pa17?

Has anyone given any serious thought to this one? I was just playing around on this map and wanted to investigate whether this one could be done a la pa26. Obviously trying to do it like Sedlo's TAS is impossible, but with a slow method it should be possible to get fairly far(at least to the blue key should be possible unassisted).

I think I may remember somebody claiming to get to the blue key. Never saw a demo. I thought the consensus on this one was that the ending in and of itself is practically impossible. But it's the same reasoning why e3m1/4 was thought to be impossible. And if pa07 can be done who knows what tricks there could be.

Still I think pa02 probably has more hope unassisted, even if not much.

Does that mean doom2 map17 pacifist?

yes this is doom2 map17. I wonder if that demo you are talking about is AdamW claiming to get to the blue key in lv02. I have never heard of anyone reaching the blue key in pa17, although it can surely be done. One of the problems for pa17 is there is so much slime around that there is little room to manoeuvre to start infighting, although there is decent health around. I can't really say about the ending. It obviously isn't completely impossible as there are TAS demos around, and I haven't gotten there in practice so I don't know how hard it is.

Selim Benabdelkhalek's TAS is much slower than sedlo's. However, the strategy might be realictic on non-TAS run.

I got the blue key with saves just now. Start infighting hitscanners, get the leftover one to fight imps (luck, then he just stays harmlessly aside).

Get the red key without triggering any cacos or imps by quickly running over the leftmost jutting parts of the walkway, take furthest warp on left.

Very tediously infight specctres with hell knight. Make hell knight blow up barrels to get them out of the way. Every time hell knight goes inside the cubby, follow him and hit the switch with him in front of you (to infight imps). When somewhat clear, go up lift (luck).

Run inside blue key area, after infighting. Hit the switch to the barrel path to release the spectre and infight everyone. Just run up the path and try to avoid shotgunners as they infight, hit switch from above without falling in ditch, get blue key (luck).

I have been testing the ending sequence, and I would say while it is extremely hard, it is quite possible as one can start with 200/200. Of course there are other problems, such as the yellow key, archie room etc. So it is unlikely one could get the 100s of tries necessary for the ending. Of course with practice it could become a bit easier, although I think it will always remain highly luck based. As for the beginning, I had assumed that one would use cacos to take out the imps at the switch. One method I used which is questionable is to take the near teleport (it telefrags a caco), get out fast and use the remaining caco to deal with imps.

Ok I've got a demo so far that I think is pretty impressive. This time I made it not just to the blue key, but to the yellow key as well, and even to the switch in the archie room, where I was immediately blasted by an arch-vile. My methods after the yellow bars are not perfected at all. I kinda rushed to the door, and was lucky that I made it. I wanted to do that quickly because I was afraid of the chainer wandering around, which I had hoped to get in a fight with one of the many cacos around. Normally I would clear the area and use the revenant to shoot imps(not that easy). This demo has convinced me that this map is completely possible, and that earlier comments that this map is "impossible" or too hard to even be considered are just plain wrong. The ending will indeed be a challenge, especially after getting through the rest of the level, but it is possible and I have in practice sessions been able to do that part in one segment(with a lot of luck). Enough rambling, go watch the demo.

pa17b.zip

Impressive since you let out the cacos (even the ones by that caged reverant), but I think its much easier to not let any of them out. When I did it (no cacos), when I first entered the damage slime I was completely enemy free so could infight the caged reverent & chaingunner with the imps.

But still the end arach is maybe 5x harder than all the rest put together. Its possible, but hard/lucky, to send him down the lift(but you'll most likely have a roaming chaingunner down there- another problem): use iddt to lower lift when he's perfectly on it (he'll still stay up, just stuck 100% in the air), then as soon as you go up, turn and face him and the lift (he has to still be perfectly stuck in the air- no portion of him on the ledge) then he sometimes falls down. But even without him up there its hard- even a single imp can come down a hall blocking you in and by then I had 100ish not 200/200, even with that megasphere.
I tried a similar trick; go up lift only when you know arach is hanging off in air, then as you enter the lift will reactivate, keeping him hanging in the air. Doesn't help though because he still shoots even while hanging stuck in the air. This was complevel 9 btw, probably the wrong cl.
Just doing it all as fast as possible with infighting might work but too many tries for me to even want to attempt it from a save position right before it.

IDDT may be useful for practice but Adam disallowed a pn08 (for Compet-N record purposes) by Henning in which he admitted to using IDDT.

it looks promising indeed ...

On a side note , I think intentional telefrags are disallowed.