What was the first wad you played where you realized you had bit off way more than you can chew?

For me it was very early on in my dooming years. I decided to tackle solo net plutonia after thinking I had mastered it. 

I would say the tougher maps from The Master Levels when i first played them, particularly TEETH and Mephisto’s Mausoleum. The latter was an absolute slog and i needed to save-scum a lot

Plutonia (yeah I suck that much)

Plutonia map32 and Valiant map31

[Removed]

Italo Doom

DOOM1.WAD

Hell Revealed power bombed me through the dinner table. It than proceeded to rip out the kitchen sink and bash it on my skull repeatedly while humming D_RUNNIN. I still have nightmares about it to this day.

Hell Revealed. Both because it isn't enjoyable as a mapset for the most part and because it was very difficult for me at the time.

Uhhh Hell Revealed I guess? That was way before I concerned myself with pistol starts, maxes or had any Doom skills/book knowledge. It was very apparent that this is no Plutonia 2 and requires some esoteric (for the me back then) knowledge on how to play the game.

After almost 20 years off Doom (before which I played nothing but the IWADs and some shovelware) I randomly found out people were still making maps for that fossil of a game. Figure that! First thing I did was download a couple PWADS at random, one of them was Sunder.

I'll let you imagine how well that went. 

As a kid: Plutonia. There was this phase when all my friends had moved onto more modern shooters such as Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, and I insisted on playing Doom. I clearly remember thinking that I was good at Doom, my friends thought so too, and then came on Final Doom. I’m not sure if I beat Evilution, but I certainly remember Plutonia beating me. I didn’t complete it until Unity port, I think.

As an adult, last year when I got Doom on my PC: I’d almost like to say Sunder too, because I can’t do the first level of it, but I think I knew it might be hard. So it’s gotta be Scythe 2 instead. The first levels might have been doable, but when I was sandwiched by a horde of revenants in some mine facility level with train tracks, I started suspecting I might do well to play some other wads first (like Scythe 1) to git guder.

(This was some 11 months ago now, I wonder if the time would be ripe…)

Hell Revealed. It was the first megawad I played, though probably not the first wad; I'm pretty sure I played nuts.wad sooner, probably even before I played Doom II. Contrary to popular belief, Nuts is easy as long as you don't expect to kill all of the cyberdemons (there isn't nearly enough ammo for that). I'm not sure if I actually managed to exit at that time, having no experience with slaughter or speedrunning, but it didn't seem like a wad that should be taken seriously anyway.

Anyway, Hell Revealed. At the time, I had a bad habit of using the SSG or regular shotgun all the time and being irrationally conservative with big guns (e.g. the BFG) to the extent that using such weapons often didn't even occur to me. Or maybe I had wasted all my BFG ammo in some useless place. Whatever the case, the cage trap in HR Map13 seemed impossible, even though I'd saved right before it. I was eventually able to just barely scrape by and finish the level with the usual frequent saving, but by then, I had no interest in giving map14 a serious try. It was supposed to be even harder, after all.

The next wad I played was Scythe and it went much better, though I do remember having a bizarrely hard time with map07 (yes, really). I did finish map30 with all the kills, but it probably took multiple hours and upwards of 60 saves.

Plutonia, especially MAP15 and one of the last maps (MAP27 I think).

Definitely Plutonia, I did get tripped up a bit by the invisible bridges early on (not a mechanic you saw in the earlier Doom games), and even when playing on I'm Too Young to Die, I remember limping around the 3rd level or so with like 3% health, lol.

sunder or sunlust (I always get the names mixed up) This is why I avoid slaughter maps. Hell revealed is a also difficult but the maps are ugly so I gave up. 

When I first got into PWADs in 1999, having made it through the likes of Icarus and Cleimos 2, I tried Dystopia 3... only to be so utterly defeated by the arachnotron ambush on map02 that I quit playing Doom2 PWADs and went entirely Doom1 for months afterwards.
 

Ancient Aliens on UV. I thought I had it handled, but had major difficulty...

Scythe's Fire and Ice and Hell Revealed's Knockout. Even with saves both of them fucked me up.

Sunlust map20, Sunder at either map02 or map03, Italo-Doom at map01

Years and years ago, I made it through Scythe II on UV as far as the end of MAP22. By that point, it had been getting harder, sure, and was a bit of a struggle at points, but I managed, with a handful of health and ammo, to get to MAP23.

And then MAP23 opened with a deafening HRAAAWWWW and the roars of Cyberdemons and after a few tries running around, trying desperately and vainly to find any kind of grounding, I realized I was finally at the end of my rope and that it was only going to get worse from there. 
 

I’m starting into Sunlust now, but on HNTR because now I’m old and I know better 

Alien Vendetta, realised 'this is too much' around map 4 or so, stopped at Beast Island. Nowadays I have evolved as a player and can get through much harder things

Hell Revealed, specifically MAP32: Mostly Harmful. The first level I encountered where knowing how to use the BFG was required, which was a skill I hadn't acquired yet.

Not sure if this fully counts but it IS technically an IWAD:

Hexen for the Playstation 1.

I swear, it's impossible to beat that version of the game as anyone but the Cleric... >_>

Looks like Hell Revealed was a baptism of fire for many...

Speed of Doom. Had absolutely zero fun playing those maps. They're crafted beautifully though.

Combat. Shock. So you know what it's like when you're less than halfway through the last map and you run out of ammo against the biggest horde of Revenants you've ever seen because you foolishly wasted your bullets on the Mancubi at the beginning whilst playing keyboard-only? Yeah.....

Sunlust. For some reason, with savescumming my way through Scythe and SoD on continuous play as my only pwad experience, I decided to see if I could single segment pistol start a handful of later Sunlust maps after seeing Decino's playthrough. I started on 28. It took 100s of attempts and I used every cheese I could find, but I did it. It would be months before returning to Sunlust. I've maxed the level several times since, but I still look on with pride at my 26+ minute run in the wrong complevel

 Tough Skin River.

A few years ago when i was getting back again into mapping i contributed to a map called impromptu minidido, where each participant would speedmap one section that would be put together into a single map. Not just the end result was a massive map, but it had contributions ranging from small sections with easy classic gameplay, to difficult slaughter setpieces. When it released i tried to complete the whole map, but the sudden difficulty spikes between sections completely caught me off guard, and after getting stuck on a difficult section i realized i had bitten more than i could had chewed at the time