Thank you! Thank you! :D Feel free to worship (or not) whenever it is convenient for you. Eternalness is optional. (I try to be reasonable!) :P Okay, I promised details, so here goes...
And yes, the early levels were the tricky part. A majority of my attempts ended either in Hell Arena or Chained Court or somewhere in between. I played those first few levels so many times that killing enemies into doorways or pools of acid or stacking their corpses or shooting barrels in order to dispose of the bodies became so natural that even after I got the Rocket Launcher, I frequently forgot that I had the option of destroying bodies the easy way. :)
Part of the difficulty was figuring out what build to use... At first, I thought of using a Sharpshooter build, since it lets me accurately predict how many shots it takes to kill each enemy and I can better control when and where they die, so I can position the bodies where I want them for easier disposal... After failing at that many times, I decided that having extra speed would be a hell of a lot more useful, especially in the arena, and I started heading for Dodgemaster first. (Since a lot of my strategy involves making sure they die at the right moment, it's important, to be able to get away from them, and to dodge their shots as I get them into position) That still didn't quite work out, and I discovered that getting an extra level of SOB at the beginning gave me that extra edge I needed to make it work. I ended up going with a Malicious Blades build, partly because the resistances helped the kind of game I was playing, and partly because I was secretly hoping to test a theory I have for picking up the Dragonslayer and I thought a melee build would be better suited for that. I recently, accidentally, discovered a trick to make the game generate Dragonslayer and I was hoping to recreate that here, but I failed. :( I have a couple of ideas for what I did differently, and I'll have to try again later. (Oh well, Azrael's Scythe still makes a pretty kick-ass melee weapon) :)
My most used strategy for the first couple of levels (which I put to use from time to time throughout) was to put a med-pack in front of an open doorway to attract Former Humans and similar enemies toward it, and then I would wait, with a shotgun wielded, and stand a "knight's move" away from the door. It's the perfect position to take them out with one shot as they enter the doorway so that they die into the doorway and they never get a shot back. Sometimes, I would get 5 or 6 of them in quick succession with that method. Later, once I had Malicious Blades, I was able to do the same trick with Barons and Knights, since my dual Chainswords (and later Azrael's Scythe) could take them out in one or two hits. In the early levels, Imps could be dispatched in a similar manner by attracting their attention with a gunshot fired at them and once I had Malicious Blades, I was able to dispatch everything else in that manner, everything from Cacodemons to Mancubi could be safely killed into doorways so they wouldn't leave corpses, and thus wouldn't regenerate.
The reason it took me over a day to finish it was that it was a slow, painstaking process making sure that every single corpse in the game got destroyed and I had to take frequent breaks so I wouldn't get too impatient, including breaks to sleep and go to work. (Several good attempts were ruined because I got careless) At the end of each level, I would search everywhere, moving items around or looking under them, to make sure there wasn't a single corpse anywhere.
Hell's Arena was a pretty big hurdle to overcome; no Eagle Eye meant I had to rely pretty heavily on my shotgun, which meant that I frequently knew the frustration of having a monster propelled one square when I wanted him to be propelled two, or vice versa. :P Eventually, I developed a pretty good system for stacking Demon corpses on top of Cacodemon or Barons. I never quite mastered the trick of using Dodgemaster to get the enemies' shots to destroy bodies, but I sometimes accomplished it by accident. :)
Chained Court was also challenging just for the fact that there were so many little enemies around. I didn't mind using rockets to destroy the Baron bodies, but I couldn't use too many of them on Former Humans, or I might not have enough for The Wall. After a few failed attempts, I discovered that it makes things considerably easier if the central structure remains intact. For this game, I ran out and took out the Barons first, being careful that no stray shots damaged the walls of the central structure, and then I hid inside the structure with my usual trick with the med-pack in the doorway and cleared out a majority of the Former Humans like that. When the Arena Master showed up, things got a bit tricky since I had used up the berserk power killing the Barons, but I managed to get him into a comfortable corner-shooting position and took him down without too much trouble. Here's a screenshot after I cleared everything out and finished digging through all the stuff to make sure there were no corpses left: :D
There is a pistol (2d4) [5/6] lying here.
There is a pistol (2d4) [5/6] lying here.
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Tormuse Armor : none
Health: 76% Exp: 6/58% Weapon: shotgun (8d3) [1/1] (T1)
tired The Chained Court
(The one corpse is that of the Arena Master; it can't be destroyed and doesn't regenerate)
EDIT: I took screenshots both in colour and black & white and the colour one came out weird, so here's B&W. ^
Nothing much to say about The Wall except lots of corner-shooting with the Shotgun and corpse-removal with the Rocket Launcher. (Having a Shell Box was a huge help in keeping my Shotgun firing rate up!)
Phobos Hellgate: I took quite a beating at the opening ambush, even with Dodgemaster, but I was able to retreat back through the starting door. By then, I had Malicious Blades and two bulk-modded Combat Knives, so I was able to take out the Nightmare Cacodemons and Imps one by one in the doorway without *too* much trouble. And I found an interesting bug, the hard way, that if one of them dies on one of the squares where the walls lower, the corpse is indestructible! I fired three rockets at one of them without it gibbing! It still revived as usual, though, so it was just a matter of luring the creature away from that area and re-killing it and I could gib it as usual. Oh, and one of the Bruiser Brothers revived just as I was about to destroy his body. Grrr! (That's why I got credit for 3 of them) :)
After that, it was pretty smooth sailing for a while, especially once I was dual-wielding two Chainswords, and I didn't run into any significant trouble until the Mortuary where I nearly died. A Blood Skull from the City of Skulls took out the corpses in the middle of the map, and a Fire Skull took out the corpses on the right side, but I botched the use of the third Skull (another Blood Skull) because there were too many enemies for me to get into a good position to use it properly, so there were a lot more enemies than I was prepared to deal with and I quickly found myself overwhelmed! I used all my med-packs, almost all of my ammo, and all armour except my Tactical Armour dealing with that situation. In the end, I was reduced to luring enemies over to the right side, one by one, to be dispatched with my Nuclear Plasma Rifle and then have their corpse destroyed by the Nuclear BFG. As luck would have it, the very last enemy on that level was a Former Sergeant, so I was able to farm him for shells to get my stockpile back up and also, somehow, despite all the rockets and BFG blasts flying around, there was still a Supercharge intact in the lower left corner! It was a big help to re-establishing myself for the endgame. :)
I hadn't planned to go for the full win, since JC's minions would totally screw up my goal of 100% kills, but as luck would have it, there was an invulnerability globe next to the entrance to Dis and thanks to Nightmare difficulty, it lasted long enough for me to nuke both the Mastermind and JC! I never even had to use the Lava Element! :D
EDIT2: YAY! :D
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Topic: [N!|YAFW/YAAM] Opposed the Nightmare! (Read 5805 times)