have created a map that I, for the first time ever, didn't feel disappointed in when near completion.

(sorry for a little OT)

Could you please put a link to your map, if you released it? I'd like to try it out.

By chance, my first map I created was for Heretic too, like yours. Here it is: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/heretic/g-i/hisymak

Actually I limited myself to Episode 1 monsters, weapons, textures, items, and one switch type only, so I had to be even more creative with even smaller amount of resources to use. Paradoxically, creating a map like this was rather easier for me, as I needed to think less what texture/monster to choose from.

 

The only thing that I really dislike about Firemace is that it is practically useless if you shoot while strafing, which I do almost permanently to dodge monster's projectiles.

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As a mapper, I think the worst problem of Heretic and Hexen is the (mentioned) lack of enemies and lack of textures. If you make two or three maps or so, it's great. But if you make more, it's boring to have the same enemies over and over again and the same textures. And it's much more easier to find new downloadable textures for Doom2 than for Heretic or Hexen.

 

When I created "Fucking Hexen", I wanted to make two Hubs, however after creating the first, I really used everything that Hexen offers and Heretic seems to have similiar troubles.

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On 10/21/2017 at 3:18 PM, Gez said:

The big difference between tomed firemace and BFG is that the BFG is a perfect weapon to either kill bosses quickly or exercise crowd-control on thick hordes (can kill up to 41 monsters at once). The tomed firemace, on the other hand, can instakill precisely one non-boss monsters.

Luckly corvus has 3 other weapons that decimate bosses once tomed so he hardly needs another boss killer. Firemace can shoot multiple times during one bfg shot, costs practically nothing, needs no aiming and allows much more mobility to dish out the damage. The only boss you'd need to worry about (minotaur) isn't remotely close to how dangerous a cyber is, might as well just run around and kill disciples\ophidians who can build up chip damage.

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7 hours ago, Hisymak said:

Could you please put a link to your map, if you released it? I'd like to try it out.

I participated in the Heretic Upstart Mapping Project (HUMP), my map is E1M1, Sidhatraz:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/heretic/Ports/hump

 

There's a lot of good maps in here, I was surprised by the kinds of environments that the other mappers could put together with the limited assets. My favourite map in the .wad so far (I haven't had time to play all of them) has to be The Bungalow of Dr. Chaos by Impie. Just play it! You will love it!

 

It runs flawlessly in GZDoom, I can't guarantee that it will run well in other source ports.

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8 hours ago, Pegg said:

The only boss you'd need to worry about (minotaur) isn't remotely close to how dangerous a cyber is

I think it depends on how are they used, for example in tight rooms, I found them potentially dangerous, you don't have a BFG-like weapon to kill it faster, and you can't dodge fire snakes. He's much slower to move or respond so that's a disadvantage of him, but he makes you move too. 

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D'Sparil on skill 5 will turn into a bullet hell/slaughtermap battle if you let his summoning get out of control (which is almost guaranteed to happen on that skill level).

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If you ask me, the biggest flaw Heretic made is to add some weakness to all strong weapons when being used against the bosses, thus making boss fights an utter chore.

 

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On 10/21/2017 at 5:22 AM, SOSU said:

The second can be answered with...why does it need it?Why do you want to Doom-ify Heretic?If you want a to mod a game and want particular stuff from another game then why not mod the other game?From the little bit of experience I got from making 5 Heretic maps (I am working in my 6th right now :D) I understood that it's combat is very different from Doom's one,it's more akin to Serious Sam because you have the most fun when you have a ton of ammo and a ton of different monsters all around you!It's basically the opposite of Quake which had you face off against small groups of 5 or less monsters.

Heretic doesn't necessarily need monsters that are exactly like Doom monsters, but it does need more variety in monster types. All the existing ones are too similar, and adding more attack patterns to the game can really improve it. The Afrits and Bishops you added to Serious Sidhe are a good example of this.

 

I think you're right about Heretic being like Serious Sam -- when trying to make big battles in Heretic, I've found that the projectile hell nature of the combat can be really fun. There's nothing like an AV or a Revenant that can be considered unfair in certain situations or that demands your entire attention or arguably forces cheesy combat strategies. The difficulty comes from having to successfully take advantage of the player's fast speed and dodge all of the projectiles. I think the people who complain about those harder monsters in Doom would probably enjoy a well-designed Heretic map more. Still, I think it would make sense for Heretic to have more monsters that are somewhat similar to the Mancubus, Arachnotron, and Cyberdemon (in terms of using splash damage), or have other interesting attack patterns that aren't like anything in Doom, because the player would still have to focus on dodging projectiles, but there would be more complex patterns to dodge. I also think that limited hitscanner use would be good for the game because it would help to give some combat a more well-defined shape, if that makes any sense.

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On ‎10‎/‎20‎/‎2017 at 2:03 PM, Grain of Salt said:

 

4. The music is worse

 

Well, that has more to do with musical taste.

 

 

 

triggered

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On ‎10‎/‎20‎/‎2017 at 4:24 PM, Major Arlene said:

One of my biggest turnoffs with Heretic (vanilla) was the first episode's "boss". Literally the most underwhelming "boss" ever, especially when you run into four or five of them in every map after. 

Well yeah the game is easy if you play it on EASY mode. hahah

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9 hours ago, DoctorGenesis said:

Well yeah the game is easy if you play it on EASY mode. hahah

Regardless of the difficulty chosen, the point is that the Iron Lich has only a little over a fifth of the hit points of the Maulotaur.  It’s presented as a boss at first then appears as a semi-common enemy later.  I’m sure this is also the case on higher difficulties.

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33 minutes ago, Major Arlene said:

Regardless of the difficulty chosen, the point is that the Iron Lich has only a little over a fifth of the hit points of the Maulotaur.  It’s presented as a boss at first then appears as a semi-common enemy later.  I’m sure this is also the case on higher difficulties.

I always regarded the Iron Lich compared to Baron of Hell in DOOM where like everyone knows were the boss of E1. Terrible at first but became much easier in later episodes bcs of more firepower etc. :)

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On 10/23/2017 at 2:18 PM, Graf Zahl said:

If you ask me, the biggest flaw Heretic made is to add some weakness to all strong weapons when being used against the bosses, thus making boss fights an utter chore.

 

It's sorta like the way Blood handles resistances and immunities. Someone can fact check me on this but from what I've observed the tomed up Dragon Claw is very effective against the Maulotaur but not as good against the Iron Lich, however the tomed up Hellstaff is very effective against the Iron Lich and laughably useless against the Maulotaur.

An old strat from RavenGames.com was to tome up the Phoenix Rod and activate a Ring when dealing with a Maulotaur and you could deal with it very effortlessly.

E: D'Sparil is just a prick without the un-tomed Dragon Claw, since it's the only hitscan weapon in the game and on Black Plague difficulty he will teleport so much at one point you are virtually screwed if you're using projectile weapons.

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The only "resistances" in Heretic are that boss monsters can't be morphed or instagibbed by the tomed Firemace.

 

What you're talking about is just a natural result of those monsters' abilities and attributes. The tomed claw's projectiles deal damage each tic while they have contact with an enemy, meaning larger targets like a maulotaur take more damage instances and subsequently take more damage and enter their pain state more. Meanwhile, while the tomed Hellstaff would work on the same principle, the maulotaur's mobility makes it so that it doesn't stay in the rain zone for all that long. However, iron liches are very slow, meaning they get stuck in the area for basically the entire duration.

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10 minutes ago, cyan0s1s said:

E: D'Sparil is just a prick without the un-tomed Dragon Claw, since it's the only hitscan weapon in the game and on Black Plague difficulty he will teleport so much at one point you are virtually screwed if you're using projectile weapons.

There is the elvenwand, but good luck plinking him to death with it. It takes roughly 50 shots with that thing to kill a single iron lich, which is 1/2 of your entire wand crystal ammo, or 1/4 if you got the bag of holding.

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Aye, I didn't mean to forget the Elvenwand, but yeah I forgot to include since it wouldn't be viable, and tomed up you'd be wasting it against him anyway because projectiles.

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32 minutes ago, cyan0s1s said:

Aye, I didn't mean to forget the Elvenwand, but yeah I forgot to include since it wouldn't be viable, and tomed up you'd be wasting it against him anyway because projectiles.

It does use hitscan with the tome of power (in a spread of 5). It's just hard to notice because of those projectiles. It's quite useful at up to medium range, much like the shotgun is better than the pistol.

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42 minutes ago, Arctangent said:

The only "resistances" in Heretic are that boss monsters can't be morphed or instagibbed by the tomed Firemace.

Not true; see Heretic's P_DamageMobj() function.

 

	// Special damage types
	if(inflictor)
	{
		switch(inflictor->type)
		{
			...
			case MT_MACEFX4: // Death ball
				if((target->flags2&MF2_BOSS) || target->type == MT_HEAD)
				{ // Don't allow cheap boss kills
					break;
				}
				...
				break;
			...
			case MT_RAINPLR1: // Rain missiles
			case MT_RAINPLR2:
			case MT_RAINPLR3:
			case MT_RAINPLR4:
				if(target->flags2&MF2_BOSS)
				{ // Decrease damage for bosses
					damage = (P_Random()&7)+1;
				}
				break;
			case MT_HORNRODFX2:
			case MT_PHOENIXFX1:
				if(target->type == MT_SORCERER2 && P_Random() < 96)
				{ // D’Sparil teleports away
					P_DSparilTeleport(target);
					return;
				}
				break;
			case MT_BLASTERFX1:
			case MT_RIPPER:
				if(target->type == MT_HEAD)
				{ // Less damage to Ironlich bosses
					damage = P_Random()&1;
					if(!damage)
					{
						return;
					}
				}
				break;
			default:
				break;
		}
	}

So: iron liches are resistant to rippers (this compensates for their size) and dragon claw shots; D'Sparil (dismounted) and the Maulotaur take less damage from hellstaff rain; D'Sparil has a chance to teleport away before taking damage when shot with phoenix rod or powered hellstaff, and all of them are completely immune to death spheres.

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On 10/20/2017 at 7:03 PM, Ichor said:

It's actually compensated with the enchanted shield, which absorbs 75% damage, basically giving you 400 max health, well actually closer to 366 health, since the armor would run out before you run out of health, when you're at about 33 health.

Nope, it's 300. Your total durability is the sum of your health and all the armor you would lose before getting to 0% health. 100 health + 200 armor = 300. However much the enchanted shield absorbs, it still only has 200 points of damage it can soak before it's gone.

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