Doom Roguelike Analysis: Powerups

Powerups in Doom Roguelike are of course broadly derived from powerups in classic Doom: those non-weapon objects you walk into and get immediate benefits. (Or walk through and nothing happens, if the powerup would currently be wasted) By classic roguelike standards, this is kind of a weird concept, and if I'd gotten these posts up a decade sooner like I'd originally been thinking I would, then I'd have presented it as 'just plain weird for a roguelike', but in the years since there's been quite a few 'roguelites' that use powerups in exactly this sort of way. (I assume in large part due to Spelunky's success)

Regardless, powerups in Doom Roguelike still don't act quite like you might intuitively expect coming from Doom (Or from various modern roguelites), in that simply entering a tile containing a powerup doesn't activate the powerup. You have to try to pick up the powerup, like any other item, it's just that picking up a powerup immediately uses it rather than putting it into your inventory.

The list of powerups itself is largely derived from the classic Doom list, though in various cases Doom Roguelike has taken creative liberties in how to represent the effect. Most obviously divergent is the Berserk powerup: in classic Doom, the Berserk powerup supercharges punching for the duration of the level. In Doom Roguelike, a Berserk Pack supercharges all your melee attacks, but does so for a limited number of actions, usually ending before you clear a floor if used early but potentially able to be carried forward into the next floor.

Also divergent is that Armor, in classic Doom, is (mostly) a powerup for restoring your armor stat, whereas in Doom Roguelike Armor is an equipped item. And two powerups that in classic Doom restore the armor stat are adapted by Doom Roguelike into restoring durability on Armor.

Incidentally, the (limited-duration) powerups in this post are what the Marine's 'bonus powerup duration' perk apply to. Anything I'm not covering in this post that you might expect to be affected by this benefit is not. (Unless you're reading this in some hypothetical future where post-0.9.9.8 updates have added new limited-duration powerups and I haven't updated this post, anyway)

I should also point out that while some enemies can pick up and use certain items, including wearing Armor, they cannot pick up powerups. So don't worry about Former Humans stealing powerups from you.

I should also point out that Intuition 1 revealing all powerups on the floor does in fact mean everything in this post.

Anyway, on to specific powerups.

Small Health Globe

Heals 10 hit points. This can heal past 100%. Sets Tactics to 'Cautious'.

Minimum floor: 1

If you're a Scout or Technician with no ranks in Ironman, this works out to adding 20% to your displayed health. For a Marine with no ranks in Ironman, your displayed health will go up by 16% or 17%. (Varying based on the game's breakpoints for what percentage a given amount of HP should display as, as Doom Roguelike refuses to display HP percentage in fractional terms)

Small Health Globes are (If you're not the sort of player who beats the game without ever taking damage) an essential early-game resource you should endeavor to leverage preferentially over using Medpacks, since of course you can take Medpacks with you into later floors while Health Globes are either used on the spot or left behind entirely.

I should however discuss the health 'rot' mechanic for being over 100%. It's pretty straightforward: every 5 in-game seconds, you lose 1 HP so long as you're over 100%. As best as I can tell the game is going by the 'external'/universal clock for this where every 5 game seconds from the start of the game checks if HP should rot: sometimes when you heal over 100% you'll immediately lose a hit point, while other times there will be a bit of a delay, but past that first tick it behaves consistently for any given stretch of being over 100% HP.

Regardless, since this is in-game seconds, there are several implications to this.

First of all, if you clear a floor and end up with 'leftover' healing powerups, you ideally will Run from one to the next before taking the stairs: Running making you cover ground 30% faster means you'll lose around 25~% less overhealed HP before descending the stairs if you are Running the whole way. Notably, healing powerups all reset Tactics to Cautious, meaning you can chain together a lot of such powerups with minimal time spent not Running... though this can be awkward if some of them are close together, since this effect on Tactics includes turning Running off if it's active.

Second, boosting your speed in any form makes overhealed HP leak more slowly relative to Doomguy's activities, making overhealing more likely to let you absorb a hit for 'free'. This applies to any speed modification effect: Reloader, Finesse, Son of a Gun, Shottyhead, Hellrunner... though the most consistently relevant speed boosters are to movement speed, especially in regards to 'clear floor, get overhealed, Run to the next floor'. This also means the Scout is slightly better at carrying overhealed HP forward to combat conditions than the Technician (Or a Marine who is ignoring their easy access to Badass) due to their innate Energy generation advantage. (Technicians using items super-fast technically has a comparable implication, but most used items are healing items that can't overheal, and even for cases like 'use a Homing Phase Device immediately after picking up a Supercharge', saving 0.9 seconds one time compared to a Marine is pretty irrelevant to the HP rot mechanic)

As virtually every build ends up taking speed-boosting Traits, this has the slightly design-odd implication that overhealed HP consistently is easier to meaningfully benefit from later in a run than early in a run.

This is also a contributing factor to points like that Tactical Boots are a great Assembly: covering ground faster effectively gives you higher HP most anytime you end up overhealing sometime before meeting enemies!

The HP rot mechanic for being overhealed itself means that even though a Small Health Globe technically loses no effectiveness at healing past 100%, unless you have Badass you should prefer to lose HP and then pick up Small Health Globes, not pick up Small Health Globes at 100% and seek out enemies afterward.

It should also be noted that Small Health Globes are one of two effects that heal Doomguy in a 'flat' manner. (The other is Vampyre) Every other healing effect is at least partially a percentage of Doomguy's max HP. This means the Marine's innate HP advantage effectively increases the healing from most sources, but not this one, and by a similar token it means that Ironman ranks cause most healing sources to give more HP at a time, but, again, not Small Health Globes.

Large Health Globe

Heals 10 hit points, potentially taking Doomguy over 100%. If Doomguy is below 100% after this healing, he is then set to 100%. Sets Tactics to 'Cautious'.

Minimum floor: 6

Yes, a Large Health Globe's raw HP healing is identical to a Small Health Globe's. Really.

As such, Large Health Globes are ideally leveraged for the big burst of healing you can get by being significantly below 100%. eg if you clear a floor and find yourself sitting at 50% HP with 1 Large Health Globe and 2 Small Health Globes on the map, you should use the Large Health Globe (To heal 25 HP), and then take the Small Health Globes.

This is especially true in early floors; late in a run, a lot of the enemies you encounter can destroy health globes with their attack's blast radius, where it becomes overall more likely that trying to leave a Large Health Globe for later will get it destroyed by stray enemy fire. Mancubi in particular cause a lot of incidental destruction, making it a lot more likely stuff deep in 'safe' territory behind you ends up blown up. Early in a run, though, item destruction is only probable if an object is in reach of an explosive barrel -and this safe period lasts longer the lower your difficulty.

Note that while it's technically optimal to get very low on HP before using a Large Health Globe to maximize the healing, actually shooting for such tends to be risking the run entire. You should certainly try to get low enough that it provides more healing than a Small Health Globe (So you should be below 80% when playing a Scout or Technician with no Ironman ranks), but dropping below about 50% can easily get you abruptly killed if your defensive setup isn't simply outrageous.

If your defensive setup is outrageous, it often becomes unimportant to optimize Large Health Globe use. If your setup is so good you can clear an entire floor and take less than 50 damage while not bothering to corner-shoot and whatnot, then odds are good that you can just use four Small Health Globes to get to full or the like. Such a great defensive setup also takes a while to be possible to arrange, which often makes such optimization unnecessary twice over: by that time you that awesome defensive setup, you probably are leaving Medpacks behind because your inventory has plenty, at which point you can be sloppy with healing usage in general. Also, by that time generally most floors have at least one Supercharge/Megasphere/Berserk Pack/Invulnerability Sphere, all of which are directly superior to Large Health Globes.

I would in fact argue that Large Health Globes exist in a pretty awkward space in the design, as it's very normal for a run to never end up with one adding any more value than a Small Health Globe. They're bizarrely rare (They show up a lot less often than Large Medpacks), take long enough to show up that very lethal enemies start showing up and make staying at low HP way too dangerous (Especially on higher difficulties), and if you're at or over 100% HP for any number of reasons they're counterintuitively identical in performance to a Small Health Globe. Exacerbating things in graphical mode is that their sprite is similar enough to a Small Health Globe's that it's easy to completely overlook that one of your Health Globes is larger than the others and end up wasting the opportunity entirely. (This is especially frustrating in Angel of Berserk, where Large Health Globes also Berserk Doomguy and so are ideally grabbed just before charging into combat)

I wish Large Health Globes both had a more distinct sprite (Being red or something if nothing else) and were just a bit better mechanically. Even bumping the non-full heal to 15 points would make their design a bit less janky.

Supercharge Globe

Sets Doomguy's health to 200%. Sets Tactics to 'Cautious'.

Minimum floor: 4

Without ranks in Badass, the HP beyond your 100% point will of course decay, so if you don't have ranks in Badass you should generally endeavor to have a Supercharge Globe be picked up shortly before you expect to get into a big fight you're liable to take damage in. Or pick it up right before you Run to the stairs, after you've cleared the floor.

And yes, Supercharge Globes have an earlier minimum floor than Large Health Globes. Most runs won't actually see a Supercharge Globe spawn 'naturally' before seeing a Large Health Globe do so, but it's totally possible. It's always a bit jarring when it happens... and for a Marine that took a rank or two in Badass early, it can be a huge boon.

Even though Supercharge Globes can show up as early as floor 4, it's actually pretty common for a standard run to not see any 'natural' Supercharge Globes until sometime in Deimos. As a run goes on they get overall more common, with this being really obvious/consistent in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs: it eventually becomes surprising to not see any Supercharge Globes on a floor, and entirely unsurprising to see two. (Three remains a rare sight, though, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a floor have more than three, not even late in Archangel of 666) Supercharge Globes themselves are mostly just a more extreme form of Large Health Globes as far as how the player relates to them: ideally, you get low on HP, then use them to maximize the heal. The only extra wrinkle is that if you don't have Badass 2, you ideally also arrange to get into a fight soon after -but for one thing, this often works out to just being much the same as Small+Large Health Globe usage. You just replace scooping up a Large Health Globe and all the Small Health Globes you can realistically string together as you Run for the stairs with grabbing a Supercharge Globe and Running for the stairs. And you still might grab Small Health Globes on the way to offset the decay!

Megasphere

Sets Doomguy's health to 200%, and raises the durability of his currently equipped Armor and Boots to their respective maximums. Sets Tactics to 'Cautious'.

Minimum floor: 16

So a Supercharge Globe, but you try to be wearing damaged Armor and/or Boots when you pick it up.

If you know what you're doing (Or just get above-average luck of certain sorts), this difference from Supercharge Globes is notable less often than you might expect. Boots only ever take damage if you walk on Acid or Lava tiles, and only if you actually take damage from the tiles -if you're under the effects of an Envirosuit Pack or Invulnerability Sphere, your Boots are fine. If your Boots have 100% Acid and/or Fire resistance so they take no damage from the tiles you walked through, you take no damage and your Boots are fine; some non-standard Boots innately have one or the other, and there's Assemblies for inducing such protection into regular Boots. Even if your Boots do take damage, Armor Shards you're picking up to repair your Armor will incidentally fix up your Boots, and your Boots can have innate regeneration -one of the primary workhorse Boots Assemblies includes Durability regeneration as part of its package (Tactical Boots), so this is very relevant.

Body Armor-wise, a run can end up finding or making Armor that's indestructible and/or has innate regeneration before Megaspheres even show up. And even for a run that isn't so lucky, good Armor gets more and more common as the run progresses, where repairing a Red Armor becomes less valuable because you've got one or more backups lying around on the floor.

Now, this isn't to suggest Megaspheres are irrelevant to the design. Lots of stuff in Doom Roguelike has a rate of not really mattering for one reason or another, and that's fine, something of an inevitable consequence of the roguelike framework. Megaspheres have a particularly high rate of not really mattering (In the sense that if you don't have any missing Durability to fix, it's effectively just a Supercharge), and that is genuinely a bit awkward, but mostly my point is that you shouldn't necessarily get hugely excited by spotting a Megasphere, even though you might intuitively expect it to be something worth getting really excited by seeing.

I do kind of wish Megaspheres were either allowed to start spawning sooner (The game isn't willing to generate them until floor sixteen, when the City of Dis is floor 24; they can only appear in the last third of a standard run!) or were used more by Special Levels, particularly early ones like Hell's Arena. They'd have a lot better odds of being properly Better Than A Supercharge if they showed up earlier, and Special Levels tend to be out-of-depth challenges that are very likely to eat into your Armor supply, where eg getting a Megasphere on completing the Chained Court would have pretty good odds of being an opportunity to repair a still-precious Blue Armor, or even a Red Armor you got unexpectedly early. (Or expectedly early because of your Angel Challenge) Even later in a run, being able to repair an Assembly or a non-standard Armor would be pretty notable... but for example Limbo/The Mortuary has a bunch of Supercharges, not Megaspheres.

The fact that Megaspheres start spawning so late, are so rare to appear even once they're allowed, and are rarely used by Special Levels also contributes to the awfulness of the 'shield' Armor variants. If Megaspheres were more common, the 'can only be repaired by a Megasphere' limitation of those Armors would be much less crippling a flaw. I'm not necessarily saying Megaspheres should be more common -if they were very common, they'd make durability and HP management a bit of a joke- but if they were semi-common, 'shield' Armors would have better odds of being worth carting around even once they were shredded in expectation you'll probably get to fix them up at some point. As-is, though, it's only mildly surprising if a standard run completes without ever seeing regular floor generation produce a Megasphere.

That said, in Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 runs, they compound with Supercharge Globes in the late game in terms of 'commonality of free full heals'. I said earlier that I've yet to see more than three Supercharge Globes on a single floor, but I have seen a floor generate with three Supercharges and one Megasphere. And late in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs, it's not shocking to find two Megaspheres on a floor. So late in such runs it's not unusual to find 2-3 heal-to-200% opportunities per floor multiple floors in a row!

Berserker Pack

Heals Doomguy up to 100%, and gives him 50 actions of Berserk. Sets Tactics to 'Cautious'.

Minimum floor: 1

I say 'actions' because the Berserk duration is in fact not dictated by the game's general mechanics for time passing, but is instead dictated by how many distinct actions Doomguy performs. For example, some weapons reload one unit of ammo per default reload action, and then have an alternate reload action that reloads all the missing ammo but takes longer than if you manually did all the reloading one at a time; if you do 5 regular reloads, you've used up 10% of Berserk's duration. If you perform the full reload, you've only spent 2% of your Berserk duration, even though you took 0.2 seconds longer than the successive individual reloads.

Note that the 'action clock' only increments when the player explicitly orders Doomguy to do something. For example, if you fire a Combat Shotgun, then pump the shotgun, then reload it, and then advance one tile, this will result in 4 actions of Berserk being depleted. If instead you have Shottyman and fire followed by moving a tile, resulting in the pumping action and reloading action being rolled into the walking action, then only two actions of Berserk will have been depleted. This applies to all kinds of effects a given player might intuitively expect to advance the 'action clock' more steps, like the free reload on killing with Gun Kata, or Malicious Blades striking twice with each blade when attacking in melee, or Dualgunner involving firing both Pistols, or Dual Reload involving reloading both Pistols.

Conversely, even extremely swift actions, including several actions the game presents as 'instant', will still deplete an action of Berserk. Gun Kata making a post-Dodge shooting action 'instant' still has that shooting action deplete an action of Berserk, Technicians 'using items instantly' still deplete an action of Berserk when using an item... this has all kinds of odd implications. For example, in 0.9.9.7 if you had Dualgunner, a Dual Reload was only slightly faster than reloading, swapping with the Prepared Pistol, and then reloading the previously-Prepared Pistol: if both Pistols took 1.2 seconds to reload, then a Dual Reload took 2.4 seconds while the two separate reloads took 2.5 seconds in total. But for 'action clock' effects, Dual Reload spent a third as much 'action clock' as reloading, swapping, and reloading again!

This has assorted weird decision-making effects. For example, a Technician who finds himself low on HP in combat by default should consider spending multiple Small Medpacks rather than a Large Medpack, because fully healing yourself in 0.3 seconds instead of 0.1 seconds is unlikely to be a consequential difference whereas using up three Small Medpacks frees up three inventory spaces while using a Large Medpack of course only frees up one inventory space. But if you're Berserking, this strategy makes your Berserk end two actions sooner, which may result in Doomguy taking a bunch more damage than if you'd used the Large Medpack! (Because you lose the Berserk resistances early and so enemies attacking start doing a lot more damage)

I sort of get why 'action clock' statuses exist insofar as speed advantage is already very widely powerful and it would be so much worse if speeding up Doomguy would let you spend more time Berserking or especially Invulnerable, but I do wish it had used a more nuanced logic. Some of the current implications are very counterintuitive and make optimal play bizarrely focused on being action-efficient in particular when under one of these statuses. Most egregious -if irrelevant to Berserk- is that starting to Run is in fact considered to be a full action! And so is manually ending the Running state! (It timing out on its own is thankfully not counted)

Anyway, Berserk Packs themselves start out notable pretty heavily for the fact that they're a 100% heal that not only can spawn early, but does so semi-regularly. (Unlike Large Health Globes, which are inexplicably quite a bit less common a sight than Berserk Packs even once both are valid to spawn at all) I personally tend to reserve early Berserk Packs pretty exclusively for this purpose, as it's not unusual for an early floor to generate a low number of Small Health Globes such that getting moderately dinged up won't let you get to full HP off those, vs a Berserk Pack being a full heal no matter how low you get. They're notably great as a fallback option if something nasty gives you trouble, as you can Run to the Berserk Pack once you're low on HP, then turn right around to finish the enemy that is very possibly still pursuing you, leveraging Berserk's benefits right away.

Marines in particular get so many Berserk actions out of a Berserk Pack that even if a Berserk Pack generates pretty far from the stairs you have good odds of getting to leverage Berserk in combat on the next floor if you grab the Berserk Pack and head directly to the stairs. And reminder that I'm speaking primarily from the perspective of Ultraviolence runs: Nightmare! and I'm Too Young To Die both double the base number of actions you get from all powerups, so runs on either of those difficulties have this work even better!

The boost to melee damage from your Berserk powerup is, contrary to classic Doom, pretty low in relevance in Doom Roguelike. If you're not a melee build, you probably don't have Brute ranks, and so unless you have Eagle Eye ranks you're going to be horribly unreliable about hitting things. Even if you do have Eagle Eye ranks, Berserk-boosted punch damage is bad in Doom Roguelike if it's not backed by Brute ranks, so unless you're just getting desperately low on ammo and are considering punching after picking up a Berserk Pack as a way to save ammo... you probably still won't punch.

If you are a melee build, then you probably have Berserker and so Berserk Packs providing Berserk is... not that important? Not that it isn't a benefit at all, but the healing is more likely to be relevant, especially for a Blademaster. The only qualifier to this is that a Malicious Blades Technician is forbidden from taking Berserker and so actually does seriously appreciate the boost to melee damage. Outside that, though, melee builds are Berserking constantly once combat gets rolling, making an external source of Berserk often redundant. Berserk from a Berserk Pack does at least stack on top of Berserk from Berserker in terms of duration, but this runs into the limitation that Berserker can't increase stockpiled Berserk past 100 actions worth. As the game doesn't track the source of Berserk for this purpose, this can result in situations where eg you're at 80~ actions of Berserk off Berserker when you pick up a Berserk Pack, and so then you're at 130~ actions of Berserk and won't benefit at all from Berserker triggering until you've taken 30 or so actions.

Though on that note, I should explicitly point out that powerups providing action clock statuses do in fact stack the duration fully in the uncommon event of managing to grab one while a prior copy is still active. That is, if you grab a Berserk Pack, then at 25 actions of Berserk left you pick up another, you'll now have 74 actions of Berserk left. (Because you spent one on the pickup, dropping to 24, and then added 50) They're not 'set action clock to X number'. As such, chaining together action clock statuses is meaningfully useful -this is especially significant if you have two (or more) copies of one of these spawn on a floor and only pick them up once you're prepping to head to the next floor.

Invulnerability Sphere

Heals Doomguy up to 100%, and gives him 50 actions of Invulnerability. Sets Tactics to 'Cautious'.

Minimum floor: 7

The Invulnerability Sphere is where it gets particularly important to maintain awareness of and plan around the action clock aspect. Since you're Invulnerable, there's really no reason to not do a full reload where relevant. By a similar token, it makes more sense to eg run to the next fight and keep shooting with a half-empty Chaingun, intending to reload mid-combat, than to reload right after you kill the last visible enemy with plenty of Invulnerability left. Most annoying is the consideration of Running, where I imagine a lot of players intuitively expect Running to be a way to extend the value of Invulnerability, and in actuality you're wasting 2% of your Invulnerability time by activating Running!

Invulnerability itself is handled oddly in that you really are invulnerable -even a Nuke going off won't kill Doomguy- but in several respects the game's feedback mechanisms behave as if you aren't invulnerable. Most glaring is that wading through Acid or Lava will still provoke the 'Doomguy hurting' noise every single tile and also produce the text prompt going 'aaah!' in response, but there's a few other ways the game behaves as if you're being hurt. A beneficial example of this is that Berserker can trigger while Invulnerable by being hit by an attack that rolled 20 or more damage. It's also worth pointing out that while Invulnerability ensures you can't be hurt (Including that equipped Armor and Boots can't lose durability), you can be knocked around by hard-hitting attacks.

On that note, I should point out that action clock statuses do stack fully, but the visual filter effects they apply are handled hierarchically: Invulnerability always displays if active. Berserk always displays unless Invulnerability is active. And Envirosuit (Which we'll get into next post) is at the bottom of the hierarchy, only displaying if neither Berserk nor Invulnerable is active.

Invulnerability's own visual effect is of course derived from classic Doom's, causing everything to be rendered in white and black. (Mostly white) I appreciate this in principle but in practice wish Doom Roguelike used a different effect: the Invulnerability visuals work pretty well in classic Doom, among other points being aided by their real-time nature and limited animation meaning things moving still stand out even with this filter up, but in Doom Roguelike the effect makes the screen difficult to read. (And hurts my eyes, personally) 0.9.9.8 made it a bit better, as previously it affected UI elements, and 0.9.9.8 adding idle animations to all units and many items makes it easier to keep track of important things, but I still wish Doom Roguelike would replace the effect entirely.

Anyway, Invulnerability is also potentially worth using as a free heal, but it takes long enough to start showing up that this utility is often dropping off in importance by the time you see a natural Invulnerability Sphere, and given that Invulnerability can block any amount of damage, using one and charging into dangerous combat can end up providing way more functional HP value than getting into a fight, dropping low on HP, running back to an Invulnerability Sphere, and having it time out before you get back to the enemies in question. Late in a run, it's very common for an Invulnerability Sphere to be showing up alongside other 100% or more heals such that using it for the heal per se isn't at all necessary, so it's often not even slightly difficult to choose between 'use an Invulnerability Sphere primarily for the heal' and 'use it to charge into combat while invulnerable'.

Invulnerability notably 'autoscales', tending to become better as a run goes on, because later floors have more dangerous and more numerous enemies. An Invulnerability Sphere you find on floor 7 may well provide little value because all you find before it times out is one Imp and one Former Human, even if a Hell Knight is somewhere on the floor. An Invulnerability Sphere you find on floor 23 is much more likely to have you in view of a good number of dangerous enemies for the majority of its duration. This principle gets especially stark in Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 runs, where floors can eventually get really packed with very hard-hitting enemies like Revenants and Mancubi. I've had some funny cases in Angel of 100 runs where I ended up clearing a floor while continuously Invulnerable because I grabbed two Invulnerability Spheres on the prior floor, and then found two more as I was fighting my way through that floor!

Within a standard run, Invulnerability Spheres work well enough, but I do wish they had a cap of one per floor or something. Their growing commonality in the extreme late game of an Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 run can at times become really stupid, making floors a complete breeze that really ought to be at least a mild challenge.

Armor Shard

Repairs the currently equipped Armor and Boots, adding up to 25 points of durability to the Armor and up to 10 points of durability to the Boots.

Minimum floor: 5

The Armor equivalent to a Small Health Globe, except Armor Shards don't have a Large Health Globe equivalent nor a Supercharge equivalent. Armor Shards are also way more rare than Small Health Globes: it's not particularly shocking to get through all of Phobos without seeing one, and I've had the occasional run complete Deimos and still have not seen any. They get more common over time, but they never become something you can count on. I've had Angel of 100 runs where I was seeing Megaspheres more often than Armor Shards!

This is part of why indestructible Armor and self-repairing or indestructible Boots are very valuable: you can never really count on finding durability repair on any kind of reliable basis, and Armor and Boots both generate erratically enough that relying on just replacing them as they get shredded is a risky plan. Especially since Armor Shards don't even provide much durability apiece; if you're taking hits on the regular, Armor Shards are very unlikely to keep a lone Armor afloat.

Reminder that Armor and Boot performance worsens when durability drops below 50 and against when it drops below 25. These thresholds are good to keep in mind when considering which Armor/Boots to prioritize repair on.


Light-Amp Goggles

Gives Doomguy +2 tiles of line of sight for 60 actions.
Minimum floor: 1

Light-Amp Goggles are one of the more divergent interpretations of a Doom powerup, but understandably so given that Doom Roguelike has made no effort to simulate lighting per se. (Which is a little weird: Angband is one of the oldest roguelikes and had a pretty decent lighting system. I've always found it strange how lighting as a game mechanic is shunned by turn-based games, and only got more weirded out by it with learning Angband did it ages ago)

In any event, Light-Amp Goggles are a powerup that's on paper pretty nice, but kind of wonky in practice.

First of all, +2 line of sight is another step down in Accuracy for firing on targets at line of sight. If you don't have either a highly-accurate weapon equipped (eg Laser Rifle) or lots of ranks in Eagle Eye, it's pretty ammo-inefficient to try to hit enemies at your new line of sight. Shotguns don't have to worry about missing, but they still lose yet more damage, and so are actually reliably ineffectual at this longer range. It's certainly nice to be able to see an enemy before it has a chance to decide it wants to attack you, and firing on an enemy to provoke it into chasing you to somewhere you can corner-shoot it at can be legitimately useful, but the obvious way to use the Light-Amp Goggles' benefit is non-obviously impaired very badly.

Second of all, Light-Amp Goggles are affected very heavily by how the map chooses to generate. If you get a relatively open map made of large rooms (Or the 'city' map type where most of the space is open areas outside the rooms that generate), then it gives a big edge in visibility! But if you find Light-Amp Goggles on a map where more or less every room is small enough you already see the entire thing with the base vision range, then they'll probably give no value on that map at all. In such a map, saving picking it up until you're about to run to the stairs may still amount to no benefit whatsoever, whether because the next floor is just as cramped, or because the effect times out before you spot anything of note beyond regular vision range.

Third, anytime you're opening a door, you're getting poor value out of the Light-Amp Goggles. (Unless you're blasting the door open from long range, I guess) Both in the direct sense that if an enemy on the other side is in regular vision range when you open the door, then Light-Amp Goggles didn't do much, but also in the sense that generally opening a door has a lot of the concerning out-of-view info being hidden by the walls, where Light-Amp Goggles don't help at all!

Fourth, melee-focused runs get a lot less value out of Light-Amp Goggles. Not no value, but noticeably less. A Vampyre Marine often wants to just charge headlong at enemies, for example, and can easily end up with Light-Amp Goggles not actually changing their decisions any because the terrain generates such that the additional info from the Light-Amp Goggles is irrelevant (In terms of choosing where to go first) and spotting an enemy early doesn't change your approach any. 

Fifth, Doom Roguelike ended up pretty heavily focused on corner-shooting. Approaching corners and blind-firing a Shotgun where you suspect enemies are (Or know from eg Intuition 2) is a typical aspect of good play, and usually doesn't benefit from Light-Amp Goggles. So it's easy to grab Light-Amp Goggles in terrain they seem good for, and then end up in an extended period of corner-shooting that wipes out the action clock on the Light-Amp Goggles without meaningfully benefitting from them.

Overall, I kind of wish Light-Amp Goggles had a different effect. If they boosted Accuracy, this would make them straight-up useless to Shotguns and even more irrelevant to melee builds, but would make them a much clearer good with Pistol and rapid-fire builds, as well as when firing various of the more unusual Exotic and Uniques with middling Accuracy. Having them give you vision through terrain -though it would be very different from classic Doom's effect- would be a stand-out bit of utility that would help with some of the game's most dangerous situations. (Even if it would occasionally be wasted by a floor generating as very open) There's certainly other reasonably on-theme possibilities that would also be smoother for the design.

Computer Map

Reveals everything except enemies across the entire floor.

Minimum floor: 1

I wish every regular floor generated exactly one Computer Map, with them not being part of the general random item generation. For one thing, a floor generating more than one Computer Map is just 'wasting' item generation, only having any potential to matter if one of them gets destroyed but Doomguy still picks one up because of there being another. I've seen up to three Computer Maps on one floor, which is just aggravating.

For another, this would make the Technician upgrading a Computer Map's benefits a more reliable perk of the class.

For a third, it would make scouring a floor less of a nuisance. Mind, 0.9.9.8 helped with this issue by making it so all enemies being dead reveals all items on the floor, but for one thing it doesn't reveal terrain, which can be a nuisance if the floor generated with a lot of hostile fluids blocking off paths so you still end up exploring the map just trying to scoop up those items you already know the exact locations of. Computer Maps do away with this issue when they're available.

Anyway...

In the game as it actually works, Computer Maps are a wildly uneven item that you sometimes find early on a floor where knowing the map immediately is somehow significantly beneficial (Letting you beeline to an Exotic Mod Pack that will immediately supercharge your build, for example, or letting you more freely blow up barrels/use your explosive weapons because you know nothing valuable will be destroyed), but a lot of the time only find once you've explored half or more of the floor already and so it doesn't help any. They're also an item that just generally gets less valuable as you get more experienced with the game -a new player might spot part of a vault, and be aware of the concept of vaults, but not realize the game's floor generation rules are such that they are definitely looking at a vault and not a regular wall for a regular room, and so go open the door and be swarmed by pinkie Demons or Cacodemons that they would've known to prepare for if they knew it was a vault. For such a player, a Computer Map can make a world of difference at times, while a more experienced player already knows from the sounds and the way the floor generated that it's a vault and doesn't need a Computer Map to realize that.

It's... not great design for an item that doesn't necessarily spawn on a floor at all and is also allowed to wastefully spawn multiple times.

Also, I should point out that 'darkness' effects functionally overrule a Computer Map. (Because all tiles outside your current vision are hidden no matter what) In 0.9.9.7, I probably wouldn't have bothered to note this here, as back then it was only relevant to Angel of Darkness runs, but the one 0.9.9.8 change I'm unambiguously negative on is that it added a level feeling that applies the darkness effect to the floor, which can happen completely randomly. It's really bad to have it as a random level feeling... the only saving grace is that it seems to be an uncommon level feeling, where you can go multiple runs in a row without running into it.

Tracking Map

Reveals everything across the entire floor. This includes the type and position of all enemies, even as they move. Lasts for the entire floor.

Minimum floor: 1

It's a Computer Map, except it makes you permanently aware of enemies on the on that floor as well. For a Technician, it's a Tracking Map, the end.

Much like I wish Tracking Maps generated consistently, I wish Tracking Maps were handled differently. Maybe the Consistent Computer Map model I laid out earlier could have a chance (1 in 3 or whatever) for the Computer Map to be upgraded into a Tracking Map when generated. Maybe Tracking Maps could just not exist and their effect be reserved exclusively for Technicians. Or if the game sticks to purely using regular random item generation for Computer Maps, maybe the Tracking Map effect could be caused by collecting a second Computer Map on the floor, so multiple Computer Maps generating isn't so consistently pointless. (3-4 Computer Maps generating would still be pointless, mind, but that happens much less often than 2)

Regardless, the Tracking Map in current conditions is much more consistently valuable than a Computer Map, letting you control engagements with enemies with precision, corner-shoot with confidence, radar-shoot to provoke enemies reliably, and just generally fight better for the entire floor. You'll still sometimes have a Tracking Map obnoxiously generate such that you don't find it until you've killed more or less everything anyway, but it's on average less swingy/inconsistent than the Computer Map.

It also doesn't really have any nuance to it where I can talk out tactical usage and all, because you just... pick it up as soon as you reasonably can if you spot one.

I will say I like the usage of one in the Military Base, where the right side of the map contains a Tracking Map while the left side has an absolute death trap of a setup. The left side of the map would be pretty heavily a luck-based death roulette if it weren't for the Tracking Map, but is instead an interesting and fair puzzle of a fight because of the assured Tracking Map. It's one of the cooler Special Level designs.

Oh, and even more egregiously than the plain Computer Map, the darkness effect overrules the Tracking Map's effects. This is bad all by itself, making Computer and Tracking Maps generating on a darkness level feel completely worthless, but 0.9.9.8 added a convenience feature where once 3 or fewer enemies are left on the map they become revealed exactly as per a Tracking Map... which is also overruled by the darkness effect. So the darkness level feel has a lot of its impact concentrated less on 'make the floor interestingly different/difficult' and more on 'make the game slower and less fun for the player'. It's bad!

As an extra layer of obnoxious, 0.9.9.8 added a further convenience feature the darkness effect also overrules: that once every enemy on a floor is dead, all items and Powerups become visible without need to get vision on their tiles.

I should note that fixed floors (Special Levels, but also the Phobos Anomaly, the Tower of Babel, and the endgame) disable both of these convenience features. Also slightly odd is how these features behave with Nightmare! difficulty: the 'reveal the last 3 enemies' feature remains active in spite of enemies being able to revive infinitely (And once it's enabled on a given floor, it stays enabled even if the enemy count goes back over 3), but the item-revealing effect can never trigger in a Nightmare! run because that's apparently tied to the 'you feel relatively safe now' message, which is never allowed to trigger on Nightmare! even if you kill every enemy on a floor and no corpses are about to provide revive opportunities.

Weird stuff.

Schematic

Adds an Advanced or Master Assembly to your list of known Assemblies, as if you had constructed the Assembly yourself.

Minimum floor: N/A (Never spawns normally)

The Schematic is unique, in that it's not really about helping the run that finds it, but rather is about helping future runs.

It's also not a standard part of level generation. It can specifically show up in Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab, and if it shows up you're getting it in place of a Mod Pack. This has the rather bizarre effect that your later runs will tend to do slightly better, because instead of getting a worthless Schematic, they'll get a hopefully-actually-useful Mod Pack. Ideally, you'll prioritize constructing unknown Assemblies yourself in your early runs to spend fewer runs finding Schematics.

Advanced Assemblies are the main priority here, as Schematics for Master Assemblies can only spawn on Ultraviolence and Nightmare difficulty, and have extremely low odds of spawning even then. Just getting all the Advanced Assemblies out of the way essentially frees you from the burden of Schematics, especially if you prefer to play on lower difficulties.

Also, note that the Schematic picks an Assembly you don't know at floor generation. That is, it's possible to enter Hell's Armory, perform an Advanced Assembly, and then when you pick up the Schematic it's the Assembly you already know how to make because you just did it. So if you're considering making an Assembly specifically to block Schematic spawns, and you're already in Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab, you should find the Schematic first, on the off chance the Assembly you had in mind got picked for the Schematic.

Also, a minor detail is that prior to 0.9.9.8, the Schematic could be destroyed by explosions and whatnot. As the Schematic spawning requires completely clearing Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory, this change doesn't amount to much, but if further development provides new opportunities for Schematic spawning, it might become a relevantly good change.

Backpack

Ammo in Doomguy's inventory has its maximum stack size raised by 40%.

Minimum floor: N/A (Never spawns normally)

The Backpack is unique, in that it's the only permanent improvement to Doomguy acquired via a means other than Traits. I'm kind of surprised Doom Roguelike didn't do this with more Special Levels. It would've been a sensible way to make Special Levels enticing for more than their regular item rewards and experience.

It's also a non-standard item that only appears in the Containment Area/The Wall. So for starters, you can't get it in Angel of 100, Archangel of 666, or Angel of Overconfidence runs. You're also unlikely to get it in Angel of Berserk, Angel of Shotgunnery, Angel of Marksmanship, and Angel of Confidence runs, but it is possible to get it in such runs.

The Backpack itself is usually a pretty nice item, but it's easy to thoughtlessly assume it's a worthy payoff to hitting the Containment Area/The Wall and be wrong in a given run. The big thing is that a melee-focused run gets little or no value out of it: Angel of Berserk runs in particular aren't really suffering from their difficulty getting the Backpack, because they literally have no use for ammo! It's easy to think of the Backpack as a general inventory expander, as that makes intuitive sense and is functionally true for a lot of runs since eg if you have 200 Shells when you pick it up, they'll go from using 4 inventory slots to using 3 inventory slots and so you can cram in a Medpack or whatever, but if you're not using ammo it's not doing anything for you!

By a similar token, getting a Nano Mod Pack can make the Backpack a much lower-value pick. If you assemble a Nanomachic/Nano-shrapnel/Mother-In-Law, ammo can be basically an optional luxury, and by extension the Backpack becomes lower impact. As the Containment Area/The Wall is placed after Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory and finding a Nano Pack in a standard  run has pretty good odds of coming specifically from there, a decent rate of runs will have the potential to go 'nah, I don't need the Backpack'. As the Containment Area/The Wall is one of the nastier Special Levels of the game, the possibility of skipping it is worth keeping in mind in general, but especially when the Backpack will be low-value: it's the main payoff, especially with The Wall. (The Containment Area also includes a Rocket Box, a 10mm Ammo Chain, and a Shell Box, not to mention it has destructible crates that can potentially provide Medpacks, so even if you don't value the Backpack per se it may still be a worthwhile payoff)

An Ammochain Marine also may be perfectly content skipping the Containment Area/The Wall, as their absolutely absurd ammo efficiency makes ammo expansion less important for fending off ammo starvation. It's still very appreciated for packing in Power Cells, but eg an Ammochain Marine who gets a Minigun and leans into using it might find the Backpack essentially irrelevant.

Outside Ammochain Marines, rapid-fire focus is generally the most ammo-hungry playstyle and so it's important for Cateye Scouts, Entrenchment Technicians, and Mastery-less Doomguys of any class that have focused on rapid-fire weapons to get the Backpack if feasible. Bullet Dance Marines are also quite ammo-hungry and really suffer from not having the Backpack. Outside Bullet Dance, Pistol-focused builds benefit from the Backpack, but aren't horribly likely to suffer ammo starvation if they miss out on it. Shotgun builds by default can also do without it decently enough, especially if you lean into stuff like the Elephant Gun to maximize ammo efficiency... but poor luck can starve out a Shotgun run in general, and finding and relying on the Jackhammer makes ammo starvation a much more urgent possibility.

Also, one of the more significant improvements made by 0.9.9.8 is that, like the Schematic, the Backpack was made indestructible. This isn't too big a change to The Wall, but the Containment Area was egregious in 0.9.9.7 about the risk of the Backpack being destroyed, as a bunch of Barons of Hell spawn in when you're close to the Backpack, and of course will usually destroy items Doomguy is standing on or next to if they land a hit on Doomguy. It's a tremendous relief that 0.9.9.8 did away with that possibility.

I kind of wish the Backpack did spawn in Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 runs, incidentally. Standard runs are able to smooth out ammo access in part through Special Level design, where even if regular floor generation is stingy with the ammo type you're dependent on you can still count on getting more ammo in the near future. The game doesn't seem to be fully cognizant of this implication itself, unfortunately: the fact that the Halls of Carnage and Spider's Lair share a 'slot' makes them a big outlier on ammo predictability, as rolling the Spider's Lair will give you tons of Power Cells and a fair few Rockets, whereas rolling the Halls of Carnage will give you access to plenty of Shotgun Shells and a more modest amount of 10mm ammo. The only piece they fully share is getting a BFG 9000 at the end.

Anyway, point is that Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 are more subject to pure RNG whim controlling ammo access, where your Shotgun-focused run might scoop up 300 Shells from floor 30 and leave behind a further 200~ Shells, and then floors 31-40 provide zero Shells and you die of ammo starvation because of an improbably hostile RNG string. If the Backpack spawned on floor 25 or something, this would smooth out the design of Angel of 100/Archangel of 666. In particular, it would make Nano Mods much less swingily important to those runs: in the current state, there is a huge gap between 'ranged attack run finds Nano Mod' and 'ranged attack run does not find Nano Mod'. (Exception: Ammochain Marines are extremely reliable with no need for a Nano Mod) It'd be nice to get that bump in ability to cover ammo famine periods with ammo feast periods.

One weird quirk of the Backpack that's not important but is interesting is that the stack size for ammunition on the floor doesn't change any, but if you drop a stack of ammo that's over the standard stack limit it will get to stay one unified stack. That is, if you pick up a stack of 40 bullets of 10mm ammo, drop it on a tile, then grab two more stacks of 40 bullets and drop each on that same tile, you'll end up with a stack of 100 bullets plus another stack of 20 bullets adjacent to the stack of 100. If you instead pick up those three stacks, causing them to compound into a stack of 120 bullets in inventory, you can then set that stack down as a stack of 120 bullets on the floor.

It's a weird quirk of the system.

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Next time, we wrap up all this item stuff with used items.

See you then.