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DRL / Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!
on: Yesterday at 15:05
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Tormuse | ||
Finally I get the legendary Tormuse in one of my threads, but thanks :p Aw, I didn't mean to neglect you. :P I just haven't touched DRL in a while, so I haven't looked at these forums much. Everyman Angelic seemed like a good excuse to come out of lurking, though. :) |
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DRL / Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!
on: Yesterday at 12:43
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Omega Tyrant | ||
Congratulations :) Nice to see you in one of my threads here too! It is funny that killing the poor Mastermind does often amount to little more than burning the rope... |
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DRL / Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!
on: Yesterday at 12:26
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Omega Tyrant | ||
That's a lot of words. :P Also, congrats on your victory! :D Finally I get the legendary Tormuse in one of my threads, but thanks :p Quote I watched the video, and it neatly highlights the one advantage that the graphics version of DRL has over the ASCII version, in that Intuition trait shows you what the powerups are before you get to them, whereas in the ASCII version that I normally play, they would all look identical. I see that it was helpful in picking up all the invulnerability spheres. (And there were a *lot* of them! Holy cow!) :o This is another little thing I forgot to mention when going over how Everyman Angelic will change in JHC era DRL, the powerup overlay filters got adjusted to be less awful, and in at least graphics mode, you can better distinguish powerups, Exotics/Uniques, and actually see the Int2 Xs while you got one of the powerup filters up (even in this run, I left that Deimos 7 Invulnerability behind not only for being far away, but I also have to really squint to distinguish between them and Supercharges with the invuln filter up and I didn't want to risk going all that way for a Supercharge I misread as an Invuln, as I already did prior on Deimos 3). So it might now be possible to distinguish powerups while invuln'd/berserked in console mode, and if not, we may possibly get a toggle in the future to turn off those powerup filters altogether, as has been officially proposed and is something even people on the Steam JHC forums have requested (which is ultimately what I would prefer, even when improved I still don't like those filters). Quote Nice use of rocket jumping in the lategame; that rocket box was a lucky find too! :) Going to Mortuary to get the Nuclear BFG was a ballsy move, but it clearly paid off. Again, well done! :) This run shows part of why I'm the biggest Rocket Launcher advocate, the hardest part about the weapon-locked challenges for me is not being able to use one! That was the happiest I ever was to see a Rocket Box, going into Mortuary wouldn't have been viable without getting that rocket restock right before it, which certainly would have made the Mastermind more nerve-wracking as I'm not 100% sure I would have had enough invuln and if her moving around would have made me waste too much time killing her even with the Double Shotgun (I have my max wait set to 100 and it took one run -> wait to run out my invuln in Dis, so I had no more than 100 turns of invuln when I reached Dis and I only burned a little over a dozen invuln turns in Mortuary), while I've never really practiced the Mastermind kiting strats (which I'm not sure would be possible without HR or having speed-boosting armor) or getting her stuck, so I was banking on having the invuln/berserk to kill her or to nuke her. Quote Also, what's with the music and sound? Is that a mod? Yeah I'm big into modding the music and audio of DRL, can only listen to same remixes of the Episode 1 tracks on repeat so much... and the default sounds are too limited for my tastes. With the music here, in my "default" music list I'm basically running a mishmash of my favorite tracks from Doom 1, Doom 2 (with some of the IDKFA remixes from the recent Doom 1 + Doom 2 release when I preferred them over the original), Sigil 1, the No Rest For The Living midi pack, and the Master Levels For Doom 2 midi pack. Also got music sets for PSX Doom (which I used in my Masochist Angelic and 0.9.9.8 Inquisitor Angelic videos) and the TNT midi pack (which I used in my 0.9.9.8 Eagerness Angelic video). Always had plans to make a lot more music sets to cycle through, but have procrastinated it... well with 0.9.9.7 wrapped up for me and me waiting for more DRL changes to happen before I try for 100% again (particularly the proposed badge overhauls and special level rebalancing), it would be a good time to get those done. As for the sounds, I used sounds from PSX Doom/Doom 64 whenever I preferred them or to make things sound more unique from each other (such examples being using the PSX Doom fireball, claw, and biting sounds for enemies with stronger attacks because I think they sound more impactful, and using the PSX Baron roar for the Bruisers because it sounds much more intimidating and more boss-like), as well as some unique demon lurking + pain sounds I found in a Doom mod to make enemies sound more distinct and better befit the atmosphere in my view. Also found out that you can even mod hoof sounds for everything, but I thought it might get annoying if every enemy had hoof sounds, so I only modded them in for the non-flying bosses and a few of the new Nightmare enemies added in 0.10 (not demonstrated in this video, but for the Shambler I got all the actual Shambler sounds from Quake, and the Deimos Lab dual Shambler fight is even more heart-pounding when you keep hearing their booming Quake hoof sound whenever they walk around...). Got some sounds for Exotics/Uniques too that lacked them previously or were grossly unfitting (for example, I got the Railgun actually sounding like a Railgun instead of a wimpy pistol), but compared to the enemies I haven't gone fully in-depth on them with many left undone and some sounds are just thrown on without me trying to search out a more suitable replacement (for example I still just got a punching sound for the Combat Knife instead of a real knife slashing sound, and I got the Cyberdemon stomp on the Dragonslayer because I don't know where to get a big ass sword slashing sound and at least that's better than complete awkward silence when swinging it). Asbadagba I know actually made a complete sound mod overhaul that give unique sounds to everything, even giving unique sounds to picking up items, after telling him how to mod DRL's audio (where possible, there are several instances where the game has an enemy or item take sounds from something else and it currently overrides whatever you have set for them in the sound.lua and audio.lua files, like I wanted to give the Shambler projectile their actual Quake sound, but in 0.9.9.7 they're hard-coded to use whatever projectile sound the Baron has and in 0.10 they take the Cacodemon's projectile sound instead). |
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DRL / Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!
on: Yesterday at 06:45
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Tormuse | ||
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That's a lot of words. :P Also, congrats on your victory! :D
I watched the video, and it neatly highlights the one advantage that the graphics version of DRL has over the ASCII version, in that Intuition trait shows you what the powerups are before you get to them, whereas in the ASCII version that I normally play, they would all look identical. I see that it was helpful in picking up all the invulnerability spheres. (And there were a *lot* of them! Holy cow!) :o Nice use of rocket jumping in the lategame; that rocket box was a lucky find too! :) Going to Mortuary to get the Nuclear BFG was a ballsy move, but it clearly paid off. Again, well done! :) Also, what's with the music and sound? Is that a mod? |
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DRL / Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!
on: Yesterday at 03:15
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Kornel Kisielewicz | ||
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Congratulations :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmuiwOGi5gA |
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on: February 16, 2026, 20:37
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Omega Tyrant | ||
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(If you just want to watch the video of this run, you can watch it here)
To finish up 0.9.9.7, I got one badge left to get, the infamous Everyman Angelic. When the Angelics were first introduced in 0.9.9.7, the one everyone hyped up to be the impossible one was Everyman Angelic, because just how do you beat the game with having only one trait and being unable to take any hits with only 10 max HP? Even 2Dev apparently thought it would be too outlandish even for him to post a mortem of clearing Archangel of Humanity on N!, with him making a post saying he was "working on it" and "damn it's hard", yet never posting a supposed completion of it before he suddenly disappeared after his infamous (and now debunked) Veteran/Elite/UAC/Demonic Quad Angelic mortem. Kornel would even say he listed the difficulty for ArchAoH as "TwoDev" because he thought you would pretty much need to cheat to beat it. However Everyman Angelic would prove to not be among the impossible tier of the Angelics and was actually won before a few of the winnable Angelics (being won many years before I first won Eagerness, Inquisitor, and Masochist in this version), with Tormuse famously first cracking it in 2017 (which earned him having the difficulty for the challenge renamed after him from 0.9.9.8-onward), and then Icy would win it too five years later. As it turns out, DRL does give you just enough tools in addition to AoH's generous starting loadout to viably win the game on N! with almost no traits and almost no health if you get good enough luck, particularly with powerups. But luck is the big caveat here and is the reason I put this badge off after even the more difficult or tedious Angelics; no matter how good you are, with no traits nor health, you still won't make it past Phobos without good level generation or Berserk luck, and you won't survive post-Phobos without getting good enough Invulnerability luck, with it taking Tormuse over 200 attempts (with him stating 173 recorded attempts and dozens of unrecorded attempts before), and Icy didn't state how many attempts it took, but when looking at his death count on this failed attempt to compare to his winning mortem and him saying he did 18 serious attempts up to that point, it's probably somewhere around 100 attempts for him at least. I really don't like doing challenges that amount to little more than spinning a slot machine until the RNG decides you can win, but could it really be worse than Berserker Angelic in that regard? For build and strategy, instead of regurgitating it, I'll just link Icy's incredible Everyman Angelic guide. With your lone trait, of the two provably viable options between Hellrunner (which Tormuse used to win) and Intuition (which Icy used to win), I decided to go with Intuition; Hellrunner would get quite a lot more attempts past Phobos (Anomaly in particular will often kill you with no HR even if you still have the Chained Court berserk intact without coming in with Invuln, a Phase, or a Rocket Launcher), but survival past Phobos is extremely reliant on being invulnerable for the vast majority of it or at least berserked when you're not, and Intuition will be vital for finding Invulns/Berserks when otherwise you would have to hope they happen to be in the way on your path to the stairs since you can't viably explore floors in this challenge, or if you are invulned/berserked, you can't afford to be burning your precious powerup turns exploring instead of heading towards the stairs. And as someone who will take needing more early game luck in exchange for more later game reliability, Intuition was the obvious pick for me. With the starting mods, I additionally go with Icy's guide and put the P Mod on the Red Armor, T Mod on the Shotgun, save the B Mod for the Chainsaw, and save the A Mod for boots or the Anomaly Red Armor (if I found no boots prior and will have to run through Anomaly with no invuln, phase, or Rocket Launcher). I thought about saving the T Mod for a Combat Shotgun, since they aren't uncommon after late Phobos and there have been a few times where I got early vaults that I could get into with a Combat Shotgun inside, but much more often than not you'll be primarily using the basic Shotgun for most of Phobos and a better shotgun won't really matter for surviving post-Phobos, so it's better to just immediately T-mod your Shotgun to help you survive Phobos rather than save it for a weapon you likely won't even get until it's too late to matter. In Phobos Base Entry, the usual strategy applies and is pretty easy, as a P Red Armor reduces nearly every hit to 1 damage. I resetted here a lot early on trying to get a good Phobos Entry, but I learned it doesn't really matter; the extra medkits would be nice but 1 or 2 more medkits is probably not going to make a difference, and you'll likely be able to heal early into floor 2, or can just use a Small Medkit that heals 70% here and so will likely heal off all damage you take here, while again you're very unlikely to die from running out of medkits in this challenge. So the only resets should be from the Shotgunners coming out of the base early, the Formers behaving in a way that makes it excessively annoying, or accidentally destroying all the Shotgunner corpses before you could farm one to load up on shells. Phobos 2 also is not bad and I had only a few resets here, the P-modded Red Armor reduce all Imp fireballs to 1 or 2 damage, all Lost Soul charges to 1 damage, and even Pinky bites will deal only 1 or 2 damage, while the T Shotgun is more than adequate for fighting here and you don't need any traits yet. The only danger are Former Captains (who will deal 4 damage minimum if every bullet of theirs connect, which is nearly half your health here) and Cacodemons if there's a Cacodemon vault (whose plasma damage will halve your Red Armor's effectiveness and so they deal 4 damage on average while hitting up to as much as 9), but Captains are easy to kill with your shotgun and Cacodemons can be pretty reliably corner shot to death with the a T-modded Shotgun, so even they won't be too bad if they don't catch you in the open. It's actually still easy in ArchAoH to clear out Phobos 2 with a decent camping spot, but since levelling up does nothing, killing all the enemies here achieves nothing and you won't need the ammo from the Formers when you can just farm the Shotgunners in Phobos Entry for most of the shells you'll need for the rest of the game. Clearing the floor would make it safe to explore the rest of the floor to find stuff without risk, but unless you get a vault or lucky with crates dropping a Shell Box or boots, there's nothing really worthwhile for this run that you can find on Phobos 2 other than Berserks that Intuition will let you immediately find anyway, so clearing Phobos 2 would often amount to just being a waste of time when you'll very likely just die in the next few floors regardless. Speaking of which, the Phobos 3-5 range as usual will be what kills the majority of runs. The Hell Knights that start appearing are a huge stepup in danger, when like Cacodemons they inflict plasma damage and so will hit you for up to 9 damage, while with their 10 extra HP and 10% extra speed compared to Cacodemons, they'll get through your corner shooting a lot more often if you can't begin firing on them from far enough away or don't have a lucky early Shell Box. More monster groups start appearing as well, and even if you can reduce the damage from weak enemies to 1, a bunch of them hitting you at once can still shave over half your health away when you got only 10. As a result, you also can't safely use medkits with several enemies in vision, as they'll just knock you back below half health, and so any hot starts here without an immediate good escape path will be lethal. Mazes here will often be invariable death without nearby stairs or berserk, and even with berserk they'll still often kill you from the sheer amount of enemies killing you by attrition. Cacodemon caves will additionally be lethal without quick stairs given that they kill you in 2 or 3 hits and you probably won't have a good corner shooting spot to fight them, but getting a Lost Soul cave will be a massive breather here and you won't even care about their trash EXP yield in this challenge that makes these levels a double-edged sword normally, while Pinky caves can be surprisingly manageable as long as you don't spawn in the middle of a bunch of them, since your P Red Armor softens their bites so much. The strategy at this point is primarily just haul ass to The Chained Court, fighting only what you have to and only go for items that are in the way. Even Berserks aren't really worth going out of your way for when they don't guarantee safety, and you're not likely to find much for helpful stuff in this range, with the big exceptions of Steel Boots being able to spawn on Phobos 4+, a Double Shotgun also on Phobos 4+, and Phase Devices on Phobos 5+. Though I'll also try going for Shell Boxes (they can start starting on Phobos 4) and rockets (Phobos 5+, I won't have a Rocket Launcher yet without a lucky vault but having a good rocket supply if I do get one later is vital), as well as any medkits or Armor Shards that won't be too dangerous to go for (the P Red Armor will be pretty beaten up by this point, so a repair is very helpful as it getting damaged will probably mean you'll die in quick order). If you reach The Chained Court, you could avoid grabbing the Chainsaw or Berserks at first and get to the exit room to camp it out to safely clear out the Formers, so you don't waste any berserk having to shoot the Formers on your way out (as you can't run by them with such low HP, especially the Captains you have to shoot down or they'll shred you), but given that most runs at this point will still fail regardless, it's not worth it time investment-wise to spend several minutes mashing run -> wait every time you make it here just to die a minute later. Actually clearing Chained Court is also possible, but again you get no EXP benefit and you'll need to expend at least two of the Berserks to do so (else the Barons will quickly slaughter you once you release them, even being able to one-shot you in P Red Armor without berserk), the mods might be nice but they aren't worth losing out taking hundreds more turns of berserk with you nor damaging your armor. So the strategy in Chained Court is to just immediately grab everything and get out, while shooting down the Formers that are in the way and trying to avoid stepping into a Chaingunner's vision (other than the one likely in the exit room that you'll have to take a hit from as waiting for him to get out would waste too much berserk). The strategy for post-Chained Court will rely on trying to have that berserk last up through Anomaly, as at this point when the enemies much worse than Hell Knights start showing up (Commandos are especially deadly, without berserk they're just one-tapping you even in P Red Armor, and if you have berserk, they're still dealing 6 damage each attack), you're not going to survive without the berserk and you'll need it at minimum to get through Anomaly without invuln, a Phase, or a Rocket Launcher. Those, and maybe boots or a Double Shotgun if I don't have them yet, are additionally the only things I will go anywhere out of my way to get here, even mods I'll leave behind if it would waste too much berserk to get them. For this particular run, after a typical Phobos Base Entry, I got a nice-looking Phobos 2 with a quick Berserk decently close to the stairs, but I made a mistake in not checking out the exit room first to clear, which ended up having a lot of enemies in the way and so I burned nearly all the berserk getting to the stairs. Phobos 3 had immediate stairs with only a Lost Soul in view, but wasting that Phobos 2 berserk nearly lost me the run when I got a Pinky + Cacodemon Cave that nearly killed me, but luckily I was able to get behind that wall to safely heal without the Pinky getting a double move to finish me and there were no enemies near the stairs, while the Pinky would also block one more plasma ball that could have killed me. Phobos 5 was a big breather, being a Pinky Cave with a water river that I spawned in, and so I could just wait in the back to shotgun down all the Pinkies while the river erased their corpses. I did get surprised by a horde of stuck Pinkies after exiting that safe spot, but I'm able to make the distance to kill them without farther damage. The cave was decently fruitful too; aside from the Armor Shard to repair my P Red Armor that was getting a bit low in its durability and a rocket stack, this cave had a Double Shotgun. A Double Shotgun doesn't sound useful at first when I have no Reloader nor even a Shell Box and Icy didn't consider it in his guide, but it will prove handy for two important levels later... (and if you do have a Shell Box, you could viably use it to more quickly corner shoot a big enemy to death). I nearly wasted that good fortune however in Chained Court when I walked into the exit room with 6 HP thinking I would be safe with the one Chaingunner in there, but there turned out to be two, which should have been 8 damage and thus death... but luckily I rolled two dodges and a miss, so I survive with 1 HP. It looked like my luck was going to end there when I got a maze for Phobos 6, but somehow nothing worse than Formers and Imps were in the way to the stairs nor did the maze have walls blocking the stairs, and so I reach the stairs pretty quickly with only a single medkit used (and that Commando at the end popped up right when I got on the stairs). I would get more luck with finally getting a Phobos 7 Invuln (15 prior runs that made it to this point didn't get one), and there was nothing but an Imp to contest it (who ended up just hitting himself on that barrel). Now I was at Phobos Anomaly. A major drawback of going Intuition instead of going Hellrunner is if you didn't get a retrievable Phobos 7 Invuln, found a Rocket Launcher, or get lucky with a Phase, most runs that make it here will still die, with me being 2 for 8 with getting past Anomaly prior to this and only one of those had a Phase, while I never got a Rocket Launcher in those runs. Without HR, your movement speed isn't fast enough to meaningfully outrun the Nightmare Demons while wearing the Red Armor even with berserk, and the Nightmare Cacodemons + Imps are going to be repeatedly pelting you without any dodge bonus, while you also can't survive running naked as said enemies will be dealing too much damage when you can't dodge them much. If you haven't found boots by this point to put your starting A Mod on, you should A-mod the fresh Red Armor here, as it'll be barely slower than running naked while leaving you a lot less vulnerable and so will be your only shot to survive here without an invuln/phase/Rocket Launcher. Since I did have invuln, I could run through the ambush no problem (though I left behind the second Large Medkit and rockets I usually pick up here to waste less Invuln), but I was in a bit of a predicament; I know I wouldn't have enough invuln to last me through the Bruisers, while the door out of the ambush hallway got destroyed with the Nightmare Demons on my ass (which I was hoping to close to block them long enough to get distance and deaggro them), and even with the A Red Armor, I probably won't make enough distance to break vision from them when I reach the Bruisers, while if the Bruisers knock me back towards the Nightmare Demons, that's probably the end of the run. This is where the Double Shotgun comes clutch, as it can be used to kill the Nightmare Demons more quickly, and if the door wasn't destroyed but a Nightmare Demon was blocking it from being closed, I could use the Double Shotgun to knock the Nightmare Demons out of the doorway and then close it. As expected, the invuln runs out well before the Bruisers, but this isn't a problem with my Chained Court berserk still intact, as the P Red Armor will reduce any acid ball that rolls below 19 damage to 1 and even a max damage roll from them still only does 2 damage, so I make it out of Anomaly and this run is in serious winnable territory now. I've gotten only two runs prior up to this point, and from here on out, I'm banking on finding Invulns ASAP or at least more berserks, you're simply not going to survive for long at this point without either, and even if you get the level luck to survive without them, beating the Cyberdemon with no traits nor health would be hopeless without said powerups (or acquiring a miracle Inquisitor Set prior to Babel, which is technically possible as you could get a Malek's Armor prior to floor 15 from a vault and then get the Laptop Boots on Deimos 7, but if you have the luck for that in an Everyman Angelic run... you're probably going to make a good subject for a Karl Jobst video). In this run I get a good start to Deimos with a nearby Invuln and stairs, as well as finally getting some boots (Protective Boots, which aren't the most ideal but it's better than nothing), the Invuln would have a Revenant guarding it, but thanks to have the Chained Court berserk still being intact, he only hits me for 1 damage and I can safely kill him after retreating back behind the nearby doorway. With the Invuln secured, I then start making a mad dash for the stairs (though I pick up that Technical Mod I ignored earlier, in case I need it later...). I get more good luck with Deimos 2 starting me near an Invuln and having pretty close stairs with a Berserk next to them too (which also somehow didn't get destroyed after getting caught in the explosion of three acid balls from the Baron chasing me). The luck continues with more good luck as Deimos 3 has close stairs, and Deimos 4 follows suit with a Homing Phase and yet another Invuln on the way to the stairs, there was just a Mancubus on the way I had to kill first to make sure he didn't blow up the Invuln. The good stair luck would end with Deimos 5, it was a tough call but with no Invulns/Berserk along the way, still no Rocket Launcher, and Babel being around the corner, I decide I should just use the Homing Phase I picked up now, there's no good saving it for a better opportunity later if my Invuln runs out and I die before a better opportunity to use it comes. Deimos 6 would start me near the special level stairs, but with me rolling Halls Of Carnage instead of Spider's Lair, it's not a viable escape path without the Homing Phase I just used up, however I do get the most important item for this run spawned uncontested right at the start, a Rocket Launcher! One major thing Icy overlooked in his guide is just how major a Rocket Launcher is, he briefly mentions rocket jumping being a viable option to get past Anomaly but rocket jumping is incredibly useful beyond that, as it greatly extends how far each Invuln can last and so greatly reduces the amount of Invuln + stair luck you need to win. Even without Invuln, rocket jumping can extend your Berserks as long as your health isn't too low (any Red Armor with berserk will reduce rocket jump damage to 1), and could be a life saver without either if you spawn near a group of enemies you can't safely outrun, not to mention being able to destroy walls will save you powerup turns whenever they block the direct path to the stairs or let you possibly get around dangerous enemies if you have no Invuln. My best attempt prior that made it to Hell 3 without a Rocket Launcher would have surely succeeded if I had one. With the Rocket Launcher secured, it's time to rocket jump like hell straight to the stairs, and after an unremarkable Deimos 7, it's time for Babel. Rocket jumping shows another strong point by safeguarding against a far away Cyberdemon spawn, without rocket jumping I would have lost several dozens invuln turns here and possibly not have enough to kill the Cyberdemon (if the Cyberdemon is any more than one hit away from dying when your invuln runs out and you aren't berserked, it's game over). Another optimization not covered by Icy and another reason why picking up a Double Shotgun if you find one is important, is if you don't have berserk, the Double Shotgun will actually kill the Cyberdemon in fewer actions than the B Chainsaw will; the B Chainsaw averages 13.5 damage per hit on the Cyberdemon (17.5 minus his 4 armor), killing him in 33.3 hits and will miss half the time, averaging 66-67 actions total to kill him, while the Double Shotgun averages 18 damage point blank (a Double Shotgun blast averages 18, gets reduced by 8 from his armor and then reduced by one more point from 10% falloff, then there's two blasts and so it's doubled back up to 18), and unlike the Chainsaw it won't miss, so it kills him in 25 shots on average and averages 49 actions total when accounting for the needed reload after each shot, requiring quite a bit less Invuln to win. If you can P-mod your Double Shotgun it'll be even better, as each shot will then average 21.6 damage and thus reduce the total average actions needed to 40-41 (so if you found a spare Power Mod and a Double Shotgun, you should P-mod it). You'll need to expend a decent chunk of shells, but if you got good enough Invuln luck to make it this far, you should have enough left over from Phobos, and you won't need much if any shells after this, so the ammo cost is irrelevant. Even if you have enough Invuln to kill him with the Chainsaw before running out, you should still kill him with the Double Shotgun, as you don't know what kind of Invuln luck you'll have in Hell and so you want to retain as much Invuln as possible. It should be noted that a point blank Plasma Rifle will similarly beat the Chainsaw without berserk here, especially if A-modded (the math is a lot more cumbersome here so just trust me on it), but the Plasma Rifle is a lot less practical as you'll need several stacks of cells to have enough ammo and unlike with shotgun shells, you won't have a good opportunity to farm cells in this run (can't stop to farm a Commando or Arachnotron when you gotta stretch your powerups as long as possible and stopping to farm one when you're out of powerups would be very dangerous), so it's very unlikely you'll have enough cells for that (though if you don't have a Double Shotgun, you could use the Plasma Rifle to weaken the Cyberdemon until you run out of cells and then finish him off with the Chainsaw to save some invuln). Speaking of cells, if you could burn a Homing Phase to nab the BFG from Halls Of Carnage, it would be the actual best weapon here, averaging 33 damage and not being able to miss, so it kills the Cyberdemon in 13-14 hits on average and will average 19/20 actions total with the needed reloads, even beating the berserk B Chainsaw (which with misses factored will average 29 actions to kill the Cyberdemon), but it would require filling half your inventory with cells and so you realistically wouldn't have enough cells for that (though you could use it to weaken the Cyberdemon before using the Chainsaw or Double Shotgun to save some Invuln at least). With that strategy aside of the Cyberdemon done, I kill the Cyberdemon and enter Hell with my invuln still intact. I'm unsure how much invuln I have left at this point, but I get a good Hell 1 with two Invulns, one of which is close to the stairs. I do have a problem however in that I have only a few rockets left (a good reason why you need to be even more proactive at picking up rockets than I was in this run), so I opt to not go for that second farther away Invuln. Hell 2 is an arena, not close stairs but an arena means I get an open area with few obstructions to only need a couple rocket jumps and so I don't lose much invuln here, as well as can nab one of the berserks along the way. I get a good Hell 3 that has yet another Invuln and nearby stairs, so I get more invuln and don't need to rocket jump. Hell 4 then has the item I need most at this point immediately in view, a Rocket Box! 20 rockets should be more than enough to get me through the rest of the game, and even give me enough to detour through Mortuary/Limbo. That's also another important thing about the Rocket Launcher, it makes it viable to go through Mortuary/Limbo if you have enough invuln to nab the Nuclear BFG for the guaranteed win at Dis, when you would otherwise need to get lucky with a Homing Phase dropping you at the right corner to do so, whereas if you were to try running to the Nuclear BFG, it would waste too much invuln and you'll probably have a mass of enemies around that makes it impossible to get, if you don't just get pinballed around until your invuln runs out. With that berserk I nabbed a couple floors prior still being intact to speed me up and no Archvile being near the Nuclear BFG, I secure it with no issues and now I just need to make it to Dis to win (I realized I made a mistake in immediately unloading that Rocket Box, I should have equipped it to make my reloads faster and reduce the amount of respawns the Archviles could get off before I reached the Nuclear BFG, but fortunately it ended up not mattering here, just something to keep in mind if anyone trying this finds a Rocket Box in their run). Hell 5 would have pretty far stairs, not too bad when I got enough rockets now to keep rocket jumping, but I would get in a bad spot when it was a Revenant level and there turned out to be a lot of Revenants around the stairs, and I proceed to get pinballed around as I try to reach the stairs (which was a major factor that lost me my prior best run, when a bunch of VMR pinballing me near the stairs on Hell 2 made me lose a lot of invuln, making it run out shortly after in Hell 3 in an Archvile level). This kind of scenario is why I nabbed that Technical Mod back in Deimos 1, as this is one of the very very few instances where increasing knockback resistance on boots is actually helpful, unfortunately I don't got Plasteel Boots to put the T Mod on so the Protective Boots would have to do, which I then put on (after taking them off prior to not have my rocket jumps reduced) and try to power my way through the Revenants. Unfortunately the Revenants are still knocking me around and it takes me about a dozen more invuln turns to get on the stairs, but the boots' knockback resistance is enough to make it usually only 1 tile of knockback per hit rather than the 2+ that would have made it even worse to reach the stairs, if not impossible without slowly shotgunning them down from far away. Hell 6 gives me a break though with quickly reachable stairs and then Hell 7 follows suit. Just like that, I'm in Dis, and I probably do have enough invuln left to kill the Mastermind conventionally (the Double Shotgun works even better against her despite the extra HP she has thanks to her having less armor than the Cyberdemon), but since I have the Nuclear BFG, I'm not going to risk it, so I just run -> wait to make the invuln run out, armed the Nuclear BFG and nuke Dis for the safe guaranteed win. With that, I become the third person to join the Everyman Angelic club (and their first one outside of Ontario :p), and I recorded it too (you can watch it here). I had 35 deaths prior to this win and another dozen to two resets on the first two floors (though most of that was early on before I realized I didn't need a good Phobos Base Entry), I do agree with what Icy said that Everyman Angelic isn't quite the worst winnable Angelic in 0.9.9.7; Berserker Angelic requires even more luck while having a lot less skill impression involved, Masochist and Eagerness Angelic have an even greater skill barrier while still requiring a lot of luck (especially the latter), Strongman Angelic has a high luck component too and requires you to tolerate far worse gameplay, and Inquisitor Angelic maybe has the highest skill requirement of any winnable Angelic while you can't be saved in it by Invuln luck. Everyman Angelic is still extremely difficult and it's going to require a grind for it no matter how good you are, but I would rate Masochist above it (as Icy said, at least you can still heal in Everyman, and starting with a Red Armor + each mod compared to starting with nothing actually does a lot to make up for your inability to get any traits), as well as Eagerness and Berserker, while Inquisitor and Strongman could be rated more difficult too (unsure at the moment). How Everyman Angelic will fare in JHC-era DRL will be interesting; a big change are powerups actually being time-based now, which will change the meta for this quite a bit (e.g. you're now going to need to wear faster equipment when invuln'd, and the Double Shotgun will now be worse against the bosses than the B Chainsaw... unless you got a Shell Box, in which case it's even better than it was before), as well as possibly no longer being able to stack powerup durations (hasn't happened yet but Kornel stated he wants to do that, which could push this badge to near impossible territory without farther adjustments to ArchAoH), and you got berserk being nerfed to +50% resistances and more randomized melee damage (notably the Cyberdemon and Mastermind can swing way harder, up to as much as 27, so you might want to try a Ballistic Red Armor as berserk + P Red Armor won't be enough to reduce their melee damage to 1). In addition to that are smaller but still meaningful changes like Technical Mods now giving resistances to armor/boots (T-modding your starting Red Armor and P-modding a Shotgun might become the better play, especially as that T Red Armor could be turned into a Ballistic Red Armor later), enemies no longer respawning in vision (less chance to get screwed over by an ill-timed respawn), Enraged Timer meaning slowly chipping down the Mastermind at the end to win without enough invuln/berserk or a nuke may no longer be viable (if her AI changes didn't already do that), and a buffed Reloader that might make it a viable option (though it probably still doesn't beat Intuition with how important Invulns are). With Everyman Angelic achieved, my time with 0.9.9.7 comes to a close with all 26 Bronze badges, all 26 Silver badges, all 26 Gold badges, all 26 Platinum Badges, all 26 Diamond badges, and now 13 Angelic badges. There are four more Angelic badges left, but they're all impossible without TASing or outright cheating, ranked from most to least plausible:
Hopefully eventually the Impossible Four get changed to something reasonable in an upcoming version as has been proposed and so 100% becomes actually possible, after which I'll tryhard again for the true 100% completion. Until then, and eternally in pre-JHC DRL, 26/26/26/26/26/13 is as close as anyone can legitimately get to 100%ing the game. Well with that all written up, here is my final 0.9.9.7 mortem: -------------------------------------------------------------- |
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on: February 13, 2026, 15:50
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Omega Tyrant | ||
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(If you just want to watch the video of this run, you can watch it here)
With 11 Angelics and all other badges won, there's very little left I can get; of the 6 remaining Angelics, there's only Everyman Angelic, Masochist Angelic, and the impossible 4. Everyman Angelic has been proven humanly possible before, but Masochist Angelic is in a grey area, as what it requires isn't as outrageous as what the impossible 4 demand, yet in the over 13 years since 0.9.9.7 released, that badge has never been verifiably won by anyone in that version. Vandam infamously claimed to have won every Angelic except for Centurial within a few months of 0.9.9.7's release in his absurd "N+" difficulty proposal, so that would include Masochist Angelic alongside the impossible 4, yet he refused to even post mortems of any of his runs, let alone video proof (with him claiming he "only plays for joy" and "showing mortems is just a way of creating hierarchy"... yet that didn't stop him from boasting about his supposed 16 Angelics). Supposedly he posted a screenshot showing the 16/17 Angelics on his record in that thread before the screenshot got taken down for whatever reason, but that is shoddy proof, when he could have pulled a 2Dev using Cheat Engine to hack the game for them, or more charitably, with Vandam being a beta tester of 0.9.9.7, he could have abused game-breaking beta bugs to get all these Angelics in the betas and then copied his player.wad file over to keep the illegitimately-won Angelics on his record, which could explain why he refused to show his mortems as they would expose being achieved on the betas (as an example of such bugs, Tormuse found a bug in the ancient 0.9.9.8 beta that tricked the game into awarding him Speedrunner Angelic when immediately letting himself die on the first floor, while one of the 0.9.9.9 betas had two major bugs where your clips would underflow to give infinite ammo and certain traits would carry over to the next run after dying/quitting with no limit, which I had some fun with to win UAC and Demonic Angelic, such glaring examples why any badges won in any beta versions shouldn't count). With his dearth of proof, and Vandam also having the 2Dev hallmark of not explaining how he actually got his badges, in addition to his sparse attempts at discussing strategy being dubious or even factually wrong (such as the very simple fact of not knowing that you don't need to kill the Cyberdemon to get past Babel in AoPc), we can conclude Vandam's claims are bullshit until proven otherwise. Now Masochist Angelic was legitimately won last year by micerang and he even had full video proof of his run... but it carries the big asterisk of being won in 0.9.9.8. For those that don't know, while an official version, 0.9.9.8 was an awfully buggy release, including a major dodging bug that essentially gave you a 95% dodge rate against everything regardless of HR levels, alongside having an OP Marine and the most broken mastery of all-time with its version of Vampyre that may as well as have been IDDQD. With these things, micerang avoided many more hits than he would have without the dodging bug (a particular moment being when he was repeatedly dodging Barons and Formers in Unchained Court without running nor having any HR levels), and when he did get hit was taking significantly less damage from the 0.9.9.8 Marine's +20% energy resistances, while by the time he reached Vampyre he had only 6 HP left and so his run just objectively doesn't win without the aid of these two factors, while by his admission it still took him hundreds of tries to reach that point even with said factors (I do hate to disparage provably legitimate runs, but the 0.9.9.8 asterisk just can't be ignored, it's even the reason why I started my 0.9.9.7 conquest when I wanted to show I could win the previously unwon-in-0.9.9.7 Eagerness and Inquisitor Angelics without the aid of 0.9.9.8). Of provable Masochist Angelic runs in 0.9.9.7, Icy did get an attempt up to the Cyberdemon; if he didn't take so long to kill the Cyberdemon and avoided getting cornered, there's a legitimate chance the run could have went the distance even with only 3 HP left by that point as he would have just needed a lucky quickly-accessible Invulnerability, so it was a good proof-of-concept to show the badge was indeed possible, unlike with the impossible 4 that have no proof of anyone getting remotely close to achieving them or otherwise have a "proof of concept" that involved grotesque amounts of save scumming (which is also another reason why Vandam's screenshot of his badge collection isn't valid proof when you can't trust that he didn't save scum Pacifist Angelic). Another point of this badge being possible is my recent Demonic Diamond run, where I finished the game with 61 damage taken, while 14 of that damage came from the completely optional Shambler fight and the Onyx mod reward made no real difference the rest of the run, so without fighting the Shambler, I could have finished that run with under 50 damage and thus could theoretically win without ever healing. So Ultimately, what makes Masochist Angelic so difficult? At bare minimum, with no conventional healing available in Archangel of Masochism, you effectively must beat the game on Nightmare! taking no more than 49 damage as a Scout/Technician or no more than 59 damage as a Marine. Any Ironman levels would give you an additional +10 HP and so you can get up to a potential +50 more damage you can take from Ironman levels, while Vampyre can still heal you indefinitely (...if you can survive long enough to get it), and there are a couple other rare sources that can heal you, but this is basically a much harder version of Demonic Diamond, a Diamond that let you take up to 199 damage and was already known for being on par with the average Angelic in difficulty, while surviving long enough in ArchAoMs to get access to that extra health is much easier said than done. ArchAoMs has an additional wrinkle where without being able to heal to restore your Tactics, you essentially can only activate running once per floor without grabbing a Berserk Pack or Invulnerability, normally you shouldn't need to use running more than once per floor but this could cause you to take more damage that you would have avoided otherwise and does make special levels like Hell's Arena more difficult. This badge demands such an extreme amount of damage avoidance while giving the player no sort of help (you just have more bullets in your starting inventory, which doesn't matter even before considering you can farm infinite bullets from respawning Formers on N!, and you can get an early Red Armor + Plasteel Boots from Hell's Arena if you can clear it without taking a crippling amount of damage), and even if you play perfectly over several floors, it only takes a single bad hot start to instantly ruin the run when you're playing with such a slim margin of error. With that said, what are the viable builds and strategies to win here? I think there's three viable ways that you could feasibly win Masochist Angelic with: *The most obvious way is to go for Vampyre (which is what micerang used in his 0.9.9.8 Masochist Angelic run), as if you can survive long enough to get Vampyre, you can then indefinitely heal as much as you want, and so have the badge pretty much won from that point as long as you can get past Phobos Anomaly and avoid making any stupid overextensions, with the only real danger post-Phobos being Arachnotron Caves. However surviving long enough to get Vampyre in 0.9.9.7 is very very hard, as the Vampyre prereq path requires three traits in two Brute levels and Badass that are virtually worthless until you get Vampyre (you can't fight in melee when you can't heal and you can't get any boosted health yet for Badass to retain while the knockback reduction is more counterproductive if anything), and the Marine's 10 extra HP barely helps (in the early game where you likely have lackluster armor, it basically amounts to being able to take only one or two more hits, the Scout's +10% universal speed bonus is far more helpful as it'll let you completely avoid more hits than that). Vampyre does give you the option of a free trait to choose, but a single level of Finesse often won't be able to shotgun down Pinkies or corner shoot Hell Knights to death before they reach you, at which point you can't get away from them when you have no Hellrunner nor can tank them when you got only 60 HP total before Vampyre, so delaying Vampyre by detouring for the Finesse -> Juggler opener is direly necessary to have any real hope of surviving long enough for it. But any delay in getting Vampyre is painful, making that an extra floor or two you need to survive without Vampyre, and for any hot start that Juggler can't get you through, you won't be able to as effectively escape without Hellrunner, while you also can't get Intuition and so will have to play very very slowly, when you can't afford to step into any enemy's vision. *The second option is to do a masterless Scout stairdive that guns for Int2 and then Dodgemaster to beat the Cyberdemon, which is what Icy was using and got his Masochist Angelic run that made it to Babel with. The main advantage of this strategy is it's the fastest in real time and so is more spammable to get more attempts in the time it would take you get a good attempt with the other options, but this strategy has a major problem in it leaves your combat woefully inept, so you're heavily reliant on getting very good Invuln/Berserk and stair luck, as well as avoiding any bad levels in mid-Phobos and onward when you can't realistically fight your way out of lethal hot starts, nor can do things in any of the special levels aside from Chained Court. A build so inept at combat isn't good for the Cyberdemon fight either even with Dodgemaster, as if you take too long to kill the Cyberdemon, his AI gets antsy and will start erratically approaching you between reloads, where he can then corner you in a position where you can't avoid his rocket splash, which is what did in Icy's best attempt. Of the three viable strats, I think this one is definitely the least viable, it's telling that Icy tried this strat in hundreds of attempts and still never succeeded with it, only getting that one run to the Cyberdemon and very few even getting past Anomaly, eventually giving up at it. It can work, but it will require a grotesque amount of luck and you can surely win in less real time if you're good enough with the other two options despite their individual attempts playing slower. *The third option would be my Demonic Diamond build, damage-avoidant Shottyhead that opens with Fin -> Juggler for the immediate big combat boost, then detours for Int2 to aid damage avoidance and detect Invulns, then the rest of Shottyhead's prereqs. The big advantages of this build are you get very strong early game traits to most effectively mitigate damage in the Phobos portion of the run where you don't yet have Invulnerabilities, and upon reaching Shottyhead, you get your best chance at surviving later hot starts with Shottyhead's ability to kill entire groups of tough enemies before they wake up or at least knock them out of vision, while additionally granting near complete safety when corner shooting, notably being able to repeatedly shoot back multiple enemies approaching from different angles when having to corner shoot from imperfect cover. This build also lets you safely do some important special levels, most notably Hell's Arena at the start for the early Red Armor + Plasteel Boots + Rocket Launcher, and then City Of Skulls/Abyssal Plains (the importance of which will be covered later...). Compared to the Vampyre strat, you'll have a much less brutal time even getting to late Phobos, but you'll still be playing on a razor's edge post-Phobos and the run will probably still come down to getting Invulnerabilities to skip most of post-Phobos. I'm unsure what ultimately has the higher odds of success between it and Vampyre, however I think it is just strictly better than the Scout pure stairdive if you're skilled enough at the game; while it will play a lot slower and you might have to deal with runs that had over an hour put into them dying, it'll be so much less luck-dependent that it should still take you a lot less real time to eventually win with. *For a possible fourth option, people might think Cateye, which is typically thought of as the damage avoidance mastery, with it detecting enemies from farther away than other builds and gives you a vision advantage over enemies to fire on them unimpeded without them being able to retaliate. The issue with Cateye is seeing enemies from farther away won't matter if they're already on top of you, and so Cateye doesn't help with the hot starts that are extra lethal in a challenge where you can't heal. Additionally, Cateye's SoB2 prereq doesn't help your Shotguns as much as Finesse/Reloader/Shottyman does, let alone remotely comparing to the power of early Juggler, and you really want faster firing speed when fighting crowds, while Triggerhappy isn't much better than a dead level. Cateye also doesn't have Hellrunner among its prereqs, a pretty crucial trait to avoiding damage and getting through N! Anomaly; now you can get Hellrunner alongside Finesse and Juggler, but that will all delay Cateye, while you're gonna need Eagle Eye too to take strong advantage of rapid fire weapons that the SoB + TH levels support, delaying Cateye even farther. I wouldn't say Cateye is completely unviable here, but there is a reason why I didn't use Cateye for my Demonic Diamond, Masochist Diamond, and even my Destroyer Diamond runs, the prereqs just aren't that good for avoiding damage in the Phobos portion of the run where it can be most difficult to avoid damage, and mitigating the threat of hot starts is so important, not to mention that Cateye and its prereqs don't help much for the major roadblock that is N! Anomaly. When I first started Masochist Angelic attempts, I was trying Vampyre, as I do favor trading more early game luck/difficulty for much greater later game reliability; as I put it, I would much rather have several runs that die in 15 minutes or less than a lose a run that goes over an hour. However trying to get to level 7 as the Marine with no Hellrunner nor Intuition, while taking those dead Brute + Badass levels in their place, was brutal. Sure I could infinitely run -> wait camp behind any good camping spot, but finding said camping spot and being able to reach it without taking damage on any given floor is much easier said than done, and you do need a concealed camping spot to be fully safe, as one other detrimental factor with the Marine is that Imps outspeed you and so can potentially get a double move on you as you wait. Normally this hardly matters, when it's uncommon and Imps deal minor damage anyway even if they do get a free shot on you, but here where every single point of damage matters so much, those Imp double move cheap shots are painful. Not to mention that Hell Knights can get double moves when you wait as a non-Scout and they're more likely to than Imps while hitting harder, so you really can't afford to run-> wait behind imperfect cover when Hell Knights are around. You additionally can't clear Hell's Arena, well you can do so with Juggler but doing so means you get the Unchained Court, and Vampyre is going to really need that Chainsaw, but you won't hit level 7 before Unchained Court and so going in would be suicide without a Homing Phase (or playing on 0.9.9.8), while you also really want the Chained Court Berserks to power your way through the final Phobos floors to Military Base or a floor 7 Invuln or through Anomaly (though you should still go in to Hell's Arena to kill some enemies for the EXP and just leave after the first or second wave). Without clearing Hell's Arena, you won't have the Red Armor and so the Marine here can't take as many hits despite the extra HP, and you won't have an early Rocket Launcher for corpse disposal, wall busting, or emergency rocket jumping. The early game also plays dreadfully too, if you're not run -> wait spamming behind the first piece of usable cover you find, you'll be constantly radar shooting every few steps. Then even if you play through multiple floors near flawlessly, it just takes a single bad floor to completely fuck you; in one Vampyre attempt, I got through the first three floors and half of Hell's Arena taking only 5 points of damage, but then I got this awful Phobos 4 maze that suddenly killed the run just like that, with virtually nothing I could have done to survive it even after choosing the right direction to run for the stairs. After 8 deaths and many other runs that I Q+Y'd on the first two floors, while not getting a single Marine past floor 5 nor even to level 5 despite delaying Vampyre for Juggler, I decided to give Demonic Shottyhead some tries before running more Vampyre attempts. Granted I was getting some very awful level generation luck in that Phobos 3-5 range (so...many...damn...mazes), so if I just got a run without early mazes or Cacodemon caves, I might have a shot, but I thought I should give Shottyhead some tries, when I came so close to finishing under 50 damage with it in my first Demonic Diamond attempt that didn't reset in Phobos Base Entry. With the Shottyhead build, in only the fourth attempt that didn't Q+Y in the first four floors, I get a run past Phobos 5 and actually managed to survive this Phobos 6 that would have probably killed the Vampyre or stairdive Scout, and then reached a Phobos 7 Invuln to get a run to Deimos, but it would end up dying in Deimos 3. On one hand it was disheartening to lose a run with nearly two hours put into it, but on the other hand, getting a run that far after not many attempts was promising, while altogether I wasn't resetting so much on Phobos 2, so I gave Demonic Shottyhead a few more tries before trying Vampyre again... For the immediate start of the run, Phobos Base Entry is a crapshoot, can just employ my usual strategy and hope the Shotgunners don't come out early while also hoping the Former Humans decide to have Stormtrooper accuracy while I'm running to the safe corner. I might accept getting punched by a Former once or taking a minimum damage roll Pistol shot, but anything more than that and it's a reset, every damage point matters and it won't take that long until you get a damageless or near-damageless Phobos Entry. Also while the medkits don't do anything, you should still take one or two with you so you can gift drop with them. I open with Finesse -> Juggler, which means I won't have Intuition 2 for Phobos 2, but I need Juggler for clearing Hell's Arena as safely as possible, and Phobos 2 isn't too bad to do taking one hit or none without Int2 as a Scout, you can makedo with less ideal cover than the Marine as Imps won't outspeed you (well due to timing oddities, it is still possible for an Imp to get a double move on a waiting Scout, but it's quite uncommon). In this run, I nearly got through Phobos 2 damageless, until a charging Lost Soul surprised me out of a thin hallway and hit me for 5 damage, which was tempting to reset for but I just accepted it. Then comes Hell's Arena, clearing which is an even more painfully tedious affair when you can't intentionally take damage to destroy corpses, it can't be overstated how much I despise N! Hell's Arena and the corpse stacking minigame it forces, but it's a necessary evil here when the rewards are so valuable. First the Red Armor, which the -20% movespeed might make me take hits I could have avoided with less slow armor, but in the scenarios where damage is unavoidable, having Red Armor makes such a huge difference over Green and Blue Armor against the small fries, and while it's not great against Hell Knights and Cacodemons, it does at least reduce some damage from their plasma balls unlike Green Armor, so having Red Armor will significantly enhance the amount of hits I'm able to take. Then there is the Rocket Launcher that is a staple in nearly all my runs, having immediate access to corpse disposal is so important when a badly timed Hell Knight or Baron respawn can just absolutely ruin your run, and a rocket jumping is your best shot at getting past Anomaly with minimal damage if you don't get a Phobos 7 Invuln, as well as being crucial to extending your Invulns later or you might even get in a spot where raw rocket jumping will save your ass. The Plasteel Boots are also quite nice to have if you get a floor that forces you to run through acid or lava, that aforementioned run that made it to Deimos dies in that awful Phobos 6 without the Plasteel Boots to mitigate all the acid I had to run through. I will have to miss out on going into The Chained Court later on when the Unchained variant will be a death trap in a challenge you can't heal, but these items are far more valuable than the Chainsaw and free Berserks will be, while I also wouldn't even be able to get the mods in Chained Court without finding a Radsuit prior, since hitting the levers will be substantial unavoidable damage. In this particular run, I managed to pull off another AoMC-less Hell's Arena Pwnage, and it's actually even harder to do here than in the standard game since I can only activate running once in the whole Arena. I won't be picking up the Cathedral's special reward later but getting a damageless Arena is still obviously nice when I can take so little damage, otherwise I would accept taking a couple hits in Hell's Arena just so the resets wouldn't get maddening. For the rest of Phobos, I hope I don't get mazes or too deadly of hot starts, and I do actively try to clear out floors when it's possible with minimal to no damage since I do really need the levels to survive tough floors later. Phobos 3 and 4 weren't so bad, and the latter even gave me a Double Shotgun that is very handy for this build, but Phobos 5 would give me a Pinky Cave that I took a couple hits in, which the Red Armor mitigated a lot but still 7 of my total 50 HP just permanently lost and the total EXP yield for the floor is quite low. Then Phobos 6 started me in a room with a Hell Knight, and when I got into a position to corner shoot him, another Hell Knight came from an angle with LoS on me and he got hits in while I couldn't kill him before the other Hell Knight reached me, putting me in this very bad spot. With the stairs nearby, I decide my only hope to keep the run alive is to rocket jump out towards the stairs (after getting out of the nearby acid barrel's range), any self-inflicted damage is painful in this run and rocket jumping without a Fireproof or at least P-modded Red Armor sucks, but it's either that or take multiple plasma balls in the ass as I try to run away. The rocket jump does keep me alive in exchange for 5 more HP lost, but then I made the bone-headed move of seeing if I could finish off the mortally wounded Hell Knight and didn't notice I depleted all my Shotguns, leading me to try firing with an unloaded Shotgun and reloading instead. Fortunately the one Hell Knight didn't attack and the other was still out of vision, so I just took a melee hit from the nearby Imp for 1 damage, but it's still even more damage I should have avoided and I'm knocked below half my total health allotment before even reaching the Anomaly. Also in retrospect I could have tried using that Phase Device I spawned near to escape the Hell Knight start, but I really wanted to try getting it to save for the Anomaly and it could have put me in a worse spot far away from the stairs, so it wouldn't have been an ideal gamble. It's not looking good, but the run gets much more serious when I get another coveted Phobos 7 Invuln; since the stairs were a bit far away and I didn't have many rockets, while the floor overall looked doable, I do clear it out first before grabbing the Invuln. I take 5 more damage as a result, but I do get the Agility Mods to build some much needed Tactical Boots, and a Power Mod to build a Tactical Shotgun later, as well as get a clean path to the stairs to ensure I can maximize that Invuln to get through Anomaly damageless, so it wasn't too bad. I also had the option of Military Base for a safe two levels and all the other useful stuff there, which I would have taken if I didn't have the Invuln, but since I did and I wasn't playing Vampyre in this run, taking the guaranteed damageless Anomaly is the better play here, especially when I had only 19 HP left and so may not have been able to survive the Anomaly even with rocket jumping if I wasn't Invuln'd. After effortlessly rocket jumping through Anomaly and the remaining Invuln letting me clear out a hot start in Deimos 1 with a potentially deadly Commando, I'm able to then clear out the rest of Deimos 1 damageless. It could have been argued to have took that Invuln and already try rushing through the rest of the game, but with my low rocket supply and still not having Shottyhead, it would be far riskier to try that, so I stay to clear out Deimos 1 and then head into Deimos Lab. Now fighting the Shamblers in Deimos Lab without Vampyre would be suicidal here, but if played very carefully, I can clear out the pre-Shambler portion of the run for EXP, some mods, a Shell Box I'm going to really need for a very important special level coming up, potentially one of the special shotguns in the weapon cache, and I can farm the Revenants here for a huge rocket stockup, which I will need to successfully Invuln rush the rest of the game with a later Invuln. Unfortunately the weapon cache had a Jackal and Combat Pistol, the Jackal could be used for corpse disposal whenever the Rocket Launcher's explosion would be too big but it isn't that helpful here and the Combat Pistol is worthless in this run, but fortunately the rest of the level goes to plan and I get through it damageless, while also being able to farm a Revenant for a half dozen rocket stacks. All that effort nearly ended up being for nought though, as Deimos 2 was a terrible arena that started me surrounded with little for cover and near a Commando that can instantly kill me, while I don't have Shottyhead yet to reasonably to fight in this position. I decide now is a time to use a Phase, and it gets me in a better position, but then when fighting off a nearby Pinky horde, there was not one but two more Commandos coming right for me, one of which got a near full plasma burst on me when I shot a barrel near an X not knowing it was a Commando and launched him into vision, knocking me down to only 7 HP left. He ended up in acid, so my only play was to activate running and stay out of the other Commando's vision while hoping running keeps me from getting hit by the other Commando until the acid finished him off, and very fortunately that Commando doesn't get any more hits on me in his next two bursts before the acid kills him, where I'm then able to fight off the Pinkies and other Commando thanks to the Shell Box I just got from Deimos Lab. I try sticking around to see if I could fight my way to the two Berserks that spawned on the other side of the map, when the third Commando I saw at the start gets to me and quickly revives after killing him, at which point I decide just fuck off and book it to the next floor. I reach the same floor as my previous best but with only 7 HP left, I'm really wanting an Invuln... which the game then promptly blesses me with and I'm able to immediately safely reach it. I take this opportunity to book it to the Deimos 4 special level, which turns out to be City of Skulls. I mention previously the Deimos 4 specials are important and are a major advantage for going the Shottyhead path, so why are they? Well I alluded to earlier that there are a couple other ways to heal outside of Vampyre, one such way being the Medical Armor and Medical Powerarmor, but with them only healing you up to 25% in this version, they won't get you out of hot start lethality range and would need the support of many Ironman levels to make a serious difference, which you'll be hard-pressed to fit in addition to the necessary combat traits, so they're not much a factor here even if you luck upon them. The other way to heal without Vampyre is with a Blood Skull, which normally are worse than a Large Medkit, but they can heal you much more than the aforementioned Medical Armors can, and well you have a very good chance of getting at least one if you kill the Agony Elemental, potentially two or even three, so any Blood Skull can essentially be an extra life in this challenge for non-Vampyre builds. I don't have Shottyhead yet to trivialize the Agony Elemental fight, and Shottyhead is also really needed to minimize damage in the rough openings of both levels, but with the Invuln to protect me, I can get through the opening of the Skull City without any damage, and then with Finesse + Tactical Shotgun + Reloader/Shottyman + the Shell Box, the Agony Elemental fight will still be pretty easy (hence why I said the Deimos Lab Shell Box was so important beyond just helping me survive hot starts). Indeed with those said things (and some Missile Launcher usage to save on shells, just making sure to not finish off the Agony Elemental with it since that would destroy the Skulls), I would kill the Agony Elemental and clear out the rest of the level without any damage, which rewarded me with two Blood Skulls! However I do still need to secure a decent corpse pile to get that health back and not get fucked over by the next floor start, which isn't looking good when Deimos 5 starts me with this, while two of those Xs turned out to be Barons, and with not quite being at Shottyhead yet, I had to use the Missile Launcher to ensure the Baron died without getting a lethal hit on me, which blew up some corpses near the Baron that I really needed for the ASAP heal. I was going to see if I could draw out some of the Formers I heard near those few corpses to get more health back, but then out popped a Commando into the nearby doorway, if he stepped out I would probably have to use the Missile Launcher to be absolutely sure that he doesn't get a shot in on me that will be absolutely lethal, which would then blow up the corpses, so I make the safe play of using my first Blood Skull there... and he immediately walks back into his room. Regardless, while not an ideal Blood Skull I do get 25 HP back, so basically a half life, and with Shottyhead now being online, I'm in a much better spot. I do got the looming Cyberdemon fight though, and after having to skip out on too many floors along the way, it's not looking like I'll get the two more levels I need for Dodgemaster to guarantee getting past him, while I'm also in the bad position of not even having a Fireproof Red Armor that I was hoping to build, nor have I found any Radsuits either for more fire res. The third skull was a Hatred Skull, so as a backup I could use it to take some berserk with me into Babel if I don't get a Deimos 6 or 7 Invuln. Deimos 6 would be a Pain Elemental + Lost Soul Cave with a nasty looking start, but thanks to the recently acquired Shottyhead, I get through it without damage, though this floor was very bad for EXP that I really need, ensuring that I won't get the two levels I need for Dodgemaster before Babel even if I went into Spider's Lair (which I considered since I had Shottyhead and the Missile Launcher, but if I wasn't going to get the levels for Dodgemaster anyway then it wasn't worth the risk), in addition to the floor not having any helpful items. Deimos 7 on the other hand does have the Invuln to guarantee getting past Babel... but it's a barrel level, and I get a nasty hot start with a Cacodemon in my face, an Arachnotron to the north, and the east + south doorways having more enemies behind them, all while there were lethal barrels around that will kill me or destroy cover. I immediately run for the west door for very dangerous cover near a Napalm Barrel and already get hit by the Arachnotron as I open the door, but it's my best-looking shot here, while it also turns out those east enemies are a group of Hell Nobles. At first it is working alright, the Cacodemon only gets one hit in on me before I kill him and with Shottyhead I'm able to keep the Arachnotron + Hell Nobles back, but unfortunately a group of enemies from the west approach, with a Shotgunner then walking into view, putting me in a very bad spot; I can't shoot him without blowing up that nearby Napalm Barrel which will be invariably fatal and he'll blow it up instead to kill me if I don't get out of this spot, but then getting out puts me back in range of the Arachnotron + approaching Hell Nobles, while I already expended my tactics... But I have to take my chances with getting out instead of staying still to get killed by that barrel, and fortunately the Arachnotron doesn't immediately fire, so I can finish him off with the Missile Launcher before eating another plasma burst, but unfortunately the approaching Hell Knight gets a hit on me to knock me down to only 14 HP left. Thanks to Shottyhead I'm able to kill off the remaining Nobles and the approaching Former platoon without taking any more damage, but with only 14 HP left and absolutely not wanting to die before I reach that Invuln, I make the decision to use my second Blood Skull despite only having four corpses around for 20 more HP instead of a full heal, not how I wanted to use these Skulls but waiting for the perfect opportunity could kill such a promising run. Luckily whatever enemy was in the southern room wandered away and there were no barrels near the Invuln, giving me an uncontested path to it, where I then immediately book it to Babel. I made a mistake when searching for the Cyberdemon, I completely missed him and he ended up being near the start to the south, so after rocket jumping across the entire map, I had to rocket jump all the way back to find him. Thanks to the P-modded Double Shotgun at point blank range, this mistake isn't costly as I'm still able to kill him before the Invuln runs out, surpassing Icy's best Masochist Angelic attempt and getting me to Hell with 34 HP remaining, so it's looking very good here if I can just find another Invuln or avoid any horrible hot starts that even Shottyhead can't handle... Well Hell 1 would be a maze, which are always very bad news and I used up most of my current Invuln killing the Cyberdemon... but it has an Invuln, and I reach it just as my current Invuln runs out! With so many rockets still in my inventory, I just go for it and try invincible rocket jumping the rest of the way. After blasting through Hell 1, 2, 3, and The Vaults, Hell 4 would have another Invuln to stack on my current Invuln, basically securing the run. I accidentally went down the stairs to Mortuary, but with rocket jumping I can still get out without wasting too much Invuln and even nabbed the Nuclear BFG to ensure I win in case my Invuln runs out against the Mastermind, but that wouldn't be needed when Hell 6 had a double Invuln to extra secure the run. Hell 7 would have yet one more Invuln near Dis' stairs, but it's not needed when I have so much already, and so can kill the Mastermind with plenty of Invuln to spare. At last, I get the first officially confirmed Masochist Angelic in 0.9.9.7, indeed proving mine and Icy's belief that the badge was possible, and with it I now have 12 Angelics to become the first person to have verifiably achieved the Chaos General rank in any version. Altogether I took 13 deaths (8 with Marine for the Vampyre strat and 5 with Scout trying for the Shottyhead strat), alongside many resets on the first two floors when I took more than a single light hit on them, with my attempts being spread out over two days, which isn't as bad as it could have been, though this badge was certainly extremely extremely difficult, with a requirement of pristine play and needing a large amount of luck on top. Maybe it's not quite as brutal as Eagerness Angelic in this version, but I would say it was even harder than Inquisitor Angelic despite that badge also similarly being unwon until I got it recently, and would rate Masochist above Strongman and Berserker Angelic despite them being even more luck-based, since they have a laxer skill requirement (especially the latter). I understand why this badge went unwon for so long, you need to be at the absolute top of your game even with viable luck, and like Icy said, it's very tilting too when any single minor mistake or little unavoidable hit that could normally be brushed off is amplified by magnitudes in this challenge. In JHC-era DRL this badge will be affected by several of the major changes since, most notably you'll no longer be able to infinitely camp thanks to the newly added Enraged Timer, but I think that won't actually be as big of a deal here, since most of the damage you'll take and eventual deaths will be from hot starts before you reach viable cover, it doesn't matter if you can infinitely camp or not if you get spawned in a maze with dozens of enemies immediately surrounding you with no good cover to get behind. Meanwhile, respawns no longer happening in vision will be quite significant for this badge; aside from hot starts, a lot of damage will come from enemies respawning near you out of cover or when you're corner shooting another enemy at a different angle, which happens annoyingly often even early on in floors before the global respawn chance gets high. There's also other little things like Hell's Arena eventually getting changed to no longer require killing respawns and so being much less tedious to clear on N!, Marines having inherent +10% energy resistances to make surviving to Vampyre a bit less brutal, the Medical Armors getting buffed to heal to 50% and Blood Skulls getting buffed to heal 10 HP per corpse, powerups becoming time-based and so will last longer in the later game, Reloader getting buffed to help boost Shotgun combat, Ironman and TaN getting buffed to be more viable survival-extending options, and Technical Mods giving resistances to armors to farther help survivability. There are however going to be other things that make it harder, such as berserk and Vampyre being nerfed so surviving to Vampyre is no longer a win condition on its own, Finesse and Intuition 2 getting nerfed, Scout's stair sense no longer detecting red stairs so you're less able to use them for quicker escapes, powerups possibly getting changed to no longer stack duration, and I put in a proposal to make N! City Of Skulls much more difficult, which as a side effect would make retrieving Blood Skulls for this challenge a more daunting prospect. Overall I think it may become slightly easier, but it'll be hard to say until I go for this badge again in a later version. Well my 0.9.9.7 journey is coming close to finishing, I won't be getting the three more Angelics needed for the Chaos Marshal rank, guess I'm not good enough to play Vandam's proposed "N+" difficulty that he wanted locked behind that rank, but there is one more Angelic I can get in Everyman Angelic to set what will probably be the closest anyone can verifiably get to 100% completion in 0.9.9.7 without outright cheating. With all this shit talking of Vandam and his unsubstantiated boasts though, it's only fair if I provide the video proof for this Masochist Angelic run here (I strongly recommend watching it sped up, lots of very slow playing and lots of pausing when I was live posting about the run in the Jupiter Hell Discord). Here is the mortem if you just want to see that, which are not only helpful for evidence but also for other people to learn things about your run that will help them possibly achieve these badges for themselves: -------------------------------------------------------------- |
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8
on: February 06, 2026, 23:53
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Omega Tyrant | ||
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It ended up not mattering in this run, but in case anyone else is attempting Arena Diamond and is reading this mortem for advice, here is what I would have done with each of the mods if there were any from vaults I could retrieve:
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9
on: February 06, 2026, 16:53
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Omega Tyrant | ||
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(If you just want to watch the video of this run, you can watch it here)
The only Diamond badge I had left in 0.9.9.7 was Arena Diamond, the most infamous Diamond that was once believed to be nearly impossible after no one won it in over a decade of 0.9.9.7 until Icy finally won it over a year ago. This badge has an interesting history though, as in the versions prior to 0.9.9.7, it was actually one of the more common Diamonds, with the Badge Hunters thread reporting seven players winning it prior to 0.9.9.7 (as well as 2Dev claiming to have won it of course, but his Arena Diamond run has outright proof of being illegitimate, with him claiming he found a Supercharge near the Arena stairs... even though they don't start spawning until floor 4 and so that's impossible), and Game Hunter himself won it too, albeit in a beta version. All of these were additionally won before Dual Angel abuse was a thing (with Dual Angels being introduced in 0.9.9.7) and the Arena itself has never been directly changed, so what happened to make this once-common badge suddenly go through such a long winless drought? Prior to 0.9.9.7, Hell's Arena did have a 50/50 chance to spawn on floor 3, which would give you an extra floor to come into the Arena a level higher and with more resources, but four of the reported Arena Diamonds were won with a floor 2 Arena, so while Hell's Arena being locked to floor 2 would have certainly made this badge harder, it's evidently not the entire reason why it became so rare. I primarily suspect two other things also contributed to this badge being easier back then; one, berserk itself used to be even more OP, with it quartering damage you took prior to 0.9.9.4 (effectively 75% resistance to everything), and two, enemy AI in very old versions used to have them congregate towards the center of the floor, which in the Arena would have made it easier to kill more enemies in your Berserker chains and get more corpses destroyed in crossfire. Whatever the reason though, the last Arena Diamond before Icy's was Q2ZOv winning it in 0.9.9.6 back in 2012, and Arena Diamond was bad enough that it made papilio give up in his quest for all Diamonds at 23/26 (with his only other two unwon Diamonds being Technician and Armorer that he would have eventually won), despite actively grinding for it before. Additionally while the Arena Diamond drought was ended by Icy and then won two more times since (by micerang in 0.9.9.8 and Asbadagba in 0.10), all three of them were won by combining Angel of Berserk with Angel of Light Travel (with AoLT's +20% universal speed boost making it significantly easier), so the badge still has not been won in pure AoB since Q2ZOv did it 14 years ago in 0.9.9.6. I have done all of my Diamonds purely up to this point, not abusing a Dual Angel for any of them, and I plan to keep it that way, but will pure Arena Diamond break me like it did with papilio? Since you only got two floors of preparation before Hell's Arena, one of which will be Phobos Base Entry with static enemies and items, you don't got many options for the build, as you'll be entering the Arena at or near only level three, maybe a fourth level if you get a clearable Cacodemon vault on floor 2, and in the Arena itself you won't hit level 4 until near the end of it without clearing floor 2 vaults. Icy did it with a Marine for the longer-lasting Berserk Packs, but I decided on the Scout, so I could outrun Cacodemons and Barons with my base movement speed, in addition to being able to more easily outrun Pinkies with running active, as well as get some crucial double-attacks on Cacos/Barons when I'm not berserked (and reduce double-attacks from Pinkies). For the first three traits, Brute 2 + Berserker is non-negotiable, but the fourth trait would be more interesting if you can get it in time to matter; Brute 3 not only increases your damage output but also ensures you can't roll below 10 damage so Berserker will reliably trigger (as your hits need to deal 10+ damage to build the Berserker counter and a Combat Knife has a 12% chance to roll below 10 damage with Brute 2), Finesse improves DPS and lets you trigger Berserker faster, Hellrunner would allow for better kiting and let you more safely approach Cacos/Barons in addition to preventing Pinkies from outrunning you without you needing berserk or running active (at least if you're a Scout, Marines and Technicians will still get outrunned by Pinkies without berserk/running), Ironman or Tough as Nails would give the extra survivability that might be needed to win at the end, and even Eagle Eye could be chosen to make throwing knives semi-functional (since it's EE rather than Brute that increases their accuracy in this version). I wasn't completely set on what I would get for my fourth trait, but as it would turn out though, a fourth trait would prove unneeded... Phobos Base Entry doesn't play differently, though with it being AoB and wanting to maintain as much health as possible, as well as wanting those medkits, I would reset a lot (though it would also turn out you don't necessarily need both medkits here). The main point of strategy is to immediately take off your Blue Armor, you need to keep that Blue Armor fully intact for the Arena. Floor 2 is also not very different from normal AoB, with it coming down to if you can find a decent camping spot (or massacre lever) before you get shot up too much, just again do not waste the Blue Armor here, if you can't make it to the Arena without using up the Blue Armor, then the run isn't going to survive the Arena anyway. Hopefully you can find Green Armors early enough to wear, which are ok to use up on floor 2 since Green Armors help little in the Arena (they do absolutely nothing to reduce the Cacodemons' plasma damage, the single point of reduction in melee amounts to basically just being able to take one more hit inbetween full heals against the Arena enemies, and Baron acid balls deal so much damage that a single point of protection will do shit all to extend survival against them). A significant portion of the luck for Arena Diamond comes down to a Phobos 2 giving you the resources to viably clear Hell's Arena. It might be tempting at first to reset until you see the "You feel there is something really valuable here!" message on floor 2, indicating you got the fabled floor 2 Butcher Cleaver to spawn, which would be amazing to have but this isn't something you should bother for; one, I've never ever seen a floor 2 Cleaver in my hundreds and hundreds of DRL runs, you could be resetting for days or weeks until you ever get one. Two, even if you did get extraordinarily lucky with a floor 2 Cleaver, it wouldn't be an instawin, especially if no Berserks spawned, while you could very well die on floor 2 before you even find the Cleaver. Considering how maddening resetting for the floor 2 Cleaver would get and how morale-shattering it would be to still lose after finally getting the Cleaver, it is just not worth it to spam resets for. More realistically, you could reset until you get floor 2 vaults, which have lots of potentially good things you wouldn't be able to get on floor 2 otherwise, including mods, more Large Medkits, more Blue Armors or even Red Armor, potentially one of the Exotic or even Unique armors that have melee resistance, or even one of the Skulls, as well as giving you extra EXP to get midway to level 3 or even up to level 4 before the Arena. The problem with vaults though is you often won't even be able to clear the enemies they have in AoB, as they'll be either Pinkies or Cacodemons, while unless it's a Pinky vault and you got acid available to kill the Pinkies for you, you'll need to hit level 3 for Berserker before you can clear them or use up a Berserk Pack that you want to save for the Arena, and usually enemies on the floor will open the vaults up to release the enemies inside before you get Berserker to fight them. Then if the vault gets opened early, these Pinkies and Cacos will ruin any camping strat as meleeing them one-by-one at this point will drain way too much health to outlast them all. In two of my failed attempts, I got a Pinky vault on floor 2 that ended up killing me when they got released before I was ready, and in another I got a Cacodemon vault that a Tracking Map shown a potentially useful Agility mod inside while I was able to hit level 3 for Berserker, but by that point they were too spread out outside the vault to cleanly chain in one Berserker rush and I didn't want the three Berserk Packs on the floor to go to waste, so I took them and booked it to the Arena (which ended up failing). It's possible to get a vault that has both stuff that will help you and circumstances end up that you can clear it out without blowing all your resources, but aiming for that will force a ton more resets that will get annoying fast and it would turn out you don't need any vault help for Arena Diamond. The big thing you really need is at least one Berserk Pack on floor 2 that isn't too far from the Arena stairs, preferably a second or even third Berserk, aside from that you just need a floor 2 that is survivable without using up any of your Blue Armor nor any of your Large Medkits, and lets you bring a few Small Medkits into the Arena. As for the Arena itself, you do need some more strategy than just rushing down every enemy and hoping for the best. My core strategy revolved around trying to get enemies clumped up together, as roshamboing enemies isolated would scatter corpses far apart, making it more difficult to get them destroyed by Cacodemons as well as making it harder to stretch Berserker chains across more enemies, and you can additionally trigger Berserker in fewer hits if you have more than two enemies in vision, which can crucially save you damage as you take fewer hits without berserk active. So whenever I found a single enemy or two, I would try kiting them to where I heard more enemies, though if you're lucky, the enemies will already be clumped up. I additionally will eat some plasma balls on corpses to destroy them whenever it was feasible, and when running around the Arena looking for enemies, I would remove my armor to speed myself up, as the less time spent running around the arena, the less chance for respawns to happen, and you additionally keep the global respawn chance from increasing as much. You want to avoid run -> waiting unless you're down to the final couple enemies or can gather up a big pile of corpses that somehow avoided being destroyed prior, as you'll inevitably get overwhelmed with respawns if you do so. I also had it in my back pocket that if I got down to a couple isolated Barons or Cacos with the other corpses all destroyed, I could try kiting them around pillars while chucking knives at them, the vast majority of the knives would miss in this version but as long as I could outrun them around the pillars, I could get to throw as many knives as needed to eventually kill or soften them up enough. No matter your skill though, it still comes down to a large amount of luck with how the waves spawn and your respawn luck. In this particular run, I got an imperfect Phobos Base Entry; I took 11 damage and didn't get one of the Small Medkits, which would have made me contemplate a reset but I decided to roll with it. The floor 2 I got didn't look promising, including the Hell Arena stairs being blocked by acid while I had to makedo with an imperfect camping spot, but I was able to clear it. The resources on it also weren't great, with no Green Armors, I only got to keep three Small Medkits to bring into the Arena, I wouldn't be able to come into the Arena with boosted health, and only a single Berserk spawned far away from the Arena stairs that even with the aid of a nearby teleporter to get me closer, I lost a few dozen berserk turns getting to the Arena. However I was able to keep my Blue Armor 100% healthy and kept both Large Medkits intact, and this would end up actually being enough. In the Arena itself, I got a quick stroke of luck at the start with most of the first wave's enemies spawning clumped together on the right side and I was able to reach them with the initial berserk still intact, letting me kill most of the wave with berserk and get several corpses destroyed. Then I found the last Caco of the first wave near the stairs, where I was actually able to take advantage of stairs destroying corpses by killing it on the stairs (using running to avoid getting hit as I lured it over the stairs). I got another stroke of luck on the second wave spawning a few enemies right around me while I could immediately trigger Berserker after building up my Berserker counter on the previously killed Caco. I then got great respawn luck with only a single Cacodemon respawning (though the aforementioned strategy to eliminate many of the corpses helped with this). Then finally I got more good luck with the final wave, as one Baron spawned reasonably close to the third wave's Large Health Globe, letting me kill it with berserk without having to lure a Baron towards it, and then I was able to find the final Baron shortly after before any of the enemies respawned, while I still had two Large Medkits in reserve to kill him without berserk. Altogether this took me... only five tries that didn't reset on Phobos Base Entry and about an hour total, I didn't expect to get it this fast, I didn't even bother to use a real name as I thought I would be typing it out hundreds of times in quick succession from all the resets and short attempts. And the winning run didn't even have a particularly good first two floors, just coming in with a few extra Small Medkits and a decent amount of berserk was all that was needed with some good Arena luck. Did Arena Diamond's reputation just spook people from ever trying it? Did people just not have the proper strategy for the Arena itself or even for handling the second floor? Arena Diamond you could always theoretically get quickly on a lucky day and plenty won it before 0.9.9.7, while I seen posts of other people saying they attempted it post-0.9.9.7, so maybe its reputation dissuaded some people from trying it, but I'm thinking some of it was people just not doing the right strategy for the badge itself, and perhaps some people did try resetting for the floor 2 Cleaver or good floor 2 vaults and ended up quitting from the inevitable frustration of constant quick resets that never bore fruit. Regardless, Arena Diamond was still very winnable in 0.9.9.7 all along without the aid of AoLT, and as proven here you don't need a miracle floor 2 to win it either. With Arena Diamond won, I now join Icy as being one of only two players to have verifiably won all Diamonds in any version, and I won them all without having to resort to Dual Angel abuse for any of them. It has been a long road, but I do got a couple Angelics left to get before I finish my business in 0.9.9.7... If you read this far, I actually recorded my Arena Diamond run from start to finish. While I wasn't recording my 0.9.9.7 runs, I figured I should at least record Arena Diamond since it would be the first pure Arena Diamond in over a decade, you can watch it here. And here is the mortem if you just want to see that: -------------------------------------------------------------- |
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10
on: February 04, 2026, 23:42
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| Started by Omega Tyrant - Last post by Omega Tyrant | ||
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With the few winnable Angelics I have left, there is Marksman Angelic, that I largely put off because of my dislike for 0.9.9.7's pistols, but when the alternatives are Masochist Angelic or spinning the slots for either Arena Diamond or Everyman Angelic, there was really no more excuse to procrastinate this one longer. Marksman Angelic requires winning an Angel of Marksmanship + Angel of Darkness Dual Angel with 50+% kills; the kill requirement is completely irrelevant when you cannot realistically stair dive with this combo and you simply aren't going to make it if you don't kill over half the enemies along the way, so that part of the badge can be ignored. However, the combo of AoMr and AoD itself is very nasty, with pistols being the worst weapon to be stuck with for reduced vision when you are going to miss over half your shots against enemies that can still fire on you perfectly fine and later game pistols can knockback enemies into this range, whereas shotguns can still fire back with perfect accuracy, melee has the defenses and/or speed to just rush in, explosives can still hit nearby walls to damage out-of-vision enemies, and rapid fire at least can pump out enough shots to make enough of them hit to effectively kill weaker enemies. This all gets exacerbated by how terrible pistols are prior to 0.10, especially in the early game where AoD additionally makes things all the more tougher. You get AoD's doubled EXP gain that stacks with N!'s 1.2 EXP multiplier, but with how many traits pistol builds already demand to even be functional, this is more a necessary mercy to keep you from completely fucked in the early game. Even Tormuse never got the badge despite actively attempting it, but according to the 0.9.9.7 Badge Hunters Thread, two other players have verifiably achieved it, with Cotonou and papilio doing so. Cotonou didn't state how many attempts it took him, but with his 6 for 157 winrate stated on his mortem, we can assume it took him lots and lots, while papilio states it took him 40+ attempts (he also did it a second time but doesn't state how many tries it took him that time), so it's looking like I have my work cut out for me...
For the build, after discussing it with Klapaucius, I first tried a cheesy Vampyre build for a few attempts, since while Vampyre isn't outright broken in 0.9.9.7 like it is in 0.9.9.8, it's still easily the best mastery and on N! it can achieved a near-IDDQD state even with just fists, which AoMr allows you to still use. However, with the vision reduction meaning you can't safely run -> wait camp without finding an enclosed room and how terrible being stuck with fists + pistols already is in the early game, on top of the fact that I still need very good indestructible or regenerating armor to actually safely go on big Vampyre rampages with my fists, I decided to abandon the idea. It is probably doable, but would require even more early game luck than just doing this with pistols would, and it would ultimately basically just play like another Strongman Angelic run that allows you to kill things with pistols, something I do not want to go through again after having already done Strongman Angelic. So with that ruled out, there's one mastery that's clearly far and away the best option for this badge, Cateye. Cateye is technically a rapid fire mastery, but the vision boost is beneficial for any weapon, and once you get Cateye, you would now have equal vision with the enemies, at which point you're basically playing a regular masterless N! AoMr game with no map memory but doubled EXP that makes the mid and late game easier. Cateye is what I used for the same reason with my Hunter Diamond Conqueror run, and is what Cotonou and papilio used in their Marksman Angelic run, so I'm not breaking new ground here, but with how bad pistols are in 0.9.9.7, not using Cateye would make this badge exponentially more terrible, and I'm not gonna run hundreds of attempts just to get some more cool points with using something else. That said, despite settling on the same mastery as Cotonou and papilio, my way to Cateye and which supplemental traits I get will be quite different. First, while Cotonou and papilio opt to open with Int2 before building their pistol traits, I just go straight for SoG3; pistols need SoG3 to even actually adequately function, knowing where enemies are won't matter if you can't actually fight back against enemies that you can see, I'm sure Cotonou and papilio lost many attempts because they were trying to fight Hell Knights or several Pinkies with SoG1 or 2. Another major distinction then comes in that while they get Dualgunner after SoG2, I never get Dualgunner here; I'm of the firm belief Dualgunner is actually a trap, as any gaudy-looking DPS numbers you get on paper with DG don't matter once you run into the severe reloading bottleneck that two pistols force on you, and so I find that even if not playing Sharpshooter, you're better off sticking to a single pistol and being able to use an Ammochain box to solve the reloading issue in fights that matter, while any extra DPS granted by DG usually ends up just being overkill. You additionally have better crowd control without DG slowing down your firing speed while pistols already struggle with crowds, and you'll end up wasting a lot less ammo too, I'm also sure that Cotonou, papilio, Tormuse, and others lost many runs from thinking they just needed to get Dualgunner. Not getting Dualgunner also means I can get Cateye sooner, and any additional delay to Cateye (which is already getting delayed by the three SoG levels) is painful when that means going through another late Phobos or early Deimos floor with reduced vision while far more dangerous enemies are around. I was initially going to try putting Intuition 2 off for after Cateye since that would delay it, but after getting a level of SoB, I decided that there was too much risk to stumble around without Int2 and that being able to get Cateye a level sooner won't matter if I just end up dying from stumbling into a Baron or Commando that I can't see. It is then getting Cateye after that; the two requisite SoB levels are very good for pistols when it's a farther desperately needed early combat boost and SoB is critical for hitting those knockback thresholds that pistols need to hit, but the requisite Triggerhappy level is a very painful completely dead level, however unlike with Bullet Dance, Cateye here makes stomaching the dead level very much worth it. After Cateye I would immediately want a level of Hellrunner, as at least one level of HR would be needed for the Anomaly, but in this run, since I don't get enough EXP to fit it in time and end up using Phase Devices instead, I get a level of Eagle Eye before HR, since pistols miss far too frequently without any EE (another deviation from Cotonou and papilio, since the former doesn't get EE until his very last level and papilio never gets it at all). I do really want Whizkid, but since I'm at level 12 at this point, SoG4 and 5 open up, which you have to get ASAP as pistols finally become actually very good with SoG5. Then I can stomach some dead Finesse levels for Whizkid to buff up my pistols farther, as well as squeeze one more SoB level in for more damage-boosting double-dipping. For the immediate start of the game, if the random starting mod isn't a Technical Mod to immediately put on my starting Pistol, I reset, as the immediate firing speed buff is far more valuable in the hardest part of the game than a slightly larger clip on that Pistol or a slightly more accurate Pistol (and while immediately getting speed-boosting boots instead with that starting A mod would be very nice, you might not get your first pair of boots until late Phobos or maybe even Deimos if you're unlucky, so going with the starting T mod is a lot more reliable even if you wanted the movement speed more). This is especially so as beating Hell's Arena in this challenge isn't feasible and so I won't be getting that guaranteed Power Mod from it to buff up my early Pistol instead, making me have to rely on that T-modded Pistol even longer (up until at least Chained Court, possibly even longer until I get my first Power Mod). And as I always say, you don't need to worry about that T Mod going to "waste" when you eventually get SoG5 (and thus hit the firing speed cap), as you can turn that T-modded Pistol into an Energy Pistol, Storm Bolter, or Demolition Pistol later on. Phobos Base Entry plays mostly the same and my usual strategy there applies, but you might have to deal with a Former ending up in that awful "they can see you but you can't see them" range, which could cause a reset. In Phobos 2, you can hopefully find yourself an enclosed space to camp out, though if not, as long as you're not forced into open combat right away or get forced to fight Pinkies in close quarters before you get SoG3, this floor won't be too bad to clear out, just stay out of the open as much as you can. While clearing Hell's Arena isn't realistic, you can go in to get some kills for EXP, but I opt against it, as fighting Cacos in a largely open arena with reduced vision while pistol-locked is far too dangerous for my liking and I really don't want to burn any medkits that I don't need to at this point. As usual, the Phobos 3 to 5 range will be where most runs likely die, fighting Hell Knights does suck, but with SoG3 + SoB on a T-modded Pistol as Scout, they won't be too bad as long as you can avoid getting caught in the open by them. On this floor 3, I spawned near the stairs and a Berserk near it, it could have been tempting to take that Berserk and immediately book it, but it's not advisable in this run, as while the early Hell Knights are bad, the enemies you'll encounter in later Phobos will be even worse if you don't get your levels in now, while a Pistol build also does not get a major power boost from just making to The Chained Court, so unlike with melee builds, you cannot expect to have The Chained Court to make up for any missed EXP by stair diving to it. I did initially try conserving that Berserk to take with me to the next floor, but after taking some damage and hearing Hell Knights around, I just went back to use it now; pistols get the least mileage out of powerups since they cumulatively use up a lot more actions to kill things, but Berserk's massive speed boost and resistances are still very useful at this point for eliminating the Hell Knights and any crowds. On this floor I also find an Ammochain box, which are crucial for any AoMr run as they solve one of the pistol's primary weaknesses of reloading without you needing to invest in Reloader nor make crappy Speedloaders, but you also need to adequately conserve them and not waste their unreplenishable ammo on trash encounters that you don't need fast reloads for (generally I'll have Ammochains equipped when entering new floors to deal with hot starts, unequip them once I got a relatively safe foothold, and then reequip them for any more dangerous encounters that I can't handle with a single clip, such as these early Hell Knights or later on Barons and especially Revenants that take multiple Pistol clips to kill). Phobos 4 has a Cacodemon vault and another Berserk, which I take advantage of to find and clear the vault ASAP, since a vault guarantees a spot you can safely camp in AoD, and of course I want to kill all those Cacodemons while I have Berserk. Unfortunately the way towards where I heard the Cacodemons ended up having most of the floor's enemies and my berserk ran out shortly into it, but I keep up the push towards the vault, with the occasional tactical retreat when things get a little too dicey, and I do succeed in reaching the vault, though by that point most of the enemies have been disposed of so it wasn't much useful (also it had nothing good inside for me). Phobos 5 would have no good camping spot but did have a horizontal water river running across it that helped with corpse disposal, and so the floor wasn't too bad when limiting my exposure in the open, while I would also get a much appreciated second Ammochain box from an ammo crate. Once my health was running a little low and with the stairs to Chained Court open, I just went into it as burning a medkit to seek out the few remaining stragglers on the floor wouldn't have been worth it. I then make the effort to clear Chained Court since I do want that mostly safe EXP while I also really want a Power and Agility mod. though unfortunately I got the worst mod outcome with a Bulk and Technical Mod, so I still don't have a P-modded Pistol and still no movement speed boost. Fortunately I can get through Phobos 6 and finally reach Cateye by the end of it, so I'm over the biggest hurdle of the run, but I'm not out of the woods yet as I still got the ever deadly N! Anomaly coming up and am still stuck using pistols. I get another unfortunate outcome when the Phobos 7 special level is Phobos Lab when I would have obviously really wanted Military Base. I could have possibly done Phobos Lab and not doing so means I'll be entering Anomaly without any HR (while I also got no Invuln on Phobos 7 to handle the Anomaly ambush), but since I didn't even have A-modded boots and managed to gather up three Phase Devices in Phobos, I decided to play it safe and skip it. For the Anomaly itself, with three Phase Devices, I would have to get extraordinarily unlucky to not get past it, but fortunately just the first Phase gets me past the ambush, and then I'm able to run by the Bruisers even with no HR nor speed-boosting boots by waiting behind the wall until both are near it, giving me a cleaner path around them. With that, I get out of Phobos with my first real Cateye attempt, and my total damage taken in Phobos isn't too bad, I actually had an Untouchable Pin still intact, something I usually lose by this point even in my normal runs. As I enter Deimos, the absolute worst things at this point are Revenants, who can take over two full Pistols clips to kill while I still don't got reliable konckback on my pistols and they of course hit very hard as well, so using the B and T mods from Chained Court to Fireproof the Anomaly Red Armor was an immediate priority. Going into Hell's Armory is a bit concerning with the two Revenants and several armored Barons, but the potential for one of the special pistols, the mods, and another Ammochain box are too good to give up. It goes surprisingly well, as I am able to mostly kill the Barons and Revenants from the ever reliable camping building before they reach me (aside from taking one Revenant missile when an "almost dead" Revenant didn't die to a Pistol shot while in the doorway, but the Fireproof Red Armor softened it a lot). The Shambler was not bad, aside from some annoyance of having to take some hits to ensure he got finished off in the lava. Unfortunately the weapon cache didn't have any special pistols, and the rare mod was a Sniper; two Snipers on a Pistol would be amazing but just a single Sniper is a lot less useful than any of the other rare mods would have been. At least I do finally get a Power mod to put on a Pistol (on top of SoG3 + SoB2, it increases a Pistol's knockback chance from 18.75% to 40%, making knockback semi-reliable, and when I get SoG5 soon after, it will jump up to 76%), and that Minigun isn't entirely useless as it can store a lot more bullets than a bullet stack can. I skip the rest of the Deimos special levels, as I couldn't make an Energy Pistol before Containment Area to even attempt it (I only entered it for a faster exit), while City Of Skulls and Halls Of Carnage are obviously not worth it in this badge. Most of Deimos went pretty smooth, but I got a pretty nasty maze for Deimos 7, which I would end up handling by using Napalm Barrels to create this shoddy-looking camping spot while I waited for every enemy to shoot them into the lava, and it took a while but it did end up working well to get me out of the maze without taking significant damage. The Cyberdemon fight was a pushover; a Deimos 7 Berserk I brought in didn't last very long (see what I said earlier about pistols running out powerups faster from requiring more cumulative actions to kill things), but a radsuit in conjunction with the Fireproof Red Armor was reducing his hits to 1 damage, and he didn't get many shots off anyway as SoG5 + SoB2 with Ammochain support took him down rather quickly. Hell gave me a pretty rough intro, as turning the corner to the right ended up having a ton of Formers and several Revenants + some Archviles, which were overwhelming me and so I had to retreat to handle them more isolated after I mostly cleared out the rest of the floor. I was hopeful the Unique that spawned was one of the pistols or armors, but it ended up being the entirely useless Mjollnir. I also built a Storm Bolter here, I don't think very highly of it normally but with excess B + T mods available, I figured it could be nice for when the extra DPS would matter, especially for the Revenants when I've been unable to find another Power mod to make an Energy Pistol to handle them with. After an easy Hell 2, I got a Hell 3 that put me in a scary-looking start with lots of enemies around, but as long as I stood back in the starting room, I did have a safe camping spot and I had the DPS to kill enemies as they stepped into the door, allowing me to clear that floor without much issue. After going through The Vaults for a quicker exit to maintain more of some Berserk I got (and getting teased with a Unique I could not get, couldn't even check the side vaults as I still had no Energy Pistol), I would get greeted with a Pain Elemental cave; normally I love getting those in N! runs since they're very easy for the Shotgun or Melee builds I'm usually playing, but as a Pistol-locked build, they may be even potentially worse than an Arachnotron cave. It did have a Power mod to finally finish assembling my Energy Pistol, and I find the stairs soon after, which I gladly take to immediately leave. That Energy Pistol would funnily end up unused though, as in Hell 5 I would finally find a Homing Phase alongside getting Invuln near stairs, then Hell 6 is a Pinky + Nightmare Demon cave with immediately accessible stairs that I dive for, and then Hell 7 I can completely skip with that Homing Phase. With that Invuln still intact and the Storm Bolter repeatedly flinching her, the Spider Mastermind stood no chance. Excluding the attempts at the Vampyre strat and the resets to start with a Technical mod, I actually managed this my first try when going for Cateye. Not getting any mazes before I got Cateye was a huge help, as was getting an early Ammochain box, but other than that, I don't think my luck was that exceptional; no Power nor Agility mods until Hell's Armory really sucked, and not getting Military Base set me back a couple levels entering Anomaly, while I also never got any special pistols. I would still rate this badge as very much deserving its Angelic tiering in 0.9.9.7, it just wasn't quite as brutal as I thought it might have been. Now in 0.10, this badge is much easier, as due to SoG being changed to +3 damage/-10% firing time, pistols have their early game woes completely reversed, so surviving to Cateye is a much easier time and then with Cateye you still invalidate the main challenge of AoD. However, I did put in an official proposal in the 0.11 Compilation Thread to change the pointless kill requirement of this badge to a Cateye ban, since Cateye is so over-centralizing in AoD and pistols are no longer bad enough that they need to be allowed it here as a mercy. If that proposal gets accepted, it's certainly going to get interesting to see how this badge evolves in later versions. Well with Marksman Angelic obtained[ I increase my record Angelic count up to 11, but with my only winnable badges remaining being Arena Diamond, Everyman Angelic, and Masochist Angelic, it may be a while before my next badge..... Until then, here is the mortem for this run: -------------------------------------------------------------- |
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