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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

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 lacking 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 it, 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 then you have two empty pistols that each take over a second to reload while the hoard 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.

Finally I get the legendary Tormuse in one of my threads, but thanks :p

Aw, I didn't mean to neglect you.  :P  I just haven't touched DRL in a while, so I haven't looked at these forums much.  Everyman Angelic seemed like a good excuse to come out of lurking, though.  :)

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...

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).

That's a lot of words.  :P  Also, congrats on your victory!  :D

I watched the video, and it neatly highlights the one advantage that the graphics version of DRL has over the ASCII version, in that Intuition trait shows you what the powerups are before you get to them, whereas in the ASCII version that I normally play, they would all look identical.  I see that it was helpful in picking up all the invulnerability spheres.  (And there were a *lot* of them!  Holy cow!)  :o  Nice use of rocket jumping in the lategame;  that rocket box was a lucky find too!  :)  Going to Mortuary to get the Nuclear BFG was a ballsy move, but it clearly paid off.  Again, well done!  :)

Also, what's with the music and sound?  Is that a mod?

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

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

(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 4 damage on average while hitting up to as much as 9), but Captains are easy to kill with your shotgun and Cacodemons can be pretty reliably corner shot to death with the a T-modded Shotgun, so even they won't be too bad if they don't catch you in the open. It's actually still easy in ArchAoH to clear out Phobos 2 with a decent camping spot, but since levelling up does nothing, killing all the enemies here achieves nothing and you won't need the ammo from the Formers when you can just farm the Shotgunners in Phobos Entry for most of the shells you'll need for the rest of the game. Clearing the floor would make it safe to explore the rest of the floor to find stuff without risk, but unless you get a vault or lucky with crates dropping a Shell Box or boots, there's nothing really worthwhile for this run that you can find on Phobos 2 other than Berserks that Intuition will let you immediately find anyway, so clearing Phobos 2 would often amount to just being a waste of time when you'll very likely just die in the next few floors regardless.

Speaking of which, the Phobos 3-5 range as usual will be what kills the majority of runs. The Hell Knights that start appearing are a huge stepup in danger, when like Cacodemons they inflict plasma damage and so will hit you for up to 9 damage, while with their 10 extra HP and 10% extra speed compared to Cacodemons, they'll get through your corner shooting a lot more often if you can't begin firing on them from far enough away or don't have a lucky early Shell Box. More monster groups start appearing as well, and even if you can reduce the damage from weak enemies to 1, a bunch of them hitting you at once can still shave over half your health away when you got only 10. As a result, you also can't safely use medkits with several enemies in vision, as they'll just knock you back below half health, and so any hot starts here without an immediate good escape path will be lethal. Mazes here will often be invariable death without nearby stairs or berserk, and even with berserk they'll still often kill you from the sheer amount of enemies killing you by attrition. Cacodemon caves will additionally be lethal without quick stairs given that they kill you in 2 or 3 hits and you probably won't have a good corner shooting spot to fight them, but getting a Lost Soul cave will be a massive breather here and you won't even care about their trash EXP yield in this challenge that makes these levels a double-edged sword normally, while Pinky caves can be surprisingly manageable as long as you don't spawn in the middle of a bunch of them, since your P Red Armor softens their bites so much. The strategy at this point is primarily just haul ass to The Chained Court, fighting only what you have to and only go for items that are in the way. Even Berserks aren't really worth going out of your way for when they don't guarantee safety, and you're not likely to find much for helpful stuff in this range, with the big exceptions of Steel Boots being able to spawn on Phobos 4+, a Double Shotgun also on Phobos 4+, and Phase Devices on Phobos 5+. Though I'll also try going for Shell Boxes (they can start starting on Phobos 4) and rockets (Phobos 5+, I won't have a Rocket Launcher yet without a lucky vault but having a good rocket supply if I do get one later is vital), as well as any medkits or Armor Shards that won't be too dangerous to go for (the P Red Armor will be pretty beaten up by this point, so a repair is very helpful as it getting damaged will probably mean you'll die in quick order). If you reach The Chained Court, you could avoid grabbing the Chainsaw or Berserks at first and get to the exit room to camp it out to safely clear out the Formers, so you don't waste any berserk having to shoot the Formers on your way out (as you can't run by them with such low HP, especially the Captains you have to shoot down or they'll shred you), but given that most runs at this point will still fail regardless, it's not worth it time investment-wise to spend several minutes mashing run -> wait every time you make it here just to die a minute later. Actually clearing Chained Court is also possible, but again you get no EXP benefit and you'll need to expend at least two of the Berserks to do so (else the Barons will quickly slaughter you once you release them, even being able to one-shot you in P Red Armor without berserk), the mods might be nice but they aren't worth losing out taking hundreds more turns of berserk with you nor damaging your armor. So the strategy in Chained Court is to just immediately grab everything and get out, while shooting down the Formers that are in the way and trying to avoid stepping into a Chaingunner's vision (other than the one likely in the exit room that you'll have to take a hit from as waiting for him to get out would waste too much berserk). The strategy for post-Chained Court will rely on trying to have that berserk last up through Anomaly, as at this point when the enemies much worse than Hell Knights start showing up (Commandos are especially deadly, without berserk they're just one-tapping you even in P Red Armor, and if you have berserk, they're still dealing 6 damage each attack), you're not going to survive without the berserk and you'll need it at minimum to get through Anomaly without invuln, a Phase, or a Rocket Launcher. Those, and maybe boots or a Double Shotgun if I don't have them yet, are additionally the only things I will go anywhere out of my way to get here, even mods I'll leave behind if it would waste too much berserk to get them.

For this particular run, after a typical Phobos Base Entry, I got a nice-looking Phobos 2 with a quick Berserk decently close to the stairs, but I made a mistake in not checking out the exit room first to clear, which ended up having a lot of enemies in the way and so I burned nearly all the berserk getting to the stairs. Phobos 3 had immediate stairs with only a Lost Soul in view, but wasting that Phobos 2 berserk nearly lost me the run when I got a Pinky + Cacodemon Cave that nearly killed me, but luckily I was able to get behind that wall to safely heal without the Pinky getting a double move to finish me and there were no enemies near the stairs, while the Pinky would also block one more plasma ball that could have killed me. Phobos 5 was a big breather, being a Pinky Cave with a water river that I spawned in, and so I could just wait in the back to shotgun down all the Pinkies while the river erased their corpses. I did get surprised by a horde of stuck Pinkies after exiting that safe spot, but I'm able to make the distance to kill them without farther damage. The cave was decently fruitful too; aside from the Armor Shard to repair my P Red Armor that was getting a bit low in its durability and a rocket stack, this cave had a Double Shotgun. A Double Shotgun doesn't sound useful at first when I have no Reloader nor even a Shell Box and Icy didn't consider it in his guide, but it will prove handy for two important levels later... (and if you do have a Shell Box, you could viably use it to more quickly corner shoot a big enemy to death). I nearly wasted that good fortune however in Chained Court when I walked into the exit room with 6 HP thinking I would be safe with the one Chaingunner in there, but there turned out to be two, which should have been 8 damage and thus death... but luckily I rolled two dodges and a miss, so I survive with 1 HP. It looked like my luck was going to end there when I got a maze for Phobos 6, but somehow nothing worse than Formers and Imps were in the way to the stairs nor did the maze have walls blocking the stairs, and so I reach the stairs pretty quickly with only a single medkit used (and that Commando at the end popped up right when I got on the stairs). I would get more luck with finally getting a Phobos 7 Invuln (15 prior runs that made it to this point didn't get one), and there was nothing but an Imp to contest it (who ended up just hitting himself on that barrel).

Now I was at Phobos Anomaly. A major drawback of going Intuition instead of going Hellrunner is if you didn't get a retrievable Phobos 7 Invuln, found a Rocket Launcher, or get lucky with a Phase, most runs that make it here will still die, with me being 2 for 8 with getting past Anomaly prior to this and only one of those had a Phase, while I never got a Rocket Launcher in those runs. Without HR, your movement speed isn't fast enough to meaningfully outrun the Nightmare Demons while wearing the Red Armor even with berserk, and the Nightmare Cacodemons + Imps are going to be repeatedly pelting you without any dodge bonus, while you also can't survive running naked as said enemies will be dealing too much damage when you can't dodge them much. If you haven't found boots by this point to put your starting A Mod on, you should A-mod the fresh Red Armor here, as it'll be barely slower than running naked while leaving you a lot less vulnerable and so will be your only shot to survive here without an invuln/phase/Rocket Launcher. Since I did have invuln, I could run through the ambush no problem (though I left behind the second Large Medkit and rockets I usually pick up here to waste less Invuln), but I was in a bit of a predicament; I know I wouldn't have enough invuln to last me through the Bruisers, while the door out of the ambush hallway got destroyed with the Nightmare Demons on my ass (which I was hoping to close to block them long enough to get distance and deaggro them), and even with the A Red Armor, I probably won't make enough distance to break vision from them when I reach the Bruisers, while if the Bruisers knock me back towards the Nightmare Demons, that's probably the end of the run. This is where the Double Shotgun comes clutch, as it can be used to kill the Nightmare Demons more quickly, and if the door wasn't destroyed but a Nightmare Demon was blocking it from being closed, I could use the Double Shotgun to knock the Nightmare Demons out of the doorway and then close it. As expected, the invuln runs out well before the Bruisers, but this isn't a problem with my Chained Court berserk still intact, as the P Red Armor will reduce any acid ball that rolls below 19 damage to 1 and even a max damage roll from them still only does 2 damage, so I make it out of Anomaly and this run is in serious winnable territory now.

I've gotten only two runs prior up to this point, and from here on out, I'm banking on finding Invulns ASAP or at least more berserks, you're simply not going to survive for long at this point without either, and even if you get the level luck to survive without them, beating the Cyberdemon with no traits nor health would be hopeless without said powerups (or acquiring a miracle Inquisitor Set prior to Babel, which is technically possible as you could get a Malek's Armor prior to floor 15 from a vault and then get the Laptop Boots on Deimos 7, but if you have the luck for that in an Everyman Angelic run... you're probably going to make a good subject for a Karl Jobst video). In this run I get a good start to Deimos with a nearby Invuln and stairs, as well as finally getting some boots (Protective Boots, which aren't the most ideal but it's better than nothing), the Invuln would have a Revenant guarding it, but thanks to have the Chained Court berserk still being intact, he only hits me for 1 damage and I can safely kill him after retreating back behind the nearby doorway. With the Invuln secured, I then start making a mad dash for the stairs (though I pick up that Technical Mod I ignored earlier, in case I need it later...). I get more good luck with Deimos 2 starting me near an Invuln and having pretty close stairs with a Berserk next to them too (which also somehow didn't get destroyed after getting caught in the explosion of three acid balls from the Baron chasing me). The luck continues with more good luck as Deimos 3 has close stairs, and Deimos 4 follows suit with a Homing Phase and yet another Invuln on the way to the stairs, there was just a Mancubus on the way I had to kill first to make sure he didn't blow up the Invuln. The good stair luck would end with Deimos 5, it was a tough call but with no Invulns/Berserk along the way, still no Rocket Launcher, and Babel being around the corner, I decide I should just use the Homing Phase I picked up now, there's no good saving it for a better opportunity later if my Invuln runs out and I die before a better opportunity to use it comes. Deimos 6 would start me near the special level stairs, but with me rolling Halls Of Carnage instead of Spider's Lair, it's not a viable escape path without the Homing Phase I just used up, however I do get the most important item for this run spawned uncontested right at the start, a Rocket Launcher! One major thing Icy overlooked in his guide is just how major a Rocket Launcher is, he briefly mentions rocket jumping being a viable option to get past Anomaly but rocket jumping is incredibly useful beyond that, as it greatly extends how far each Invuln can last and so greatly reduces the amount of Invuln + stair luck you need to win. Even without Invuln, rocket jumping can extend your Berserks as long as your health isn't too low (any Red Armor with berserk will reduce rocket jump damage to 1), and could be a life saver without either if you spawn near a group of enemies you can't safely outrun, not to mention being able to destroy walls will save you powerup turns whenever they block the direct path to the stairs or let you possibly get around dangerous enemies if you have no Invuln. My best attempt prior that made it to Hell 3 without a Rocket Launcher would have surely succeeded if I had one.

With the Rocket Launcher secured, it's time to rocket jump like hell straight to the stairs, and after an unremarkable Deimos 7, it's time for Babel. Rocket jumping shows another strong point by safeguarding against a far away Cyberdemon spawn, without rocket jumping I would have lost several dozens invuln turns here and possibly not have enough to kill the Cyberdemon (if the Cyberdemon is any more than one hit away from dying when your invuln runs out and you aren't berserked, it's game over). Another optimization not covered by Icy and another reason why picking up a Double Shotgun if you find one is important, is if you don't have berserk, the Double Shotgun will actually kill the Cyberdemon in fewer actions than the B Chainsaw will; the B Chainsaw averages 13.5 damage per hit on the Cyberdemon (17.5 minus his 4 armor), killing him in 33.3 hits and will miss half the time, averaging 66-67 actions total to kill him, while the Double Shotgun averages 18 damage point blank (a Double Shotgun blast averages 18, gets reduced by 8 from his armor and then reduced by one more point from 10% falloff, then there's two blasts and so it's doubled back up to 18), and unlike the Chainsaw it won't miss, so it kills him in 25 shots on average and averages 49 actions total when accounting for the needed reload after each shot, requiring quite a bit less Invuln to win. If you can P-mod your Double Shotgun it'll be even better, as each shot will then average 21.6 damage and thus reduce the total average actions needed to 40-41 (so if you found a spare Power Mod and a Double Shotgun, you should P-mod it). You'll need to expend a decent chunk of shells, but if you got good enough Invuln luck to make it this far, you should have enough left over from Phobos, and you won't need much if any shells after this, so the ammo cost is irrelevant. Even if you have enough Invuln to kill him with the Chainsaw before running out, you should still kill him with the Double Shotgun, as you don't know what kind of Invuln luck you'll have in Hell and so you want to retain as much Invuln as possible. It should be noted that a point blank Plasma Rifle will similarly beat the Chainsaw without berserk here, especially if A-modded (the math is a lot more cumbersome here so just trust me on it), but the Plasma Rifle is a lot less practical as you'll need several stacks of cells to have enough ammo and unlike with shotgun shells, you won't have a good opportunity to farm cells in this run (can't stop to farm a Commando or Arachnotron when you gotta stretch your powerups as long as possible and stopping to farm one when you're out of powerups would be very dangerous), so it's very unlikely you'll have enough cells for that (though if you don't have a Double Shotgun, you could use the Plasma Rifle to weaken the Cyberdemon until you run out of cells and then finish him off with the Chainsaw to save some invuln). Speaking of cells, if you could burn a Homing Phase to nab the BFG from Halls Of Carnage, it would be the actual best weapon here, averaging 33 damage and not being able to miss, so it kills the Cyberdemon in 13-14 hits on average and will average 19/20 actions total with the needed reloads, even beating the berserk B Chainsaw (which with misses factored will average 29 actions to kill the Cyberdemon), but it would require filling half your inventory with cells and so you realistically wouldn't have enough cells for that (though you could use it to weaken the Cyberdemon before using the Chainsaw or Double Shotgun to save some Invuln at least). With that strategy aside of the Cyberdemon done, I kill the Cyberdemon and enter Hell with my invuln still intact.

I'm unsure how much invuln I have left at this point, but I get a good Hell 1 with two Invulns, one of which is close to the stairs. I do have a problem however in that I have only a few rockets left (a good reason why you need to be even more proactive at picking up rockets than I was in this run), so I opt to not go for that second farther away Invuln. Hell 2 is an arena, not close stairs but an arena means I get an open area with few obstructions to only need a couple rocket jumps and so I don't lose much invuln here, as well as can nab one of the berserks along the way. I get a good Hell 3 that has yet another Invuln and nearby stairs, so I get more invuln and don't need to rocket jump. Hell 4 then has the item I need most at this point immediately in view, a Rocket Box! 20 rockets should be more than enough to get me through the rest of the game, and even give me enough to detour through Mortuary/Limbo. That's also another important thing about the Rocket Launcher, it makes it viable to go through Mortuary/Limbo if you have enough invuln to nab the Nuclear BFG for the guaranteed win at Dis, when you would otherwise need to get lucky with a Homing Phase dropping you at the right corner to do so, whereas if you were to try running to the Nuclear BFG, it would waste too much invuln and you'll probably have a mass of enemies around that makes it impossible to get, if you don't just get pinballed around until your invuln runs out. With that berserk I nabbed a couple floors prior still being intact to speed me up and no Archvile being near the Nuclear BFG, I secure it with no issues and now I just need to make it to Dis to win (I realized I made a mistake in immediately unloading that Rocket Box, I should have equipped it to make my reloads faster and reduce the amount of respawns the Archviles could get off before I reached the Nuclear BFG, but fortunately it ended up not mattering here, just something to keep in mind if anyone trying this finds a Rocket Box in their run). Hell 5 would have pretty far stairs, not too bad when I got enough rockets now to keep rocket jumping, but I would get in a bad spot when it was a Revenant level and there turned out to be a lot of Revenants around the stairs, and I proceed to get pinballed around as I try to reach the stairs (which was a major factor that lost me my prior best run, when a bunch of VMR pinballing me near the stairs on Hell 2 made me lose a lot of invuln, making it run out shortly after in Hell 3 in an Archvile level). This kind of scenario is why I nabbed that Technical Mod back in Deimos 1, as this is one of the very very few instances where increasing knockback resistance on boots is actually helpful, unfortunately I don't got Plasteel Boots to put the T Mod on so the Protective Boots would have to do, which I then put on (after taking them off prior to not have my rocket jumps reduced) and try to power my way through the Revenants. Unfortunately the Revenants are still knocking me around and it takes me about a dozen more invuln turns to get on the stairs, but the boots' knockback resistance is enough to make it usually only 1 tile of knockback per hit rather than the 2+ that would have made it even worse to reach the stairs, if not impossible without slowly shotgunning them down from far away. Hell 6 gives me a break though with quickly reachable stairs and then Hell 7 follows suit. Just like that, I'm in Dis, and I probably do have enough invuln left to kill the Mastermind conventionally (the Double Shotgun works even better against her despite the extra HP she has thanks to her having less armor than the Cyberdemon), but since I have the Nuclear BFG, I'm not going to risk it, so I just run -> wait to make the invuln run out, armed the Nuclear BFG and nuke Dis for the safe guaranteed win.

With that, I become the third person to join the Everyman Angelic club (and their first one outside of Ontario :p), and I recorded it too (you can watch it here). I had 35 deaths prior to this win and another dozen to two resets on the first two floors (though most of that was early on before I realized I didn't need a good Phobos Base Entry), I do agree with what Icy said that Everyman Angelic isn't quite the worst winnable Angelic in 0.9.9.7; Berserker Angelic requires even more luck while having a lot less skill impression involved, Masochist and Eagerness Angelic have an even greater skill barrier while still requiring a lot of luck (especially the latter), Strongman Angelic has a high luck component too and requires you to tolerate far worse gameplay, and Inquisitor Angelic maybe has the highest skill requirement of any winnable Angelic while you can't be saved in it by Invuln luck. Everyman Angelic is still extremely difficult and it's going to require a grind for it no matter how good you are, but I would rate Masochist above it (as Icy said, at least you can still heal in Everyman, and starting with a Red Armor + each mod compared to starting with nothing actually does a lot to make up for your inability to get any traits), as well as Eagerness and Berserker, while Inquisitor and Strongman could be rated more difficult too (unsure at the moment). How Everyman Angelic will fare in JHC-era DRL will be interesting; a big change are powerups actually being time-based now, which will change the meta for this quite a bit (e.g. you're now going to need to wear faster equipment when invuln'd, and the Double Shotgun will now be worse against the bosses than the B Chainsaw... unless you got a Shell Box, in which case it's even better than it was before), as well as possibly no longer being able to stack powerup durations (hasn't happened yet but Kornel stated he wants to do that, which could push this badge to near impossible territory without farther adjustments to ArchAoH),  and you got berserk being nerfed to +50% resistances and more randomized melee damage (notably the Cyberdemon and Mastermind can swing way harder, up to as much as 27, so you might want to try a Ballistic Red Armor as berserk + P Red Armor won't be enough to reduce their melee damage to 1).  In addition to that are smaller but still meaningful changes like Technical Mods now giving resistances to armor/boots (T-modding your starting Red Armor and P-modding a Shotgun might become the better play, especially as that T Red Armor could be turned into a Ballistic Red Armor later), enemies no longer respawning in vision (less chance to get screwed over by an ill-timed respawn), Enraged Timer meaning slowly chipping down the Mastermind at the end to win without enough invuln/berserk or a nuke may no longer be viable (if her AI changes didn't already do that), and a buffed Reloader that might make it a viable option (though it probably still doesn't beat Intuition with how important Invulns are).

With Everyman Angelic achieved, my time with 0.9.9.7 comes to a close with all 26 Bronze badges, all 26 Silver badges, all 26 Gold badges, all 26 Platinum Badges, all 26 Diamond badges, and now 13 Angelic badges. There are four more Angelic badges left, but they're all impossible without TASing or outright cheating, ranked from most to least plausible:

• 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 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 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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  #...................&......................................
  #.................X......................................&.
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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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[--------------------------------------------------------------]

(If you just want to watch the video of this run, you can watch it here)

With 11 Angelics and all other badges won, there's very little left I can get; of the 6 remaining Angelics, there's only Everyman Angelic, Masochist Angelic, and the impossible 4. Everyman Angelic has been proven humanly possible before, but Masochist Angelic is in a grey area, as what it requires isn't as outrageous as what the impossible 4 demand, yet in the over 13 years since 0.9.9.7 released, that badge has never been verifiably won by anyone in that version. Vandam infamously claimed to have won every Angelic except for Centurial within a few months of 0.9.9.7's release in his absurd "N+" difficulty proposal, so that would include Masochist Angelic alongside the impossible 4, yet he refused to even post mortems of any of his runs, let alone video proof (with him claiming he "only plays for joy" and "showing mortems is just a way of creating hierarchy"... yet that didn't stop him from boasting about his supposed 16 Angelics). Supposedly he posted a screenshot showing the 16/17 Angelics on his record in that thread before the screenshot got taken down for whatever reason, but that is shoddy proof, when he could have pulled a 2Dev using Cheat Engine to hack the game for them, or more charitably, with Vandam being a beta tester of 0.9.9.7, he could have abused game-breaking beta bugs to get all these Angelics in the betas and then copied his player.wad file over to keep the illegitimately-won Angelics on his record, which could explain why he refused to show his mortems as they would expose being achieved on the betas (as an example of such bugs, Tormuse found a bug in the ancient 0.9.9.8 beta that tricked the game into awarding him Speedrunner Angelic when immediately letting himself die on the first floor, while one of the 0.9.9.9 betas had two major bugs where your clips would underflow to give infinite ammo and certain traits would carry over to the next run after dying/quitting with no limit, which I had some fun with to win UAC and Demonic Angelic, such glaring examples why any badges won in any beta versions shouldn't count). With his dearth of proof, and Vandam also having the 2Dev hallmark of not explaining how he actually got his badges, in addition to his sparse attempts at discussing strategy being dubious or even factually wrong (such as the very simple fact of not knowing that you don't need to kill the Cyberdemon to get past Babel in AoPc), we can conclude Vandam's claims are bullshit until proven otherwise.

Now Masochist Angelic was legitimately won last year by micerang and he even had full video proof of his run... but it carries the big asterisk of being won in 0.9.9.8. For those that don't know, while an official version, 0.9.9.8 was an awfully buggy release, including a major dodging bug that essentially gave you a 95% dodge rate against everything regardless of HR levels, alongside having an OP Marine and the most broken mastery of all-time with its version of Vampyre that may as well as have been IDDQD. With these things, micerang avoided many more hits than he would have without the dodging bug (a particular moment being when he was repeatedly dodging Barons and Formers in Unchained Court without running nor having any HR levels), and when he did get hit was taking significantly less damage from the 0.9.9.8 Marine's +20% energy resistances, while by the time he reached Vampyre he had only 6 HP left and so his run just objectively doesn't win without the aid of these two factors, while by his admission it still took him hundreds of tries to reach that point even with said factors (I do hate to disparage provably legitimate runs, but the 0.9.9.8 asterisk just can't be ignored, it's even the reason why I started my 0.9.9.7 conquest when I wanted to show I could win the previously unwon-in-0.9.9.7 Eagerness and Inquisitor Angelics without the aid of 0.9.9.8). Of provable Masochist Angelic runs in 0.9.9.7, Icy did get an attempt up to the Cyberdemon; if he didn't take so long to kill the Cyberdemon and avoided getting cornered, there's a legitimate chance the run could have went the distance even with only 3 HP left by that point as he would have just needed a lucky quickly-accessible Invulnerability, so it was a good proof-of-concept to show the badge was indeed possible, unlike with the impossible 4 that have no proof of anyone getting remotely close to achieving them or otherwise have a "proof of concept" that involved grotesque amounts of save scumming (which is also another reason why Vandam's screenshot of his badge collection isn't valid proof when you can't trust that he didn't save scum Pacifist Angelic). Another point of this badge being possible is my recent Demonic Diamond run, where I finished the game with 61 damage taken, while 14 of that damage came from the completely optional Shambler fight and the Onyx mod reward made no real difference the rest of the run, so without fighting the Shambler, I could have finished that run with under 50 damage and thus could theoretically win without ever healing.

So Ultimately, what makes Masochist Angelic so difficult? At bare minimum, with no conventional healing available in Archangel of Masochism, you effectively must beat the game on Nightmare! taking no more than 49 damage as a Scout/Technician or no more than 59 damage as a Marine. Any Ironman levels would give you an additional +10 HP and so you can get up to a potential +50 more damage you can take from Ironman levels, while Vampyre can still heal you indefinitely (...if you can survive long enough to get it), and there are a couple other rare sources that can heal you, but this is basically a much harder version of Demonic Diamond, a Diamond that let you take up to 199 damage and was already known for being on par with the average Angelic in difficulty, while surviving long enough in ArchAoMs to get access to that extra health is much easier said than done. ArchAoMs has an additional wrinkle where without being able to heal to restore your Tactics, you essentially can only activate running once per floor without grabbing a Berserk Pack or Invulnerability, normally you shouldn't need to use running more than once per floor but this could cause you to take more damage that you would have avoided otherwise and does make special levels like Hell's Arena more difficult. This badge demands such an extreme amount of damage avoidance while giving the player no sort of help (you just have more bullets in your starting inventory, which doesn't matter even before considering you can farm infinite bullets from respawning Formers on N!, and you can get an early Red Armor + Plasteel Boots from Hell's Arena if you can clear it without taking a crippling amount of damage), and even if you play perfectly over several floors, it only takes a single bad hot start to instantly ruin the run when you're playing with such a slim margin of error.

With that said, what are the viable builds and strategies to win here? I think there's three viable ways that you could feasibly win Masochist Angelic with:

*The most obvious way is to go for Vampyre (which is what micerang used in his 0.9.9.8 Masochist Angelic run), as if you can survive long enough to get Vampyre, you can then indefinitely heal as much as you want, and so have the badge pretty much won from that point as long as you can get past Phobos Anomaly and avoid making any stupid overextensions, with the only real danger post-Phobos being Arachnotron Caves. However surviving long enough to get Vampyre in 0.9.9.7 is very very hard, as the Vampyre prereq path requires three traits in two Brute levels and Badass that are virtually worthless until you get Vampyre (you can't fight in melee when you can't heal and you can't get any boosted health yet for Badass to retain while the knockback reduction is more counterproductive if anything), and the Marine's 10 extra HP barely helps (in the early game where you likely have lackluster armor, it basically amounts to being able to take only one or two more hits, the Scout's +10% universal speed bonus is far more helpful as it'll let you completely avoid more hits than that). Vampyre does give you the option of a free trait to choose, but a single level of Finesse often won't be able to shotgun down Pinkies or corner shoot Hell Knights to death before they reach you, at which point you can't get away from them when you have no Hellrunner nor can tank them when you got only 60 HP total before Vampyre, so delaying Vampyre by detouring for the Finesse -> Juggler opener is direly necessary to have any real hope of surviving long enough for it. But any delay in getting Vampyre is painful, making that an extra floor or two you need to survive without Vampyre, and for any hot start that Juggler can't get you through, you won't be able to as effectively escape without Hellrunner, while you also can't get Intuition and so will have to play very very slowly, when you can't afford to step into any enemy's vision.

*The second option is to do a masterless Scout stairdive that guns for Int2 and then Dodgemaster to beat the Cyberdemon, which is what Icy was using and got his Masochist Angelic run that made it to Babel with. The main advantage of this strategy is it's the fastest in real time and so is more spammable to get more attempts in the time it would take you get a good attempt with the other options, but this strategy has a major problem in it leaves your combat woefully inept, so you're heavily reliant on getting very good Invuln/Berserk and stair luck, as well as avoiding any bad levels in mid-Phobos and onward when you can't realistically fight your way out of lethal hot starts, nor can do things in any of the special levels aside from Chained Court. A build so inept at combat isn't good for the Cyberdemon fight either even with Dodgemaster, as if you take too long to kill the Cyberdemon, his AI gets antsy and will start erratically approaching you between reloads, where he can then corner you in a position where you can't avoid his rocket splash, which is what did in Icy's best attempt. Of the three viable strats, I think this one is definitely the least viable, it's telling that Icy tried this strat in hundreds of attempts and still never succeeded with it, only getting that one run to the Cyberdemon and very few even getting past Anomaly, eventually giving up at it. It can work, but it will require a grotesque amount of luck and you can surely win in less real time if you're good enough with the other two options despite their individual attempts playing slower.

*The third option would be my Demonic Diamond build, damage-avoidant Shottyhead that opens with Fin -> Juggler for the immediate big combat boost, then detours for Int2 to aid damage avoidance and detect Invulns, then the rest of Shottyhead's prereqs. The big advantages of this build are you get very strong early game traits to most effectively mitigate damage in the Phobos portion of the run where you don't yet have Invulnerabilities, and upon reaching Shottyhead, you get your best chance at surviving later hot starts with Shottyhead's ability to kill entire groups of tough enemies before they wake up or at least knock them out of vision, while additionally granting near complete safety when corner shooting, notably being able to repeatedly shoot back multiple enemies approaching from different angles when having to corner shoot from imperfect cover. This build also lets you safely do some important special levels, most notably Hell's Arena at the start for the early Red Armor + Plasteel Boots + Rocket Launcher, and then City Of Skulls/Abyssal Plains (the importance of which will be covered later...). Compared to the Vampyre strat, you'll have a much less brutal time even getting to late Phobos, but you'll still be playing on a razor's edge post-Phobos and the run will probably still come down to getting Invulnerabilities to skip most of post-Phobos. I'm unsure what ultimately has the higher odds of success between it and Vampyre, however I think it is just strictly better than the Scout pure stairdive if you're skilled enough at the game; while it will play a lot slower and you might have to deal with runs that had over an hour put into them dying, it'll be so much less luck-dependent that it should still take you a lot less real time to eventually win with.

*For a possible fourth option, people might think Cateye, which is typically thought of as the damage avoidance mastery, with it detecting enemies from farther away than other builds and gives you a vision advantage over enemies to fire on them unimpeded without them being able to retaliate. The issue with Cateye is seeing enemies from farther away won't matter if they're already on top of you, and so Cateye doesn't help with the hot starts that are extra lethal in a challenge where you can't heal. Additionally, Cateye's SoB2 prereq doesn't help your Shotguns as much as Finesse/Reloader/Shottyman does, let alone remotely comparing to the power of early Juggler, and you really want faster firing speed when fighting crowds, while Triggerhappy isn't much better than a dead level. Cateye also doesn't have Hellrunner among its prereqs, a pretty crucial trait to avoiding damage and getting through N! Anomaly; now you can get Hellrunner alongside Finesse and Juggler, but that will all delay Cateye, while you're gonna need Eagle Eye too to take strong advantage of rapid fire weapons that the SoB + TH levels support, delaying Cateye even farther. I wouldn't say Cateye is completely unviable here, but there is a reason why I didn't use Cateye for my Demonic Diamond, Masochist Diamond, and even my Destroyer Diamond runs, the prereqs just aren't that good for avoiding damage in the Phobos portion of the run where it can be most difficult to avoid damage, and mitigating the threat of hot starts is so important, not to mention that Cateye and its prereqs don't help much for the major roadblock that is N! Anomaly.

When I first started Masochist Angelic attempts, I was trying Vampyre, as I do favor trading more early game luck/difficulty for much greater later game reliability; as I put it, I would much rather have several runs that die in 15 minutes or less than a lose a run that goes over an hour. However trying to get to level 7 as the Marine with no Hellrunner nor Intuition, while taking those dead Brute + Badass levels in their place, was brutal. Sure I could infinitely run -> wait camp behind any good camping spot, but finding said camping spot and being able to reach it without taking damage on any given floor is much easier said than done, and you do need a concealed camping spot to be fully safe, as one other detrimental factor with the Marine is that Imps outspeed you and so can potentially get a double move on you as you wait. Normally this hardly matters, when it's uncommon and Imps deal minor damage anyway even if they do get a free shot on you, but here where every single point of damage matters so much, those Imp double move cheap shots are painful. Not to mention that Hell Knights can get double moves when you wait as a non-Scout and they're more likely to than Imps while hitting harder, so you really can't afford to run-> wait behind imperfect cover when Hell Knights are around. You additionally can't clear Hell's Arena, well you can do so with Juggler but doing so means you get the Unchained Court, and Vampyre is going to really need that Chainsaw, but you won't hit level 7 before Unchained Court and so going in would be suicide without a Homing Phase (or playing on 0.9.9.8), while you also really want the Chained Court Berserks to power your way through the final Phobos floors to Military Base or a floor 7 Invuln or through Anomaly (though you should still go in to Hell's Arena to kill some enemies for the EXP and just leave after the first or second wave). Without clearing Hell's Arena, you won't have the Red Armor and so the Marine here can't take as many hits despite the extra HP, and you won't have an early Rocket Launcher for corpse disposal, wall busting, or emergency rocket jumping. The early game also plays dreadfully too, if you're not run -> wait spamming behind the first piece of usable cover you find, you'll be constantly radar shooting every few steps. Then even if you play through multiple floors near flawlessly, it just takes a single bad floor to completely fuck you; in one Vampyre attempt, I got through the first three floors and half of Hell's Arena taking only 5 points of damage, but then I got this awful Phobos 4 maze that suddenly killed the run just like that, with virtually nothing I could have done to survive it even after choosing the right direction to run for the stairs. After 8 deaths and many other runs that I Q+Y'd on the first two floors, while not getting a single Marine past floor 5 nor even to level 5 despite delaying Vampyre for Juggler, I decided to give Demonic Shottyhead some tries before running more Vampyre attempts. Granted I was getting some very awful level generation luck in that Phobos 3-5 range (so...many...damn...mazes), so if I just got a run without early mazes or Cacodemon caves, I might have a shot, but I thought I should give Shottyhead some tries, when I came so close to finishing under 50 damage with it in my first Demonic Diamond attempt that didn't reset in Phobos Base Entry. With the Shottyhead build, in only the fourth attempt that didn't Q+Y in the first four floors, I get a run past Phobos 5 and actually managed to survive this Phobos 6 that would have probably killed the Vampyre or stairdive Scout, and then reached a Phobos 7 Invuln to get a run to Deimos, but it would end up dying in Deimos 3. On one hand it was disheartening to lose a run with nearly two hours put into it, but on the other hand, getting a run that far after not many attempts was promising, while altogether I wasn't resetting so much on Phobos 2, so I gave Demonic Shottyhead a few more tries before trying Vampyre again...

For the immediate start of the run, Phobos Base Entry is a crapshoot, can just employ my usual strategy and hope the Shotgunners don't come out early while also hoping the Former Humans decide to have Stormtrooper accuracy while I'm running to the safe corner. I might accept getting punched by a Former once or taking a minimum damage roll Pistol shot, but anything more than that and it's a reset, every damage point matters and it won't take that long until you get a damageless or near-damageless Phobos Entry. Also while the medkits don't do anything, you should still take one or two with you so you can gift drop with them. I open with Finesse -> Juggler, which means I won't have Intuition 2 for Phobos 2, but I need Juggler for clearing Hell's Arena as safely as possible, and Phobos 2 isn't too bad to do taking one hit or none without Int2 as a Scout, you can makedo with less ideal cover than the Marine as Imps won't outspeed you (well due to timing oddities, it is still possible for an Imp to get a double move on a waiting Scout, but it's quite uncommon). In this run, I nearly got through Phobos 2 damageless, until a charging Lost Soul surprised me out of a thin hallway and hit me for 5 damage, which was tempting to reset for but I just accepted it. Then comes Hell's Arena, clearing which is an even more painfully tedious affair when you can't intentionally take damage to destroy corpses, it can't be overstated how much I despise N! Hell's Arena and the corpse stacking minigame it forces, but it's a necessary evil here when the rewards are so valuable. First the Red Armor, which the -20% movespeed might make me take hits I could have avoided with less slow armor, but in the scenarios where damage is unavoidable, having Red Armor makes such a huge difference over Green and Blue Armor against the small fries, and while it's not great against Hell Knights and Cacodemons, it does at least reduce some damage from their plasma balls unlike Green Armor, so having Red Armor will significantly enhance the amount of hits I'm able to take. Then there is the Rocket Launcher that is a staple in nearly all my runs, having immediate access to corpse disposal is so important when a badly timed Hell Knight or Baron respawn can just absolutely ruin your run, and a rocket jumping is your best shot at getting past Anomaly with minimal damage if you don't get a Phobos 7 Invuln, as well as being crucial to extending your Invulns later or you might even get in a spot where raw rocket jumping will save your ass. The Plasteel Boots are also quite nice to have if you get a floor that forces you to run through acid or lava, that aforementioned run that made it to Deimos dies in that awful Phobos 6 without the Plasteel Boots to mitigate all the acid I had to run through. I will have to miss out on going into The Chained Court later on when the Unchained variant will be a death trap in a challenge you can't heal, but these items are far more valuable than the Chainsaw and free Berserks will be, while I also wouldn't even be able to get the mods in Chained Court without finding a Radsuit prior, since hitting the levers will be substantial unavoidable damage.

In this particular run, I managed to pull off another AoMC-less Hell's Arena Pwnage, and it's actually even harder to do here than in the standard game since I can only activate running once in the whole Arena. I won't be picking up the Cathedral's special reward later but getting a damageless Arena is still obviously nice when I can take so little damage, otherwise I would accept taking a couple hits in Hell's Arena just so the resets wouldn't get maddening. For the rest of Phobos, I hope I don't get mazes or too deadly of hot starts, and I do actively try to clear out floors when it's possible with minimal to no damage since I do really need the levels to survive tough floors later. Phobos 3 and 4 weren't so bad, and the latter even gave me a Double Shotgun that is very handy for this build, but Phobos 5 would give me a Pinky Cave that I took a couple hits in, which the Red Armor mitigated a lot but still 7 of my total 50 HP just permanently lost and the total EXP yield for the floor is quite low. Then Phobos 6 started me in a room with a Hell Knight, and when I got into a position to corner shoot him, another Hell Knight came from an angle with LoS on me and he got hits in while I couldn't kill him before the other Hell Knight reached me, putting me in this very bad spot. With the stairs nearby, I decide my only hope to keep the run alive is to rocket jump out towards the stairs (after getting out of the nearby acid barrel's range), any self-inflicted damage is painful in this run and rocket jumping without a Fireproof or at least P-modded Red Armor sucks, but it's either that or take multiple plasma balls in the ass as I try to run away. The rocket jump does keep me alive in exchange for 5 more HP lost, but then I made the bone-headed move of seeing if I could finish off the mortally wounded Hell Knight and didn't notice I depleted all my Shotguns, leading me to try firing with an unloaded Shotgun and reloading instead. Fortunately the one Hell Knight didn't attack and the other was still out of vision, so I just took a melee hit from the nearby Imp for 1 damage, but it's still even more damage I should have avoided and I'm knocked below half my total health allotment before even reaching the Anomaly. Also in retrospect I could have tried using that Phase Device I spawned near to escape the Hell Knight start, but I really wanted to try getting it to save for the Anomaly and it could have put me in a worse spot far away from the stairs, so it wouldn't have been an ideal gamble. It's not looking good, but the run gets much more serious when I get another coveted Phobos 7 Invuln; since the stairs were a bit far away and I didn't have many rockets, while the floor overall looked doable, I do clear it out first before grabbing the Invuln. I take 5 more damage as a result, but I do get the Agility Mods to build some much needed Tactical Boots, and a Power Mod to build a Tactical Shotgun later, as well as get a clean path to the stairs to ensure I can maximize that Invuln to get through Anomaly damageless, so it wasn't too bad. I also had the option of Military Base for a safe two levels and all the other useful stuff there, which I would have taken if I didn't have the Invuln, but since I did and I wasn't playing Vampyre in this run, taking the guaranteed damageless Anomaly is the better play here, especially when I had only 19 HP left and so may not have been able to survive the Anomaly even with rocket jumping if I wasn't Invuln'd.

After effortlessly rocket jumping through Anomaly and the remaining Invuln letting me clear out a hot start in Deimos 1 with a potentially deadly Commando, I'm able to then clear out the rest of Deimos 1 damageless. It could have been argued to have took that Invuln and already try rushing through the rest of the game, but with my low rocket supply and still not having Shottyhead, it would be far riskier to try that, so I stay to clear out Deimos 1 and then head into Deimos Lab. Now fighting the Shamblers in Deimos Lab without Vampyre would be suicidal here, but if played very carefully, I can clear out the pre-Shambler portion of the run for EXP, some mods, a Shell Box I'm going to really need for a very important special level coming up, potentially one of the special shotguns in the weapon cache, and I can farm the Revenants here for a huge rocket stockup, which I will need to successfully Invuln rush the rest of the game with a later Invuln. Unfortunately the weapon cache had a Jackal and Combat Pistol, the Jackal could be used for corpse disposal whenever the Rocket Launcher's explosion would be too big but it isn't that helpful here and the Combat Pistol is worthless in this run, but fortunately the rest of the level goes to plan and I get through it damageless, while also being able to farm a Revenant for a half dozen rocket stacks.

All that effort nearly ended up being for nought though, as Deimos 2 was a terrible arena that started me surrounded with little for cover and near a Commando that can instantly kill me, while I don't have Shottyhead yet to reasonably to fight in this position. I decide now is a time to use a Phase, and it gets me in a better position, but then when fighting off a nearby Pinky horde, there was not one but two more Commandos coming right for me, one of which got a near full plasma burst on me when I shot a barrel near an X not knowing it was a Commando and launched him into vision, knocking me down to only 7 HP left. He ended up in acid, so my only play was to activate running and stay out of the other Commando's vision while hoping running keeps me from getting hit by the other Commando until the acid finished him off, and very fortunately that Commando doesn't get any more hits on me in his next two bursts before the acid kills him, where I'm then able to fight off the Pinkies and other Commando thanks to the Shell Box I just got from Deimos Lab. I try sticking around to see if I could fight my way to the two Berserks that spawned on the other side of the map, when the third Commando I saw at the start gets to me and quickly revives after killing him, at which point I decide just fuck off and book it to the next floor. I reach the same floor as my previous best but with only 7 HP left, I'm really wanting an Invuln... which the game then promptly blesses me with and I'm able to immediately safely reach it. I take this opportunity to book it to the Deimos 4 special level, which turns out to be City of Skulls. I mention previously the Deimos 4 specials are important and are a major advantage for going the Shottyhead path, so why are they? Well I alluded to earlier that there are a couple other ways to heal outside of Vampyre, one such way being the Medical Armor and Medical Powerarmor, but with them only healing you up to 25% in this version, they won't get you out of hot start lethality range and would need the support of many Ironman levels to make a serious difference, which you'll be hard-pressed to fit in addition to the necessary combat traits, so they're not much a factor here even if you luck upon them. The other way to heal without Vampyre is with a Blood Skull, which normally are worse than a Large Medkit, but they can heal you much more than the aforementioned Medical Armors can, and well you have a very good chance of getting at least one if you kill the Agony Elemental, potentially two or even three, so any Blood Skull can essentially be an extra life in this challenge for non-Vampyre builds. I don't have Shottyhead yet to trivialize the Agony Elemental fight, and Shottyhead is also really needed to minimize damage in the rough openings of both levels, but with the Invuln to protect me, I can get through the opening of the Skull City without any damage, and then with Finesse + Tactical Shotgun + Reloader/Shottyman + the Shell Box, the Agony Elemental fight will still be pretty easy (hence why I said the Deimos Lab Shell Box was so important beyond just helping me survive hot starts). Indeed with those said things (and some Missile Launcher usage to save on shells, just making sure to not finish off the Agony Elemental with it since that would destroy the Skulls), I would kill the Agony Elemental and clear out the rest of the level without any damage, which rewarded me with two Blood Skulls!

However I do still need to secure a decent corpse pile to get that health back and not get fucked over by the next floor start, which isn't looking good when Deimos 5 starts me with this, while two of those Xs turned out to be Barons, and with not quite being at Shottyhead yet, I had to use the Missile Launcher to ensure the Baron died without getting a lethal hit on me, which blew up some corpses near the Baron that I really needed for the ASAP heal. I was going to see if I could draw out some of the Formers I heard near those few corpses to get more health back, but then out popped a Commando into the nearby doorway, if he stepped out I would probably have to use the Missile Launcher to be absolutely sure that he doesn't get a shot in on me that will be absolutely lethal, which would then blow up the corpses, so I make the safe play of using my first Blood Skull there... and he immediately walks back into his room. Regardless, while not an ideal Blood Skull I do get 25 HP back, so basically a half life, and with Shottyhead now being online, I'm in a much better spot. I do got the looming Cyberdemon fight though, and after having to skip out on too many floors along the way, it's not looking like I'll get the two more levels I need for Dodgemaster to guarantee getting past him, while I'm also in the bad position of not even having a Fireproof Red Armor that I was hoping to build, nor have I found any Radsuits either for more fire res. The third skull was a Hatred Skull, so as a backup I could use it to take some berserk with me into Babel if I don't get a Deimos 6 or 7 Invuln. Deimos 6 would be a Pain Elemental + Lost Soul Cave with a nasty looking start, but thanks to the recently acquired Shottyhead, I get through it without damage, though this floor was very bad for EXP that I really need, ensuring that I won't get the two levels I need for Dodgemaster before Babel even if I went into Spider's Lair (which I considered since I had Shottyhead and the Missile Launcher, but if I wasn't going to get the levels for Dodgemaster anyway then it wasn't worth the risk), in addition to the floor not having any helpful items. Deimos 7 on the other hand does have the Invuln to guarantee getting past Babel... but it's a barrel level, and I get a nasty hot start with a Cacodemon in my face, an Arachnotron to the north, and the east + south doorways having more enemies behind them, all while there were lethal barrels around that will kill me or destroy cover. I immediately run for the west door for very dangerous cover near a Napalm Barrel and already get hit by the Arachnotron as I open the door, but it's my best-looking shot here, while it also turns out those east enemies are a group of Hell Nobles. At first it is working alright, the Cacodemon only gets one hit in on me before I kill him and with Shottyhead I'm able to keep the Arachnotron + Hell Nobles back, but unfortunately a group of enemies from the west approach, with a Shotgunner then walking into view, putting me in a very bad spot; I can't shoot him without blowing up that nearby Napalm Barrel which will be invariably fatal and he'll blow it up instead to kill me if I don't get out of this spot, but then getting out puts me back in range of the Arachnotron + approaching Hell Nobles, while I already expended my tactics... But I have to take my chances with getting out instead of staying still to get killed by that barrel, and fortunately the Arachnotron doesn't immediately fire, so I can finish him off with the Missile Launcher before eating another plasma burst, but unfortunately the approaching Hell Knight gets a hit on me to knock me down to only 14 HP left. Thanks to Shottyhead I'm able to kill off the remaining Nobles and the approaching Former platoon without taking any more damage, but with only 14 HP left and absolutely not wanting to die before I reach that Invuln, I make the decision to use my second Blood Skull despite only having four corpses around for 20 more HP instead of a full heal, not how I wanted to use these Skulls but waiting for the perfect opportunity could kill such a promising run. Luckily whatever enemy was in the southern room wandered away and there were no barrels near the Invuln, giving me an uncontested path to it, where I then immediately book it to Babel.

I made a mistake when searching for the Cyberdemon, I completely missed him and he ended up being near the start to the south, so after rocket jumping across the entire map, I had to rocket jump all the way back to find him. Thanks to the P-modded Double Shotgun at point blank range, this mistake isn't costly as I'm still able to kill him before the Invuln runs out, surpassing Icy's best Masochist Angelic attempt and getting me to Hell with 34 HP remaining, so it's looking very good here if I can just find another Invuln or avoid any horrible hot starts that even Shottyhead can't handle... Well Hell 1 would be a maze, which are always very bad news and I used up most of my current Invuln killing the Cyberdemon... but it has an Invuln, and I reach it just as my current Invuln runs out! With so many rockets still in my inventory, I just go for it and try invincible rocket jumping the rest of the way. After blasting through Hell 1, 2, 3, and The Vaults, Hell 4 would have another Invuln to stack on my current Invuln, basically securing the run. I accidentally went down the stairs to Mortuary, but with rocket jumping I can still get out without wasting too much Invuln and even nabbed the Nuclear BFG to ensure I win in case my Invuln runs out against the Mastermind, but that wouldn't be needed when Hell 6 had a double Invuln to extra secure the run. Hell 7 would have yet one more Invuln near Dis' stairs, but it's not needed when I have so much already, and so can kill the Mastermind with plenty of Invuln to spare.

At last, I get the first officially confirmed Masochist Angelic in 0.9.9.7, indeed proving mine and Icy's belief that the badge was possible, and with it I now have 12 Angelics to become the first person to have verifiably achieved the Chaos General rank in any version. Altogether I took 13 deaths (8 with Marine for the Vampyre strat and 5 with Scout trying for the Shottyhead strat), alongside many resets on the first two floors when I took more than a single light hit on them, with my attempts being spread out over two days, which isn't as bad as it could have been, though this badge was certainly extremely extremely difficult, with a requirement of pristine play and needing a large amount of luck on top. Maybe it's not quite as brutal as Eagerness Angelic in this version, but I would say it was even harder than Inquisitor Angelic despite that badge also similarly being unwon until I got it recently, and would rate Masochist above Strongman and Berserker Angelic despite them being even more luck-based, since they have a laxer skill requirement (especially the latter). I understand why this badge went unwon for so long, you need to be at the absolute top of your game even with viable luck, and like Icy said, it's very tilting too when any single minor mistake or little unavoidable hit that could normally be brushed off is amplified by magnitudes in this challenge. In JHC-era DRL this badge will be affected by several of the major changes since, most notably you'll no longer be able to infinitely camp thanks to the newly added Enraged Timer, but I think that won't actually be as big of a deal here, since most of the damage you'll take and eventual deaths will be from hot starts before you reach viable cover, it doesn't matter if you can infinitely camp or not if you get spawned in a maze with dozens of enemies immediately surrounding you with no good cover to get behind. Meanwhile, respawns no longer happening in vision will be quite significant for this badge; aside from hot starts, a lot of damage will come from enemies respawning near you out of cover or when you're corner shooting another enemy at a different angle, which happens annoyingly often even early on in floors before the global respawn chance gets high. There's also other little things like Hell's Arena eventually getting changed to no longer require killing respawns and so being much less tedious to clear on N!, Marines having inherent +10% energy resistances to make surviving to Vampyre a bit less brutal, the Medical Armors getting buffed to heal to 50% and Blood Skulls getting buffed to heal 10 HP per corpse, powerups becoming time-based and so will last longer in the later game, Reloader getting buffed to help boost Shotgun combat, Ironman and TaN getting buffed to be more viable survival-extending options, and Technical Mods giving resistances to armors to farther help survivability. There are however going to be other things that make it harder, such as berserk and Vampyre being nerfed so surviving to Vampyre is no longer a win condition on its own, Finesse and Intuition 2 getting nerfed, Scout's stair sense no longer detecting red stairs so you're less able to use them for quicker escapes, powerups possibly getting changed to no longer stack duration, and I put in a proposal to make N! City Of Skulls much more difficult, which as a side effect would make retrieving Blood Skulls for this challenge a more daunting prospect. Overall I think it may become slightly easier, but it'll be hard to say until I go for this badge again in a later version.

Well my 0.9.9.7 journey is coming close to finishing, I won't be getting the three more Angelics needed for the Chaos Marshal rank, guess I'm not good enough to play Vandam's proposed "N+" difficulty that he wanted locked behind that rank, but there is one more Angelic I can get in Everyman Angelic to set what will probably be the closest anyone can verifiably get to 100% completion in 0.9.9.7 without outright cheating. With all this shit talking of Vandam and his unsubstantiated boasts though, it's only fair if I provide the video proof for this Masochist Angelic run here (I strongly recommend watching it sped up, lots of very slow playing and lots of pausing when I was live posting about the run in the Jupiter Hell Discord). Here is the mortem if you just want to see that, which are not only helpful for evidence but also for other people to learn things about your run that will help them possibly achieve these badges for themselves:

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

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

-- 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.

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


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.