*When enemies are Enraged, have their melee attack deal piercing damage
The Enraged Timer has mostly worked to counter excessive waiting, but one thing found was if you have good enough melee resistance to reduce melee attacks to 1 damage and secure an area with tight corridors that forces enemies into melee range (such as in a vault), you can still safely camp out the Enraged Timer, wth the enraged enemies being of little threat if they'll all be plinking you with their melee attack for 1 damage, making this a viable tactic as long as you don't mind the reduced EXP gain. If it's possible, a fix for this would be once the Enraged Timer is triggered, have all enemies deal piercing damage with their melee attack, so that way the player cannot abuse this on any tough floor once they get a strong melee armor, Berserker, or Malicious Blades.
*Buff the Tristar Blaster's damage to 4d6
The Tristar Blaster is an unusual Exotic weapon that barely gets any use, due to being a cumbersome and dangerous ammo-hungry weapon that doesn't synergize well with any particular build other than Fireangel, and even if you try to use it, it's not even that strong and so the reward for using it properly is underwhelming; you'll probably deal out more cumulative damage against a horde with a single BFG shot than you would with three Tristar Blaster shots that consume even more cells. It's hard to adequately buff this weapon due to the aforementioned asynergy, so you could give it a slight damage buff to make it somewhat more rewarding to actually use, with it being possible for it to actually score one-shots against tougher enemies (4d6 would also have it actually match Mancubus rockets in damage output, and the Tristar Blaster is supposed to be a weaponized version of their attack).
*Buff Blood Skulls to give 10 HP per gibbed corpse.
Blood Skulls don't sound so bad on paper, with healing you by 5 HP per each corpse gibbed around you and being able to overheal you. The problem though is that in order for a Blood Skull to just match a Large Medkit in efficacy for players with default max HP, you need to gib 10 corpses, and outside of Mortuary/Limbo, you're going to have a hard time getting 10 corpses within a 8 x 8 radius, especially not without the corpses getting gibbed in crossfire, and it's gonna be even unlikelier in the sort of situations where you do want to heal. Then as a Marine or for each level of Ironman, you'll need an additional 2 corpses to match the Large Medkit, and you can forget about healing up to 200% with a Blood Skull as good fucking luck getting 20+ corpses packed near each other on any normal floor. As a result, you'll usually only carry a Blood Skull on you if you're short on Large Medkits, and will ditch it as soon as you get 4+ Large Medkits again, while they're also far less desirable for Mortuary/Limbo than Hatred Skulls and even Fire Skulls. Buffing Blood Skulls to give 10 HP per corpse makes sense to me, 5 corpses for a full heal at default max HP and 10 corpses for 200% makes them a lot more usable on normal floors, and as an Exotic, they shouldn't be beaten by the standard Large Medkit so easily, while this would hardly affect their usage in Mortuary/Limbo.
*Decrease Charch's Null Pointer ammo consumption to 5 cells per shot
Another very unusual weapon is Charch's Null Pointer, that sees even less usage than the Tristar Blaster. The Null Pointer has a theoretical niche where you can stunlock a threatening enemy to death with it, but requiring a whopping 10 cells just to inflict 10 damage to a single enemy, the critical issue is it simply consumes too much ammo for that to be worthwhile in all but the most extreme niche of situations, as it'll require an entire cell stack or more to kill anything bigger than a Cacodemon. As such, the ammo consumption should be decreased to 5 cells per shot, which would still be awfully ammo inefficient for killing enemies (in comparison, 5 Plasma Rifle bolts with no SoB would deal 20 damage on average, twice as much as the Null Pointer), but the ammo consumption won't be so out of whack with what it does and so it could maybe not be such a terribly disappointing find. Alternatively, per Clamp's suggestion, you could make it a self-charging weapon so it has more clear utility without such crippling ammo consumption, while also simultaneously preventing the player from stunlocking bosses to death since they wouldn't be able to manually reload it.
*Buff the Subtle Knife farther
Invoke was buffed in 0.9.9.8 by no longer draining max HP and dealing 15 plasma damage to all in-vision enemies instead of 10. This effect though is still very underwhelming, basically just being a slightly better Arena Master Staff that will one-shot Imps and Lost Souls, but won't gib Formers, and the Subtle Knife itself is woefully weak for a Unique, as such it's still a near-worthless Unique even before considering being so damn annoyingly rare. When doing research on the Subtle Knife's inspiration, how the Subtle Knife works in DRL doesn't make much sense, where in its titular book, it is supposed to be a weapon capable of harming intangible supernatural beings and god, while its "reality cutting" ability manifests as creating dimensional doorways, which isn't reflected by the Subtle Knife being a puny 3d5 weapon with no special ability nor by how Invoke works. Invoke draining max HP before was the only thing that made sense for its inspiration, as the actual Subtle Knife is supposed to mutilate its user's hand. As such, I want to propose the following changes to make the Subtle Knife actually worth it as a Unique and to be better faithful to its inspiration:
- Reduce the Subtle Knife's damage to 2d5 but have it deal tripled damage to any non-former nor non-cybernetic enemy (cybernetic enemies would include Arachnotrons and their Nightmare variant, Mancubi and their Nightmare variant, Revenants and their Nightmare variant, the Cyberdemon, and the Spider Mastermind), representing its ability to kill supernatural beings (and have its damage bonus work on Carmack too to represent its god-killing ability).
- Change Invoke completely, instead having it work as a Homing Phase while draining 5 max HP on use (2 max HP instead if in A100/666), with a minimum 10 max HP requirement to use it, representing its ability to let its user create dimensional portals and the self-mutilation of its use. If the old effect of Invoke must be kept, still bring back the 2 max HP reduction but it make much stronger, such as having it instantly kill and gib all enemies in vision that aren't a boss monster.
The first change would give the Subtle Knife a more clearer usecase for melee builds, as it'll be able to hit a large chunk of enemies at Spear or even Scythe damage levels, and exceed even farther beyond that for Malicious Blades, but there will still be a large contingent of threatening enemies that the Subtle Knife would be no stronger than a vanilla Combat Knife against, so it wouldn't obsolete other melee weapons. The second change of a reusable Homing Phase has obvious use to any build, but the max HP cost, aside from being faithful to the source material, prevents it from outclassing the Hell Staff and ensures players can't so easily skip the entirety of the remaining game (especially if they don't have a means to easily kill the Mastermind), just make the max HP drain less severe in A100/666 given the much greater amount of floors makes it a lot more relatively punishing. If the alternative Invoke change is done instead, it'll at least have more clear usefulness as an emergency instant kill button with a cost than it does as a slightly better Arena Master Staff with a negligible cost. If these changes are done, it still should be able to spawn sooner and have a weight of 2 to not be so absurdly rare, especially if melee weapons continue to be unable to spawn in vaults, but maybe with a minimum depth of 12 rather than the originally proposed 7.
*Make Azrael's Scythe "Whisper Of Death" alt-fire require a minimum of over 5 max HP to use
Oddly, while the Trigun's Angel Arm has a minimum >10 max HP to use, the Scythe's Whisper Of Death has no minimum max HP requirement, and so even as you decrease your max HP to 5, you can keep spamming it indefinitely as long as you can restore your tactics. While running around with only 5 max HP is extremely hazardous, this can be abused to cheese several lategame levels, particularly in Angel of Humanity, as was exploited in this Everyman Diamond run.
*Allow the Mastermind to appear in very deep levels of A100/666?
Alongside adding the Angel of Death to A100, I was thinking the Mastermind could still work as a lategame spawn, since it is basically just a big Nightmare Arachnotron with weird AI and isn't exceedingly powerful, while in Doom 2, the Mastermind got used as a normal enemy in several levels. If this is done, you should naturally create Mastermind + Arachnotrons and Mastermind + Nightmare Arachnotrons groups, and perhaps also add a new cave type with only Masterminds. You'll just need to lower its Danger value to like 40, 35, or even 30 to match the Cyberdemon, as 50 would make it give too much EXP and significantly cut into other enemy spawns, while it's not strong enough to merit such a high danger level.
*Allow melee weapons and boots to spawn in vaults
A weird oddity is that melee weapons and boots cannot spawn in vaults, which ends up making special boots and especially special melee weapons harder to come by than special armors and ranged weapons. The reasoning I was told was if they did, vaults would get flooded with useless Combat Knives and Steel Boots, which makes sense, but it should be possible now to exclude specifically Combat Knives and Steel Boots from spawning in vaults, right? If it's not possible, then I suppose it is better that this restriction remain to keep vaults more fruitful, but if it is possible, then I see no reason to continue keeping this restriction with vaults. If this is done, you could maybe add Protective Boots to the restriction list too since they would be useless more often than not and you can already get early Protective Boots from armor crates.
*Add a new Unique called "Big Fucking Shotgun", a 40d5 plasma shotgun with a max range of 10, spread of 5, damage dropoff rate of 10%, a clip size of 40 while requiring 40 cells per shot, a 2 second firing time, and 4 second reload time.
An idea briefly talked about with Kornel in one of his streams when he added the JHC BFT, and he seemed receptive to the idea, so I want to formally propose it, while we could also use a third Unique shotgun. This is essentially a more mechanically faithful recreation of the actual Doom BFG, which despite it appearing to shoot a big plasma ball that explodes in a large splash radius, actually mechanically functions as like a, well, Big Fucking Shotgun, with the BFG firing 40 invisible hitscan tracers in a very large spread after the BFG ball explodes. The 40d5 damage appears absurd at first, but for reference, its average damage of 120 is the same as the Biggest Fucking Gun's average of 120, while unlike the Biggest Fucking Gun that has no damage falloff, this Big Fucking Shotgun would have a severe dropoff rate and cover a lot less ground than a 16 radius explosion, and with its 40 cells a shot that would make it less ammo efficient than the Plasma Shotgun that's already not known for ammo efficiency, it gotta be worth the ammo. Plus it should be able to very reliably one-shot any normal enemy from a few tiles away like the actual BFG, and the 40 dice would match the amount of tracers the BFG has. I think the weapon is strong enough to warrant the 2 second firing time and it would better resemble the actual BFG's very long firing startup, but if this would make it too impractical for non-Shottyhead builds, it could be reduceed to 1.5 seconds. It can also be moddable by Technicians with a 1 mod/basic assembly limit (though no basic assemblies in DRL would be applicable to it other than the Plasmatic Shrapnel that does nothing), and it can have a minimum depth of 20 to match the other BFGs (though maybe 18 or even 15 to give players more of a chance to get it before Mortuary/Limbo where it would see most utility) and naturally a spawning weight of 1.
*Add a new challenge called "Angel of Turbo", which makes all enemies +20% faster, and an Archangel variant that makes them +40% faster.
Among the available challenges, there are currently none that directly buff enemies (AoMC makes them hit a lot harder, but you get the same buff), just various ways to nerf the player or alter the game. A simple effective yet fun one would be a challenge that just makes all enemies faster, which would make them more offensively dangerous, more difficult to outrun, and makes corner shooting them all to death harder, while seeing how the new Enraged mode can make enemies faster, this should be doable to program in as a challenge now. N! was originally supposed to have faster enemies anyway, and this would emulate actual Doom's fast monsters setting, which is commonly played as its own challenge category there. Not to mention this would also serve a purpose for people wanting to make the game harder without having some restriction imposed on them like other challenges do. If implemented, naturally there should be an Archangel variant too that makes enemies even faster (+40% could be tried initially, but it could be +30% if it proves rather unplayable). "Angel of Turbo" is a placeholder name, if someone thinks of a better name that should be used instead. I can think up of new badge ideas for the challenge if this is accepted.
*Add a new challenge called "Angel of Drought", which makes all ammo drops contain a third of the usual ammo amount (including ammo in ammo boxes and ammo dropped by enemies), and makes melee weapons unusable, while also making Brute give no damage bonus.
This was discussed for JHC after playing the one beta with bugged ammo drops, but this challenge idea would work in DRL too, as a more effective ammo-deprivation challenge than Angel of Light Travel since you'll be encountering far less ammo altogether, thus creating a challenge where ammo management is a much more serious obstacle, while there is farther meaningful difference from AoLT since the rest of your inventory is not limited nor do you get a speed boost. A ban on melee weapons will be needed however, since otherwise this would just devolve into a lighter Angel of Berserk, and Brute should give no damage bonus either, since the fist would be able to do respectable damage after several Brute levels and thus significantly lighten the later portion of the challenge. If you want to get cute with the references, "Angel of McGee" would work well, naming it after the Doom developer responsible for some of Doom's most infamous drought maps (such as E4M1: Hell Beneath), but "Angel of Drought" works if you don't want the name to be overly referential (and it's probably better to name the badge series after McGee instead). I can think up of new badges for this challenge if this is accepted.
*Add a new challenge called "Angel of Pestilence", which emulates a permanent deadly air event where the player's health steadily drains nonstop, and perhaps an Archangel version as well with a ramped up health draining rate.
A common criticism of DRL's Angel modes is that a large chunk of them enforce more cautious play (particularly the "don't get hit" challenges of Purity, Impatience, Masochism, Humanity, and even Max Carnage, which all severely inhibit the player's hit-taking ability in some way), while the only one that enforces more aggressive play is Angel of Red Alert, so another challenge that forces the player to play faster would help increase the strategic variety of the available challenges. When discussing this with Icy in the initial 0.9.9.8 proposal compilation thread, I thought up of one that emulates a permanent Deadly Air event with a continually steady HP drain, and while I backed off when Icy rejected it, an idea like it recently got independently brought up by Asbadagba as "Angel of Pestilence", and I still like the idea, so I'm gonna formally propose it. Like AoRA, you'll have to get through the game quickly lest you just get all your health drained away, while the strategic differences arise in rather than there being a strict timer cutoff on each individual level where you die instantly unless Invuln'd, here you can theoretically spend as long as you want on any level but it's a steady degradation in the player's ability to survive, which will carry over to the succeeding floors rather than getting a clean slate timer restart like AoRA gives you, and you'll become increasingly fragile with the health drain so you can't go as balls-to-the-walls as you would in AoRA. Compared to the actual Deadly Air event, enemies shouldn't be affected, so that way the player cannot abuse this by waiting in a safe hidey hole with a nearby full heal until all enemies get severely weakened, and Envirosuits shouldn't stop the health drain, while I also think Invulnerability shouldn't stop it either so that Invuln rushes doesn't dominate this challenge too hard. As a mercy, the health drain shouldn't be able to kill the player and so it should stop whenever the player is at 1 HP (though on that note, can Deadly Air kill the player, I never tried testing that before). An appropriate health drain rate will have to be decided through testing, but it could start at 1 HP every 5 ingame seconds (with an Archangel variant being twice as fast), matching the decay rate of boosted health, and then adjusted down if it's too easy (or up if it's actually too hard). I can think up of new badges for this challenge if this is accepted.
*Allow flooding events to flood with blood on UV/N!
After blood was added as a new damaging fluid in 0.10, this seems to be a sensible addition, especially as lategame floods tend to be rather nonthreatening, or can even be exploited by players with Cerberus/Lava/Enviro Boots to kill off most enemies on a floor if they don't mind losing the items, or just running by them and letting the flood kill them. Maybe add a new message too to let players immediately know it's a blood flood and so they don't leave enemies behind thinking the flood will kill them.
*Add a new "Malice" event, where the Enraged timer gets reduced to 2 and a half minutes on the floor.
With the Enraged Timer being added, we can have ways to play with it to create more time sensitivity, and one idea that came to mind is a lategame event that severely truncates the timer. It could be adjusted, but half of the nuke timer seems reasonable to me; the Enraged Timer running out doesn't instantly kill you like a nuke would, nor does it running out pose much a threat if you only have a few enemies left alive on a floor when it does run out, so the timer will have to be much shorter to seriously threaten the player. Also in my experience, at lategame you should be able to comfortably clear floors even on N! within a few minutes. I would restrict this event to HMP+ however, as it could be overly harsh for lower level players.
*Add a new "Reinforcements" event, where new enemies steadily spawn in on the floor.
DRL has the capability to spawn in new enemies onto a floor, but this capability is pretty underutilized, so an idea of a new event is one where new enemies will spawn in somewhere on the floor at regular time intervals based on difficulty (I'm thinking every 60/50/40/30/20 seconds on each difficulty respectively), and maybe in lategame on UV/N!, you can get a harder version of this event where every third enemy is an Elite Former or Nightmare enemy (or boss enemy if beyond floor 50 in A100/666), allowing these enemies to appear more often in the standard game. These spawned in enemies should naturally give no EXP, so the player is not incentivized to wait around and let them all spawn in, and the reinforcements should stop once the player kills all enemies so players going for 100% kills aren't forced to stick around, or after 12 ingame minutes has passed (shortly before the Enraged Timer runs out) so a player struggling to kill all the enemies don't get overrunned with infinitely spawning enemies and to also prevent players from abusing infinite spawns to inflate their kill rate (the 12 minutes limit means each difficulty would have 12/14/18/24/36 enemies spawn in total, which seems sensible to me). I would additionally disallow this event from showing up in AoRA, as it could otherwise screw over the Quartermaster runs that require a 100% killrate if it keeps spawning enemies on the opposite side of the map.
*Add a new "Turbo" event, where enemies get a +10% speed buff.
Like the rationale for the challenge idea of this, currently there are no events that directly buff enemies (unless you count giving all enemies the hunting flag a buff), so this seems sensible to me to spice up any given floor. The speed boost should be less than the proposed challenge gives, since the player will be less prepared for it as a random event than if they were playing said challenge (especially when playing other challenges that could make it extra dangerous), though on UV/N! there should naturally be a chance to roll a harder variation that gives the +20% speed boost.
*Add "Partial Invisibility" as a new powerup.
Among Doom's powerups, there is one conspicuously missing from DRL, the Partial Invisibility globe, and according to that very old archive I found of planned DRL features in 0.9.9.8-beyond before development stalled, the Partial Invisibility was planned to get added. There are three potential effects it could have implemented; the first one is to make enemies fire in random directions instead of at the player, which would be most faithful to how it actually works in Doom but could be overly chaotic and cause problems with how VMR targeting works. The second idea is to have it reduce enemy accuracy and increase the player's dodging rate like running already does, which would be practical but rather boring and worthless against the VMR. The third idea would be to have it replicate JHC's Stealth, i.e. enemies can't see you until it runs out or you attack, and wouldn't be completely out-of-line with what Doom players expect since that is sorta how it works in ZDoom-based source ports, while the coding for Stealth already exists. Of the three options, I would prefer the third, and I imagine it's what most players would find more exciting. However perhaps you can do a combination of the second and third ideas, where the player is stealthed initially, but if the player attacks before it wears off, the stealth gets turned off while the remaining Partial Invisibility time gives them the reduced enemy accuracy/buffed dodging bonus, as otherwise Stealth as a random powerup might not be that useful for players on completionist playthroughs who often wouldn't find much extended use for sneaking past enemies (while also again this would resemble its ZDoom functionality, where it lets you sneak by enemies that haven't been alerted to your presence yet and then behaves like usual Partial Invisibility once they have been and start attacking you).
*Change the listed difficulty for the challenges
This isn't important because the listed difficulty of challenges don't really matter, but if the difficulty ratings are meant to guide newbies towards which challenges they should try first, the following have difficulty ratings that are significantly off and should be adjusted accordingly:
- Angel of Light Travel: Hard -> Easy - The smaller inventory isn't as significant a drawback as you might expect, but mainly the 20% speed boost can make AoLT actually easier than a standard game for melee or very ammo efficient builds. Tellingly, combining challenges with AoLT was exploited by several people to get Diamond badges easier than they would be normally.
- Archangel of Travel: Blade -> Very Hard or even Hard - Only two inventory slots is actually very restrictive, even pure melee builds would want to carry more medkits and spare armors, but you get an even greater speed boost, and as a result AAoLT isn't remotely as difficult as the other Archangels or even the top-end normal Angels. I think you can justify rating it just Hard, but Very Hard could be listed instead just to be a little conservative with not underrating it.
- Angel of Impatience: Hard -> Very Hard - The inability to store medkits is a pretty major limitation; you get yourself in a bad spot with no healing immediately available, and your run can just end right there, even late game runs that otherwise would be near home free in other challenges can abruptly end from getting a bad starting spawn with no healing powerups around. This is on top of many special levels being far more dangerous with no healing available whatsoever in them, and being unable to store mods for better equipment later (without Scavenger that is) nor store other items that could be useful later. As such, I think rating AoI as just Hard is underselling it.
- Angel of Confidence: Very Hard -> Hard - You might need to reset a few times to get a first floor that doesn't kill you, but those few resets wouldn't make completing an AoCn run take more cumulative time than a standard game run, and AoCn overall just isn't that hard to win. If AoOC didn't exist, Sereging probably would have still thrived with AoCn.
- Angel of Red Alert: Medium -> Hard - "Medium" for AoRA? No, absolutely not. Just look at how often people got their shit kicked in when they first played AoRA, and many of them just never really get the hang of it. AoRA not only forces people to test a skill in their routing and overall time efficiency that otherwise often didn't matter in standard play, but it's also very unforgiving and even runs that make it past Phobos can suddenly die from a single bad floor. Medium is jut a gross underrating of what people can expect when delving into AoRA.
- Angel of Pacifism: Easy -> Medium - AoPc being listed as "Blade" prior to 0.9.9.7 was a hilarious overrating, but "Easy" is still underselling it. It's not hard to spam runs until you get the luck needed to win, but since you are completely unable to fight back, there will be many runs even on HNTR that you just cannot win in, and so I think "Easy" is giving an inaccurate picture here.
- Archangel of Masochism: Blade -> Tormuse - Aside from it not making sense to have this share the same difficulty rating as its Angel counterpart, the fact this challenge has so far only been beaten once on N! in over a decade, by someone using the most busted mastery in DRL history, and in a buggy version with the permanent 95% dodging rate to boot, says enough that Blade undersells the difficulty of this.