I remember when I would first do the Chained Court (with arena beaten) I would just grab the chainsaw and run out and kill some stuff. I always figured that was a good way to do things, until I read one time about grabbing one of the berserk packs as well, to guarantee that my berserk would last long enough. After that moment, I started having a lot more success in the Chained Court. However, in attempt to move on to HMP, and even sometimes on HNTR in the slightly harder betas, I would kill the arena master but end up stranded outside with all the cacodemons or hell knights still alive and wandering around who knows where, and I would often be almost dead. Since there's one remaining berserk pack just begging to heal me, I would save my medkits and usually die.
Then it clicked. Why don't I kill those four bastards before I go after the arena master? With this strategy I was able to kill the four hell knights, beat the arena master, and even clear out a lot of the formers on HMP before running out of berserk. It took a couple of small medkits because I probably should have started off with green armor while all the formers were blasting me (I've never actually done the math on this), but now rather than having the four hell knights to worry about without any berserk, I just have to kill the straggling formers, which easily fall to my regular weapons.
I have to say, I felt rather proud about arriving at this strategy change on my own. I feel like I'm understanding DoomRL more and more every day. Do you guys have any similar moments you'd like to share for posterity?
