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1

Requests For Features / Re: Compilation of fixes, changes, and new ideas for version 0.11

« on: April 24, 2026, 04:38 »

reposting/updating some of my map-specific medal ideas, so they don't get buried in discord:

Oh I meant to add some of these ideas to the prior post containing the new special level medal ideas but I forgot about it, so good thing to bring them up again. I'll just add my feedback to them here:

Duke of Nukage - pass toxin refinery/central processing in archangel of red alert
(pass meaning you just have to exit, no need to conquer it)

A bit of overlap with the proposed DSDA medals but seems fine enough.

chained court I'm not sure, maybe just have one for beating the "unchained court"? (the "hard" version with the arenamaster)
that way the nickname becomes canon

There is the proposed new "Unchained" badge series for The Chained Court that references its internal nickname. Aside from that, a generic medal for just beating it I don't think is necessary, especially as beating the Unchained Court already builds towards getting the Aurora Medallion (the Arena Master Staff counts as a Unique and then it'll likely get you a second Unique later in Vaults/House Of Pain, covering half of what you need for Aurora Medallion).

Iron Feet - clear phobos lab on UV+ without enviro suits or boots

Yeah I don't like this one, seems overly complicated to implement while not being all that interesting of a challenge.

^alternatively: lab-rat award - clear phobos lab on UV+ without shotgun kills

Not a bad idea aside from needing a better name, but in the proposed new badge series for Phobos Lab and Military Base, the proposed Romero Platinum badge is beating Phobos Lab on N! in AoMr, which this medal would have a bit too much overlap with.

NM100S pin - collect the supercharge in hell's armory on N!

A fun little idea I like.

Kleptomaniac Award - collect the backpack in containment area in archangel of pacifism

I mentioned before on Discord that this one requiring the Archangel is unnecessary and just makes it more annoying to get, but otherwise I like it with allowing normal Angel of Pacifism, just need to add the stipulation to also exit The Wall/Containment Area alive. You otherwise have no sane reason to ever get the Backpack in AoPc, so it's a fun little challenge to get a medal for it.

Skull Stomper - clear the city of skulls/abyssal plains in angel of marksmanship

Mostly fine with this one, main thing is if the Skull badge series was to get expanded beyond Silver, surely one of the higher tier badges would require AoMr (though currently there is no standing proposals for higher tier Skull badges, so if anyone has good ideas for them, as well as for Brick, Lava, Spider, and possibly an entire new series for Halls of Carnage, those are open).

World Traveller - clear the vaults in archangel of light travel

A harder version of my "Loaded Backpack" medal idea is fine by me.

^alternative: Worthyness pin - clear unholy cathedral after activating super-enraged mode

Aside from the potential cheese of killing everything on N! and letting the Super Enraged Timer trigger after, there's also the cheese of if you can outrun the enraged AoD, you can get him down to almost dead and then just run away until you run out the Super Enraged Timer, and then hit once more to kill him. He also doesn't gain much from Super Enraged because of the 250% speed cap, and I'm not sure Kornel would like a medal that intentionally entails stalling the game out to trigger the Enraged Timer.

Azrael's Cross - clear the mortuary/limbo with 250+ kills (and without nukes)

^alternatively, clear+exit the mortuary/limbo with 100 enemies alive at some point (with the same name for the medal)

I like either idea.

Eternal Firekeeper - convert every non-stair tile into lava in the lava pits/mt erebus

Neat idea, but may be too complicated to program, and may be too tedious in practice to actually win this medal.

Some of them involve the archangels, since I think the archangels are pretty underutilized, they each only have a single angelic badge tied to them (and I imagine most people won't be touching the angelics, thus there is no reason to play the archangels)

Maybe the Archangels should just have their own distinct badge series, I remember back when I started getting serious into badge collecting and beating all the challenges, feeling pretty disappointed when I first beat Archangel of Light Travel + 666 and got nothing nothing new in the awards to show for it since I didn't just immediately jump into their Angelic requirement. That would do more to encourage people playing the Archangels beyond a single run for their respective Angelics than a few medals only obtainable in an Archangel, and would make playing them on lower difficulties not feel "pointless" for lower level players. They probably didn't have their own badges series to begin with because of the arbitrary 26 badges per tier limit being enforced at the time when they were added, but Game Hunter later mentioned he planned to add a lot more badges, mainly for Dual Angels but I wonder if perhaps he would have added more for the Archangels as well...

Oh and speaking of the angelics, if were gonna have more angelic badges, why not add some more ranks between chaos marshal and no life king?

Between more badges being added and the proposal to expand requirements for them, the ranks would need some reshuffling, but I'm sure Kornel can think up some extra rank names. "Chaos Grand Inquisitor" is a cool name though :p

If the Unexplored Star medal is added, I'd personally prefer if it's called the Medal of Chance. "Unexplored Star" makes it sound like you're being rewarded for not doing something that's completely optional, which the special levels are. "Medal of Chance" on the other hand is an ironic name.

As for weapons:

* Thank you for adding the M6D Pistol to the proposal list. I'm glad balance changes make implementing it in its full glory a workable idea.

* I feel like the WSTE-M5 Combat Shotgun could work as a weapon if it was given a damage boost to be better than the tactical/assault shotguns, and if its generation chance was weighted to favor early levels (as early as level 2 I'd say).

* I'm fine with Ammochain working with the Unmaker on its final level, since getting to that point requires significant investment to do so. I think I'm alright with having its final level work with Triggerhappy if it's a rapidfire weapon, as long as it means more rapidfire shots in succession like eg. the chaingun, instead of shooting more than 3 beams at once. Accuracy for the base Unmaker should be fairly high but not perfect, with better accuracy being one of the rewards of upgrading.

* As for upgrading the Unmaker, I'd probably go with demon keys hidden in certain special levels, in spots that aren't totally obvious but fairly easy to find for players who are paying attention. Think of the destructible walls that are in (IIRC) Toxin Refinery, or a switch hidden in a destructible crate. That's how it was in Doom 64, after all. Alternatively they could just be rewards for killing certain boss enemies while having the Unmaker. "You feel the Unmaker calling out to a demonic artifact here/possessed by a powerful demon!" could be the hint text for either situation.

* Two new weapon ideas from me that tie more closely to Doom's history and legacy:

The Wolfenstein 3D pistol, stated in The Official Hint Manual for Wolfenstein 3D™ to be a Walther P38 but should probably be called the Old Pistol. A unique pistol, with firing sound lifted straight from Wolf3D and sprite graphic...probably lifted from some modder who made one for a Doom mod or something. 8 round magazine, faster reload, more accurate and a bit more damaging than the base pistol. Does additional damage damage the closer you are to an enemy. I wish that WolfRL total conversion mod from a while back actually got finished, but this will do.

The grenade launcher from Quake, assuming that programming and implementing grenade projectiles that don't explode on impact (if they don't hit an enemy) is feasible and desirable.

I forgot to reply to Trar's post too. For the Old Pistol, I would say that should be an Exotic, since currently we got three Uniques and only two Exotics, while we got a fourth Unique Pistol proposed with the M6D Magnum, and it sounds more fitting as an Exotic. As for the Quake Grenade Launcher, it could just do what JHC's Grenade Launcher does, where the projectile explodes on the aimed tile if there's no enemy or obstacle in the way, but then that would basically just be a Revenant Launcher with different stats. Which could still be fine, though it would make both less special.

[--------------------------------------------------------------]

2

Nightmare! / (0.10.8) [N!|11%|YAVP] - Another Speedrunner Angelic Badge (in 3:40)

« on: April 22, 2026, 00:38 »

(You can watch the video of this run here)

With Asbadagba showing Speedrunner Angelic is now possible in this version, I decided I should try getting it for myself before the eventual badge rebalancing, despite not trying to 100% 0.10 like I did with 0.9.9.7 (and so I can claim winning 14 Angelics across all versions). Running this badge was awful, but after over 300 failed runs and another 100ish I Q+Y'd on, and having to make use of the extra buttons on my mouse, as well as removing my Caps Lock key from my keyboard to stop misinputting it, I was finally able to manage a 3:40 win to claim the badge (as well as what should be the verified N! speedrun record for DRL). I don't feel like doing a big writeup for this badge as I usually do, as it would just be mostly regurgitating what Asba wrote about it, so you should read his post, and you can just watch my video to see how my run went, it's less than 4 minutes long anyway. The only real deviation in my run is that I got Berserker before Intuition, since when I was doing Int first, I was losing too many runs from running out of Berserk/Invuln in Deimos without Berserker or even making it to the Cyberdemon without having Berserker, while I realized I needed the powerups to spawn on the way to the stairs anyway and so Intuition just wasn't helping all that much (the time limit is just too tight to spend any time looking over the floor and detouring for powerups). In hindsight, I think I should have gotten HR2 instead of Intuition. After firsthand experience with this badge, I'm convinced sub-4 minutes will be back in TAS-only territory after powerup stacking is removed and other likely incoming changes happen like nerfing running's duration; this time limit is just barely doable even with all the speedrunning advantages this version has, and it's just flatout impossible without using a mouse. As such,I'll be keeping the proposal to nerf the badge's time limit (the current proposal is 8 minutes, but it may be adjusted farther after seeing the incoming changes in action). The time I got is very beatable in this version, since my technical play was far from perfect, with many mistakes throughout, and I didn't get a nuke so I lost over 10 seconds killing the Mastermind, but if no one beats it before the next DRL version comes out, it may end up technically standing as an unbeatable speedrun record (though any serious speedrun leaderboard should be divided based on version, comparing speedrunning times obtained in this version to speedruns in other versions just isn't remotely fair).

Here is the mortem:

--------------------------------------------------------------
 DRL (0.10.8) roguelike post-mortem character dump
--------------------------------------------------------------

 Derek Yu, level 5 Mancubus Marshal Scout,
 defeated the Mastermind at the City of Dis.
 He survived 6123 turns and scored 305608 points.
 He played for 3 minutes and 40 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 87 out of 764 encountered hellspawn. (11%)
 Who gave him the ticket to Hell, anyway?

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 12
  Levels visited   : 1
  Levels completed : 0

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  Cyberdemon's Head          Killing the Cyberdemon w/o taking damage
  Mastermind's Brain         Killing the Mastermind w/o taking damage
  Major Icarus Cross         Won the game in less than 20,000 turns
  Compet-n Platinum Cross    Won the game in under 10 minutes
  Untouchable Pin            Won taking less than 500 damage
  Speedrunner Angelic Badge  Win standard N! game under 4 minutes

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  #################................................##########
  ################...............####...............#########
  ###############.......####.....####.....####.......########
  ##############........####.....####.....####........#######
  #############.........####.....####.....####.........######
  ############..........####..............####..........#####
  ###########............................................####
  ###########....####............................####....####
  ###########....####............................####....####
  ###########....####............................####&...####
  ###########....####............................####....####
  ###########............................................####
  ############..........####..............####..........#####
  #############.........####...%X####.....####.........######
  ##############........####.....####.....####........#######
  ###############.......####.....####.....####.......########
  ################...............####...............#########
  #################................................##########
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 81/50   Experience 10466/5
  ToHit Ranged +0  ToHit Melee +4  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +6

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Hellrunner       (Level 1)
    Brute            (Level 2)
    Berserker        (Level 1)
    Intuition        (Level 1)

  HR->Bru->Bru->Ber->Int->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [ Armor      ]   nothing
    [ Weapon     ]   chainsaw (4d6)
    [ Boots      ]   nothing
    [ Prepared   ]   shotgun (8d3) [1/1]

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    pistol (2d4) [3/6]
    green armor [1/1] (29%)
    red armor [4/4] (91%)
    10mm ammo (x20)
    shotgun shell (x43)
    large med-pack
    phase device

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    bullet     - internal 50%   torso 50%   feet 50% 
    melee      - internal 50%   torso 50%   feet 50% 
    shrapnel   - internal 50%   torso 50%   feet 50% 
    acid       - internal 50%   torso 50%   feet 50% 
    fire       - internal 50%   torso 50%   feet 50% 
    plasma     - internal 50%   torso 50%   feet 50% 

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    23 former humans
    10 former sergeants
    10 former captains
    2 former commandos
    15 imps
    5 demons
    5 lost souls
    2 cacodemons
    1 baron of hell
    5 arachnotrons
    1 pain elemental
    1 revenant
    1 mancubus
    4 nightmare imps
    1 Cyberdemon
    1 Spider Mastermind

    Melee kills   : 20
    Pistol kills  : 1
    Shotgun kills : 39
    Unarmed kills : 0
    Other kills   : 27

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  He left level 4 as soon as possible.
  On level 5 he stormed the Chained Court.
  He arrived at the Phobos Anomaly.
  He left level 9 as soon as possible.
  Entering level 10 he was almost dead...
  He left level 10 as soon as possible.
  He left level 12 as soon as possible.
  He left level 13 as soon as possible.
  He left level 14 as soon as possible.
  He sounded the alarm on level 15!
  He found the Tower of Babel.
  On level 17 he stumbled into a complex full of revenants!
  He left level 22 as soon as possible.
  On level 23 he stumbled into a nightmare demon cave!
  He left level 23 as soon as possible.
  Then at last he found Dis!
  On level 24 he finally defeated the Mastermind.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind.
 You feel more calm. You are hit! You dodge! Boom! You are hit! You dodge!
 Boom! You are hit!(x2)
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. You feel like a killing machine! You're going
 berserk! You need to taste blood! You are hit!(x6)
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You need to
 taste blood!
 You are hit!(x6)
 You need to taste blood! You are hit!(x4) You dodge! Boom! You are hit!
 You need to taste blood!
 You are hit!(x6)
 You need to taste blood! You are hit! You dodge! You are hit! You dodge! You
 are hit!(x2)
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind dies. Congratulations!
 You defeated the Spider Mastermind!

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 476 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 422 of those were killed.
 4 of those were killed by something unknown.
 8 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 17 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 25 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 3 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 15 killed the bitch and survived.
 7 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

--------------------------------------------------------------


3

Nightmare! / Re: (v0.10.8) [N!|19%|YAVP] Speedrunner angelic! (with video proof!)

« on: April 13, 2026, 13:24 »

Already commented on Discord and your video to congratulate you, so I'll let you know that I pinned your mortem. Now you just need to get Everyman and Masochist Angelic to join the 26/26/26/26/26/13 club!

[--------------------------------------------------------------]

4

Nightmare! / (0.9.9.7) [N!|99%|YAVP] - First legitimate standard game Apostle Insignia

« on: March 20, 2026, 14:33 »

Note this post contains major spoilers about DRL's biggest secret, I will not be hiding any of it in any spoiler text to maintain readability, so stop reading if you still care about that spoiler.

Guess I lied, I got one more 0.9.9.7 mortem left after my Everyman Angelic run. So one major thing DRL has is that there is actually another, much more secret final boss besides John Carmack, the elusive Apostle. To encounter him, there are one of three ways:

• Enter Hell Fortress with the Dragonslayer and Berserker Armor equipped.
• Enter floor 100 of Angel of 100 with the Berserker Set equipped.
• Enter floor 666 of Archangel of 666 with the Berserker Set equipped.

The third method is by far the most obtainable if you know how to pick up the Dragonslayer and several people have done it after the Dragonslayer's secret pickup conditions got revealed, and the second method requires a great deal of luck but has been done by a few people (even after one version where the Apostle was bugged to spawn on A100's final floor always). The first method however is especially elusive, as you either have to find all of the Dragonslayer, Berserker Armor, and Thermonuclear Bomb randomly within standard game limits, which I don't know what the odds are for that but I'm sure it's somewhere in the 1 in five digits range, or alternatively, fulfill the guaranteed method for finding the Berserker equipment. To do that, as explained in my Gutts' Heart mortem post, you have to be playing on Nightmare! and clear Hell's Arena without taking any damage, which will then replace the Artifact weapon in Unholy Cathedral with the Dragonslayer and replace the Angelic Armor in Mortuary/Limbo with the Berserker Armor. Doing that is very very hard, achieving Hell Arena Pwnage itself without the aid of AoMC or AoLT is a high-end Diamond-level feat, then you still have to get through the rest of the game on N!, with the hardest parts coming right after you grind out several runs for your one Hell Arena Pwnage. Then if you reach the Cathedral for the Dragonslayer, you're still not done yet, as you then have to go through N! Mortuary/Limbo, which are much more difficult when locked to the Dragonslayer, as you can no longer use the BFG to blow up corpses nor the Rocket Launcher to rocket jump around, as well as can't use ranged weapons to kill far off Formers chipping you down, and the permanent berserk doesn't really matter when Berserker builds will basically remain perpetually berserked in these levels anyway, especially if you brought in Hatred Skulls; in fact the Scythe and even the Spear are straightup better, as they don't lock your weapon and can actually gib much more effectively than the Dragonslayer with their plasma damage, while the Ripper would be better as well with its crazy attack speed. You can at least cheese Limbo if you can raise the bridges and then reach one of the corners with the walls intact, as you can then safely camp out everything, but Mortuary has no such cheese and you can only bring in as many Skulls as you can find, while hoping you got good indestructible/regenerating armor and/or Antigrav Boots. Then if you do all that, you're still subjected to the RNG of finding a random Thermonuclear Bomb, as being locked to the Dragonslayer means you can't equip the Nuclear BFG or another nuclear weapon to activate their nukes, and while Thermos aren't rare, they're uncommon enough that you will frequently go entire games without ever finding one (I actually had a previous attempt at this feat fail because one never spawned in the run, and you won't find out until the very end if you got unlucky...).

Unsurprisingly, people getting an Apostle kill outside of A100/666 is exceedingly rare, in fact from what I can find, no one in 0.9.9.7 or any other pre-JHC version has verifiably ever gotten an Apostle Insignia legitimately in the standard game or any non-A100/666 challenge; when searching through the forums, the only non-A100/666 mortems I found with an Apostle Insignia were various 2Dev mortems, and Firstblood's Demonic Quintuple Diamond Conqueror mortem, which were all blatantly cheated runs (the story with 2Dev and his unabashed cheating has been told several times by now, Firstblood meanwhile flew under the radar since he never posted again after that prior ridiculous mortem and so never got the rep that 2Dev or Vandam did, but I rip into why Firstblood's Quintuple Diamond run is 2Dev-level bullshit in my Demonic Diamond post, and after doing multiple runs through N! Mortuary and the rest of Hell with the Dragonslayer while playing Blademaster, once even having Antigrav Boots + Powered Red Armor, I can see there's absolutely no fucking way you can avoid enough damage to keep a Demonic Diamond badge intact while Dragonslayer-locked and still clearing all the levels along the way). I also found this post by Evilpotatoe claiming to have done a standard game Apostle kill twice while attaching the mortems to his post, but aside from him talking about playing on a custom module with things like "super zerk", I downloaded the mortems to see them and.... the first mortem says he saved 13 fucking times!, while the second mortem says he saved a still suspicious 6 times (you should never need to save more than a few times in a single game that isn't in A100/666). Aside from what looks to be some glaring save scumming, you know, you can't save on Nightmare in 0.9.9.7, showing that he was playing on the aforementioned custom module that was modifying gameplay. From all that I seen, Evilpotatoe was a legitimate player, but even if you want to assume that there was no save scumming going on with those 19 saves across those two games, these standard game Apostle Insignia runs by him can not be considered legitimate when they weren't played on the official version and broke a then fundamental rule of Nightmare. Maybe there's another non-A100/666 Apostle Insignia run buried somewhere on the forum, but surely anyone else who gotten a Hell Fortress Apostle would have made a big deal about it and the post about it would have been easily found, so it can be assumed that no one has verifiably legitimately achieved an Apostle Insignia outside of A100/666 in any of the official pre-JHC versions. With that said, I decided that my 0.9.9.7 conquest wasn't fully complete yet without picking up the standard game Apostle Insignia that seemingly no one has done legitimately before.

For the run, as explained in the prior Gutts' Heart mortem, opening up with Finesse -> Juggler as a Scout gives you the best chance at pulling off Hell Arena Pwnage, as you absolutely can't let a single enemy get through your Shotguns and you need the instant weapon swapping for the least painful corpse stacking, while Juggler is also your only chance to avoid getting hit if you get enemies approaching from different angles while you're already corner shooting something else. Having Intuition 2 instead would let you avoid walking into a Cacodemon's or Baron's vision without having to radar shoot, but you're going to have a much more cumbersome time corpse stacking and are far more likely to be unable to kill an enemy before they reach you, especially if you're fighting a lot more respawns from being unable to effectively corpse stack. Now if you get floor 2 vaults, it's possible to have both Juggler and Intuition 2 at least halfway into the Arena, but since I'm going for Blademaster and need Whizkid, doing that would delay both too long for my liking, so in the winning run where I did get a floor 2 Cacodemon vault, I used the additional two opening traits on Hellrunner instead of Intuition, which is still very helpful if you get bad starting wave spawns and need to outrun Pinkies and/or dodge Cacodemon plasma balls. And indeed in my winning run that second HR level would prove vital when I had to successfully dodge over a half dozen Cacodemon plasma balls after a terrible wave 2 starting spawn. I wasn't keeping count and I just quit out whenever I got hit in the Arena, but I think it took nearly double digit tries before I got a damageless N! Arena here. That aforementioned floor 2 vault having a Double Shotgun was also nice.

After the Arena it's a normal N! game until the Cathedral. It could be tempting to just rush through the game and not bother with the special levels along the way, but as I mentioned before, N! Mortuary is going to be brutal when Dragonslayer-locked and so you need to get yourself as strong as possible for it, I do not want to go through the hassle of pulling off a Hell Arena Pwnage just to die in Mortuary late in the game. This is also still Nightmare and no damaging Hell's Arena gives you no immediate additional benefit, so you can still very much die before even reaching the Cathedral if you play sloppy. As such, I'm still killing everything and doing all the special levels along the way. Also I'm going Blademaster, as aside from being the quickest build for a completionist run and one of the best builds in general, it is pivotal to ensure you don't get chipped down to death in Mortuary while you're Dragonslayer-locked. Vampyre would work well too, but no Scout speed bonus and being unable to get HR would make getting Hell Arena Pwnage even more difficult, while it also may fare worse in Mortuary without being able to use the Ripper, especially if you can't make Antigrav Boots nor get better indestructible armor than a Nanofiber Red. Some other particularly important points:

• Unchained Court is a must, you won't be using the Chainsaw beyond Cathedral but it'll greatly reduce the chance you die to a bad hot start along the way, and you're going to want the mods. The Staff ain't bad either for The Vaults, since you might get a good Exotic or Unique armor there that will really help, or boots that will help with Lava Pits/Erebus later if you're unable to build Cerberus Boots.
• Military Base is too good of an EXP dump to pass up and is necessary to get Blademaster before Anomaly, but even Phobos Lab you should still do for the mods, which wouldn't be hard anyway for a Berserker build with HR2 and a Rocket Launcher.
• Before triggering the Anomaly ambush, use facerockets to trigger Berserker, and if you have Blademaster online, you can actually stand your ground and kill everything with the preemptive berserk.
• Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab is another must stop; aside from more mods, a Nano or Onyx would be crucial to Mortuary/Limbo, and Berserker makes the normally dangerous Shamblers a free fight. With an Onyx, you can just put it on a Red Armor, but an Energy-Shielded Vest, Fireproof Phaseshift, or Fireproof Duelist Armor would also be great if you manage to find them. As for a Nano, you want to make Antigrav Boots, when speed will be the most important thing to limit the amount of respawns you deal with in Mortuary and limit the chip damage you take while melee-locked. On that note, do not make Tactical Boots before Armory/Lab, you can survive without them until then and you really don't want to miss out on Antigrav Boots because you used up two A mods on Tactical Boots and then didn't find enough after to make Antigrav. Then even if you don't get a Nano, you don't want to make Tactical Boots, nor the aforementioned Fireproof armors for that matter to Onyx or Power mod them, before you get WK2, as that will otherwise lock you out of modding them in this version, and if you don't got Antigrav, you want the next best thing of A-modded Tactical Boots. Unfortunately in this run I got a Firestorm in Armory that I can't get any use of once locked to the Dragonslayer, and saving it for the BFG wouldn't even help either since I would only get two floors to make use of it before the Dragonslayer, so I just slapped it on a Rocket Launcher once it was clear I wasn't going to be able to Tacticalize it (I would end up getting a random Onyx anyway though shortly before Mortuary).
• City Of Skulls/Abyssal Plains is another mandatory stop, when the Skulls will be your only means of mass corpse disposal while melee-locked, and you need to bring all three Skulls you get here with you, while Blademaster also makes the Agony Elemental completely free and so there's no excuse to skip them. Oddly the Fire Skulls will actually be your most coveted Skulls for once; the Hatred Skulls do nothing extra when you're already permanently berserked, and the Blood Skulls' healing don't matter when you got Supercharges at the start of Mortuary/Limbo, so Fire Skulls are most valuable for destroying more corpses outside of the Skull popping radius with the corpse explosions and potentially killing any Archviles caught within the explosions. In this run I ended up getting three Fire Skulls, normally that would be a really disappointing result but it's the perfect result here, and I find a fourth randomly later too.
• Halls Of Carnage could be helpful to stop by for the mods if you're not strapped for health, and this normally very dangerous level on N! can be handled easily by Blademaster. Spider's Lair meanwhile doesn't have mods, and the Battery Pack that would normally be great for Mortuary/Limbo is of no use here, but the Plasteel Boots can be nice if you have none yet, particularly to help you for Lava Pits/Erebus later if you can't make Cerberus Boots in time.
• When it comes to post-Blademaster traits, you gun for WK2 ASAP, and then you get HR3. You might think you don't need to get Brute 4/5 since the Dragonslayer is basically one-shotting all normal enemies with just Brute 3 (even an Archvile is one-shotted 99.25% of the time), but you should still max out Brute, as it significantly increases the chances of you gibbing Arachnotrons and Revenants, which will help you clear Mortuary/Limbo (at Brute 3, you have a 67.2% and 20.4% chance of gibbing respectively with the Dragonslayer, while at Brute 4 those chances increase to 79.6% and 32.8%, and at Brute 5 they increase to 88.8% and 47.5%). It also ensures you don't fail to gib a Commando either (only a 4.1% chance you would fail to gib at Brute 3, but you really don't want these guys getting back up and so reducing it to less than a half percent is nice). After maxing out Brute it's then Dodgemaster and Ironman, don't need to worry about the latter preventing Berserker triggers once you're permanently berserked. I don't get any Intuition as it really doesn't help for Mortuary/Limbo when you're melee-locked and I don't need it for the normal floors. I additionally don't get Finesse 3, since as mentioned, the Dragonslayer is one-shotting everything and with Blademaster that translates into instant attack speed anyway, while none of the bosses need the extra DPS when they go down in only a few Dragonslayer swings at most and I can survive without Fin3 before I get the Dragonslayer.
• As alluded to, after getting A-modded Tactical Boots and P-modding your relevant armor, you want to try building Cerberus Boots, as without being able to rocket jump, Lava Pits/Erebus will be shakier to get through if you can't bring in sufficient supplies, and clearing them is necessary to not rely on getting a lucky Invuln close enough to Dis' stairs. If you can't make them though, with the permanent berserk you have, undamaged Plasteel Boots will be enough to reduce lava damage to 1. I made the mistake here of Fireproofing a pair when I realized later that isn't necessary, just B-mod them instead so they last longer, but I would get to make Cerberus Boots anyway. On that note, in Mortuary/Limbo, you should prioritize going towards the corner with the Power Mod first if you do not have Cerberus Boots nor other lava-immune boots yet.

Even after making it to the Cathedral and then successfully clearing N! Mortuary, I'm still ultimately dependent on the RNG of finding a random Thermonuclear Bomb (the Nuclear BFG in Mortuary/Limbo should really be replaced with one if you enter holding the Dragonslayer, this run is difficult enough without the extra RNG needed on top), and I already lost a prior attempt at this from never finding one, while it was looking dicey again as I exit Mortuary still without one. However Hell 5 would finally drop one, and to be damn sure nothing could blow it up as I go towards it, I move back and camp away until everything comes to die, where I'm then able to secure it. Erebus then goes without a hitch, but the Lava Element would prove unnecessary as I get a Hell 7 Invuln to nuke the Mastermind with, just need to make sure to put on the Berserker Armor before entering Dis (I didn't mention it but yeah don't immediately equip it after getting it from Mortuary/Limbo, it fucking sucks with that abominable -70% movespeed penalty and the infinite Nightmare Demons it spawns will make clearing Lava Pits/Erebus much more tedious). At last, I get the incredibly rare Hell Fortress Apostle... and just like that it's over, while you don't even get unique ending text, nor do you get credited for a full win. Yeah all this work for a super secret final boss that is just a lame Archvile and no special ending for it, the Apostle got a bit of a visual glowup and a slight buff in 0.10, but hopefully there's a lot more to come to make this not so anti-climatic in future versions.

So there it is, the first legitimate Apostle Insignia verifiably achieved outside of A100/666. This isn't the hardest achievement in DRL and am a bit surprised no one ever actually done it legit before once it was found out how to get the guaranteed Dragonslayer + Berserker Armor, but I would say the standard game Apostle Insignia is an Angelic-tier feat even with the Apostle being so absurdly free, even moreso if said Apostle actually becomes a worthy boss fight in later versions. One other Apostle first remaining is to get the Apostle Insignia on I'm Too Young To Die difficulty, which not only excludes you from getting the guaranteed DS + BA but also excludes you from playing A100/666, so the only way to get that would be to get a random DS, BA, and Thermal Nuke all in the same run, which yeah I'm not going to try that. Here is what should be my final 0.9.9.7 mortem for real:

--------------------------------------------------------------
 DoomRL (0.9.9.7) roguelike post-mortem character dump
--------------------------------------------------------------

 OT, level 18 Apostle Chaos General Scout,
 defeated the Mastermind at the Hell Fortress.
 He survived 1555269 turns and scored 1128314 points.
 He played for 4 hours, 11 minutes and 13 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 1731 out of 1739 hellspawn. (99%)
 He was a real killing machine...

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 11
  Levels visited   : 11
  Levels completed : 11

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  UAC Star (silver cluster)
  Aurora Medallion
  Conqueror Badge
  Grim Reaper's Badge
  Hell Armorer Badge
  Hell Arena Pwnage Medal
  Apostle Insignia

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................c...............
  ...........................................................
  ..............................%............................
  ..............................X............................
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................................
  .................c.........................................
  %..........................................................
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................................
  .................................................c.........
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................................
  ...........................................................
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 130/70   Experience 187504/18
  ToHit Ranged +0  ToHit Melee +10  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +15

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Ironman          (Level 2)
    Finesse          (Level 2)
    Hellrunner       (Level 3)
    Brute            (Level 5)
    Juggler          (Level 1)
    Berserker        (Level 1)
    Dodgemaster      (Level 1)
    Whizkid          (Level 2)
    Blademaster      (Level 1)

  Fin->Jug->HR->HR->Bru->Bru->Ber->Bru->MBm->Fin->WK->WK->HR->Bru->DM->Bru->Iro->Iro->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   Berserker Armor [4]
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   Dragonslayer (9d9)
    [c] [ Boots      ]   tactical boots [0/0] (100%) (A)
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   chainsaw (5d6) (BT)

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] red armor [6] (OP)
    [b] fireproof phaseshift armor [4/4] (100%) (P)
    [c] Shielded Armor [2]
    [d] small med-pack
    [e] large med-pack
    [f] large med-pack
    [g] large med-pack
    [h] large med-pack
    [i] large med-pack
    [j] large med-pack
    [k] large med-pack
    [l] large med-pack
    [m] large med-pack
    [n] large med-pack
    [o] large med-pack
    [p] large med-pack
    [q] phase device
    [r] technical mod pack
    [s] bulk mod pack
    [t] lava element
    [u] cerberus plasteel boots [0/0] (100%)

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    Bullet     - internal 60%   torso 95%   feet 60% 
    Melee      - internal 60%   torso 95%   feet 60% 
    Shrapnel   - internal 60%   torso 95%   feet 60% 
    Acid       - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Fire       - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Plasma     - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    179 former humans
    202 former sergeants
    91 former captains
    271 imps
    127 demons
    324 lost souls
    75 cacodemons
    51 hell knights
    88 barons of hell
    47 arachnotrons
    42 former commandos
    38 pain elementals
    43 revenants
    48 mancubi
    44 arch-viles
    14 nightmare imps
    5 nightmare cacodemons
    12 nightmare demons
    7 elite former humans
    5 elite former sergeants
    7 elite former commandos
    3 bruiser brothers
    1 shambler
    1 lava elemental
    1 agony elemental
    1 Angel of Death
    1 Cyberdemon
    1 Spider Mastermind
    1 Arena Master
    1 Apostle

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 2 he entered Hell's Arena.
  He left the Arena as a champion!
  On level 5 he stormed the Chained Court.
  On level 5 he found the Arena Master's Staff!
  He defeated the Hell Arena Master!
  On level 7 he marched into the Military Base.
  He purified his fellow comrades.
  On level 8 he encountered the Phobos Anomaly.
  On level 9 he entered Hell's Armory.
  On level 9 he found the Grammaton Cleric Beretta!
  On level 9 he assembled a tactical shotgun!
  He destroyed the evil within and reaped the rewards!
  On level 11 he witnessed the Wall.
  He massacred the evil behind the Wall!
  On level 12 he assembled a fireproof armor!
  On level 12 he romped upon the Abyssal Plains.
  He slaughtered the beasts living there.
  On level 13 he assembled a tactical boots!
  On level 14 he ventured into the Spider's Lair.
  He cleared the Lair, kickin' serious spider ass!
  On level 16 he found the Tower of Babel!
  On level 17 he invaded the Unholy Cathedral!
  On level 17 he found the Dragonslayer!
  He then destroyed the Unholy Cathedral!
  On level 19 he entered the Vaults.
  On level 19 he assembled a fireproof boots!
  He cracked the Vaults and cleared them out!
  On level 20 he was foolish enough to enter the Mortuary!
  On level 20 he assembled a cerberus boots!
  On level 20 he found the Berserker Armor!
  He managed to clear the Mortuary from evil!
  On level 21 he found the Railgun!
  On level 22 he arrived at Mt. Erebus.
  On level 22 he found the Shielded Armor!
  He managed to raise Mt. Erebus completely!
  On level 23 he found the Necroarmor!
  Then at last he found Dis!
  He nuked level 24!
  He defeated the Mastermind and found the TRUE EVIL!
  On level 25 he finally defeated the Mastermind.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 The Apostle raises his arms! You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You dodge! You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Apostle. You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Apostle. You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Apostle. The Apostle dies. Error: beings[apostle].OnDie -- Lua
 error : lua\\beings.lua:1541: attempt to read undeclared variable
 Error written to error.log, please report! Next!

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 481 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 246 of those were killed.
 1 of those was killed by something unknown.
 98 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 13 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 123 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 9 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 74 killed the bitch and survived.
 40 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

--------------------------------------------------------------


5

Discussion / Re: 0.9.9.7 Final Build Tier List

« on: February 22, 2026, 18:02 »

For those that just want to see the tier list without all yapping splitting it up, here it is:

S Tier: Vampyre (S+ on N!)

A Tier: Shottyhead (A+ on N!), Blademaster (A+ on N!)
A- Tier: Masterless Scout, Cateye

B+ Tier: Ammochain
B Tier: Scavenger, Masterless Technician
B- Tier: Masterless Marine

C Tier: Sharpshooter, Fireangel, Gunrunner
C- Tier: Malicious Blades

D Tier: Gun Kata, Army Of The Dead

F Tier: Entrenchment, Survivalist, Bullet Dance

6

Discussion / 0.9.9.7 Final Build Tier List

« on: February 22, 2026, 17:58 »

Skip to this post if you just want to get to the tier list and don't care to read my explanations for the rankings.

As I finished up my Everyman Angelic run and achieved 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges in DRL, before ending my time with 0.9.9.7, I wanted to write up a final review and ranking of all the badges in 0.9.9.7, as well as do the same for all the different builds. Most people playing DRL at this point will be playing one of the post-JHC DRL versions, but for those going back to play what was the final version for over a decade, the information here could help them, and I thought it would be fun to write this up to later compare how the builds and badges have evolved since then, as I plan to eventually do this again with a later DRL version after even more major changes happen.

Going back to 0.9.9.7 after spending the past couple years playing 0.9.9.8/0.9.9.9 beta/0.10 DRL and JHC, yeah DRL then was certainly full of warts; some of the most degenerate strategies ruled (infinite run -> wait camping, infinite respawn farming, Sereging, etc), half the Assemblies/Exotics/Uniques were very underwhelming or outright trash, only a few masteries I would say were legitimately good (bit of a spoiler on the tier list later...), special levels are completely imbalanced on higher difficulties (to say nothing how much a chore many are to clear on N!), and the badges and medals are pretty whack between very inconsistent difficulty within the same badge tier and many just offering uninteresting challenges or lack of variety.  And that's just the gameplay aspects, DRL has certainly gotten a big visual glowup in the versions since. It's still DRL and I still enjoyed playing it, DRL is one of my favorite games, but it certainly was a bit hard to go back to 0.9.9.7, and after fulfilling my goal of getting as close to 100%ing pre-JHC DRL as is realistically possible, I probably won't play it again beyond maybe the occasional nostalgia trip.

To begin with, I'll preface how many Diamonds and Angelics I won with each build to establish some credibility (with Technician, Armorer, and Heroic excluded since they required the effort of many runs, also note all challenge-based Diamonds were gotten purely, i.e. they weren't mixed in any Dual Angel so no Sereging):

• Shottyhead - 6 Diamonds (Veteran, Elite, Demonic, Shottyman, Lightfoot, Masochist), 5 Angelics (Veteran, Elite, Shottyman, Lightfoot, Masochist), 11 total
• Vampyre - 5 Diamonds (Strongman, Berserker, Everyman, Daredevil, Scavenger), 2 Angelics (Strongman, Berserker), 7 total
• Blademaster - 2 Diamonds (Quartermaster, Centurial), 3 Angelics (Eagerness, Quartermaster, Centurial), 5 total
• Cateye - 2 Diamonds (Hunter, Longinus), 1 Angelic (Marksman), 3 total
• Masterless Scout - 1 Diamond (Destroyer), 1 Angelic (Inquisitor), 2 total
• Masterless Scout (no mastery possible) - 1 Diamond (Arena), 1 Angelic (Everyman), 2 total
• Scavenger - 2 Diamonds (Marksman, Eagerness), 0 Angelics, 2 total
• Ammochain - 2 Diamonds (Reaper, Inquisitor), 0 Angelics, 2 total
• Fireangel - 1 Diamond (Gatekeeper), 0 Angelics, 1 total
• Gunrunner - 1 Diamond (UAC), 0 Angelics, 1 total

I'll note the 2 Diamonds I won with Ammochain I would have went Vampyre for instead if I wasn't trying to intentionally limit my Vampyre usage, rather than legitimately thinking Ammochain gave me the most optimal chance at those badges. Similarly, I wouldn't have used Gunrunner for UAC if I wasn't intentionally trying to make an overly easy Diamond more interesting by maining Shotguns with no Berserker nor any melee, otherwise that would have been another Diamond for Blademaster. From this you can already see what I meant with only a few builds being legitimately good, with me not even using half the possible builds, even less if I didn't intentionally go with a less optimal choice, and while some of the unused ones could have been used just fine for the easier Diamonds/Angelics like Veteran, Scavenger, Longinus, or Lightfoot, they would have merited little to any serious consideration for the legitimately difficult badges and never had a real niche where they could shine.

This post will be for the Build Tier List, I'll do the Badge Difficulty Ratings in another thread since this post is going to get huge enough without trying to fit both in the same OP.

S tier

(Brokenly good, actively simplifies the game)

*Vampyre - 0.9.9.7 Vampyre isn't the outright cheat code that it is in 0.9.9.8 (which in retrospect, I should have ranked it SS tier on my 0.9.9.8 Build Tier List, that shit was an abomination to game balance), it can be mortal with lesser equipment and the early game is a more serious hurdle without the 0.9.9.8 Marine's OP inherent +20% energy resistances nor 0.9.9.8's dodging bug. However, it still doesn't take all that much to achieve a near immortal state with 0.9.9.7 Vampyre, with a relatively reachable ceiling that is still essentially IDDQD; it says a lot that I could still viably tank with Vampyre in Angel Of Humanity, while the rougher early game can be alleviated by getting Finesse with the free trait Vampyre allows, which also gives you the option of Juggler if you need more early game help and that will only delay Vampyre to level 7, the same as most other masteries anyway. What really pushes Vampyre to S tier is how much it just simplifies the game, when nearly any combat encounter can be solved by "rush in and mash click", Berserker and the massive boosted health Vampyre lets you basically carry at all times means you don't need to worry about suddenly wiping from any blunder, inventory management doesn't really matter when you don't need ammo to kill things nor medkits to heal, and it destroys all the special levels aside from maybe N! Mortuary if you're in AoB and are lacking speed-boosting equipment. Vampyre additionally gets even better on Nightmare!, in fact I would rate it S+ there, when Vampyre can farm respawns for 150%/200% health at any time, making hot starts basically a complete nonissue as you enter every floor with Supercharged health and can quickly trigger Berserker to kill everything while getting all your health back, and in general it means Vampyre won't need to worry about getting overwhelmed from respawns when it just keeps fully healing from them while not needing to expend any ammo. The only thing that keeps Vampyre from being an even more dominant choice for Diamonds/Angelics is several of them having a strict damage limit, having a strict speed requirement that makes HR mandatory while Vampyre is blocked it, or just limiting you from using melee altogether. Vampyre very much deserved the nerfs it got in 0.10 even after the 0.9.9.8 excesses got stripped away. Even having one of the worse set of blocks doesn't matter with how OP Vampyre is on top of Berserker being OP and melee in general being OP.

A tier

(Very powerful and often optimal builds, but have just enough holding them back from trivializing the game)

*Shottyhead - Always been my personal favorite build and believed it got slept on, but thought "ok maybe it's only a B tier mastery, Reloader was pretty bad before 0.9.9.8". However when going through 100%ing 0.9.9.7, I've come to realized that no, Shottyhead was very much a top tier mastery even before the Reloader buff and those rating it as mediocre or bad were the ones doing something wrong with it, if they even gave it a chance. Having triple speed shotguns is very powerful, not just for DPS but very importantly this gives you perhaps your best answer to countering deadly hot starts aside from Vampyre or lategame Blademaster, as Shottyhead can just blow away tough monster groups before they wake up and knockback other enemies out of vision before they wake up to give you time to escape or the space to stand your ground. Another common but dangerous scenario is you're cornershooting something from imperfect cover and another enemy pops up at a different angle with LoS on you, normally you would have to take hits here or try retreating, but with Shottyhead you can keep blasting this enemy out of vision while keeping the enemy you're corner shooting from reaching you until either dies. Shottyhead can additionally fight well in the open if need be, since you can keep knocking back multiple enemies out of vision from different angles, limiting or eliminating their ability to hit you, while you're still outputting strong AoE DPS. These sort of situations are what will most often cripple or outright kill your runs beyond the early game, and so Shottyhead's ability to get you out of these game-altering scenarios with little to no damage is extremely valuable, while Shottyhead can get Berserker too to make it even better at these scenarios. Shottyhead also has a very strong and synergistic prereq path, with being able to open with Finesse -> Juggler without delaying it being especially powerful in the early game, and so Shottyhead will be great from beginning to end. Shottyhead tended to get written off because it blocked SoB, a trait a lot of people insisted was mandatory, but SoB just doesn't matter much for shotguns when +1 flat damage (before falloff!) is so relatively little when shotguns are dealing 10+ damage per hit and Whizkid with Power Mods are much better for buffing their damage output. The main drawback of the SoB block is that Shottyhead can't really use a Plasma Rifle all that well, but with the aforementioned overwhelming strengths, you can very much live without them. The other common criticism of Shottyhead is it being "ammo hungry", but shotguns are already naturally ammo efficient, so it's only being ammo inefficient if you get carried away with repeatedly blasting far away enemies, and if you're playing N!, you can just infinitely farm shells off of any Shotgunner anyway (which I would actually rate Shottyhead A+ on N!, because you can utterly abuse the infinite ammo to blast away at long distance enemies with no threat to yourself). With the aforementioned collection of Diamonds and Angelics I got with Shottyhead without any Dual Angel abuse, including serious heavy hitters like Masochist Diamond, Demonic Diamond, and the previously unwon Masochist Angelic, I do think I proved myself on how good Shottyhead is.

*Blademaster - When it comes to clearing out floors, simply no build is faster than Blademaster, and Blademaster is your other best option for surviving hot starts alongside Vampyre and Shottyhead, as Blademaster will slice through large hordes of enemies before they can ever act with your instant action kills. You also got Berserker to greatly limit the damage you take in these hot starts, as well as protect you from big hits when exploring. Blademaster is simply unparalleled with completing anything time-sensitive, or for just when you want to get through the game quickly. Blademaster's main stumbling is the below-average early game, being even weaker than Vampyre in that regard with its inability to pick up Finesse without delaying it and not being able to get early Juggler without delaying until level 9, but once you make it to The Chained Court, it'll make the rest of the game significantly easier than with any of the below builds. On that note, Blademaster is another mastery I say gets even better on N! and would rank A+ there, as melee's early weakness is significantly alleviated when you got doubled healing, doubled armor repair, doubled powerups, and faster EXP gain, while Blademaster's effect becomes more valuable the more enemies there are and how fast Blademaster clears out floors quickly greatly limits the amount of respawns you have to deal with. As a testament to this is me being able to win the once-believed near impossible Eagerness Angelic with Blademaster even in 0.9.9.7 where respawns count towards your kill percentage, and then winning Quartermaster Angelic on N! in 0.9.9.7 with Blademaster, something I'm sure people would have thought inconceivable previously. The SoB block is the only real detrimental block, but Blademaster has far more other traits that it would rather have anyway and with how strong melee is, not being able to effectively use Plasma Rifles doesn't really matter, while the TaN block doesn't matter either when berserk alone gives so much resistance in this version and TaN gives no additional resistances (with the TaN block only mattering when playing Angel of Purity).

A- tier

(Great builds but lack the oomph to easily handle difficult situations)

*Masterless Scout - Probably my most controversial ranking here is putting the perennial favorite Masterless Scout merely at fourth best and in A- tier. Masterless Scout is certainly good when you got unparalleled flexibility and no suboptimal prereqs you have to fuss with, which combines well with the Scout being inherently stronger than the other two classes in this version with the great +10% universal speed bonus and stair sense. But no mastery leaves you missing that strong extra perk, which can make going masterless lacking power and make difficult scenarios all the more harrowing to get out of. In particular, a major reason I rank the three above masteries higher is their ability to get you out of hot starts without dying or crippling your health/armor supply, whereas if you go Masterless, you get no such boon to help get you out of them and become more dependent on Phase Devices, and whether you can survive said hot starts will often be what kills runs. You can get Berserker to help you with hot starts, but the three above builds get Berserker in addition to abilities that actively help with hot starts on their own and stack very strongly with Berserker. Aside from when the game is too short to even get a mastery, the only things Masterless Scout can really offer over the above three masteries is being able to get SoB, which is just a much weaker boon than what the three higher masteries give, and being able to get TaN/Badass unlike Shottyhead and Blademaster, but these two are some of the least impactful traits most of the time and even Masterless Scout won't want to get them before most other traits outside of the couple Angels where they're more meaningful. You usually can't go wrong though with Masterless and it has no glaring weakness, and you can do the vast majority of challenges well with it, it just isn't strong enough to optimally handle some of the top end challenges and can be inadequate to surviving especially terrible level generation.

*Cateye - Another perhaps controversial ranking, as Cateye tends to be the mastery that gets ranked alongside Masterless Scout at the top of lists. Cateye offers a level of flexibility not seen in most other masteries, with its more open prereq path (including allowing a free level and being a level 6 mastery), and Cateye's effect itself being a +2 vision boost that's universally good on any weapon, so while technically a Rapid Fire mastery, you can play it as a Generalist build, as a Shotgun build, or even a Pistol build. This +2 vision boost and being able to stack Int2 on top to effectively detect and fire on enemies from 5 tiles outside your vision additionally makes Cateye the premier build for avoiding damage, so what keeps it from being up in the S or even A tier? Well the +2 vision boost doesn't directly boost your combat prowess, and more importantly, it effectively doesn't do anything when the enemies are already around you. So like masterless, Cateye crucially doesn't help you get out of hot starts, and unlike masterless, Cateye can't get Berserker to help as it is blocked Brute, which additionally makes Cateye more fragile in dangerous situations where damage is unavoidable. This is why I didn't use Cateye in any of the Diamond/Angelic badges with extreme damage limits, as Cateye ends up actually taking more damage or outright dying in these hot starts or pincer moments, while Int2 and smart play will usually be enough to avoid stumbling into enemy fire. So overall, still very good and it'll have no significant problem handling most challenges, it just will be suboptimal for some of the hardest ones and you can get screwed over by a really bad hot start.

B+ tier

(Borderline great with top tier potential, but has holes significant enough to bring it down)

*Ammochain - A ranking I surprised myself to be making, as Ammochain has historically been a top tier or outright OP mastery, and I would rank it A+ in my 0.9.9.8 build tier list even above Shottyhead. 0.9.9.7 Ammochain though is definitely its weakest iteration, as this is after Ammochain's broken glory days where it gave you outright infinite clips and then got a guaranteed Nuclear Plasma Rifle from Spider's Lair, but this is before the inherently weak Marine got buffed with inherent energy resistances and before the mostly lousy Reloader got buffed. Reloader and SoB don't make for a bad early game, you'll be able to corner shoot with shotguns quite effectively with that combo, but since this is prior to the Reloader buff, it isn't quite as reliable as you would hope with killing bigger enemies before they reach you without also having Finesse or the Scout's speed boost, and with no Eagle Eye, the Chaingun is woefully unreliable, which in turns make those Triggerhappy levels later in Phobos quite painful, as the Chaingun will still not be good and they'll do nothing to bolster the Shotgun nor help you escape/tank enemies. This can make later Phobos and early Deimos a noticeable rough patch, especially if you don't get any Commandos to spawn on Phobos 6/7 and so don't get a Plasma Rifle until Deimos. The Marine's 10 extra max HP also just doesn't do all that much to bolster survivability without the inherent resistances too, and longer powerups is contingent on said powerups spawning in the first place for that perk to matter. Once you get Ammochain with a Hyperblaster, a tricked out Nuclear or Laser Rifle, or even just an A-modded Plasma Rifle, Ammochain does become quite powerful, and its perk extends beyond ammo-saving, as being able to fire off 40 consecutive full TH2 Plasma Rifle bursts before needing to reload instead of a mere five, does help with the aforementioned hot start problem. Ammochain additionally does not have Hellrunner and Berserker blocked, so Ammochain can pick up both lategame and achieve one of the highest ceilings. "Lategame" is the keyword though, as taking the traits for them earlier in the game will delay Ammochain, and picking up Whizkid is near mandatory for Ammochain to alleviate the EE block, while Ammochain can't get both the mastery and WK2 until level 11 at minimum. Overall, while offering stronger potential than the B tier masteries, I think Ammochain just has too long of an awkward period before it truly comes online to be an A tier mastery and I find it to rarely be a compelling choice for Diamond/Angelic badges (with me getting only two Diamonds with it, and both times was me deliberately avoiding the much easier path of yet another Vampyre run), so it ends up ranked in this borderline tier.

B tier

(Builds that can be good but have clear weaknesses or not overwhelming enough strengths that makes them rarely optimal picks)

*Scavenger - While this is before 0.9.9.8 gave Scavenger a much welcome buff with being able to dissemble melee weapons, armor, and boots, Scavenger is still pretty good, as it not only has the fewest blocks of any mastery, but two of its three scant blocks (Dualgunner and Triggerhappy) really don't matter, so it's not much different than playing masterless, except you get some extra mods, and have increased odds to get the highly coveted rare mods; even just getting a single Firestorm or Sniper can make a serious difference on N! with letting you build a Demolition Pistol or Plasmatic Shotgun for much easier corpse disposal. Since you can only dissemble ranged weapons in this version, Scavenger won't be able to get that many extra mods, especially outside of A100, and Scavenger itself offers no extra perks, while the Berserker block does make it more frail in the later game and bad at handling hot starts without rare mods, so it's clearly below the A tier masteries, as it will be weaker in most games without exceptional scavenging luck. Still it has no major detriment bringing it down, overall being the best Technician build in this version, which does give it a niche for Eagerness Diamond (where you must play a Technician), and I would say Scavenger is actually the best at running pistols (with me successfully using it for pure Marksman Diamond), as you can play it as a pseudo-Sharpshooter build that trades excessive EE for SoB levels that significantly help the early game hell while getting more mods and SoB to bridge the gap in lategame power. So while not a serious optimal pick for most Diamonds/Angelics, there are a couple where Scavenger can shine, and it can otherwise work well as a "vibe pick" for less difficult Diamonds.

*Masterless Technician - You can see what I wroteup about Masterless Scout and apply much of it here, but the Masterless Technician has near-instant item use, turning Computer Maps into Tracking Maps, and being able to mod a few Uniques, instead of the Scout's +10% universal speed bonus and stair sense for inherent perks. This leaves Masterless Technician substantially weaker, and results in it having an even greater problem with hot starts without the Scout's inherent perks. Masterless Technician is additionally nearly outclassed by Scavenger, as they'll play mostly the same but Scavenger gets extra mods to have better equipment. However unlike Scavenger, it can get Berserker, which can be more valuable than the extra mods at times (having a particular niche in Angel of Humanity). And overall as a Masterless build, it can't be bad at any point of the game, so Masterless Technician is solid B, though very rarely, if ever, will it be an optimal pick for any run.

B- tier

(Not noticeably flawed to be ranked lower but is too lacking in compelling advantages to be ranked higher)

*Masterless Marine - Take what I said already about Masterless builds, but instead of being universally faster and having stair sense, or having near-instant item use to prevent getting caught in healing loops or getting killed after Phasing in the middle of enemies, you only have 10 extra max HP and a situational bonus of longer powerups. Additionally, while the Scout gets immediate access to Intuition that has obvious use, and the Technician's immediate access to Whizkid can be quite useful too, the Marine's signature advanced trait is... Badass, which unless you're playing Vampyre or a few certain challenges where retaining boosted health has increased value, is mostly a dud of a trait and can even be counterproductive with the permanent knockback reduction nerfing your rocket jumps, or making you take more hits than you would have if it kept an enemy from launching you out of its or another enemy's vision. Once more as masterless, it can't be bad, so it can't be ranked in the lower tiers, yet Masterless Marine really has no real compelling niche of its own. If you really want to play a Marine with access to Intuition, Masterless Marine has that over the higher ranked Vampyre and Ammochain, which are blocked from getting Intuition via virtue of their EE blocks, but the perk offered by Ammochain and especially Vampyre are far stronger, and the flexibility advantage is greatly diminished if you have to denote a whopping four traits to getting Int2.

C tier

(Functional, but held back by serious faults that cannot be ignored)

*Sharpshooter - If this tier list was only ranking masteries by how strong they are once you get them, Sharpshooter would be an easy A tier; always max damage on pistols with just SoG3 is seriously powerful, to say nothing of when you get them with SoG5. But a serious aspect of ranking masteries are their prerequisite traits and how their early game will play out, and this is where Sharpshooter falls apart. Pistols already mightily struggle in the early game even after you get SoG3, with no Berserker nor Chained Court equivalent to give them a major mid-mastery power boost like the similarly weak-early-on melee builds, but then you need to get three fucking EE levels after that with each having greatly diminished returns, and then still survive one more level after that for Sharpshooter. Even outside of AoMr where you're free to use other weapons on your way to Sharpshooter, its prereqs do absolutely nothing to boost the shotguns you would be primarily relying on, and the Chaingun is still worthless without any SoB, so the EE levels don't help there. And it's hard to justify taking traits outside of Sharpshooter's prereq path for more immediate help, as the build is still going to be incredibly weak until you get to Sharpshooter, while each additional level will take increasingly longer to get to; you really really don't want to be in Deimos on UV or N! without Sharpshooter nor anything else but SoG3 to bolster your wimpy pistols. Sharpshooter without a doubt has the worst early game of any build other than maybe Bullet Dance, and Sharpshooter builds will have abominable winrates on UV or especially N! for anyone but the absolute best players. It's hard to rank such a polarizing mastery, there is value in having a mastery that nearly ensures you won't have a run die in Deimos or Hell after hours have been invested into it, but it can't be ignored how much effort and luck it'll take to even reach that point with such a weak early build, and how all those extra early game deaths will make successful Sharpshooter runs require more real time investment than the higher tiered builds that are far more reliable in the early game while still offering a reliable mid and late game. Ultimately this early weakness will keep Sharpshooter from being seriously considered for any Diamond/Angelic or even Platinum badge, outside of Marksman Platinum/Diamond or being chosen as a vibe pick for the easier badges. Even for Marksman Diamond, the one Diamond that Sharpshooter should be the optimal pick for, this was major enough of a problem to make me go with Scavenger instead, and I'm sure my unconventional Scavenger pick is part of what made me need far fewer attempts to win the badge than the other people who used Sharpshooter reported needing. I'll still rate it above the lower tiers though, as at least there is an opportunity for Sharpshooter to shine if you can get it, while the lower ranked masteries offer far less compelling advantages, even if their early games aren't as bad.

*Fireangel - Splash damage immunity is a nice defensive perk, and no damage rocket jumps can be very fun, but offering no direct offensive benefit, blocking SoB, and no Scout universal speed bonus, gives Fireangel abysmal offensive potential, and splash immunity alone is not a strong enough defensive perk to make up for Fireangel's abysmal offense. As a result, Fireangel can seriously struggle in encounters where it can't output enough offensive power to quickly kill the most pressing threats, especially when they involve enemies where the splash immunity is irrelevant, such as against Arachnotrons, Formers, or Shamblers. And trying to heavily use Rocket Launchers offensively to take advantage of damageless rocket jumps or close quarter rockets will lead to you running out of ammo in short order unless you play N!, while even then having to repeatedly farm Revenants or Mancubi to keep your rocket supply up is cumbersome. Fireangel can get Berserker to help its offense problem, but Fireangel has anti-synergy with Berserker, when the splash immunity means you can't facerocket yourself or use barrels to trigger it, while you also can't have VMR trigger it unless you stand still for them to hit you directly, which then makes you vulnerable to getting hit by other enemies before the VMR hit you, so Fireangel is still worse off offensively. The Reloader, Shottyman, and Hellrunner2 prereqs does give Fireangel an above-average early game, though it's still not compellingly strong early on, especially when this is before Reloader's buff, and this prereq path will start falling behind in later Phobos without stronger offensive traits or Berserker, especially when the other prereq is the rather situational and mostly defensive Dodgemaster. At least if you get the mods and Double Shotgun to make a Focused Double Shotgun early on, the ability to detour for Whizkid without needing Finesse would give you a significant offensive boost with Fireangel's prereqs in late Phobos and for the Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab Shamblers, but that requires a decent amount of luck to obtain before Armory/Lab, and since this is 0.9.9.7, you would also need to get WK2 first or else you painfully won't be able to mod that Focused Double Shotgun later. Altogether, 0.9.9.7 Fireangel is the epitome of "mid", having no point in the game where it's ever particularly good but it's functional and will never reach the depths that the below masteries will. At least it should be mentioned that Fireangel does have a legitimate niche in being the least luck-dependent way to get Gatekeeper Diamond, though considering that double-digit players still won the badge without Fireangel in 0.9.9.7, it's evident that it's still one of the easiest Diamonds even without Fireangel.

*Gunrunner - When you get Shottyman alongside Gunrunner, Gunrunner rampages can be a thing of beauty; combining shooting, reloading, and moving into one action is extremely powerful on shotguns, and can be devastatingly good with rocket launchers too, while it significantly helps with the ever prominent hot start problem, but it has two major problems. One, Gunrunner has a crippling Whizkid block, which aside from that being a major later game power limiter in general, means it can't use what would have been its reliably best weapons in a Focused Double Shotgun and Tactical Rocket Launcher. Gunrunner with an Elephant Gun can be nice, but it just doesn't compare to its damage ouput with a Focused Double Shotgun, and a Missile Launcher is similar to a Tactical Rocket Launcher, but the Tactical's smaller explosion radius is even more important for Gunrunner to safely use an explosive weapon without facerocketing itself. You could still get a Super Shotgun to match what a Focused Double Shotgun would do, but without Whizkid, Gunrunner can't triple P mod nor potentially make its dream weapon of the Nano Shrapnel SSG, and no Whizkid also means it can't make its other dream equipment of Antigrav Boots or just the reliable good footwear option of A-modded Tactical Boots, so no matter what, Gunrunner's potential is seriously impaired. Two, neither Shottyman or Reloader are among its prereqs, and Gunrunner without Shottyman is nigh-worthless, so Gunrunner is effectively a level 9 mastery. It has a very strong early game by getting Juggler, HR, and Reloader, very similar to Shottyhead in that regard, but instead of getting one of the biggest mastery boosts in the game upon hitting level 7, you have to get a second level of HR and then Dodgemaster, weakening its late Phobos/early Deimos, and this also means you can't really afford to go for traits like Intuition outside this strict path, as any farther mastery delay gets especially painful. Even when you do get Gunrunner with Shottyman, it's only active when you are running, so any time you're not running it effectively does nothing, and there can be dangerous combat situations where it's not safe to use, such as against a squad of VMR that you can't dodge or whenever barrels are around, while Gunrunner's auto-firing can also be very chaotic and can shoot at things you don't want it to. Gunrunner rampages will additionally consume a lot of ammo, particularly as it will be repeatedly firing shotguns at long distances, and so that's another knack against it when playing below N!. It should be noted that Gunrunner can get Berserker, but it's another mastery that's actively anti-synergetic with it as you can't activate run while you're berserked, and an enemy hitting you to trigger it in the midst of a Gunrunner rampage will end it right there, so even ignoring the difficulty of fitting in Berserker on Gunrunner, it can't be viably picked up for defensive purposes nor to bolster Gunrunner's offense farther. The great early game and a mastery effect that can occasionally be amazing means Gunrunner can't be that bad, however the kneecapped potential, needing extra levels, and unreliable nature means Gunrunner can't be rated highly either, while there's just really no good reason to pick Gunrunner when Shottyhead does much of the same but better, with it not needing as many levels, synergizing great with Berserker, and the mastery effect itself being active at all times and fully controllable (the only time I went Gunrunner instead was in my shotgun-only no-Berserker UAC Diamond run, and only because killing the Mastermind with Gunrunner was faster in real time). Also it should be mentioned that Gunrunner was a popular pick for Quartermaster Diamond and Angelic, but I wouldn't say this is a real niche for it, as aside from Shottyhead being basically straightup better, Blademaster was clearly the far better choice for AoRA-related badges.

C- tier

(Grossly outclassed with no niche, but just functional enough)

*Malicious Blades - The mastery itself gives a nice defensive benefit, when fire is the most important resistance in the game and +50% of it on top of Red Armor will mostly invalidate the VMR, while 75% melee res is obviously great for melee builds or when you have the opportunity to get in the face of an enemy that would be more dangerous at range. The critical issue with Malicious Blades is it blocks Berserker... and Berserker is pretty much straightup better on its own. First that +50% fire res... you get +60% with berserk, and Berserker will often be triggered by most sources of fire damage, while unlike Malicious Blades, berserk will give you +60% resistance against plasma and acid too, while the extra +15% melee resistance of Malicious Blades is mostly overkill, when the +60% melee resistance of berserk on top of common armor will reduce most sources of melee damage in this version to 1. Malicious Blades' offensive perk is additionally laughable compared to what berserk gives you, as it would take double P-modded Chainswords with maxed out Brute just to match the damage output of Artifact weapons without berserk, and they'll never match the offensive potential of a Ripper, so this offensive perk may as well not exist. Meanwhile with berserk, you not only are hitting far harder with other weapons, but you're also moving and attacking way faster, so Malicious Blades just doesn't compare to a build with Berserker, even without comparing it to what Vampyre and Blademaster can do. As a result, Malicious Blades ends up taking far more attrition damage from melee combat, and it can't really rush into hordes like other melee builds do, especially when they consist of plasma enemies or Barons. For the extra salt in the wound, berserk lets melee hit hard enough to gib enemies, especially with the Artifact weapons, but Malicious Blades will be unable to hit these gibbing thresholds and so that makes the gap even wider on N. There's the idea you can just play Malicious Blades as a hybrid build, that takes advantage of it not blocking SoB like the other melee masteries and the ability to just slot a Combat Knife in your prepared slot to benefit from it defensively, but said hybrid build requires a lot of ancillary traits before it really gets going on top of Malicious Blades' prereqs, and you'll be unable to use ammo boxes when you need to keep a blade in your prepared slot, while Berserker will trigger off of any strong fire hit and give you even better defense in addition to all the other benefits of berserk. If you play Malicious Blades as a straight melee build, it just makes early melee even harder; no Berserker removes your big powerup in the level 3-5 range, and the prerequisite Dodgemaster really sucks when HR2 lets you dodge many things already, while you especially want Fin2 or Brute 3 when you don't got Berserker, all for a payoff that is so underwhelming. So whether you want to play a hybrid melee build, a melee Technician, or a melee build that actually sticks to only using knives, anything with Berserker just outclasses Malicious Blades to a hilarious degree, to say nothing of how much it pales to what Vampyre and Blademaster can do as proper melee masters, and there's just no possible run I can think of where Malicious Blades is a remotely optimal pick. Still, semi-permanent +50% fire resistance without being locked to a specific weapon type, alongside prereqs that aren't all bad, is functional enough to not reach the dreadful depths the lower tier masteries do.

D tier

(Not unplayable, but these severely flawed builds actively make the game much harder)

*Gun Kata - Gun Kata is supposed to offer a Pistol mastery with a "good" early game compared to Sharpshooter. "Good" is in quotes though, because you're still using fucking pistols, and even then Gun Kata really isn't all that much better early on than Sharpshooter; Dualgunner is a trap that lures you in with dazzling DPS numbers on paper, then when you actually use it you kill a couple enemies and you now have two empty pistols that each take over a second to reload while the horde you're fighting bears down on you, being unable to use an Ammochain box to get a quick reload. Then having Hellrunner isn't as nice a prereq as you would think here and that Dodgemaster prereq is outright bad, as pistols desperately need to get their combat up to snuff, and so you much rather get SoB, which Gun Kata is blocked, or Whizkid or even one level of EE since pistols miss so much, which ties into the next point... Gun Kata requires a gross amount of ancillary traits, as firstly Gun Kata doesn't technically require SoG3 but you NEED SoG3 for pistols to be halfway functional, SoG2 + DG is not adequate and you're going to get your ass kicked if you're still rocking SoG2 when the big fry like Barons, Arachnotrons, and Revenants start showing up. This effectively makes Gun Kata a level 8 mastery, but there's more! Unless you get lucky with finding the Unique pistols, you're gonna really want Whizkid to buff up your weakass pistols and compensate for the lack of SoB, but this requires two levels of Finesse that will eventually become pointless on your pistols and you won't get WK2 until level 12. But then you desperately need SoG4 and SoG5 at that point, you still haven't gotten any EE yet to patch up your accuracy issues, and you can just forget about fitting in HR3 or Int or other nice post-mastery stuff soon enough to matter. Then for Gun Kata itself? The "90% faster firing after dodging" perk is unusable in nearly every meaningful combat encounter, as you can't dodge VMR, can't reliably dodge rapid fire enemies, and can't effectively dodge if several enemies are firing on you from multiple angles, all to become completely irrelevant anyway once you get SoG5 and your pistols hit the firing speed cap. Meanwhile the "automatic reload on kill" perk sounds great at first to solve the Dualgunner reloading bottleneck, but is very finnicky in practice when you can't always cleanly get a kill when you need the reload and is overall less reliable in meaningful combat encounters than the single pistol + ammo box. Not to mention if you get lucky enough to build a Nanomachic Pistol, Gun Kata's reloading perk becomes pointless and you're just worse off than you would have been playing a masterless Pistol build that can get SoB, or even Cateye, which can get SoB and has an effect that is always beneficial to pistols. At least with Sharpshooter, if you can survive to it you get a serious powerhouse that immediately makes the game significantly easier from that point forward, while with Gun Kata you're just always lagging behind the power curve until the very end and even there it's not anything impressive. Funny how much I rag on DRL Gun Kata prior to its 0.10 iteration, when I would later become its biggest advocate with its JHC iteration...

*Army Of The Dead - When it comes to blocks absolutely crippling a mastery, there's no bigger example than Army Of The Dead. First you got the Eagle Eye block, ok you don't care about that with shotguns, but it also means Intuition is blocked, not a dealbreaker by any means but that's not a trivial block. Then you got Hellrunner blocked, which is much worse, as aside from its universal usefulness, Shotgun builds especially want it when it actively bolsters the effectiveness of Shottyman, and this also means Dodgemaster is blocked, not important but still yet another block by association and it means you lose the option to get a free Cyberdemon fight if you need it. For the third block you then have Finesse..... I cannot put into words how crippling this is. Aside from the major hit to your DPS potential, corner shooting effectiveness, and general attacking safety, this blocks Juggler, the best early game combat trait and a nice trait later on for letting you more cleanly utilize several different weapons, while also blocking Whizkid! With Whizkid blocked, Army Of The Dead just gets a hard cap put on its potential, no ifs ands or buts, no Advanced or Master assemblies and no more than a single mod on any piece of equipment, you'll be stuck rocking lackluster equipment to the end of the game and can't rely on your equipment to make up for your slow ass movement + attacking speeds. Altogether, this also results in Army Of The Dead being blocked SEVEN FUCKING TRAITS, the most of any mastery! Ok, but Vampyre managed to be the best mastery in the game despite some bad blocks, so what incredibly broken effect does Army Of The Dead have to warrant such a horrendous block list? You get shotguns that... just deal piercing damage... which effectively amounts to your shotguns dealing 2 or 4 more damage against non-boss enemies before falloff. Yippee, you saved a shell corner shooting that Baron to death... did the old devs really think this was some game-breaking mastery effect that needed such brutal blocks to be balanced? So you're slow as balls, you can't viably fight in open combat without getting mauled, your equipment sucks, hot starts will fuck you, you don't even excel at corner shooting when you're stuck using slow firing shotguns, and you have arguably the weakest mastery effect in the game aside from maybe Bullet Dance, just how is Army Of The Dead not in the bottom of F Tier? Well, it is not blocked Brute, and so it can get Berserker, while it is a level 6 mastery that lets you pick a free trait, so you can get it and Berserker by level 8, with you being able to open with Rel2 -> SM for an alright early game and then going for Berserker as you approach The Chained Court. With this, you can rely on Berserker to help keep you alive in hot starts and carry you through boss fights or any other meaningful combat encounter, while you shotgun stuff down whenever you can corner shoot to save on attrition damage. This is nominally a Shotgun build when Melee will be doing all the heavy lifting and there's the serious question of why would you play this instead of just playing Vampyre (which you will have to actively forego as the prereqs overlap if you get Berserker before Army Of The Dead), or even a masterless Melee build that will be far far better than this with no such awful blocks to deal with, but Army Of The Dead built this exact way is a semi-functional build that can more viably achieve things on UV or N! than the below ranked masteries. Just don't try Army Of The Dead in AoSh...

F tier

(Abysmal from beginning to end with little good to say about them, just beating standard N! with them would be a Diamond-level achievement)

*Entrenchment - No surprise that the most commonly derided mastery ends up in F Tier. You got terrible prereqs in TaN, Badass, and Triggerhappy that make for a dreadful early game. You require several ancillary traits for Entrenchment to function, as you obviously need EE for rapid fires without Ammochain and need Whizkid, making it take a much longer time for Entrenchment to truly come online than just reaching the mastery. Then Entrenchment itself is one of the weakest mastery effects, only applying when chainfiring, already something that is impractical the vast majority of the time, and then only giving +30% resistances. To actually make Entrenchment functional, you're also going to need very good armor or Berserker to stack those +30% resistances on (the latter means even more ancillary traits), as 30% resistances alone is not enough to actually stand still tanking enemies, and you're also going to need a Nanomachic weapon or a Minigun that is Bulked to hell, as if you try to actually extensively chainfire, you're going to be depleting your weapons' clip after only a handful of bursts, where you then have to deal with 2+ second reloads without an ammo box and start your chainfiring again, while wasting a lot of ammo in general. If you do get all those things, Entrenchment can actually work and be a surprisingly decent answer to hot starts, but nearly any build already nearly autowins with a Nanomachic weapon and can function just fine without one. Did I mention Entrenchment is blocked Finesse too, at least as a Technician you won't be blocked Whizkid but that puts a significant cap to your offense, which when combined with the Reloader blocks, just makes the early game all the more worse as you lose the option of an early Finesse, Juggler, or Reloader detour to more effectively corner shoot with shotguns. The more surprising thing is Entrenchment not being ranked last, but it does at least boast legitimately good boss matchups, including surprisingly having one of the easiest times for a non-melee build against the Deimos Lab dual Shamblers, which when combined with being able to competently use a Plasma Rifle and having the option to get carried by Berserker, saves it from reaching the absolute worst depths that DRL has to offer. Also for the dozen Entrenchment fans that existed back in 0.9.9.7, be sure to play 0.10 and JHC, Entrenchment will get a serious redemption arc after over a decade of languish.

*Survivalist - A purely defensive mastery in 0.9.9.7? Already not off to a good start, but then we see those prereqs... Tough as Nails 2, Badass, and Ironman fucking 3?! Being before Ironman got buffed to give physical resistance and TaN got buffed to give energy resistances, while there are no inherent Marine resistances in this version to stack resistances on, this is just hideous in a game that very much favors offense over defense. Sure you'll be able to tank the early Formers and Imps well enough, but when the Hell Knights and Cacodemons start showing up, your TaN does shit to reduce their damage, while each Ironman level basically amounts to only being able to take one or two more hits from them inbetween heals, and then once the Barons and other big enemies start showing up, you're just not tanking shit, but you can't effectively fight back against them without any offense-boosting traits. As for what Survivalist itself does, it does have an interesting primary perk of any hit that your defenses would reduce to 0, will actually be reduced to 0 half the time rather than you taking the usual mandatory minimum 1 damage, which is a serious boon to tanking when normally several enemies hitting you at once can chip you down fast even if you're reducing everything to 1 damage, especially from rapid fire enemies. The issue is actually getting the defenses to reduce damage to 0, which TaN2 alone on even Red Armor is not going to remotely achieve against anything bigger than Imps, so you effectively need Whizkid to build a good enough armor to utilize this perk, which will almost certainly come down to building a a P-modded Cerberus Armor, or if you get a Nano Mod, a P-modded Powered Red Armor, Nanofiber Skin Armor, or Cybernano Armor. Thus you need WK2 before Survivalist can actually do anything, making it effectively a level 11 mastery, and actually probably more like level 12 because opening with Finesse -> Juggler is likely going to be your only shot to survive the early game on UV and especially N!. Oh Survivalist also has the perk to let you overheal with medkits, but if you're constantly chugging medkits anyway because you can't really tank nor have the offense to avoid damage and will struggle to get medkits back from Formers/Nobles, this perk may as well not exist most of the time. Speaking of no offense, you're blocked HR, SoB, and Berserker, so you just get the worst offense in the game, all you can do is shotgun stuff down with no boost to them beyond what Fin/Rel/WK can give, or whack stuff with a modded Chainsaw or Artifact weapon with no berserk, all while being unable to outmanuever enemies. You can get SoG for offense, but fitting five levels of SoG in top of everything else already mentioned... yeah fucking no, that isn't viable at all outside of lategame A100, and with no SoB nor Sharpshooter, your pistols are going to be shite until SoG5, so you can't try to makedo with only SoG3 or some other half-measure. At least the skeleton is there for a workable mastery, so Survivalist will see much better days in JHC and later DRL versions after getting several direct and indirect buffs, with it even being the top dog and outright OP in 0.10, just anyone visiting 0.9.9.7 from post-JHC be warned that this mastery isn't the juggernaut they may be used to...

*Bullet Dance - And the reward for worst DRL mastery in 0.9.9.7 goes to this horribly impractical piece of shit. The idea is it's the only actual Pistol mastery that can stack SoG and SoB together, which when combined with it shooting extra bullets and Dualgunner, will give the greatest DPS potential on paper. "On paper" being very VERY keywords here. First you look at the prereqs, SoB is nice for pistols but instead of SoG3 you get DG... as mentioned with Gun Kata, your pistols aren't shit without SoG3 and DG is a trap, so that already effectively delays your mastery a level. Then another prereq is Triggerhappy... a trait that does literally nothing for your pistols until you get Bullet Dance, so an actual literal dead level! This already gives you an early game whose terribleness is nearly on par with Sharpshooter's, and with how bad the Chaingun is, you can't even rely on TH to make the Chaingun help carry you to Bullet Dance. As for Bullet Dance itself, firing an extra bullet from your pistol for each TH level sounds nice at first, it's double and then tripled damage, how can it be bad?! Well those second and third bullets are going to be missing a lot, especially if the first bullet knocks an enemy out of your vision, which will happen frequently with SoG and SoB stacked on each other, and with enough levels or strong enough pistols, knockback will become a near guarantee. Just get EE then you say? Well guess what, Bullet Dance is blocked Eagle Eye! Unless you find the Trigun with its inherent +6 accuracy, or get Whizkid and load up your pistol with Agility or Sniper Mods, you're not remotely touching your theoretical "DPS" from all these missed bullets. Additionally, those double and especially triple shots are draining your pistols fast, while the basic Pistol has a puny 6 bullet clip and maxes out at 13 bullets with three Bulk mods, and the aformentioned Trigun also has a 6 bullet clip, so unless you can make a Nanomachic pistol, get a Nano-modded Blaster, or at least a Combat Pistol that is heavily Bulked, you're going to be reloading nearly as often as you're firing, and I already ranted about the issue with having to reload two pistols in the midst of a fight. You could go with one pistol + Ammochain box, but then that just makes that DG level you had to get even more wasted. Bullet Dance additionally severely nerfs your firing time by +50% for each Pistol, so while you're dealing more damage to a singular enemy, all the other enemies around are getting much more hits in on you, making it so much worse at fighting crowds and hot starts than any other sort of Pistol build is. As for your other two blocks, you got Hellrunner, so you're always slow and N! AoMr with Bullet Dance is flatout unviable, and you got Brute, so you don't even have the option for Berserker to save your ass. And ultimately? DPS is the last thing lategame pistols need! Even if you get a Bullet Dance build with maxed out SoG/SoB/Fin with a S-modded Nanomachic Combat Pistol and NNSSA Blaster, any other build with those traits and weapons would be basically killing everything before they can act, so Bullet Dance's added DPS is just completely overkll, you go through all that hell to survive to this point and get all that incredible luck to reach your absolutely platonic ideal, and you're still not offering anything practically more with it than what any other build could with the same amount of levels and item luck. Awful in the early game, awful in the mid game, awful in the late game without very good item luck, no sort of niche in any special level or challenge, requires an absurd amount of ancillary traits and equipment to even be semi-functional, there's absolutely nothing redeeming about Bullet Dance. And unlike with Entrenchment or Survivalist, there is still no happy ending for Bullet Dance, with its successor of Bulletstorm in JHC often being derided as that game's worst mastery, while in the current DRL version of 0.10 it's even worse despite no longer being blocked EE, as the SoG change to +3 damage/-10% firing time and Finesse being nerfed to -10% firing time makes Bullet Dance's +50% firing time an even more crippling drawback, being arguably worse than having a mastery that does literally nothing.

____________________________________________________

Well thanks for reading that far. For a TL;DR - Being good at all points of the game matter, not just the early or late game; Scout good, Marine sux unless you're Vampyre; helping you survive hot starts is important; Berserker is OP; Pistols sux; faster attacking speed rules unless you're Pistols, in which case you still sux anyway; tanking sux unless you're Vampyre; the less things you need to be good the better; don't get blocked Hellrunner unless you're Vampyre; don't get blocked Finesse; and don't get blocked Whizkid.

7

Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!

« on: February 17, 2026, 12:43 »

Congratulations :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmuiwOGi5gA

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...

8

Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!

« on: February 17, 2026, 12:26 »

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

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).

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.

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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9

Nightmare! / (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoH|16%|YAVP] - Everyman Angelic + 26/26/26/26/26/13 badges!

« on: February 16, 2026, 20:37 »

(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? 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 also later 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 5 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 spawning 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:

• UAC Angelic - Win standard N! with no damage: Of the "Impossible Four", this is the only one you could reasonably dispute the impossible status of, as it does have the theoretical path of getting an incredibly lucky Phobos that lets you get to Phobos 7 damageless, then having an Invuln spawn on Phobos 7 that you can reach without getting hit, as well as a Phobos 7 Rocket Launcher, and then getting yet more luck with Invulns + stairs alongside enough rockets to fuel enough rocket jumping to remain invulnerable for the remaining 2/3rds of the game. To put it in perspective though, Destroyer Diamond gives you a damage buffer of 49 to work with and the immense offensive benefits of AoMC to make avoiding getting hit much easier, as well as saving much more invuln turns by letting you kill things much faster and making your rocket jumps send you way farther, yet it's more difficult than the majority of Angelics (I would even say it's in the same tier as Everyman Angelic) and only me + papilio won the badge without cheesing it in a Dual Angel. There's then Masochist Angelic that at minimum lets you take up to 49 damage and offers some opportunity to expand the amount of hits you can take beyond that (Ironman, Blood Skulls, Medical Armors, and indefinitely with Vampyre if you can reach it), yet it's in contention with Eagerness for the most difficult winnable Angelic and nobody won it in 0.9.9.7 for nearly 13 years until I did last week. Winning completely damageless like UAC Angelic requires is multiple magnitudes above these badges that already push the limit of what's possible in this game; a single mistake, a single enemy getting a cheap double move near you, a single enemy pops up with LoS while you're corner shooting another enemy, a single unlucky damage or accuracy roll, roll a single maze or Caco/Arachnotron cave when you're not invuln'd with stairs that aren't immediately accessible, get any hot starts when you're not invuln'd, that's it the run is immediately over, and so I don't see it as feasible. If someone was willing to put in thousands and thousands of attempts, maybe they could eventually pull the extraordinary luck needed on top of perfect play to win damageless, but I'm not going to do that when that would take me even longer to do than it just took me to get the rest of the Angelics and all Diamonds combined, if I even get it at all. And the novelty of 0.9.9.7 has well worn off by this point for me.
• Pacifist Angelic - Win Archangel of Pacifism with only 1 kill: I.e. make it to Dis with no traits nor stair sense, being completely unable to fight back, and without a single enemy dying, as your 1 kill can only be the Mastermind. Getting through any single random floor without you nor any enemy dying from infighting, spawning on or running through fluids, or killing themselves from barrels or their own fireballs isn't too unlikely on any single floor, but as Icy puts it, it's tantamount to little more than a coin flip on each floor, and you're going to need to flip heads 21 times in a row, which is a 1 in over 2 million chance. Then getting through Anomaly without a Lost Soul being killed is far less likely than a coin flip, making the theoretical odds so much worse than even that. If someone absolutely no lifed this badge, maybe after many years, just maybe, they could roll the RNG lottery to win this badge. Otherwise the only way anyone is winning this badge without save scumming is something like a wrong warp being discovered to let you skip all or most of the game, but if you're abusing blatantly game-breaking bugs to win, is it really any more legit than just save scumming this badge?
• Demonic Angelic - Win standard N! with no damage and 100% kills: With the 100% kills requirement, not only will you naturally be giving enemies far more chances to hit you, but you also lose UAC Angelic's one theoretical path of getting to Phobos 7 damageless and then invuln rushing the rest of the game. The only remotely theoretical path for this badge is to retain a 100% kill rate without getting hit until you find a miraculous Trigun and then having the invuln + rockets to nuke the rest of the game. The Trigun however can't spawn naturally until Deimos, and even if you get the unbelievable fortune to have it drop in a vault on Phobos, you'll still then need to make it up to at least Phobos 7 damageless with 100% kills intact before you can get your first Invuln, which that alone probably borders on impossibility, while the odds of getting a Phobos 7 Invuln are still quite low (which is going to be nearly necessary too to clear N! Anomaly damageless), and even then, you're still going to need a Rocket Launcher with enough rockets and Invuln luck after to keep nuking every floor. I think this badge is actually even less plausible than Pacifist Angelic despite the latter often being thought of as the most impossible badge, as not only do you need probably comparable luck, but you're also going to need to play absolutely perfectly, and each attempt is going to take faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr longer; in the time it takes you to get a single Demonic Angelic attempt just past floor 2, you would be able to get several Pacifist Angelic attempts in, so even if you tried no lifing attempts for this badge, you're going to be getting in exponentially fewer attempts. Unlike Pacifist Angelic, this isn't a badge that you could mostly shut off your brain for and maybe someday eventually brute force the RNG needed to win. Without TAS, the only way you could win this badge is absolutely stupid game-breaking bugs being discovered, such as a bug to make you permanently invincible, a bug to spawn whatever item you want whenever you want, or what one 0.9.9.9 beta actually had where you could underflow your ammo to get infinite clips and carry over certain traits from previous runs with no limit to have something incredibly stupid like SoG50 with SoB50 and TH20 (which I exploited to win UAC and Demonic Angelic in said beta), but winning by blatantly breaking the game isn't remotely legitimate.
• Speedrunner Angelic - Win standard N! in under 4 minutes of real time: Lol, lmao, as if the other Angelics didn't do enough to show they weren't remotely thought out nor tested, this one alone shows how little went into their balancing. I'm convinced the time limit for this badge was chosen by pulling a random number out of a hat, with it not just being a completely stupidly impossible time limit but also such a weird number to pick too. Now there are verified ITYTD runs in under 4 minutes, but those just aren't remotely indicative to what's possible in N!; even ignoring all the ways that N! is so much more difficult, you watch these runs, and you'll simply notice how very empty the floors are, while on N! those floors would have been flooded with swarms and swarms of enemies. Even if you weren't to die horribly bumrushing through all these enemies, running through or even past these enemies is going to consume far more time, especially as the game will keep pausing as all these enemies keep throwing shit at you. You not only will need to repeatedly get quickly accessible stairs, you'll need to nearly always have the stairs so close that enemies don't even wake up to cost you time by attacking you; Uranium once roughly calculated the odds to have the stairs spawn within your vision radius on every floor, while ignoring walls or you spawning near the outskirts that would limit the amount of ground your immediate vision would cover, and it basically amounts to 1 in quintillions. Lets say the needed stair luck is a little more generous than this and the stairs spawning within twice your vision radius on each floor would be enough to make this time limit viable, the odds for that are still roughly around 1 in 11.5 billion, while you're still probably going to need to find a reachable nuke too along the way to kill the Mastermind ASAP (else she is going to waste a lot of time by shooting at you, repeatedly walking away, and having nearly twice the health compared to ITYTD), kill the Cyberdemon (who also has over twice the health compared to ITYTD and will thus consume more time), and have a Rocket Launcher or a lucky Phase for Anomaly (which unlike ITYTD has the ambush and thus lots of enemies to slow down the game even if you can survive running through the incredibly deadly N! Anomaly). This is a badge I'm not sure is even possible to TAS, the amount of RNG possibilities is finite and so there may not even be a string of RNG that would make this badge winnable even with inhumanly perfect inputs (something else I didn't touch on is how your inputs are going need to be made at a maniac pace too without misinputting). The only way any human is winning this badge without hacking the game is again a wrong warp being discovered and abused, or abusing a bug that tricks the game into erroneously awarding it (such a bug being found in the ancient initial 0.9.9.8 beta by Tormuse, with the game thinking he won after letting himself die in the first minute), and yet again who is going to seriously consider "winning" the badge in such a manner to be legitimate?

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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 DoomRL (0.9.9.7) roguelike post-mortem character dump
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 =_=, level 6 Apostle Chaos General Scout,
 sacrificed himself to kill the Mastermind at the City of Dis.
 He survived 61260 turns and scored 205058 points.
 He played for 15 minutes and 44 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 132 out of 817 hellspawn. (16%)
 Who gave him the ticket to Hell, anyway?
 He was an Archangel of Humanity!

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 11
  Levels visited   : 4
  Levels completed : 0

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  Cyberdemon's Head
  Compet-n Gold Cross
  Untouchable Badge
  Everyman Angelic Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

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-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 0/10   Experience 14298/6
  ToHit Ranged +0  ToHit Melee +0  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +0

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Intuition        (Level 1)

  Int->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   red armor [4/4] (92%) (A)
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   nothing
    [c] [ Boots      ]   nothing
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   double shotgun (9d3)x2 [0/2]

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] shotgun (8d3) [1/1] (T1)
    [b] rocket launcher (6d6) [1/1]
    [c] red armor [6/6] (100%) (P)
    [d] chainsaw (5d6) (B)
    [e] shotgun shell (x50)
    [f] shotgun shell (x50)
    [g] shotgun shell (x50)
    [h] shotgun shell (x50)
    [i] shotgun shell (x49)
    [j] shotgun shell (x50)
    [k] rocket (x10)
    [l] rocket (x5)
    [m] small med-pack
    [n] small med-pack
    [o] large med-pack
    [p] large med-pack
    [q] large med-pack
    [r] envirosuit pack
    [s] protective boots [2/2] (100%) (T)

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    Fire       - internal 0%    torso 25%   feet 0%   

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    28 former humans
    28 former sergeants
    10 former captains
    20 imps
    16 demons
    7 lost souls
    1 arachnotron
    6 revenants
    2 mancubi
    4 nightmare imps
    8 nightmare demons
    1 Cyberdemon
    1 Spider Mastermind

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 5 he stormed the Chained Court.
  On level 8 he encountered the Phobos Anomaly.
  He left level 13 as soon as possible.
  On level 16 he found the Tower of Babel!
  On level 17 he invaded the Unholy Cathedral!
  He fled the Unholy Cathedral seeing no chance to win.
  Level 19 was a hard nut to crack!
  On level 20 he was foolish enough to enter the Mortuary!
  He managed to escape from the Mortuary!
  On level 21 he stumbled into a complex full of revenants!
  On level 22 he entered the Lava Pits.
  He decided it was too hot there.
  He left level 23 as soon as possible.
  Then at last he found Dis!
  He overloaded a nuclear BFG 9000 on level 24!
  On level 24 he finally sacrificed himself to kill the Mastermind.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 Your vision fades.
 You feel vulnerable again.
 Are you sure you want to overcharge the nuclear BFG 9000? This will overload
 the nuclear reactor... [Y/n]
 You overcharge the nuclear BFG 9000! Warning! Explosion in 10 seconds!
 Run - direction...
 Warning! Explosion in 9 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 8 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 7 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 6 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 5 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 4 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 3 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 2 seconds!
 Warning! Explosion in 1 seconds!
 Congratulations! You defeated the Spider Mastermind! Press <Enter>...

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 466 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 245 of those were killed.
 1 of those was killed by something unknown.
 97 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 13 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 110 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 8 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 65 killed the bitch and survived.
 37 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

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10

Nightmare! / (0.9.9.7) [N!|ArchAoMs|66%|YAVP] - Masochist Angelic and first Chaos General

« on: February 13, 2026, 15:50 »

(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. (EDIT: I found one mortem Vandam actually posted during 0.9.9.7's beta testing... and yeah it's completely blatantly bullshit. Even ignoring all the unbelievably absurd things he supposedly did in a Marksman Angelic run like pull off a Hell Arena Pwnage in it, getting Longinus Diamond while being stuck with only fists and having no Finesse, and never getting any SoG until the end, you take one look at that 2368 turn count reported in the mortem that is completely utterly impossible, that's less than half the 5670 turn count Icy's sub-4 minute ITYTD speedrun had! Even if you want to be charitable and chalk it up to be a copy paste error, the mortem states he supposedly got a Major Icarus Cross and thus finished under 20000 turns, which no, that's still completely impossible to do in a run where you clear out 9 special levels and finish a N! game with 97% kills, even a Blademaster build isn't coming remotely close to doing that, let alone a pure pistol build in AoD with no SoG for the vast majority of it nor even any HR. If Vandam would post a mortem more obviously cheated than anything 2Dev did for fucking beta testing, then anything he claims without irrefutable video proof shouldn't be remotely entertained. Here is a screenshot of Vandam's aforementioned mortem if you can't access the beta forums, it's too big to fit in a clean screenshot but you can see enough from what is captured.)

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:

--------------------------------------------------------------
 DoomRL (0.9.9.7) roguelike post-mortem character dump
--------------------------------------------------------------

 invulnorbust, level 10 Apostle Chaos Lt. General Scout,
 defeated the Mastermind at the City of Dis.
 He survived 238187 turns and scored 341623 points.
 He played for 2 hours, 18 minutes and 6 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 1009 out of 1517 hellspawn. (66%)
 He was an Archangel of Masochism!

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 11
  Levels visited   : 7
  Levels completed : 3

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  Cyberdemon's Head
  Mastermind's Brain
  UAC Star (gold cluster)
  Untouchable Medal
  Chessmaster's Token
  Chessmaster's Cross
  Hell Arena Pwnage Medal
  Masochist Angelic Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  #>#####################................................####
  ######################...............####...............###
  #####################.......####.....####.....####.......##
  ####################........####.....####.....####........#
  ###################.........####.....####.....####.........
  ##################..........####..............####.........
  #################..........................................
  #################.....###............................####..
  #################....####.....%......................####..
  #################....####.....X......................####&.
  #################....####............................####..
  #################..........................................
  ##################..........####..............####.........
  ###################.........####.....####.....####.........
  ####################........####.....####.....####........#
  #####################.......####.....####.....####.......##
  ######################...............####...............###
  #>#####################................................####
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 34/50   Experience 40956/10
  ToHit Ranged +0  ToHit Melee +0  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +0

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Finesse          (Level 1)
    Hellrunner       (Level 2)
    Reloader         (Level 2)
    Juggler          (Level 1)
    Intuition        (Level 2)
    Shottyman        (Level 1)
    Shottyhead       (Level 1)

  Fin->Jug->Int->Int->HR->Rel->Rel->SM->MSh->HR->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   red armor [4/4] (89%)
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   double shotgun (10d3)x2 [0/2] (P1)
    [c] [ Boots      ]   tactical boots [0/0] (100%)
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   shell box (x80)

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] tactical shotgun (8d3) [5/5]
    [b] rocket launcher (6d6) [1/1]
    [c] missile launcher (6d6) [2/4]
    [d] nuclear BFG 9000 (8d6) [40/40]
    [e] shotgun shell (x50)
    [f] shotgun shell (x50)
    [g] shotgun shell (x26)
    [h] shotgun shell (x50)
    [i] shotgun shell (x50)
    [j] rocket (x10)
    [k] rocket (x10)
    [l] agility mod pack
    [m] bulk mod pack
    [n] hatred skull
    [o] plasteel boots [2/2] (100%) (A)
    [p] shell box (x1)

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    Fire       - internal 0%    torso 25%   feet 0%   

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    84 former humans
    86 former sergeants
    43 former captains
    108 imps
    100 demons
    447 lost souls
    37 cacodemons
    9 hell knights
    10 barons of hell
    1 arachnotron
    14 former commandos
    34 pain elementals
    31 revenants
    2 mancubi
    1 agony elemental
    1 Cyberdemon
    1 Spider Mastermind

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 2 he entered Hell's Arena.
  He left the Arena as a champion!
  On level 7 he assembled a tactical boots!
  On level 8 he encountered the Phobos Anomaly.
  On level 9 he assembled a tactical shotgun!
  On level 9 he entered Deimos Lab.
  On level 9 he found the Anti-Freak Jackal!
  He fought hard, but decided the reward was not worth it.
  On level 12 he found the City of Skulls.
  He wiped out the City of Skulls.
  On level 16 he found the Tower of Babel!
  On level 17 he invaded the Unholy Cathedral!
  He fled the Unholy Cathedral seeing no chance to win.
  He left level 19 as soon as possible.
  On level 19 he entered the Vaults.
  He came, he saw, but he left.
  On level 20 he was foolish enough to enter the Mortuary!
  He managed to escape from the Mortuary!
  He left level 22 as soon as possible.
  On level 22 he arrived at Mt. Erebus.
  He decided it was too dangerous.
  On level 23 he stumbled into a complex full of arch-viles!
  He left level 23 as soon as possible.
  Then at last he found Dis!
  On level 24 he finally defeated the Mastermind.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You dodge! You dodge! You are hit! You dodge! You dodge! You dodge!
 The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the double shotgun.
 The Spider Mastermind flinched! The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the double shotgun.
 The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the double shotgun.
 The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the double shotgun.
 The Spider Mastermind flinched! The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the double shotgun. The Spider Mastermind hits you.
 The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the double shotgun.
 The Spider Mastermind dies. Congratulations! You defeated the Spider
 Mastermind! Press <Enter>...

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 430 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 211 of those were killed.
 1 of those was killed by something unknown.
 97 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 12 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 109 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 7 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 65 killed the bitch and survived.
 37 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

--------------------------------------------------------------


11

Nightmare! / Re: (0.9.9.7) [N!|AoB|76%|3|YASD] - All 26 Diamonds with pure Arena Diamond

« on: February 06, 2026, 23:53 »

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:

• Bulk Mod - There's an argument to put this on your Blue Armor to effectively triple its durability, but I think it should definitely go on your Combat Knife. Not only do you increase your average damage by 3 before berserk, but you also decrease your chance of rolling below 10 damage with Brute 2 from 12% to 0.8%. It's basically getting Brute 3 and you near entirely remove the possibility of Berserker not triggering from rolling below 10 damage, which does matter (even in my winning run, it took me 6 hits to trigger Berserker against the last Baron, which meant I rolled below 10 damage twice in 5 hits, which could have cost me the run if I didn't have such a big health surplus to make triggering Berserker not needed). However if you're fortunate enough to also get a Red Armor or one of the Exotic armors in the same vault, I would consider B-modding them since the Red Armor does reduce melee damage so much and something like a B-modded Duelist Armor would let you possibly 1v1 every enemy in the Arena.
• Power Mod - Comparatively, I would unquestionably put a Power Mod on the Blue Armor (or any better armor if I get one from the same vault), rather than putting it on the Combat Knife, as a P Mod increases its average damage by only 1 point and decreases the chance of rolling below 10 damage to 8.33%, not enough to meaningfully eliminate the danger of Berserker not triggering. Meanwhile that extra 2 points of protection would substantially reduce damage and effectively extend the durability of the Blue Armor or whatever armor you put it on, which is certainly going to be a lot more valuable than you dealing marginally more damage. If you're fortunate enough to get both a P and B Mod from a vault, I would absolutely make a Chainsword, as a Chainsword at Brute 2 lets you very consistently two-shot Pinkies without berserk and guarantee one-shot them with berserk, as well as three-shot Cacos without berserk and guarantee two-shot with Berserk (while you could even score one-shots if you get Brute 3), whereas a B-modded Knife has only a 33.18% chance to two-shot Pinkies without Berserk and a 72% chance to one-shot with berserk, while having a measly 19.11% chance to three-shot Cacos without berserk and can fail to two-shot with berserk (having a 6.3% chance to fail it). You could Nanofiber your Blue Armor instead, but that would definitely be far inferior to making a Chainsword or running a B Knife and P Blue Armor, as a Nanofiber Blue Armor is barely better than having no armor. Even if you get Red Armor I would take the stronger equipment over permanent mediocre defense, in my run I didn't lose my Blue Armor until the last Baron, so you're likely screwed if a Chainsword + Red Armor couldn't last you.
• Technical Mod - If you're playing 0.9.9.7 or an even older version, unquestionably put this on your Combat Knife, the 0.8 second attack time would be invaluable when you don't have berserk to getting you double attacks on Cacos and Barons to trigger Berserker faster or just kill them without them getting an extra hit in, and would mostly eliminate double attacks from Pinkies if you're playing Marine or Technician, while entirely eliminating double attacks from them if you're a Scout. If you're playing 0.9.9.8 or later, where Tech mods got changed to give +20% physical and +10% energy resistances to armor, there's much more of an argument to be made on whether to put it on your Knife or Blue Armor, as it will be saving you 2 points of damage on higher melee damage rolls and will shave a point off most plasma balls, but I do think the greater attack speed is more valuable, as every double attack it gets you (or prevents) without berserk is essentially saving you 6+ damage and you won't end up eventually losing it as you would with the armor. If you got Red Armor or one of the melee-resistant Exotic armors, there's much more consideration for putting the T Mod on them instead, as reducing melee damage to the 1-3 damage range would greatly increase your survivability.
• Agility Mod - If you get any boots on the floor in addition to the Agility Mod, you obviously slap the A Mod on the boots. If you don't got boots, you put the A Mod on your Blue Armor or any better armor you get, you'll eventually lose the armor but the faster movement until then will help limit respawns and save you some damage when approaching the Cacos, though if you get both A and P Mods, I would prioritize P-modding the Blue Armor and A-Mod a Green Armor to use for exploration of the Arena. You could A-mod the Knife to reduce misses, but with Brute 2 and the Knife's inherent +1 accuracy, an A Mod increases its hit chance from 95% to 98%, only a 3% increase, so I would only do that if you got the aforementioned P + A combo and absolutely nothing else to put the A Mod on after P-modding the Blue Armor (you could P-mod your Knife and A-mod your Blue Armor in that scenario, but I think the P-modded Blue Armor is so much more useful to make up for the A-modded Knife being negligibly improved). If you get A + T Mods, you have the opportunity to make Ballistic Armor, which sounds obvious at first for the +30% melee res prior to 0.9.9.8 and +40% melee res from 0.9.9.8-onward, while the fire weakness wouldn't matter in the Arena, however currently in all versions that assembly also removes any plasma resistance the armor has, and you really need that plasma res on the Blue Armor to eat some Cacodemon plasma balls to destroy corpses, so I probably wouldn't make that assembly unless you get a Red Armor or at least a spare Blue. It is in the proposal list however to have Ballistic Armor retain the plasma and acid resistances of the base armor, which if that goes through, would make Ballistic Blue Armor a very serious consideration for this run in future versions if you can make it.

[--------------------------------------------------------------]

12

Nightmare! / (0.9.9.7) [N!|AoB|76%|3|YASD] - All 26 Diamonds with pure Arena Diamond

« on: February 06, 2026, 16:53 »

(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:

--------------------------------------------------------------
 DoomRL (0.9.9.7) roguelike post-mortem character dump
--------------------------------------------------------------

 5, level 4 Apostle Chaos Lt. General Scout,
 was shot by a former sergeant on level 3 of the Phobos base.
 He survived 219351 turns and scored 29929 points.
 He played for 11 minutes and 35 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 70 out of 92 hellspawn. (76%)
 He was an Angel of Berserk!

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 11
  Levels visited   : 1
  Levels completed : 1

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  Hell Champion Medal
  Arena Diamond Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  ........0#......................c....#....................#
  .........#..........###..............#............###.....#
  ...##0...#..........###..............#............###|....#
  #.0##....+...###....###...###........#.###........###.....#
  #....s..h#...###..........###.###....#.###....h...........#
  ...##....#...###..........###.###....+.###...B....###.|.0.#
  ...##....#.........###........###....#......###...###...c.#
  .........#...========#...............#..###.###...###.0...#
  #....================i==============.#..###.###.....h.....#
  =============.###....===c===============+==....=X==========
  0====....#........i......###....###.============i==========
  ^........#.i..###....###.............#.....====....###....#
  ....##...#i...###..0.###..###...###..#......###..%........#
  ....##...#....###....###..###...###..#......###.....###...#
  .........#i..i|......i.|..###...###..#......#.#.....###...#
  .........#...........................#..............###...#
  .........#................i..........#.................0..#
  .........#.........>...B..i..........#....................#
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 0/50   Experience 4592/4
  ToHit Ranged +0  ToHit Melee +4  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +6

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Finesse          (Level 1)
    Brute            (Level 2)
    Berserker        (Level 1)

  Bru->Bru->Ber->Fin->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   nothing
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   combat knife (2d5)
    [c] [ Boots      ]   nothing
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   combat knife (2d5)

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] large med-pack
    [b] large med-pack
    [c] large med-pack
    [d] homing phase device

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    None

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    15 former humans
    8 former sergeants
    1 former captain
    22 imps
    6 demons
    5 lost souls
    10 cacodemons
    1 hell knight
    2 barons of hell

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 2 he entered Hell's Arena.
  He left the Arena as a champion!
  On level 3 he finally was shot by a former sergeant.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 knight hits you. The barrel explodes! The former human dies. The former
 sergeant dies. The former human dies. Boom!
 The hell knight hits you.
 You hit the hell knight. The hell knight hits you.
 You hit the hell knight. The hell knight hits you.
 You hit the hell knight. The hell knight dies.
 You are hit! You dodge! Boom!
 You are hit! Your blue armor is damaged! You dodge! Boom!
 The missile hits the imp. The imp hits you.
 You dodge! The missile hits the imp.
 You dodge! The missile hits the imp. The imp dies. You dodge! Boom!
 You are hit!
 Boom! You are hit! You are hit! Boom!
 The imp hits you. The former sergeant reloads his shotgun.
 You are hit! The imp dies. You are hit! You dodge! Boom! Boom! Your blue
 armor is completely destroyed! You die!... Press <Enter>...

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 416 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 201 of those were killed.
 1 of those was killed by something unknown.
 97 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 9 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 108 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 7 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 64 killed the bitch and survived.
 37 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

--------------------------------------------------------------


[--------------------------------------------------------------]

13

Nightmare! / (0.9.9.7) [N!|AoMr+AoD|91%|YAVP] - Buffing my Angelic record to 11 with Marksman

« on: February 04, 2026, 23:42 »

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:

--------------------------------------------------------------
 DoomRL (0.9.9.7) roguelike post-mortem character dump
--------------------------------------------------------------

 pistolssux4, level 18 Apostle Chaos Lt. General Scout,
 defeated the Mastermind at the City of Dis.
 He survived 1990595 turns and scored 1065986 points.
 He played for 5 hours, 9 minutes and 6 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 1340 out of 1469 hellspawn. (91%)
 He held his right to remain violent.
 He was an Angel of Marksmanship!
 He was also an Angel of Darkness!

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 11
  Levels visited   : 4
  Levels completed : 2

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  Mastermind's Brain
  UAC Star (silver cluster)
  Hell Armorer Badge
  Marksman Angelic Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  ####................................#####################>#
  ###...............####...............######################
  ##.......####.....####.....####.......#####################
  #........####.....####.....####........####################
  .........####.....####.....####.........###################
  .........####..............####..........##################
  ..........................................#################
  ..####............................####....#################
  .&####............................####....#################
  ..####............................####....#################
  ..####.......................%....####....#################
  .................................X........#################
  .........####..............####..........##################
  .........####.....####.....####.........###################
  #........####.....####.....####........####################
  ##.......####.....####.....####.......#####################
  ###...............####...............######################
  ####................................#####################>#
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 81/50   Experience 188729/18
  ToHit Ranged +2  ToHit Melee +2  ToDmg Ranged +3  ToDmg Melee +3

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Finesse          (Level 2)
    Hellrunner       (Level 1)
    Son of a bitch   (Level 3)
    Son of a gun     (Level 5)
    Eagle Eye        (Level 1)
    Intuition        (Level 2)
    Whizkid          (Level 2)
    Triggerhappy     (Level 1)
    Cateye           (Level 1)

  SoG->SoG->SoG->Int->SoB->Int->SoB->TH->MCe->EE->HR->SoG->SoG->Fin->Fin->WK->SoB->WK->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   red armor [4/4] (100%) (A)
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   storm pistol (1d8)x2 [7/9]
    [c] [ Boots      ]   tactical boots [0/0] (100%)
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   10mm ammo chain (x83)

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] pistol (2d5) [8/8] (B1P1S1)
    [b] energy pistol (2d5) [6/6]
    [c] minigun (1d6)x8 [338/338] (B2)
    [d] red armor [4/4] (100%)
    [e] fireproof red armor [4/4] (100%)
    [f] red armor [4/4] (200%) (B)
    [g] 10mm ammo (x100)
    [h] 10mm ammo (x100)
    [i] 10mm ammo (x72)
    [j] power cell (x50)
    [k] large med-pack
    [l] large med-pack
    [m] large med-pack
    [n] large med-pack
    [o] large med-pack
    [p] large med-pack
    [q] phase device
    [r] envirosuit pack
    [s] blood skull
    [t] plasteel boots [2/2] (100%)
    [u] 10mm ammo chain (x250)

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    Fire       - internal 0%    torso 25%   feet 0%   

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    146 former humans
    168 former sergeants
    139 former captains
    353 imps
    91 demons
    186 lost souls
    54 cacodemons
    31 hell knights
    44 barons of hell
    20 arachnotrons
    14 former commandos
    23 pain elementals
    29 revenants
    22 mancubi
    17 arch-viles
    1 shambler
    1 Cyberdemon
    1 Spider Mastermind

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 5 he stormed the Chained Court.
  On level 8 he encountered the Phobos Anomaly.
  On level 8 he assembled a fireproof armor!
  On level 9 he entered Hell's Armory.
  On level 9 he assembled a tactical boots!
  He destroyed the evil within and reaped the rewards!
  On level 11 he arrived at the Containment Area.
  Not knowing what to do, he left.
  On level 16 he found the Tower of Babel!
  On level 17 he assembled a storm bolter pistol!
  On level 17 he found the Mjollnir!
  On level 19 he entered the Vaults.
  He came, he saw, but he left.
  On level 20 he assembled a energy pistol!
  He left level 22 as soon as possible.
  He left level 23 as soon as possible.
  Then at last he found Dis!
  On level 24 he finally defeated the Mastermind.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! The
 missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the storm pistol.
 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The missile hits the Spider
 Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! The
 missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! The
 missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched!
 You quickly reload the storm pistol.
 The missile hits the Spider Mastermind. The missile hits the Spider
 Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind dies. Congratulations! You defeated the
 Spider Mastermind! Press <Enter>...

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 411 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 196 of those were killed.
 1 of those was killed by something unknown.
 97 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 9 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 108 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 7 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 64 killed the bitch and survived.
 37 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

--------------------------------------------------------------


[--------------------------------------------------------------]

14

Nightmare! / (0.9.9.7) [N!|100%|YAVP] - Gutts' Heart to finish all medals for Heroic Diamond

« on: February 02, 2026, 17:49 »

NOTE: This post will contain a spoiler about the Dragonslayer that I won't be hiding behind spoiler tags for readability sake, I assume all the secrets involved with it are open knowledge by this point but in case someone reading this doesn't know and still wants to figure that stuff out on their own, they should stop reading now.

To finish collecting all 43 medals in 0.9.9.7 and thus get the Heroic Diamond badge, I just needed one more, the Gutts' Heart, which simply requires killing the Spider Mastermind with the Dragonslayer. The required feat itself is trivial, the issue is getting the Dragonslayer within standard game limits in the first place; the Dragonslayer can randomly spawn starting from floor 16, functionally floor 17 outside of A100/666, given the Tower of Babel occupies floor 16, and it has a spawning weight of 1. Additionally, as a melee weapon, it cannot spawn in vaults, which means it cannot spawn below its minimum spawning depth nor have an increased spawning weight, and it also can't randomly spawn in any of the special levels, so you can't bank on finding it in one of Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab, The Vaults, or The Lava Pits/Mt. Erebus, which all have significantly enhanced odds to spawn Exotics/Uniques. As a result, a random Dragonslayer can only spawn on the 7 Hell floors before Dis, with the absolute minimum odds; outside of A100/666, I have seen a random Dragonslayer like twice or thrice ever in all my time playing this game across all versions, and I don't think any of those times were after I even learned how to actually pick it up (or spawned when I couldn't pick it up anyway), so I never got Gutts' Heart. When starting up my 0.9.9.7 conquest, I was hoping to happen upon a Dragonslayer in one of my many Diamond or other Angelic runs to knock out Gutts' Heart, yet alas, after reaching 24 Diamonds with only Heroic and Arena remaining, alongside 10 Angelics with only Marksman, Masochist, and Everyman remaining among winnable Angelics, I never found a random Dragonslayer in any of those runs (excluding the A666 runs) and so I'm now at a point where I have to do a dedicated run for Gutts' Heart. Finding a random Dragonslayer within standard game limits would be horrendous, if that was the only way, getting this medal would be magnitudes worse than my recent A666 grind for a Subtle Knife to complete Armorer Diamond. But I do keep saying "random Dragonslayer" for a reason, as there does exist a way to get a guaranteed Dragonslayer to spawn in Unholy Cathedral in the place of the artifact weapon. The requirement for getting the guaranteed Dragonslayer is quite tough and annoying on its own, as you must be playing Nightmare! and clear Hell's Arena damageless (i.e. get the Hell Arena Pwnage medal) earlier in the run, but doing this is far far faaaaaaarrrrrrrrr more efficient and tolerable than spamming hundreds or thousands of Angel of Overconfidence runs until I luck out with a random Dragonslayer, so that is what I will be doing.

Beating N! Hell's Arena damageless is a very daunting prospect on its own, given how bad the Arena already is on N! when you have no good means for corpse disposal (barring a lucky floor 2 vault with a Rocket Launcher and a stack of rockets for it), especially when your most reliable way to destroy corpses is to intentionally eat plasma/acid balls on corpses, which you obviously cannot do in a damageless challenge. The guaranteed Dragonslayer is not challenge-restricted however, nor is Gutts' Heart, so you can do this in Angel of Max Carnage, which makes this ordeal much easier, between the general massive advantages of AoMC offense (including making the Chaingun much more reliable) and AoMC's exact damage making Shotgun knockback perfectly predictable (so corpse stacking is much easier to control). You could also do it in Angel of Light Travel instead if you don't want to play a later melee-focused game in AoMC, which also makes Hell Arena Pwnage easier with the speed boost letting you a lot more effectively outrun enemies and a lot more effectively Shotgun down enemies before they reach you, as well as better corpse stacking control too since if you try using a Chaingun to finish off an enemy in an exact spot and it fails to kill them, you have more of a chance to get a second burst off before they move off the corpse. Several people have achieved Hell Arena Pwnage through one of these two challenges, and I already did it myself in AoMC during my Destroyer Diamond run, so it would make sense to do that again for my Gutts' Heart run. However I got thinking, has anyone in 0.9.9.7 or earlier actually achieved Hell Arena Pwnage without the aid of these two challenges? I thought papilio did it, but apparently it was just something he wanted to possibly record and then never did. When searching the forums, the only mortems I was finding with Hell Arena Pwnage without AoMC/AoLT were all from 2Dev and Firstblood, i.e. probable cheaters, with the exception of one; this Shottyman Diamond run by scotherns achieved a Hell's Arena Pwnage. Not technically a standard game, but AoSh gives no particular advantage for this medal (AoSh makes it easier to get both medkits from Phobos Base Entry by starting you with a Shotgun and so you could use more running in the Arena, but then you also can't use the Chaingun for more precise corpse stacking, which makes it probably actually a little harder), so I have to give scotherns the full adulations for the first verified Hell Arena Pwnage without the use of AoMC nor AoLT (Micerang also got Hell Arena Pwnage without AoMC/AoLT in his Masochist Angelic run,  and wyrvic additionally posted a non-AoMC/AoLT mortem with Hell Arena Pwnage on the JH Discord, but both did it in 0.9.9.8 with its game-breaking dodging bug, which made it much easier to avoid getting hit and allowed you to very reliably dodge Cacodemons and Barons to have them destroy corpses near walls without having to get hit yourself). While I can't lay claim to the first non-AoMC/AoLT Hell Arena Pwnage, I did still wanted to try adding that feather to my cap and show I could do it even before Hell's Arena is eventually changed in later versions to no longer require killing all the respawns to clear it, so for this Gutts' Heart run I'm doing it in the standard game.

When it comes to the traits to use when going for Hell Arena Pwnage, gunning for Intuition 2 seems obvious at first, as the goto trait for avoiding walking into enemy fire. I opted not to go for it though, as you'll only get three traits before or by the start of the Arena and then a fourth during it (normally near or at the end, earlier if you got a floor 2 vault that let you get more EXP before entering the Arena), and so going for Int2 means you're only left with one other trait for most of the Arena, while without AoMC nor AoLT boosting your offense, you are not reliably killing the enemies before they reach you with one or zero combat-boosting traits. You won't be able to easily escape the Pinkies as well if they get too close without Hellrunner nor AoLT (a running Scout can still outrun them with no HR, but you'll need to burn several run actions for each one tile of space you get from them). With this in mind, I opted for my standard opener of Finesse -> Juggler; not only will Juggling Fin-boosted Shotguns very reliably keep even the Barons from reaching me before they die, but it also really helps with corpse stacking when I can instantly swap to the Chaingun as an enemy steps onto another's corpse, when otherwise I would need to swap before an enemy moves onto said corpse. I could go for Int2 after this but I also opted against that; one, Int1 itself would be functionally a dead level in the Arena, and two, Int2 won't come online until the Arena is nearly done anyway unless I get a floor 2 Cacodemon vault, while getting Intuition here would also farther delay Blademaster that I'm going for later in the run. As such, I end up opting for Hellrunner with my third trait instead, still can't outrun the Pinkies without burning running but any runs I do burn will more quickly get away from them, while it lets me more effectively kite Cacos and Barons around the pillars, and crucially the dodging rate boost could save me if I walk into a Caco's or Baron's vision, or end up in a position where I can't avoid them firing on me. For the fourth trait, I would go for HR2, but in the winning run, it came too late for it to really matter and so I got Brute instead to start building for Berserker later.

For the strat of actually playing a damageless N! Hell's Arena, well it's all about long and painfully corpse stacking, maybe you could lure a Pinky over the stairs before killing them but that's your only other real means to destroy a corpse when you can't take any damage. Without Int2, I have to do lots and lots of radar shooting to avoid stepping into a Caco's vision, it's not a good idea to run -> wait immediately since respawning becomes more frequent the longer the level goes on and so things will get out of hand if you're run -> waiting with too many corpses around, while a Caco could also pop up at an awkward angle that forces having to dodge. With corpse stacking, I will prefer overwriting Caco corpses with Pinkies since Cacos are the bigger threat and Pinkies can be more safely lured over other corpses, but I will just do it the other way whenever it's prudent, and of course when the Barons come, I want to overwrite their corpse with anything else. As mentioned, I want to avoid run -> waiting at first, but when I'm in the second wave and a good chunks of the enemies have been permanently erased, I will start doing tons and tons of run -> waiting wherever it appears least dangerous, and I'll run -> wait on a corpse to keep it from getting back up. For your inventory with the Juggler strat, you want to bring a half dozen Shotguns and a Chaingun, alongside a couple bullet stacks and farm the Shotgunners in the first two floors for hundreds of shells, you're going to need a ton of ammo for radar shooting and repeatedly killing lots of respawns. While you won't be needing to heal if you succeed in taking no damage, you still want some Small Medkits, since there will be spots when you need to activate running to avoid getting hit, and then you'll need to use a medkit to restore your tactics so you can run again if needed. It took five attempts over an hour of play, but I managed to get a damageless N! Hell's Arena in the standard game!

Well the run isn't done yet, I still need to not die on the way to Unholy Cathedral or else I would need to go through the damageless Hell's Arena ordeal again, but at my skill level while playing a good build, standard N! doesn't threaten me much. Even did a 100% Conqueror for the hell of it instead of just speedrunning to Cathedral, since a melee build simplifies and speeds up much of it. And as prophesized, the Dragonslayer spawns in Unholy Cathedral, I could just run straight to the Mastermind but getting to use the Dragonslayer in the standard game as Blademaster is something to have fun with. Some other little highlights:

• I got a Duelist Armor on Phobos 6, why couldn't I get that in any of my Berserker Angelic runs? I would get a Ballistic Vest in early Deimos too and then a Phaseshift Armor in Hell, as well as a Deimos 6 Lava Armor, so I just got all the good armor for this run.
• I got a Nano mod from Hell's Armory, so yes Antigrav Boots with a Dragonslayer-wielding Blademaser.
• I got this funny Cyberdemon spawn, which saved me the few seconds of having to seek and chase him down.
• I got a second Nano on Hell 3, so I made a Powered Red Armor with it just to get even more spoiled with my armor.
• Even with Blademaster having the Dragonslayer, A-modded Antigrav Boots, the Powered Red Armor, all three skulls, and a Hellwave Pack, I still took a decent amount of damage in N! Mortuary. I also had to make sure no corpses got back up as I exited so it counted as cleared. I haven't mentioned it but you get the Berserker Armor instead of the Angelic Armor in Mortuary/Limbo too if you got Hell Arena Pwnage, but the Berserker Armor sucks and you're stuck in it once you put it on, so there's no reason to unless you're intentionally going for the Apostle fight (which I can't do anyway as Gutts' Heart requires killing the Mastermind with the Dragonslayer, and I haven't found a nuke anyway even if I did wanted to).

The Mastermind herself of course stood no actual threat, while I popped the Lava Element before fighting her just to add a little extra dazzle to the mortem with a Mastermind Brain. With that, I finally have the Gutts' Heart and now all 43 medals in 0.9.9.7, which nets me the Heroic Diamond badge (only the fourth player in 0.9.9.7 to do so, after papilio, Tormuse, and Icy). I'm now only one Diamond away from having all 26, but it's the most infamous 0.9.9.7 Diamond of them all... It may be a while before I get it if I don't resort to Dual Angels.

Here is the mortem:

--------------------------------------------------------------
 DoomRL (0.9.9.7) roguelike post-mortem character dump
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 shouldbeheroicangelic5,
 level 18 Apostle Chaos Lt. General Scout,
 defeated the Mastermind at the City of Dis.
 He survived 695691 turns and scored 970421 points.
 He played for 3 hours, 40 minutes and 25 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 1489 out of 1489 hellspawn. (100%)
 This ass-kicking marine killed all of them!

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 11
  Levels visited   : 11
  Levels completed : 11

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  Mastermind's Brain
  Medal of Prejudice
  UAC Star (silver cluster)
  Aurora Medallion
  Conqueror Badge
  Grim Reaper's Badge
  Hell Armorer Badge
  Hell Arena Pwnage Medal
  Gutts' Heart
  Heroic Diamond Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  #>#####################................................####
  ######################...............####...............###
  #####################.......####.....####.....####.......##
  ####################.......%####.....####.....####........#
  ###################.......X.####.....####.....####.........
  ##################..........####..............####.........
  #################..........................................
  #################....####............................####..
  #################....####............................####..
  #################....####............................####&.
  #################....####............................####..
  #################..........................................
  ##################..........####..............####.........
  ###################.........####.....####.....####.........
  ####################........####.....####.....####........#
  #####################.......####.....####.....####.......##
  ######################...............####...............###
  #>#####################................................####
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 135/70   Experience 165222/18
  ToHit Ranged +0  ToHit Melee +10  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +15

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Ironman          (Level 2)
    Finesse          (Level 2)
    Hellrunner       (Level 3)
    Brute            (Level 5)
    Juggler          (Level 1)
    Berserker        (Level 1)
    Dodgemaster      (Level 1)
    Whizkid          (Level 2)
    Blademaster      (Level 1)

  Fin->Jug->HR->Bru->Bru->Ber->HR->Bru->MBm->Fin->WK->WK->HR->Bru->Bru->DM->Iro->Iro->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   phaseshift armor [4/4] (100%) (PT)
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   Dragonslayer (9d9)
    [c] [ Boots      ]   antigrav steel boots [1/1] (100%) (A)
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   rocket launcher (6d6) [1/1] (B2)

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] powered red armor [5/5] (100%)
    [b] fireproof duelist armor [4/4] (100%) (P)
    [c] Lava Armor [4/4] (100%)
    [d] Berserker Armor [0]
    [e] large med-pack
    [f] large med-pack
    [g] large med-pack
    [h] large med-pack
    [i] large med-pack
    [j] large med-pack
    [k] large med-pack
    [l] large med-pack
    [m] large med-pack
    [n] large med-pack
    [o] phase device
    [p] phase device
    [q] phase device
    [r] phase device
    [s] homing phase device
    [t] cerberus plasteel boots [0/0] (100%)

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    Bullet     - internal 60%   torso 90%   feet 60% 
    Melee      - internal 60%   torso 90%   feet 60% 
    Shrapnel   - internal 60%   torso 90%   feet 60% 
    Acid       - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Fire       - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Plasma     - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    155 former humans
    155 former sergeants
    65 former captains
    153 imps
    97 demons
    384 lost souls
    95 cacodemons
    35 hell knights
    72 barons of hell
    69 arachnotrons
    20 former commandos
    42 pain elementals
    35 revenants
    19 mancubi
    41 arch-viles
    4 nightmare imps
    4 nightmare cacodemons
    35 nightmare demons
    2 bruiser brothers
    1 shambler
    1 lava elemental
    1 agony elemental
    1 Angel of Death
    1 Cyberdemon
    1 Spider Mastermind
    1 Arena Master

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 2 he entered Hell's Arena.
  He left the Arena as a champion!
  On level 5 he stormed the Chained Court.
  On level 5 he found the Arena Master's Staff!
  He defeated the Hell Arena Master!
  On level 7 he sneaked into the Phobos Lab.
  He broke through the lab.
  On level 8 he encountered the Phobos Anomaly.
  On level 9 he entered Hell's Armory.
  He destroyed the evil within and reaped the rewards!
  On level 10 he assembled a tactical shotgun!
  On level 11 he witnessed the Wall.
  He massacred the evil behind the Wall!
  On level 12 he found the Hellwave Pack!
  On level 12 he found the City of Skulls.
  On level 12 he assembled a antigrav boots!
  On level 12 he assembled a fireproof armor!
  He wiped out the City of Skulls.
  On level 14 he found the Lava Armor!
  On level 14 he ventured into the Spider's Lair.
  He cleared the Lair, kickin' serious spider ass!
  On level 16 he found the Tower of Babel!
  He left level 16 as soon as possible.
  On level 17 he ran for his life from lava!
  On level 17 he invaded the Unholy Cathedral!
  On level 17 he found the Dragonslayer!
  He then destroyed the Unholy Cathedral!
  On level 19 he assembled a power armor!
  On level 19 he entered the Vaults.
  On level 19 he found the BFG 10K!
  He cracked the Vaults and cleared them out!
  On level 20 he was foolish enough to enter the Mortuary!
  On level 20 he assembled a cerberus boots!
  On level 20 he found the Berserker Armor!
  He managed to clear the Mortuary from evil!
  On level 22 he entered the Lava Pits.
  He managed to clear the Lava Pits completely!
  Then at last he found Dis!
  On level 24 he finally defeated the Mastermind.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You dodge! Boom! You are hit! You dodge! Boom! You dodge! Boom! You dodge!
 Boom! You dodge! Boom! You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You need to
 taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You need to
 taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You need to
 taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You miss the Spider Mastermind. You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind dies. Congratulations!
 You defeated the Spider Mastermind! Press <Enter>...
 Next! You're going berserk!

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 408 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 194 of those were killed.
 1 of those was killed by something unknown.
 97 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 9 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 107 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 7 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 63 killed the bitch and survived.
 37 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

--------------------------------------------------------------


[--------------------------------------------------------------]

15

Nightmare! / (0.9.9.7) [N!|AoMC|67%|YAVP] - Pure Destroyer Diamond, no AoOC cheesing needed

« on: January 30, 2026, 22:41 »

Destroyer Diamond has a fairly infamous history; prior to 0.9.9.5, it was absurdly easy for a Diamond, requiring just beating Angel of Max Carnage on N! with no Ironman or Tough as Nails, traits that were pretty useless in AoMC anyway, while AoMC itself was well known for being easier than the standard game, and as a result it was the most commonly won Diamond, with the old Badge Hunters thread listing nearly two dozen players reporting winning it across pre-0.9.9.5 versions. This badge got completely changed in 0.9.9.5 accordingly, with it having no trait restriction but instead now having a requirement of winning N! AoMC with the Untouchable Cross, i.e. you must win with under 50 damage taken. However the badge was bugged, which wouldn't be fixed until 0.9.9.7, the version that introduced Dual Angels, which brought along the cheese strategy of Sereging, i.e. combining challenges with Angel of Overconfidence or other challenges that makes their badges easier to obtain. One thing with Destroyer Diamond is that it doesn't actually require the Untouchable Cross itself despite the badge's description, rather it directly checks if you finish the game with under 50 damage taken. As a consequence, while AoOC normally disqualifies you from winning the Untouchable Cross, it does not disqualify you from earning the Destroyer badges if you combine AoMC with AoOC. This make Destroyer Diamond one of, if not the most blatantly cheesable badge by Sereging, as it's much easier to finish with under 50 damage taken when you got only 7 floors and a Mastermind that's easily bullied in AoMC to get through, and can just spam resets until you spawn near an Invuln that prevents you from taking any damage. If you have the scruples to not resort to abusing such a blatant oversight and actually go for Destroyer Diamond the intended way in pure Angel of Max Carnage with no other challenges combined with it, it becomes possibly the most difficult Diamond in the game (aside from the slot machine that is pure Arena Diamond) and more difficult than many Angelic badges; the only player who reported actually winning pure Destroyer Diamond in 0.9.9.7 is papilio, one of DRL's greatest players who once held the record for most Diamonds with 23, and unlike most other players, he got all his Diamonds without abusing Dual Angels. I could have easily gotten this badge in 0.9.9.7 long ago if I just Sereg'd it like other people did, but as made clear in all my other Diamond runs, I think Sereging heavily cheapens the accomplishment of any badges won from it, and so I made it a point to get all these Diamonds without any Dual Angel abuse, which meant having to get Destroyer Diamond through the much more brutal way of pure AoMC.

So with the preamble done, what is the difficulty with pure Destroyer Diamond? You do get the massive offensive benefit of AoMC that makes it much easier to avoid ever getting hit, but the 49 damage buffer you're allowed is very very strict, especially when enemies are dealing max damage anytime they do hit you. Getting shot by a Former Human in Green or Blue Armor will result in you taking 6 damage, normally not a big deal at all, but here, that's already over 10% of your total damage allowance. Get hit by an Imp fireball in Blue Armor, that's 8 damage, get caught out by an Imp group in the open and that can be the end of the run right there. Get hit by a Hell Knight or Cacodemon plasma ball in Blue Armor, that's 9 damage, take a few of those and your damage allowance is already over halfway used up. Step into a Shotgunner's sight at mid-range, that's gonna be 12+ damage, even shrapnel doubling armor protection won't save you from taking a big hit. Those Chaingunners you can normally scoff at? A single burst from them will deal 16 damage with Green or Blue Armor on, that's basically a third of the damage you can take. Then you better not get hit by any Barons without a certain trait, when they're dealing 20 damage before armor, even a P-modded Red Armor just reduces that to 14. And you absolutely can't ever give a Commando the chance to fire on you, when their Plasma Rifle burst does 30 damage in Blue or Red Armor, and even with said armor P-modded, the 24 damage they'll inflict is still half of the total damage you can take. Then you got the Arachnotrons and VMR soon after... In short, AoMC may give you obscene offensive power to better control encounters and avoid getting hit, but Destroyer Diamond's under 50 damage requirement alongside enemies also getting AoMC's offensive boost means you can make very few mistakes, and it only takes a couple hot starts with unavoidable damage for you to run out the measly 49 damage total you're allowed to take, even just making it out of Phobos with under 50 damage is a hell of a feat, especially when it ends in N! Phobos Anomaly that is brutal to not just die in, let alone get through it without taking significant damage.

Now to discuss the build. Obviously it's going to be opening up with Intuition 2, a must for any badge where extreme damage avoidance is required, especially so in AoMC where any single stray hit is so overwhelmingly punishing, while AoMC offense means you don't feel the power loss as much with taking Intuition instead of direct combat-boosting traits as you would normally. Papilio in his pure Destroyer Diamond would get Hellrunner, Dodgemaster, and then build to Cateye, a typical AoMC build, however I'm going to be doing things differently. After Int2 I get Finesse and Juggler; as demonstrated in many of my other runs, Juggler is a very powerful early game trait, and that's especially so in Destroyer Diamond when instantly swapping between several Shotguns, AoMC-boosted rapids, and even the Rocket Launcher are going to be required to avoid getting hit in any bad hot starts or other bad combat scenarios where I'm caught out without good cover. I then go for maybe the unusual selections of Brute 2 and Berserker; the Brute levels are pretty much dead levels and actually meleeing enemies is out of the question when you can take so little damage, but Berserker is important for two critical reasons. One, Berserker, already a very powerful defensive trait, becomes even more powerful in AoMC when Revenants, Mancubi, Barons, and Shotgunners from within 5 tiles are now guaranteed to always trigger it if they hit you, which in effect gives you permanent +60% resistance against these enemies, so with just vanilla Red Armor, you'll reduce all Revenant, Mancubi, and close/midrange shotgun blasts to 1 damage, while Baron acid balls will get reduced to 4 damage, 2 if you got your Red Armor Power-modded. Ideally you want to avoid getting hit at all, but reducing their damage by such a huge amount will keep your run alive when any mistakes around them could otherwise instantly end a good run with how hard they hit, or if you get into a scenario where you have to choose getting hit either by them or other enemies, you can kill the other enemies and take the hit from them that will deal much less damage, as well as give you the berserk speed boost to farther avoid additional damage. The second critical reason for Berserker is it's your only way to get through N! Anomaly with minimal damage without a lucky Phobos 7 Invuln or gambling with a Phase Device to not only teleport you past the ambush but also teleport you past the Bruisers. With the 50 max HP you'll have by default as a Scout or Technician, AoMC will make rocket jumps with the vanilla Rocket Launcher always trigger Berserker. Why is this important? Without an Invuln, the reliable way to get past the N! Anomaly ambush and through the Bruisers is to rocket jump, but an AoMC rocket jump does a hefty 18 damage; Red Armor reduces that to 10 damage, 8 if P-modded, and so that will be 20/16 damage if you rocket jump past the ambush and through the Bruisers, which is just too much and chances are you won't even be able to take that damage without it sending your total damage to 50+. If you make a Fireproof Red Armor, that will reduce rocket jump damage to 4 and so 8 total, this is a lot more palatable but every damage point counts and you may not even be able to afford taking that damage without failing Destroyer Diamond by the time of Anomaly, while chances are also that you won't be able to make a Fireproof Red Armor unless you clear both Chained Court and the Phobos 7 special level, which is a tall order within Destroyer Diamond's constraints. A radsuit on top of the Fireproof Red Armor would reduce jump damage to 1, but you're not guaranteed one before Anomaly either unless you do Military Base or Phobos Lab. Meanwhile with Berserker triggering on a rocket jump in AoMC, with just a vanilla Red Armor it'll reduce rocket jump damage to 1, so you're guaranteed to only take 2 damage in Phobos Anomaly if you don't get a Phobos 7 Invuln, eliminating the luck needed to get past N! Anomaly with Destroyer Diamond intact (provided you don't make it to Anomaly with exactly 48 or 49 damage already taken), while it can also save your run if rocket jumping is your only way to escape any hot start with minimal damage. Plus I will try to Invuln rush as much of the post-Phobos portion as possible, and berserked Chainsaw will kill bosses faster than even an AoMC Plasma Rifle will, thus burning less Invuln killing them. After Berserker the aim will be for Shottyhead, which is my best answer to getting through hot starts unscathed, but I may not get the levels for it and may have to audible on it, as you'll see later...

The first major obstacle of the run is Phobos Base Entry. As mentioned prior, even a Former pistol shot takes away over 10% of the damage you're allowed to take total, so you really want to get a damageless Phobos Base Entry, but with the AoMC accuracy boost, Former Humans will now actually be able to hit you while you have running active and even with running's dodge bonus you have a well below 50% chance to dodge their bullets, so now you need a lot more luck than just "hope the Shotgunners don't leave the building early". You really need this Phobos Entry layout in particular, as it'll let you get behind good cover before any of the Formers can see you, which is your only reliable away to avoid damage from the Formers before you can get a Shotgun. This layout can also work despite me normally not liking it (with this being the winning run), as it does give you immediate cover, but you'll still need some luck to make it work, as the Formers can pop up at bad angles or multiple can approach you from different angles at once, where damage then can't be avoided (you also gotta remember that you can't try camping behind the narrow tunnel, as it creates one of those weird diagonal LoS angles that enemies can see you but you can't see them, so you have to camp at the top or bottom to avoid enemies getting free shots on you). Any other layout will require far more luck to get through damageless. If you opt to try killing the Formers in the open instead as papilio did in his run, without a Shotgun, you need to get lucky blind firing with your Pistol, having the timing luckily line up to get a double shot off whenever a Former step into vision, or get very lucky with a Former deciding not to shoot when you're in vision (Formers have a 75% attack chance normally, I'm unsure how that interacts with N!'s +50% enemy attack chance modifier but you might have better odds of Former Humans rolling the minimum 2% miss chance that persists even in AoMC than you would with them deciding to not attack on N!); even if you open with SoB, you can't one-shot the Formers with your Pistol, so avoiding damage here in the open would require even more luck than resetting until you get one of the viable layouts. There are going to be many resets in Phobos Base Entry inbetween real attempts, there's just no way around it, you don't want to settle for an imperfect Phobos Entry and then end up losing Destroyer Diamond in the end by a margin of =<8 damage after you took a Pistol shot at the start.

Phobos 2 will be another reset point, as you won't immediately have Int2 and won't have Juggler, so any hot start can immediately cause unavoidable damage, while you have to play very carefully before you have Int2 if you don't got an immediately accessible good camping spot (or the game just says fuck you and immediately spawns you in a position where acid damage is unavoidable, as happened in this run that I then had to immediately Q+Y out). As long as you don't get a bad start, you should be able to get through Phobos 2 damageless, and if you do get hit, you should probably reset, because again you don't want to play through a long Destroyer Diamond game after getting hit in Phobos 2 just to lose it by a margin of 8 or less damage. After clearing out Phobos 2, there is then the question of if to do Hell's Arena; papilio in his run didn't and it's understandable as anything optional is more chances to get hit, but I would say not doing so is a mistake, since getting a Rocket Launcher before Anomaly is critical as explained previously, while having access to reliable corpse disposal is also obviously immensely useful when a badly timed respawn can end such a fragile run (especially so when intentionally eating fireballs on corpses to destroy them is not viable here), and rocket jumping is needed to much more efficiently Invuln rush the post-Phobos portion of the run. AoMC additionally makes Hell's Arena much easier, even on N! you can manage it damageless without serious difficulty (and I would indeed clear Hell's Arena damageless, which will net me the Hell's Arena Pwnage Medal too, one of the three medals I have left), though you could accept taking a single hit from a non-Baron here if doing Hell's Arena damageless would cause too many resets for you. If you skip Hell's Arena, you have to get lucky with a Rocket Launcher spawning on Phobos 7 or in a vault to get one prior to Anomaly, and if you're unlucky, you may not get one for Invuln rushing until deep into Deimos, if you can even make it that far, while you're far more at the mercy of Phobos level generation when you can't destroy Hell Noble corpses or other troublesome corpses on demand. Papilio didn't say how many attempts it took him, but I'm sure skipping Hell's Arena made him have to reset far more runs past Phobos 2.

The Phobos 3 to 7 range is perilous, and it is tempting to just stair dive through them whenever possible, but I do mostly clear them out in this run, as I need to hit level 7 before Anomaly in order to get Berserker in time for it. Another benefit of clearing Hell's Arena is it ensures you'll hit level 4 before Phobos 3 and so I have Juggler before that floor range. After a damageless Phobos 3, I would get a bad floor on Phobos 4, where I spawned in an open area that I had to use crates for cover while a Cacodemon vault nearby got opened, and at one point I accidentally stepped into a Shotgunner's vision, where that was suddenly 13 damage gone, over 25% of my total damage allowance depleted over a single mistake. I then got hit by a Lost Soul shortly after, not as bad but now I'm at 18 damage, a couple more floors like this and the run is over. There was farther tense moments when Cacodemons were approaching me from multiple angles while I ran around the small stacks of crates I had for cover, but eventually I managed to kill everything without getting hit again, and the vault would have a Combat Shotgun, very nice to have when I may not get one otherwise when I'll be skipping the Phobos 7 special level. In Phobos 5 I would get a bad Warehouse level where corpse disposal wasn't easy but I would manage to avoid getting hit, up until the end when it came to clearing out two straggling Hell Knights, and after killing them, rather than just blowing them up immediately with my Rocket Launcher, I would get overly stingy by trying to let them revive to kill them in the doorway, which only resulted in one getting up while I was out in the open and then getting hit, knocking me to 27 damage taken. Just like that I was already halfway over my damage allowance and was feeling pessimistic about the run, I was initially thinking of skipping Unchained Court but since I didn't think the run was going all the way, I went in anyway just to see if it would be that bad to do damageless, as the Chainsaw and mods would be helpful. Going into Unchained Court does sound like a really bad idea at first, when even with berserk, the Barons will deal 6 damage to you in Blue Armor, the Arena Master's zap will do 4 damage, and there's a lot of Chaingunners who will do 4 damage minimum even when you have berserk with armor on, while the level starts you surrounded with shoddy cover. However with Int2, you can avoid the usually prevalent problem of walking into a Baron's vision as you exit the center building, as well as avoid walking into any of the Formers' vision, while AoMC offense will let you reliably one-shot any Formers that walk into range, let you much more quickly kill the Barons when plinking them from across the lava pools (that their AI then get stuck on instead of walking around it), and let you corner shoot the Arena Master from the center building once you get his attention. As such, I was able to clear Unchained Court damageless without even grabbing the Chainsaw nor berserks.

After keeping the damageless streak going through Phobos 6, Phobos 7 greeted me with this run-ending predicament. I managed to avoid the run ending there but I don't get out unscathed, as I would again get hit by a Hell Knight, which are actually worse than Barons once you get Berserker since the 12 damage they inflict before defenses are factored is 4 damage shy of the Berserker trigger amount, and so my total damage is up to 36 now, not even out of Phobos yet and I'm already at nearly 75% of the damage I can take after getting hit just four times (a shotgun blast for 13, a Lost Soul charge for 5, and two Hell Knight plasma balls for 18). I would manage to clear the rest of that maze without any additional damage, but in more bad news, there is no Invuln on Phobos 7, I was prepared for that, it's why I made sure to get Berserker before Anomaly, still a damageless Anomaly would have been nice and I could have potentially parlayed that into an Invuln chain that this run is probably going to hinge on to survive when I got only 13 damage left I can take. Military Base spawned for the Phobos 7 special level, which would be doable damageless unlike Phobos Lab, so I considered going in, but I didn't want to spend a good 15 minutes or so playing Military Base extremely cautiously just to lose this run at the start of Deimos, and as mentioned, I'm banking on finding Invulns at this point, so all the mods and juicy EXP there won't really do much to enhance this run's odds of winning. Then it's time for the Anomaly, I did have a Phase Device to potentially get through it damageless, but I stuck to the Berserker rocket jump plan for two reasons; one, a Phase Device needs to teleport me past the Bruisers to completely avoid any damage, just getting past the ambush won't do, and a Phase Device dropping me in the later half of the ambush tunnel just ends the run, while two, I may need a Phase to get me out of a hot start later. So I stuck to the plan, and indeed Berserker triggers on the rocket jump to reduce it to 1 damage in the Red Armor conveniently supplied by Anomaly, while thanks to AoMC, a single rocket jump will get you completely out of the Nightmare enemies' vision and completely past the Bruisers once you get to them, thus I get through Anomaly with only 2 damage taken. However, I make the dumb mistake of trying to corner shoot the Bruisers from the teleport room, thinking AoMC would make this easy EXP, but then with Int2 I see one of the Bruisers start walking around the top, at which point he would eventually pop into melee range if I stayed, so I decide to bail and get on the teleporter. As it turns out, stepping onto the teleporter doesn't immediately teleport you out, so the other Bruiser got to attack me as I stepped on it. Thankfully Berserker triggers on their acid balls too, but that was an additional 4 damage that was completely avoidable, and so now I enter Deimos with 42 damage taken, the run is technically alive but I got to get through 16 floors while taking no more than 7 damage across them all...

Deimos 1 would be a little rough, with it pitting me against a Baron in a bad spot that got a hit on me, another point where the run would have ended right there without Berserker but his damage gets reduced to 4 to keep it alive a little longer, and I get hit by something else I don't remember for 2 damage (maybe an Imp after I P-modded my Red Armor?). At this point I don't bother to clear out floors, I just need to find an Invuln ASAP as I'm still a few levels away from getting Shottyhead and I can't take any more hits, so the focus is getting straight to the stairs and only killing what's in the way or otherwise potentially threatens me. I would get through the first half of Deimos with no additional damage but no Invulnerability Globes spawn on the first four Deimos floors. Upon reaching Deimos 5, I would finally get an Invuln... but I got an absolutely horrid hot start, that would be a potential run ender in a normal game, let alone in a Destroyer Diamond run where I'm at 48 damage taken and so can take no more than 1 more point of damage or else the run ends. Even with AoMC offense, without Shottyhead, I cannot hope to kill everything with LoS on me before they wake up, so a Phase Device is my only option, and I do have the one I saved from Anomaly earlier, but I also having a Homing Phase. I opt to use the latter, as it would not only have a higher probability to put me in a safe spot (all these enemies means there's likely less or none around the stairs), but in case the stairs are a bad spot too, I could at least then immediately leave and hope the next floor is better, even though I really want that Invuln... The stairs would turn out to have only a single Mancubus in vision, so the Homing Phase not only gets me out of the run ender but also gives me a chance to procure the Invuln. The game makes me work for it with lots of enemies being around the Invuln, but playing very carefully I can slowly chip away at the enemies as they wander out, and thanks to finding the flooding lever near the stairs, I don't need to worry about respawns either. Eventually I manage to get to the Invuln, and it's a good thing I made sure not to shoot towards it too, only shooting enemies through the top or left side of that room, as there turned out to be a barrel right next to the Invuln that would have destroyed it if I did shoot towards it (those Protective Boots are also the first pair of boots I get the whole run, I really didn't get a single pair of Steel Boots in Phobos, and I do have an A mod I've been waiting to put on boots, but I don't put them on yet so the -25% knockback resistance they have doesn't nerf my rocket jumps).

With finally having Invuln and three stacks of rockets in my inventory, I decided it's time to just Invuln rush the rest of the game, as when I can't take any more hits, my best shot is to try remaining Invulnerable for the entirety of the remaining game. I just rocket jump through the final two Deimos floors before Babel, and within Babel I get an inconvenient Cyberdemon spawn on the opposite end of the map, but with how far AoMC rocket jumps send you, it only takes a few before I get to him, where then the berserk Chainsaw kills him with plenty of Invuln left. Hell 1 would then give me an Arachnotron + Cacodemon cave with not just one Invuln, but two of them. I have to make sure the Cacodemons don't blow them up but I managed to get them, so that's a +200 turns Invuln refresh to potentially carry me the rest of the way. I continue the Invulnerable rocket jump mad dash to end, rocket jumping straight to the stairs on every floor, only stopping to pick up rockets and a failed attempt to get an Invuln in another Arachnotron + Cacodemon cave when a Caco did blow it up this time. I reach level 10 shortly into Hell, and since it was clear I wouldn't be getting enough levels for Shottyhead, I use it on HR2 to ensure I can outrun the Mastermind in case the Invuln runs out before I kill or reach her, at which point I would need to chip away at her with hit and run tactics. As I'm blasting through Hell, I get a Hell 6 that perfectly encapsulates why I got Armorer Diamond before doing this run, with a maze that has a Unique within it, which could have very well been the Subtle Knife I was missing for Armorer Diamond previously, but detouring looking for it instead of heading straight for the stairs would likely deplete all the Invuln and potentially ruin the run. With me already having Armorer Diamond, I can just ignore that Unique and stay focused on the current mission. I'm not sure how much Invuln I have left at this point, but Hell 7 gives me close stairs that are reached in a single rocket jump, and just like that I'm in Dis with under 50 damage to keep Destroyer Diamond still intact, when I thought the run was most likely finished after running up 48 damage by early Deimos and was pessimistic about it back in Phobos 5. With the Invuln still not out, I proceed to effortlessly saw the Mastermind down.

Moral of the story? Rocket jumping is damn good, and when you got Invulnerability + AoMC, rocket jumping is really damn good, off that one Deimos 5 Invuln and then those two Hell 1 Invulns, I remained Invulnerable for the entire second half of the game, with a single rocket jump being able to launch me a quarter of the way through any floor without an obstruction in the way. Also, while my first run that wasn't resetted in the first two floors ended up going all the way (two prior runs were resetted on Phobos 2 and over a dozen were resetted in Phobos Base Entry), I think this shows just how hard pure Destroyer Diamond is; altogether I got hit just seven times the entire run + those two rocket jumps in Anomaly for an additional 2 damage, and I finished just 1 damage short of the allowed damage limit, you're given minuscule room for any mistakes. While you don't get AoMC's insane offense in Demonic Diamond, that badge's 199 damage allowance and enemies not having the AoMC boost allowed you to take some hits here and there, so it had a much less strict margin of error in comparison. While there's lots I disagree with in papilio's badge difficulty rankings, I do agree with him that Destroyer Diamond without Dual Angel abuse is one of the two hardest Diamond badges (it remains to be seen if I'll find it harder than Arena Diamond), and that it's more Angelic-worthy than several of the actual Angelics. I see why everyone else took the easy way out on this badge, because very few players could have realistically won it the intended way through pure AoMC, and of those that could, most would have probably needed to do a seriously extended grinding session for it. As for how this badge will fare in the modern DRL versions, you can no longer infinitely camp due to the Enraged Timer, can no longer farm respawns for virtually infinite ammo, and both Int2 + Finesse got nerfed, but I think it might actually not be as bad, as corpses no longer being able to respawn in vision means you don't have to worry about respawn RNG screwing you over with an enemy getting back up at a terrible time, while special levels no longer requiring all respawns be killed for clearing means it'll be easier to do Hell's Arena damageless (once it's unbugged at least), and time-based powerups means your lategame Invulns will effectively last longer. We'll see how it compares across versions when I eventually go for the modern DRL 100%. With Destroyer Diamond won here, I now have 24 Diamonds in 0.9.9.7, surpassing papilio's Diamond count for uncontested #2, and the Untouchable Cross + Hell's Arena Pwnage Medal also bumps my medal count up to 42, I just need Gutts' Heart now for Heroic Diamond (I could have potentially went for it in this run after doing Hell's Arena damageless, but grabbing the Dragonslayer means I then can't rocket jump, and I do not stretch the Invulns out to last the entire rest of the run without rocket jumping, so I'll have to do it in its own dedicated run).

If you're still reading, here is the mortem:

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 DoomRL (0.9.9.7) roguelike post-mortem character dump
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 ONLY50DAMAGE?!,
 level 10 Apostle Chaos Lt. General Scout,
 defeated the Mastermind at the City of Dis.
 He survived 256773 turns and scored 345501 points.
 He played for 2 hours, 32 minutes and 48 seconds.
 He opposed the Nightmare!

 He killed 728 out of 1082 hellspawn. (67%)
 He was an Angel of Max Carnage!

-- Special levels --------------------------------------------

  Levels generated : 11
  Levels visited   : 2
  Levels completed : 2

-- Awards ----------------------------------------------------

  Cyberdemon's Head
  Mastermind's Brain
  UAC Star (gold cluster)
  Untouchable Cross
  Hell Arena Pwnage Medal
  Destroyer Diamond Badge

-- Graveyard -------------------------------------------------

  ###########################################################
  #>#####################................................####
  ######################...............####...............###
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  ####################........####.....####.....####........#
  ###################.........####.....#........####.........
  ##################..........####..............####.........
  #################..........................................
  #################......##..X%........................####..
  #################.....###............................####..
  #################....####............................####&.
  #################....####............................####..
  #################..........................................
  ##################..........####..............####.........
  ###################.........####.....####.....####.........
  ####################........####.....####.....####........#
  #####################.......####.....####.....####.......##
  ######################...............####...............###
  #>#####################................................####
  ###########################################################

-- Statistics ------------------------------------------------

  Health 50/50   Experience 41956/10
  ToHit Ranged +12  ToHit Melee +16  ToDmg Ranged +0  ToDmg Melee +6

-- Traits ----------------------------------------------------

  Class : Scout

    Finesse          (Level 1)
    Hellrunner       (Level 2)
    Reloader         (Level 1)
    Brute            (Level 2)
    Juggler          (Level 1)
    Berserker        (Level 1)
    Intuition        (Level 2)

  Int->Int->Fin->Jug->Bru->Bru->Ber->Rel->HR->HR->

-- Equipment -------------------------------------------------

    [a] [ Armor      ]   red armor [6/6] (100%) (P)
    [b] [ Weapon     ]   chainsaw (5d6) (B)
    [c] [ Boots      ]   nothing
    [d] [ Prepared   ]   plasma rifle (1d7)x6 [10/40]

-- Inventory -------------------------------------------------

    [a] double shotgun (9d3)x2 [2/2]
    [b] combat shotgun (7d3) [2/5]
    [c] combat shotgun (8d3) [3/5] (P1)
    [d] rocket launcher (6d6) [0/1] (B1)
    [e] shotgun shell (x50)
    [f] shotgun shell (x46)
    [g] shotgun shell (x50)
    [h] shotgun shell (x50)
    [i] shotgun shell (x50)
    [j] rocket (x7)
    [k] power cell (x50)
    [l] power cell (x42)
    [m] large med-pack
    [n] large med-pack
    [o] phase device
    [p] phase device
    [q] agility mod pack
    [r] protective boots [2/2] (100%)

-- Resistances -----------------------------------------------

    Bullet     - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Melee      - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Shrapnel   - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Acid       - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 
    Fire       - internal 60%   torso 85%   feet 60% 
    Plasma     - internal 60%   torso 60%   feet 60% 

-- Kills -----------------------------------------------------

    136 former humans
    80 former sergeants
    36 former captains
    157 imps
    95 demons
    109 lost souls
    44 cacodemons
    11 hell knights
    22 barons of hell
    1 arachnotron
    18 former commandos
    10 pain elementals
    1 revenant
    4 mancubi
    1 arch-vile
    1 Cyberdemon
    1 Spider Mastermind
    1 Arena Master

-- History ---------------------------------------------------

  He started his journey on the surface of Phobos.
  On level 2 he entered Hell's Arena.
  He left the Arena as a champion!
  On level 5 he stormed the Chained Court.
  On level 5 he found the Arena Master's Staff!
  He defeated the Hell Arena Master!
  On level 8 he encountered the Phobos Anomaly.
  He left level 15 as soon as possible.
  On level 16 he found the Tower of Babel!
  He left level 19 as soon as possible.
  He left level 23 as soon as possible.
  Then at last he found Dis!
  On level 24 he finally defeated the Mastermind.

-- Messages --------------------------------------------------

 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You need to
 taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You need to
 taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You're going
 berserk! You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind flinched! You need to
 taste blood!
 You need to taste blood!
 You hit the Spider Mastermind. The Spider Mastermind dies. Congratulations!
 You defeated the Spider Mastermind! Press <Enter>...

-- General ---------------------------------------------------

 407 brave souls have ventured into Phobos:
 194 of those were killed.
 1 of those was killed by something unknown.
 97 didn't read the thermonuclear bomb manual.
 And 9 couldn't handle the stress and committed a stupid suicide.

 106 souls destroyed the Mastermind...
 7 sacrificed itself for the good of mankind.
 62 killed the bitch and survived.
 37 showed that it can outsmart Hell itself.

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