Great thanks to the both of you for your comments.
I actually did this intentionally, I thought it was a good challenge to have to run down the hallway with the specters while trying to avoid fireballs and rockets from the imps and revenants above. Having to avoid some enemies for the time being instead of just everything being right in front of you to be killed all at once is just something a little different from traditional Doom carnage, and that's what I was going for in that room.
What I think works the best there is to use the chainsaw (which I even put right at the entrance to that corridor as a hint) to hack through the specters and just keep moving forward as fast as you can. If done right, by the time you get to the end, you may have taken some damage, but it should be minimal, and there are also several stimpacks along the way to help out in that regard.
I do see what you mean about it being unclear where to go next, that's definitely something I'll be working on.
This is also something I can work on. I just put about equal amounts of both shells and bullets at the beginning of the level and left it up to the player to decide which kind to use. Would you load up on shotgun ammo in the first room and then give the player more chaingun ammo after the Mancubi are dead?
Although, I do think a lot of your grief could have been alleviated by using the chainsaw in the dark room, and not worrying about killing the baddies above you until later, when you're actually up there with them and it becomes much easier. I understand that of course, as the level designer, it would seem more obvious to me, but I am also a staunch believer in "trial-and-error" dooming and saving very often. If your strategy doesn't work, hopefully you have a saved game right before you entered that room so you can just reload and try something different.
Yep, this is basically what I was most worried about. I figured my attempts at scenarios that were a little atypical would take a toll on the gameplay, but I was hoping it wouldn't be so bad.
This is essentially what I'm going to end up having to do anyway, since this new levelset I'm working on is unique in that every level fits spatially with the other levels in the set, giving it a kind of 3d "hub" feel.
But as for the "good ideas," I did want to keep the multi-level brick10 "maze" in some capacity, because I love the idea of using rising and lowering water levels to access new parts of the maze. Do you have any suggestions for how to better implement that? Using numbers in the walls to help progression be more clear, maybe? Or is it really just not an idea that is meant to be compatible with the Doom engine?