*Ensure every badge that requires a specific medal actually explicitly requires said medal.
This covers several different badges such as the Destroyer badges, I listed every one in the OP that is applicable, but simply if Dual Angels remain able to win badges from both challenges, this should be done to patch out the most blatant AoOC and AoCn abuse that clearly go against the badges' intended challenge.
*Make all Veteran Badges disallow AoMC, AoLT, AoCn, and AoOC.
Currently the Veteran Badges can be won in any sort of game mode, which is ok, there should be some badges with freedom on how you win them, but these four challenges in particular make the Veteran Badges much easier to win. In particular, this has contributed to Veteran Diamond being the most won Diamond according to the 0.9.9.7 Badge Hunters Thread, with a whopping 18 people winning it, and then Veteran Angelic is the 2nd most won Angelic after the infamously easy Shottyman Angelic, with 13 people recorded winning it, which is also common than all but six of the Diamond Badges. That was in 0.9.9.7, but nothing was changed about these particular challenges that would prevent them from still making these badges much easier, other than AoOC being made slightly harder with a weaker starting loadout. You can conversely argue however that it's ok to have a few easier Diamonds and Angelics, so I won't push hard on this one.
*Make Armorer Gold, Platinum, and Diamond a less horrendous grind.
Aside from the unwinnable ones, the absolute worst-designed badges are these three, not only having very little skill involved in obtaining them, but they also require an atrociously long grind if you play naturally, and trying to force them any faster would require running several A666 games, while you should obtain most or literally every other badge in their respective classes before getting these Armorer badges. For examples:
- When I was doing my 100% 0.9.9.8 attempt, I obtained every other Gold before Armorer Gold and 15 Platinums, I had to run an A666 game to force getting Armorer Gold else it would have taken me who knows many more non-A100/666 games to get it.
- When I stopped playing said 0.9.9.8 file, I had 18 Platinums while still being 357 specials away from Armorer Platinum, so realistically I could have easily won the 7 other remaining Platinums long before getting Armorer Platinum. Even running A100/666 games wouldn't speed it up that much, since each special item only gets counted once per run, so even if I did found especial special item in each run, it would still take at last a half dozen A666 games to win Armorer Platinum at this point.
- When it comes to Armorer Diamond, on my 0.9.9.7 file, over the course of 299 games, including over dozen A100 games and 3 completed A666 games, I still do not have Armorer Diamond!. According to my play time, I got nearly a thousand hours clocked in (938:02:49:35 to be exact with my play time), assume half that time was the game running idle and it's still absurd I do not have Armorer Diamond yet with that much play time. Depending on how stingy the game's RNG wants to keep being with dropping the last Subtle Knife I need for this awful badge, I could very realistically get all the 6 other Diamonds I do not have yet and even get all the remaining 5 winnable Angelics before I get Armorer Diamond, and I only started actively going for these badges last month!
These badges could serve as "easy" badges that players of any skill level can get, since only Azrael's Scythe actually requires you to play above ITYTD to get it, but their requirements are so absurdly high, that no lower level players will ever play remotely enough to get these higher level Armorer Badges. For reference, according to the aforementioned Badge Hunters thread, in over a decade of 0.9.9.7, only two players ever reported actually earning Armorer Diamond; Tormuse and Icy, i.e. two of the most legendary and hardcore DRL players, and according to the mortems, it was well over 1000 games for Tormuse before he won it, while in Icy's case, it was over 2000 games, not to mention Icy is also a heavy A100/666 player too. We can all agree the grind for these badges is unreasonable, right? Also the more special items that get added, the grind for Gold and Diamond will get even worse (while these badges shouldn't be a factor against adding more special items to the game). For what to exactly do with these badges:
- Change Armorer Gold to collecting 100 total special items. This is a much less giant jump compared to the Silver requirement of a mere 30 total special items, and a player good enough to start winning Gold badges should shortly add it to their Gold collection.
- Change Armorer Platinum to collecting 300 total special items. I contemplated the 500 that JHC has for its Armorer Platinum, but I think 300 is more reasonable (Silver gets you a tenth of the way there and Gold gets you one-third), and players capable of winning Platinums won't have this badge delaying them getting all Platinums as long as the 500 or especially 1000 requirement would.
- Change Armorer Diamond to collecting 1 of every special item and 500 total. There's just no reason for why you should need to collect more than 1 of each special item for Armorer Diamond, what does a player prove by finding the Dragonslayer two more additional times after their first time finding it? The secondary requirement ensures you can't win Armorer Diamond before the Platinum.
*Increase Lightfoot Bronze's floor requirement to level 16.
I mean this is a Bronze so who really cares, but since AoLT is one of the easiest challenges, it doesn't quite make sense that its Bronze has a floor requirement of 9 like some of the other harder challenges, especially when it's braindead easy to just run through Phobos on HNTR with AoLT's speed boost without even trying to fight back, so I feel it makes more sense for Lightfoot Bronze to have a slightly harder requirement like the other easier challenges.
*Decrease Quartermaster Bronze's floor requirement to level 9.
Conversely, Quartermaster Bronze should be made easier, as AoRA is one of the harder challenges, that people tend to notoriously struggle with their first time playing it, so it also makes no sense that it has one of the harder Bronze requirements. Again this is just Bronze badges so it feels nitpicky, but the requirement of Quartermaster and Lightfoot Bronze are inverse to their challenge's respective difficulties.
*Bump Marksman Gold's difficulty down to HMP.
It never made much sense to me that the Marksman series skipped HMP and jumped straight to UV for Marksman Gold, especially when AoMr wasn't an easy challenge. In fact back in 0.9.9.7, I would say Marksman Gold was the hardest Gold badge, because being locked to pistols on UV was so brutal. The 0.10 SoG change reversing pistols' early games woes did made AoMr a lot easier, but I still think it doesn't justify skipping straight to UV, and regardless if you're able to beat AoMr on UV, you should be able to jump straight to the Platinum requirement and beat it with 100% kills. So for more clear delineation in the difficulty between the Gold and Platinum, this change should be made.
*Give Lightfoot Gold the additional requirement of beating AoLT in under 40000 turns.
As mentioned previously, AoLT is one of easiest challenges, and its Gold just requiring beating HMP with no additional requirement made it one of the easiest Golds. Adding the stipulation of winning in under 40000 turns makes sense to me, to both spice up Lightfoot Gold a bit and to also have a natural progression towards Lightfoot Platinum requiring winning in under 20000 turns.
*Give Daredevil Gold the additional requirement of getting 100% kills.
One of the super free Golds currently is Daredevil Gold. It's infamous how you can just spam quick AoOC games until you get lucky, and on HNTR, you don't even need much luck to get a game where you can easily run to the Mastermind with barely any fighting and then nuke her. I can run pacifist games in HNTR AoOC and easily get the luck needed to win in under 30 minutes. I would say Daredevil Silver is actually much less easy, since you can't so easily rush through it and will have to get through a boss you can't just nuke without Invuln. I think Daredevil Gold should be given a 100% kills stipulation; it would probably still be one of the easiest Golds, but at least this requirement will make players have to play through it more honestly and not just try rushing to the Mastermind with a nuke or Berserker (while also meaning they can't enter Mortuary/Limbo just to snag a free nuke unless they actually clear it).
*Change Arena Gold's requirement to beating it on UV in AoRA.
Prior to 0.10, Arena Gold had a well balanced requirement, since beating it in AoMr on UV was tough but not exceedingly so. However after SoG's change in 0.10 and pistols becoming far better in the early game as a result, beating Hell's Arena in AoMr is far easier, and so this is now overly easy for a Gold badge. What to change the requisite challenge to was a bit hard to decide; AoSh has it even easier, AoMC and AoLT would make this completely free, Hell's Arena is only slightly harder in AoP on account of coming with less health and no Berserk/Light Goggles, AoB is already used for the Diamond, AoD would make this harder than Arena Platinum, AoHu would be a bit much, AoPc is obviously unviable, and AoI and/or AoMs would be a good replacement but they already have a medal (Chess Master's Token) for this exact requirement. That leaves AoRA, which would actually be a great replacement challenge, since beating UV Hell's Arena in AoRA is quite tough and requires some luck (especially if you don't get Hellrunner and Reloader), but it shouldn't be harder for players to do than beating Hell's Arena on N! as the Platinum badge requires. Also it would be fun to encourage beating Hell's Arena in a quick manner.
*Perhaps give Longinus Gold an additional stipulation, such as no Berserker and Malicious Blades?
Yet one more super free Gold badge is Longinus Gold, beating Unholy Cathedral is incredibly mindless for any lategame melee build, and even low level melee builds in AoOC can very easily beat it. It just makes no sense that beating Unholy Cathedral gives you the same tier of badge as beating Mortuary/Limbo does, at least The Vaults also giving a Gold badge for just beating it can be justified by it being tricky to figure out without looking it up and needing to beat two prior special levels to do so. Not to mention that it is also much easier to get than the special level Silvers. Giving it the additional stipulation of disallowing Berserker and Malicious Blades would mean players wouldn't just be able to mindlessly steamroll through it with typical melee builds, but unlike the harder Longinus badges, they would still be allowed Brute. Maybe you could add a Bronze and Silver tier to the Longinus series, with the Bronze badge being to simply enter Unholy Cathedral and leave it alive, while the Silver badge can be to just beat it with any traits, and then the Gold can be this proposed requirement, which along with the proposed Platinum requirement, all seems like a much more natural badge progression than how the Longinus series currently is (why is there no Longinus Bronze and Silver to begin with?).
*Change Berserker Platinum's kill requirement to Explorer Pin.
It was proposed previously to just remove Berserker Platinum's kill requirement given the similarity to Gargulec Cross, and beating UV AoB on its own would be an ok Platinum-level challenge, but it would be rather mundane for a Platinum Badge, while you would still be doubling up Berserker Platinum with any Gargulec Cross run. So perhaps give it an Explorer requirement to spice it up, while also making doubling it up with Gargulec Cross a more complicated endeavor, as entering any special levels would mean having to kill everything in them to keep Gargulec Cross alive (or at least everything before additional waves spawn in). I additionally think it would tie in nicely to the proposed new Berserker Diamond requirement of beating N! AoB with no special levels visited.
*Change Shottyman Platinum's requirement to beating it on UV beating it in under 40000 turns.
Shottyman Platinum isn't glaringly imbalanced but has two particular issues, first if you're able to beat AoSh on N! than doing so with 80% kills for the Diamond isn't meaningfully more difficult and so players would nearly always get the Platinum + Diamond together, and secondly it's just a boring Platinum. With what I'm about to propose for Shottyman Diamond though, I think Shottyman Platinum would make more sense and be more interesting with its difficulty requirement being bumped down to UV, but now have the additional requirement of beating AoSh in under 40000 turns. This would not only have a more natural progression to the proposed new Shottyman Diamond requirement, it would also give players another Platinum they can get without playing N!, but having to play through UV at such a fast pace will make it sufficiently more difficult than the Gold.
*Give Centurial Platinum the additional requirement of getting Experience Medal.
Centurial Platinum is fine as it is and the vast majority of Centurial Platinum runs probably incidentally got the Experience Medal anyway, this will just have a better progression to the proposed Centurial Diamond change of beating N! A100 with an Experience Cross.
*Change UAC Diamond to require only UV, disallow Berserker, or do both.
While UAC Diamond looks imposing at first, it is actually a very easy Diamond, that is easier than at least half the Platinums, with the badge having the clear obvious optimal strategy of rushing through the game with a melee Scout that anyone can copy and 20 minutes being a surprisingly generous time limit when you're rushing through the game berserked most of the time. According to the Badge Hunters thread, this was one of the most won Diamonds in 0.9.9.7 with a dozen people winning it, and if you look at the mortems, they all cleared the 20 minute requirement by several minutes at least, with the majority being under 15 minutes and some even almost getting under 10 minutes. It was suggested that this could be a 0.9.9.7 thing and changes since then would make it harder, but after running it in 0.10, I got a 11:17 first try without even trying hard to be fast with my physical inputs and making some serious time-losing flubs. The berserk nerf does make it more difficult to survive rushing through the game, but the game engine itself faster counterbalances this and it wouldn't take many resets to get the luck needed to not die during a melee rush. An unusual idea to buff this badge's difficulty would be to make it strictly require UV, as speedrunning through the game on UV would actually be harder without N!'s doubled powerups/healing and faster levelling. Alternatively, you just disallow Berserker, as getting to Chained Court ASAP and rushing through the rest of the game with Berserker is the one clear dominant strategy for speedruns, and any time limit that would make this a reasonably difficult Diamond-level challenge for Berserker builds would be unreasonably difficult or even impossible for non-Berserker builds. If you want to be extra sure with making this a Diamond-worthy challenge, you can do both the UV-only and no Berserker requirements.
*Change Shottyman Diamond's kill requirement to beating it on N! in under 20000 turns.
JHC's Shottyman Diamond equivalent got the new much more interesting requirement of beating N! AoSh in under 20000 turns. This ended up being terrible for JHC, as due to that game's different structuring that makes JHC longer and much harder to rush through, beating the game on N! that fast with purely shotguns is probably impossible or close to it, and even Sereging it with a Berserker build requires a ridiculous amount of luck. With DRL's structure being conductive to much faster playthroughs however, this requirement would actually work well here for a Diamond-worthy challenge. There was some concern given that it could still be unreasonably tight even in DRL, but I would prove it was possible with a UAC Diamond run in under 20K turns that was essentially shotguns only, and that was in 0.9.9.7 before the Reloader and Gunrunner buffs that would make this less difficult, as well as under real time pressure that invariably caused many turn-inefficient moves. Plus kill requirements are boring and overdone, so more varied badge requirements would be appreciated.
*Give Marksman Diamond the additional requirement of getting the Explorer Pin.
Marksman Diamond was fine previously, as despite being only one of two Angel-related Diamonds with no secondary requirement (the other being Centurial Diamond), it was actually one of the hardest Diamonds in 0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8 to get purely because of how much pistols sucked, particularly in the early game. They sucked so much that the people who got it through Sereging basically just played it as a pseudo-pacifist run and didn't even bother trying to actually use the pistols. With 0.10's SoG change however, while pistols became weaker in the lategame, they became far far better in the early game and better in the mid game too, so AoMr is overall easier now. Thus an additional stipulation should be added to keep this badge an appropriate Diamond-level challenge, with the idea being to make it require Explorer, as being pistol-locked would especially complicate getting out of the newly added Toxin Refinery/Central Processing, Military Base/Phobos Lab, Abyssal Plains, Halls Of Carnage, and of course Mortuary/Limbo. The upcoming suggestion to change Hunter Diamond would also mean Explorer will be unused as a secondary Diamond requirement.
*Change Inquisitor Diamond's Marine-only requirement to disallowing Ironman and Tough as Nails.
Inquisitor Diamond was one of the most fearsome Diamond badges in 0.9.9.7, with only four people recorded winning it (Sereg, Icy, papilio, and myself, the latter two being the only ones who did it purely). In 0.10 however it's far easier, with the main culprit being the currently OP Survivalist, that even if the Marine-only restriction didn't exist, would be the perfect mastery for significantly nerfing this challenge. My first thought was to disallow Survivalist even if it gets its proposed nerfs, but it would be awfully restrictive to require a specific class and ban one of their masteries on top. I was thinking though, the Marine-only restriction doesn't hit as hard anymore due to the Marine getting the inherent energy-resistances passive, so the Marine in AoP isn't so disadvantaged, and all the Marine's non-Vampyre masteries got buffed too. So instead of having the Marine-only restriction, allow any class but disallow Ironman and Tough as Nails; one of the primary things that makes AoP so difficult is the player's health supply being severely reduced to only medkits and being unable to repair armor without risky levers or rare mods, so traits that let you get more health back from medkits and give you inherent defenses are a lot more valuable, making these traits pivotal to nerfing the threat of AoP (especially so when both of these traits are much better than they were in 0.9.9.7). Banning TaN will additionally prevent the use of Survivalist regardless of its OPness, and it would prevent Entrenchment, which would probably be the second best mastery choice for AoP after Survivalist. Probably still wouldn't be as brutal as 0.9.9.7 Inquisitor Diamond was, but this change should make it go back to being one of the harder Diamonds instead of one of the easiest.
*Change Hunter Diamond's Explorer requirement to disallowing Intuition.
Hunter Diamond's Explorer requirement didn't really add much to its difficulty and seemed rather tacked on. Meanwhile if you run Cateye, which you could get as early as floor 3 with the insane EXP rate of N! AoD, the primary hurdle of the challenge got negated and you'll just be essentially playing a normal N! game with no map memory as a masterless Scout, except with a doubled EXP rate that makes it actually easier than standard N!. Even with just Intuition 2, you significantly nerf the main threat of vision reduction, and Intuition 1 helps too by letting you still see powerup locations despite Computer Maps no longer working. It seems very obvious to me that a no Intuition requirement would be far more fitting and difficult for Hunter Diamond than the Explorer requirement is (an Intuition ban would also prevent the use of Cateye). If either iteration of the proposed Hunter Angelic gets added, it too should get the no Intuition requirement for the same reasoning.
*Increase Daredevil Diamond's kill requirement to 100%.
As explained with Daredevil Gold, the nature of AoOC makes it easy to just spam quick runs until you get lucky, and while Daredevil Diamond has an 80% kill requirement to make you have to at least kill things, this is still easy to achieve rushing through the game, in addition to giving you the leeway to completely skip an overly bad floor or two, such as any Arachnotron or Nightmare Demon caves. It also doesn't make sense that while Elite Diamond requires beating the entire standard game on N! with 90+% kills, you got another Diamond requiring you to beat a third of the game with a smaller kill percent requirement. Plus with the change of respawns no longer counting towards kill percent, the hurdle of lacking corpse disposal no longer matters (not that the difficulty of disposing corpses even mattered previously when nearly two dozen people won Daredevil Diamond across all pre-0.10 versions).
*Change Speedrun Angelic's real time requirement to under 8 minutes.
Icy and I previously agreed that this infamous unwinnable badge should have its requirement bumped up to 10 or even 12 minutes. However when looking at the UAC Diamond times, I found several people came close to getting their UAC Diamond run in under 10 minutes. while I found a run by papilio that got under 10 minutes and a run by Sereg that got under 9 minutes. This is on top of DRL getting engine improvements since then that makes it play faster since those 0.9.9.7 runs (particularly mitigating all the pauses whenever the game renders projectiles flying around). And as mentioned previously, I got a run nearly under 11 minutes despite not trying to play as physically fast as possible and getting some clearly lousy early game level luck (getting any early maze with stairs on the opposite end would make you reset on any serious Speedrun Angelic attempt). 4 minutes is still completely out of the question, but I think 8 minutes will be a reasonable threshold that will be extremely difficult while not venturing into "spin the slot machine thousands of times until you win" territory for top level players, and so will be revising the proposal to that.
*Remove Marksman Angelic's kill requirement and replace it with disallowing Cateye.
As I ranted about under Hunter Diamond, Cateye just significantly neuters Angel of Darkness, and indeed everyone who has won Marksman Angelic did so with Cateye. This wasn't so bad in 0.9.9.7 when pistols sucked so badly and needed any sort of buoy thrown to them, and said pistol suckiness made it extremely hard to survive long enough with reduced vision even with doubled EXP to reach Cateye, especially as you needed to get SoG3 first to have any chance and thus delaying Cateye. But as also explained prior, pistols are a lot better now with the SoG change, especially in the early game, and so surviving long enough in AoD to get Cateye is no longer such an arduously excruciating task. As such, the pointless kill requirement should instead be replaced with disallowing Cateye, forcing players to engage with this badge the intended way and encouraging more varied builds (you could also just ban Intuition too like was proposed for Hunter Diamond/Angelic, but I think you can leave Intuition allowed as a mercy, as even if you know enemies are right outside your vision, pistols are still heavily disadvantaged when they can't fire back against these enemies without the out-of-vision accuracy penalty).
*If Angel of Drought is added, change Shottyman Angelic to beating AoSh + AoDr on N!
This is preemptive, but if the proposed Angel of Drought does get added, I think the notoriously easy Shottyman Angelic could instead be spruced up by replacing AoOC with AoDr in the requisite Dual Angel combo. It would need testing after that to determine an appropriate kill requirement if any (or perhaps if 100% kills is feasible), but this would be an obviously more fitting asynergistic combo than AoSh + AoOC (which frankly never made much sense), and I basically already did this in JHC with 100% kills to boot in that bugged beta version for one of my most tense runs ever in either game. Also there probably should be an additional stipulation that disallows building Nano-shrapnel, because otherwise the dominant strategy would be resetting until you get a Nano mod in Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab (or find one randomly) to then build a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun that invalidates the challenge (could still apply a Nano raw to a shotgun, but aside from the Plasma Shotgun, raw Nanoing shotguns doesn't work well with their limited or non-existent clips and so you'll still need other shotguns loaded to kill most enemies).
*Revising the proposed Daredevil Angelic to clearing AoOC + AoP with 100% kills.
When Icy originally proposed Daredevil Angelic, it was an AoOC + AoD combo, but when thinking of it now, Angel of Purity is clearly the far more asynergistic combo with AoOC, when successful AoOC runs heavily depend on powerups. Even when Sereg and Icy Sereg'd Inquisitor Diamond, it took them several hundreds of tries and of course both finished with abysmal kill percents. As such, I'm revising the proposal to replace AoD with AoP.
*Add Gatekeeper Angelic, which requires clearing Phobos Anomaly, Tower of Babel, and Hell Fortress all damageless on N! in a single run.
When I originally brought up the idea of Gatekeeper Angelic, Icy shot it down as being too easy for an Angelic. The original suggestion was Anomaly + Babel + Dis, and while the Mastermind should be no longer so easy to beat damageless with its AI change + possibly impending flinching threshold buff, I think it would be better to replace Dis with Hell Fortress. Aside from being more difficult, it makes more sense for an Angelic anyway to require no damaging the true final boss. The only caveat is this badge should only be added if the proposal of having Hell Fortress turn off powerups when you enter it is implemented, as otherwise, it would be too easy and cheesy to just find an Invuln in Hell then rush to Hell Fortress to kill Carmack damageless with Invulnerability (maybe have the badge require not using the Lava Element too so you can't use it to kill Carmack damageless with a high DPS build?). Also of course nuking any of these three levels should disqualify you from earning the badge.