If you were to remove a Doom II enemy...

[roadworx]

termrork said:

never in a million years I will understand why so many people dislike arch-viles... they are so awesome! I mean come on.. it is the by far most creative creature of doom. It's attack is so unique which allows you to handle with skill and practice. I partially admit that the ressurecting all kind of monsters can be annoying, but I think it is the player side which has to go to the offensive to prevent him from doing this and or killing him first so he cannot resurect monsters.

i mean, i agree; the arch-vile is a cool enemy. but he just has too much health.

[rodster]

Pain Elemental + Lost Souls. Most annyoing monsters. Well if not both then only Pain Elemental.

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Chaingunners so mappers can't place them in out of sight elevated towers or randomly in closets\fall and get surrounded by 20 of them lol such trap. That and the little shits are either completely absent from a mapset or EVERYWHERE.

On archviles I actually hate when they are used as medics way more than as rare mini-bosses. Nothing is as fun as returning to a room you spent 15 mins cleaning then seeing it is all back up.

WELL.. The more I think about it the closer I realize the real answer : Badly placed monsters and obnoxiously designed shit rooms in maps.. SO I'd remove maps since they are the most annoying enemy.

[joepallai]

Icon of Sin--it's just not fun to shoot a wall

Also I'd change the Wolfenstein SS guys to turrets (always thought a military research center should have turrets of some kind)

[Chickensoup101]

Pain Elemental... Goddamn all them lost souls spawn! They're the reason why my Chaingun ammo and Plasma Gun cells running out so quick because of them.

[Job]

So...has anyone made a .deh for a pain elemental that spawns archviles instead of lost souls? It could be regular, full size AVs or LS sized ones with less health. Sounds like torturous, fun nightmare fuel.

[sesq]

Job said:

So...has anyone made a .deh for a pain elemental that spawns archviles instead of lost souls? It could be regular, full size AVs or LS sized ones with less health. Sounds like torturous, fun nightmare fuel.

I've made it so that Pain Elementals spawned other pain elementals, and that pain elementals would explode into pain elementals when they died.... Game quickly died.

[Spocks_Beard]

Chickensoup101 said:

Pain Elemental... Goddamn all them lost souls spawn! They're the reason why my Chaingun ammo and Plasma Gun cells running out so quick because of them.

Corners and Berserker Packs are your friend.

[Lord Shadow Z]

Arch-Viles

I am terrified of those things.

[Maes]

Sesq said:

I've made it so that Pain Elementals spawned other pain elementals, and that pain elementals would explode into pain elementals when they died.... Game quickly died.

Heh, that's really the best approximation of a "fork bomb" in Doom: PEs spawning other PEs can't really attack/damage anything, so they will just keep shooting ineffectively, quickly multiply at an exponential rate. Being able to kill them as soon as they spawn would only triple that rate, and if caught in a situation where the spawned PEs would explode immediately (e.g. in a wall, inside other monsters), it could easily freeze the game in an infinite spawning loop inside the same tic, until it ran out of memory and/or overwrote some critical part of memory.

[rehelekretep]

roadworx said:

i mean, i agree; the arch-vile is a cool enemy. but he just has too much health.

i thought this - perhaps if he had HK health? id be scared about messing about the balance.

[ZALGO]

Revenants, everyone always overuses them in even popular megawads. And I suck at fighting them in comparison to most other enemies.

Archviles also suck, five in one level is just wrong in a few doom wads I play.

[Frisky]

Pain Elementals. I have spoken.

[Sayok6]

I'd remove either the Arch-vile or the Pain Elementals.

[Cupboard]

Remove Baron of Hell. Keep the Hell Knight but make him pink. Barons have a lot of HP for how easy their projectiles are to dodge.

[rehelekretep]

EDIT: totally mis-read the thread title...

such a hard choice but im going to go with the PE, simply because lost souls are so irritating to deal with. i actually really like the mechanic of a mobile spawner, but just wish lost souls had less HP...

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Archviles are well balanced in Iwads they aren't used everywhere just because mappers can place them. They don't need a nerf just a damn tutorial to mappers to stop adding them whenever they have extra spaces in a monster closet.

[baja blast rd.]

Maybe you need a tutorial to teach you that the goal of mapping isn't to make maps that Pegg likes, but rather maps that the mapper will like. If those mappers find fighting AVs fun, they will place lots of AVs. You have options: you can learn how to fight AVs, drop the difficulty setting or -- if those are impossible, particularly the latter (some people's families will disown them if they are caught playing below UV, the horror!) -- play other mapsets.

[rehelekretep]

other difficulty settings? ヽ( ͡°⏠ ͡°)ﾉ

[ShoDemo]

Although the revenants fire rockets, I've learned how to dodge them. I stand still when they fire and dodge the last moment, because the rocket will just go straight back. Plus, revenants are easy to kill (four shotgun blasts, two with ssg).
Arch-viles: I love them for some strange reason. Maybe because arch-viles are healers and have personality with their human-like characteristics.
Pain Elementals: Banish them from existence! I hate them. I can kill them easily (ssg rocks), but each time that I face one it is a high priority enemy in my books, due to the damn lost souls (lost souls = less shotgun shells for me to use).

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

I pretty much find myself in the "they all have their uses" camp.

Chaingunners can be annoying, but I've seen enough places where the use of them has made a situation more exciting that I can't hate them.
Hellknight/Baron can be kind of dull, but fill the space where you want a tougher monster without giving it devious powers.
Spiderdemon would be a pretty strong candidate since it takes the chaingunner and trades most of his advantages for having lots of HP and a somewhat stronger attack, but is huge and unwieldy, and still goes down pretty easily to heavy weapons. Not the greatest monster of the bunch, but I do like the existence of a gigantic monster even if it could be done better.
Pain elemental seems basically to be most useful as a decoy to draw fire from other monsters because you want to kill it ASAP, but is otherwise an annoyance and also helpless if you can close to melee range with it. Also ports removing the spawning cap = just no.
I'm not really counting the Icon of Sin as a monster.

I'm going to have to go with the pain elemental.

Also, revenants are awesome. If there's one place I feel the Heretic/Hexen bestiaries have an unfortunate gap, it's the lack of a revenant/vore type monster (Heretic's nitrogolem almost qualifies, but he's so weak in comparison, both in damage done and seeker accuracy...) Arch-viles are also awesome.

[Outrageous Videos]

For all of doom definitely the spectre
For doom 2 probably the pain elemental
Those shits are just annoying and cause s huge mess you've got to clean up
I normally limit lost souls to 21 to keep it balanced

[drygnfyre]

Probably the specter. A redundant enemy and I remember it often causing weird graphical glitches for me when I played Doom on various computers.

[leodoom85]

PAIN ELEMENTAAAAAAL!!!!!!!!

[MARVELLER]

I could never remove the Pain Elemental, he's always looked cute and not threatening to me, something about his stupid little arms and his weird expression. 

When it comes to removing any of them, i don't really know, i guess Chaingunners kinda make The Spider Mastermind seem a bit less scary to me, aside from them being a huge pain in the ass.  I don't think there should be two enemies using the same weapon, even if Spider Mastermind uses a more powerful version.

[Spectre01]

I find myself not caring for Hell Knights lately and rarely find them better to use than Revenants or Cacodemons. Especially in slaughtermaps where they tend to exist as "stuff that dies to infighting" or for the sake of mowing down with Rockets or BFG. If you want to "wall-of-meat" the player, you can always use Barons, or again, a larger number of Revenants. In scenarios where they're mixed with Revenants, they tend to just make the latter less dangerous and reduce the difficulty of the encounter. I was messing around with an encounter recently and found that cutting 512 Hell Knights from it while keeping everything else nearly the same actually made it more challenging because it lessened the infighting simulator aspect and forced you to actually engage the threats, namely the 400 Revenants that spill into the map. They're also more boring to punch or fight in more casuals maps as well.

[baja blast rd.]

I feel like you made that post just to casually drop the '512 hell knights' and '400 revenants' lines. :D

[Fonze]

I think you have it backward: hell knights are generally better to use than barons. Take out any baron and replace with 2 hell knights; that's one very effective way to tell if a baron is used... effectively and in most cases you'll find that the two HKs simply work better; they control more area by their nature and 2:1 is a potential doubling of the fire-rate. Also, you can split them up and pressure the player from an additional angle.

 

That said, when slaughter-type scenarios come into play, or even just groups of mobs, it is generally best to mix both HKs and barons. For example, put a baron or three in front of a small/medium group of HKs; the fight dynamic changes now with a small amount of prioritization towards the HKs in the back over the barons up front, if nothing else to clear space faster as the mobs fan out and bump around each other. When put into this role, the barons serve to compliment the HKs by strengthening the group's health both individually and as a whole (as while monsters will die individually, having barons up front makes it more difficult for the player to 'kill the weaker ones first,' [faster to kill and therefore clear up space; a baron's worst nightmare] especially when both are of equal threat).

 

I think barons' problems (as with most monsters) are increased exponentially in legit slaughter-type scenarios. If your slaughter encounter revolves around a giant wall of health slowly closing in on you while you list lazily to the left to avoid straight-shot, non-leading projectiles and deal with other mobs then you might want to reconsider your approach. Keep in mind also that this giant wall of health has to be cleared after the main threat and the exciting part has subsided. HKs take up more room and shoot more per unit of health (and health=time, time spent "cleaning up"); that's the most important thing about them when compared to barons.

 

Barons are support monsters in every sense, meaning that you cannot rely on them to control a battlefield. They aren't a boss, they aren't an independent force; they aren't even as useful as a lowly demon. They can control a small space or the area immediately surrounding them, sure, but large areas are their bane and often times they fall short of other monsters when put into this role, which isn't their natural one.

 

It's ironic in a way that AVs, the medics, the intuitive 'support' -style monsters, are actually more of an independent force than what was presented as the first boss of the original Doom, who even then needed a buddy, clunky-robot players and me at 7, a group of spectres, somewhat tight quarters easy to get cornered in, and some barrels to make the fight remotely challenging.

 

That said, I like barons and they do shine in their natural roles, but I've always found their best uses to be 'monsters meant to be skipped and follow the player' and my example before: mixed in with HKs, preferably with some in the very front. HKs are far more useful, especially for slaughter-type scenarios. They were a godsend in Doom 2, along with every other monster, heh.

[drygnfyre]

I agree that hell knights are good to keep around. Since barons have 1k HP, much higher than most other "lesser" demons, there was an issue in Doom where barons were used too often and thus were just a drain on ammo. It was evident that a demon in between was necessary, hence the hell knights.

[Hells Kitchen]

I'd remove Barons. They are basically an ammo sponge that poses little more threat than an Imp. 2x Hell Knights make for a far more threatening encounter for the same total HP.