Doom Roguelike Equipment Analysis: Used Items

Used items are of course items you stick into your inventory and use directly from there. (Or use directly from the ground, if you like) They can't go into equip slots (Not even the Prepared slot), and notably Doom Roguelike doesn't believe in stackability of (non-ammo) items: a used item always uses one full inventory slot, and in almost all cases a used item can be activated exactly once, deleting itself upon usage.

There's two used items that actually are reusable that I'll be covering in this post as well, which are instead bounded by the 'tactics' system, where you can only use them when Cautious and using them sets you to Tired. They don't substantially change the above summary, though: for one thing, one of them is extremely rare, and the other can only be acquired from a specific Special Level and has a 'true' use that gets rid of it forever.

Regardless, used items is technically a somewhat diverse category, but is most continuously relevant in the form of healing, such as...

Small Medpack

Heals 2 flat HP, plus 25% of the user's maximum health. Can't overheal Doomguy (Unless he has Survivalist), but will always reset his Tactics to Cautious if Running or Tired. Can be picked up and used by monsters, who will use it when low on health.

Minimum floor: 1

Early on, you're probably going to end up needing to use a few Small Medpacks. (Unless you're the kind of player who does no-damage runs, of course, but that's a challenge I've never come close to pulling off, and never been all that interested in, so...) It's possible to get lucky and have a lot of Health Globes spawn, or just happen to get missed a lot when enemies take shots at you, or even find a really early Supercharge Globe, but most runs are liable to stack up dangerous amounts of damage in the early game and need to fall back on using a few Small Medpacks to avoid the possibility of being unexpectedly killed in one hit, especially on higher difficulties where stuff like Hell Knights can be running around alarmingly early.

Past the early game, Small Medpack usage gets notably clunkier, especially on higher difficulties where enemies ramp faster. Powerup-based healing gets more and more common as a run progresses, and does so in a 'top-heavy' way; a Small Medpack you use to heal in the late game has non-trivial odds of doing literally nothing in practice because you find a Large Health Globe, Berserk Pack, Supercharge Globe, Megasphere, or Invulnerability Globe before losing enough HP that you'd have died if you hadn't used the Small Medpack. As all these heals set you to 100% or 200%, a Small Medpack used beforehand is instantly rendered irrelevant. (Aside the mild qualifier that a Large Health Globe in specific can potentially overheal)

That same Small Medpack used in the early game is far more likely to have its heal not promptly invalidated; Large Health Globes, Supercharge Globes, Megaspheres, and Invulnerability Globes literally can't spawn on the earliest floors (Aside Special Level-based qualifiers), for one, but even Berserk Packs are uncommon sights on the early floors. (Even though they can spawn from literally the first floor) Using a mix of Small Medpacks and Small Health Globes to keep yourself afloat can easily have the Small Medpacks have definitively kept you alive when you would otherwise have died, even if your HP never dropped down below a Small Medpack's worth of HP.

A similar point is the consideration of combat healing; early on, especially on lower difficulties, a Small Medpack used in response to dropping low on HP in combat has decent odds of meaningfully helping, where the enemies don't instantly negate all the healing you did. A lone Imp does at best 10 damage, for example, while a Small Medpack heals a minimum of 14 HP. (Unless you abuse effects that lower max HP) Later in a run, when enemies are more elite and more numerous, only a Technician is liable to find such combat healing working out; a Marine or Scout is far too likely to find their HP is lower on the start of their next turn than it was before they used the Small Medpack. In such conditions, a Small Medpack is essentially just wasting a turn.

This is why I say Small Medpack usage gets clunky later in a run; if you're not a Technician, it's very difficult to be completely sure you're using a Small Medpack such that it meaningfully helps, whether you're using it in the middle of combat or using it between fighting. Either way, the Small Medpack can easily end up providing no value at all. There's qualifiers there, as Intuition, Computer Maps, and Tracking Maps can all let you make more informed decisions about between-combat healing ("There's no big heal powerups nearby, so if I use a couple of Small Medpacks now I'll probably get good benefit out of them"), and in combat you can potentially duck out of sight and use 2-3 Small Medpacks to actually get your HP ahead of enemy damage, but the qualifiers themselves have qualifiers! (eg your Mastery might block Intuition, you can never count on Computer Maps or Tracking Maps spawning with useful placement, the terrain right after you descend the stairs might not support getting behind cover...)

Due to the above, for Marines and Scouts there's a fair argument that Small Medpacks should be used pretty aggressively starting somewhere in the midgame instead of being hoarded; tying up a lot of inventory space on an item so difficult to truly benefit from is a dubious use of your increasingly cramped inventory. There's playstyle considerations, mind, but I'd argue this is, if nothing else, decent advice for a player still getting a handle on the game.

For a Technician, Small Medpacks are actually excellent for combat healing and never fully fall off in this regard; even three Small Medpacks used is still only 0.3 seconds of time passing, which is to say you're getting over 80% of your life back between any two actions of a given enemy. (75% plus 6 HP, out of a default max of 50 HP? That's around 85% of max HP, actually) They're still increasingly worth considering dropping to make space for other stuff as a run progresses, but it's much less dramatic than with Marines and Scouts, and their utility for in-a-pinch combat healing means the problem of inventory management is somewhat self-solving: if you have 6 Small Medpacks on the idea you'll use them for emergency combat healing, and then an emergency happens and you use up 3 of them, there you go, you've opened up 3 inventory slots without having to explicitly make space for stuff. Marines and Scouts being increasingly unable to meaningfully use them as combat healing means they have a harder time playing out this sort of dynamic to streamline their inventory.

Of course, you should always try to displace Small Medpacks with...

Large Medpack

Heals 100% of the user's maximum health. Can't overheal Doomguy (Unless he has Survivalist, in which case it will add 50% if that will heal more than setting to 100%), but will always reset his Tactics to Cautious if Running or Tired. Can be picked up and used by monsters, who will use it when low on health.

Minimum floor: 5

If you're running into inventory space limits and you find a Large Medpack, an easy decision is to just swap out a Small Medpack for the large one... unless you're just painfully low on Medpacks in general, of course, in which case ammo is probably the better thing to dump.

Large Medpacks start a run as a high-value heal that should generally be reserved for fairly specific dangerous situations; until you've reached floor 5, Large Medpacks literally can't spawn outside vaults and Special Levels, so your Hell's Arena-granted Large Medpack is essentially irreplaceable initially! And even once Large Medpacks can spawn normally, they're still uncommon initially.

As a run progresses, Large Medpacks will tend to displace Small Medpacks in your inventory, not only for the obvious reason of just being better than Small Medpacks, but also because of the previously-covered rising awkwardness of Small Medpacks and the fact that Large Medpacks just plain get more common; late in a run, it's actually not surprising for a given floor to contain more Large Medpacks than Small Medpacks.

Large Medpacks do still suffer from a similar bit of awkwardness to Small Medpacks as a run progresses, in that between-combat healing can be wasted and the late game can produce outrageously lethal situations where a Large Medpack doesn't actually help at all, but much less thoroughly and much less inevitably than Small Medpacks. It actually is plausible in eg Angel of 100 to create a defensive setup that can have 10+ enemies attacking simultaneously for only 1 damage apiece where a Large Medpack is actually buying multiple turns of survival, for example.

I do kind of wish both Medpacks took less than a full second to use as a default. They both work much smoother for a Technician, and it's not a problem for the gameplay; between Medpacks generating at a low rate overall (Well, sort of) and the consideration of inventory limitations, while a Technician can occasionally power through a fight that really ought to have killed them by virtue of spamming stockpiled Medpacks, this isn't a way to stably mitigate the game's assorted skill elements; if a player tries to do that as a default, they're basically always going to fail every run. Something like taking 0.5 seconds or 0.3 seconds by default would make combat healing usage more reliably worth doing without breaking anything else in the design.

A similar point is that I have mixed feelings about a cool mechanic Doom Roguelike has: some enemies in Doom Roguelike are willing to pick up and use some items, including both kinds of Medpacks. I tend to like it when a game has enemies able and willing to benefit from mechanics that are 'in the wild' like this, but enemies being able to use Medpacks in Doom Roguelike has a lot of weird implications I don't feel the design maintains an adequate awareness of.

For example, I said Medpack generation is sort of low overall, and the reason I qualified that statement that way is that Medpack generation is actually kind of high -early floors will usually have 3+ Small Medpacks spawn- but in real play the player misses out on a notable fraction of those Medpacks by virtue of enemies picking them up and then using the Medpacks when the player does some damage to them without killing them. On higher difficulties, it's not shocking in the beginning of the game for every Medpack on the floor to be picked up before the player has a chance to see them!

One of the weirder implications of this is that the player tends to find more Medpacks once they're past the earliest floors. Only Former Humans/Sergeants/Captains/Commandos (Including Elite variations), Hell Knights, Barons of Hell, and the Bruiser Brothers can make use of equipment, which is a list of enemies that skews common toward the beginning of the game; as a run progresses and more enemy types are added to the pool it becomes less common to see any given existing enemy type, and furthermore Doom Roguelike outright phases out some enemy types; past a certain point, the zombie humans are removed from standard enemy generation entirely! (And yes, I'm including 'group' generation in this statement)

(In the extreme long haul of an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run, the Elite variants enter standard rotation and so Medpacks being looted becomes a bit more common, but I'm mostly focusing on runs using the standard framework. Conversely, you might argue that enemies with explosive attacks capable of destroying items on the ground become more common, but while this is true, the player has far greater ability to play in a way that minimizes the odds of this actually happening)

This similarly has some odd implications for the difficulty curve; I honestly feel Ultraviolence is, on average, a bit easier than Hurt Me Plenty, and part of why is that higher difficulties accelerate the rate at which the game moves through its enemy pool 'sets', resulting in Ultraviolence phasing out zombie enemies faster and so you often get the ability to get a buffer of Medpacks going sooner. In Hurt Me Plenty runs, I'm noticeably more prone to dying in the mid-early game by virtue of just being Medpack-starved than on Ultraviolence runs -and this is true even though the first floor is modified on Ultraviolence expressly to reliably result in enemies stealing the guaranteed 2 Small Medpacks on that floor! (And also even though very early Hell Knights that pick up a Medpack are almost impossible to prevent from using it -zombies are at least frail enough you can realistically skip right over the zone of HP that prompts them to heal themselves, killing them without a Medpack getting used)

The game absolutely does have bits of its design clearly rooted in an awareness of the hazards of enemies being able to pick up items, such as how vaults can't select such enemies to spawn in them and Special Levels are reliably designed to minimize opportunities for enemies to loot Medpacks (Hell's Arena generates a Large Medpack only after you've gotten through every wave, for example), but the implications for the core floor progression do not appear to have been recognized and are a bit of wonkiness that reliably matters to any run. It's one of the more subtly unfortunate bits of Doom Roguelike's design.

Phase Device

Teleports user to a random unoccupied tile. Will not teleport into Acid or Lava tiles. Can be picked up and used by monsters, who will use it when low on health.

Minimum floor: 5

A risky escape tool, instantly removing you from a bad situation but potentially putting you into a worse one.

Overall, I feel Phase Devices are generally a questionable investment of inventory space. They're always risky; even if there's literally only one enemy on the map, a Phase Device can always elect to dump you in a tile that's still in that enemy's range. It's unlikely to do so in that particular case, but if you try to escape with a Phase Device while low on HP and promptly die, saying 'that was unlikely' doesn't change the fact that the decision killed you. And in more general conditions the odds of escaping into a just-as-bad-or-even-worse situation are often not actually low.

Their usage outside of escape-or-die situations is a bit limited, too. The main non-escape thing they can do outside certain Special Levels is potentially let you bypass a river of Acid or Lava that's creating a meaningful pathing problem, which doesn't happen very often (Less than one time per standard run, on average), and a Phase Device is one of the worst tools for dealing with that situation.

That said, Special Levels give Phase Devices some niches worth keeping in mind. For example, a Phase Device can be used to break into the Containment Area/The Wall if you can't blast through the walls, such as you're running an Angel Challenge that forbids you from using Rocket Launchers. (And that hasn't lucked into some alternative) By a similar token, if you skipped the Chained Court you can still potentially get some loot out of the Vaults by hoping the Phase Device dumps you into one of the sealed rooms. (As they all have teleporters inside them that dump you outside them, there's no risk of becoming trapped, either)

Much more risky but worth pointing out is that if you don't have proper answers for Mount Erebus/Lava Pits in terms of safely crossing the Lava, you can potentially gamble on a Phase Device: it has to drop you on solid ground, after all, and your starting island is a minority of overall land. This is especially reliable on Mount Erebus, as it only has the two islands: your starting one, and the mountain. It's much more risky in the Lava Pits, as there's no guarantee you'll be dropped on an island with Envirosuit Packs, and in fact it's worryingly likely you'll be dropped onto the strip of land between your starting island and the island clusters. That strip of land doesn't have any tools for helping you survive the lava, so that can easily be a run-ender. I'd say only try this with the Lava Pits if you eg you have a Homing Phase Device (So you can just teleport back to the stairs if the Phase Device doesn't drop you on an acceptable point), multiple Phase Devices, or would literally rather have a failed run than a mere standard victory.

The Phase Device being another item some enemies will pick up and use is, like with Medpacks, a bit janky, though with Phase Devices it's sort of inoffensively annoying rather than anything I'd argue is an actual design problem. It can be obnoxious to have a Hell Knight blip away partway through trying to kill it, but it can also potentially save your life if they were liable to kill you in a second and now you have breathing room to heal up or look for the stairs or whatever, and both of these are kind of dumb situations but not particularly terrible for the design. Phase Devices are also impinged less by the jank of being more likely to be stolen in early floors, partly because they're just less useful (If you weren't going to pick it up in the first place, you don't care that an enemy ate it) and partly because they don't generate regularly in general. (That is, with Medpacks you expect to get multiple per floor if they're not stolen, whereas with Phase Devices you can easily go multiple floors without any generating in the first place; there's barely any experiential difference between 'I didn't get a Phase Device from this floor because none generated' and 'I didn't get a Phase Device from this floor because one generated but an enemy used it')

I like Phase Devices as an attempt to get classic Doom teleportation being a bit more present, but honestly if regular Phase Devices were removed from the game entirely I suspect that would really just be a modest improvement to the experience.

As an aside, teleportation tiles exist and at first glance seem like 'Phase Devices, but as an unlimited-use terrain object automatically used when walked into', but have a couple of important differences. The first difference is easy to figure out and remember; teleportation tiles don't have their destination random-per-use. That is, if you walk into a teleport tile, and it dumps you at the x/y coordinates of 06/15, then walking into that teleport tile again will teleport you to 06/15 again, every single time you walk into it. So where a Phase Device failing to dump you where you want can be responded to with 'try again' (assuming you have another Phase Device, of course), with a teleportation tile there's no point.

More importantly and counterintuitively is the consideration of time: using a Phase Device takes exactly as long as it takes you to use an item. (So 1 full second for a Marine, effectively slightly over 0.9 seconds for a Scout, and 0.1 seconds for a Technician) Using a teleportation tile takes longer, because you lose time to both the movement action that put you into the tile but also you always lose further time to 'using' the teleportation tile. (This has a base time of 1 full second, and can only be modified by Energy generation modifiers) This makes teleportation tiles surprisingly bad escape tools if you don't have reason to be confident the teleport destination won't have enemies in range, since at default speeds enemies will get two full turns to pile damage on you!

This time differential aspect is of course particularly stark for Technicians since they use items in 0.1 seconds and this effect does not apply to teleportation tiles; for a Technician, a Phase Device is reasonably safe to gamble on because usually no enemy will get to act immediately after the teleport. A teleportation tile by default giving enemies two turns to attack before you even know what's what is far more dangerous than that.

Homing Phase Device

Teleports user to the exit stairs. If there's more than one, it picks randomly, but stairs to Special Levels are not included. If the floor has no exit stairs, functions like a regular Phase Device. If the stairs are blocked, will attempt to drop the user close to the stairs. Can be picked up and used by monsters, who will use it when low on health.

Minimum floor: 7

A much less risky escape tool compared to Phase Devices, especially if you have significant knockback resistance so that enemies are unlikely to knock you off the stairs. Among other points, unless a floor has multiple (regular) stairs, you can make an effort to clear the stairs as soon as you've found them so your Homing Phase Device is close to guaranteed to be pulling you entirely away from enemies.

The Scout innately detecting stairs of course makes them particularly reliable at implementing such a plan since they can make an effort to navigate toward the stairs instead of having to wait to either randomly stumble into the stairs or happen upon a Computer Map or Tracking Map.

The Homing Phase Device can notably 'break' a few Special Levels like the Phobos Lab, where you're meant to fight through the entire map and the game creates this dynamic through a linear map design where the stairs cannot be walked to until other tasks are completed. This is less common than you might intuitively expect -for example, Hell's Arena has the stairs in the open and the actual rewards simply don't spawn until you've killed all the enemies- but is something to keep in mind in the cases it applies. (Especially in 0.9.9.8, where the Nightmare Demons that Phobos Lab has on U;traviolence have become way nastier since they're no longer susceptible to the Acid in the center of the map)

Homing Phase Devices being something monsters will pick up is more meaningfully janky than with regular Phase Devices, pretty much purely because they're more stably useful to the player. A monster using a Homing Phase Device is often the same functional result as a monster using a regular Phase Device as far as 'the monster vanishes, and this is inconvenient/lifesaving', but the fact that it denies the player the Homing Phase Device is way more annoying. It comes up less in practice because Homing Phase Devices take a while to start being able to spawn at all and on higher difficulties several kinds of monsters that pick up items are already getting phased out, but I honestly wish monsters wouldn't pick up Homing Phase Devices; the low-odds chance that a Homing Phase Device will be eaten by a monster isn't interesting or design-useful, it's just obnoxious.

Shockwave Pack

Explodes on Doomguy's tile for 10d10 Fire damage with a 6-tile blast radius when used. Doesn't affect Doomguy.

Minimum floor: 5

You'd think, looking at those numbers, that this would be really powerful, but it's surprisingly lackluster in practice. This operates on standard explosion rules, so anything that isn't directly adjacent to Doomguy when you use it will at most take 50% (or less) of the listed damage, instantly bringing it from an impressive average damage of 50 to a mediocre average of 25 damage. This will kill surprisingly few enemies, as Imps and Lost Souls are both sufficiently resistant to Fire that 25-ish base damage isn't good enough to reliably kill them; only Former Humans, Former Sergeants, Former Captains, and pinkie Demons will be killed by a Shockwave Pack doing exactly average damage at 3-4 tiles away. And pinkies are exactly 25 HP, so if it rolls even slightly under its average, they'll live.

A big part of the problem is that Doom Roguelike doesn't offer controlled mobility tools. You can't spot a blob of enemies, teleport into the middle of them, and set off the Shockwave Pack for big damage: you have to manually walk your way there, weathering fire the whole way. Enemies also tend to naturally spread out over time, so even if you're quite fast and beeline directly for a group when you see it, in most cases it won't stay clumped long enough for you to get an impressive effect -especially since best results would require you successfully get completely surrounded (Without dying), a feat that's actually quite difficult to achieve.

You might descend stairs and find yourself right on top of a pack of enemies that spawned en mass, in which case the Shockwave Pack might be a decent tool, maybe. But this happens less than once a standard run.

The other issue with it is that generally a build comfortable with running directly toward a blob of enemies is a melee build, and melee builds don't want enemies being knocked away from them, as that makes it take longer to kill them. Furthermore, the Marine and Scout melee Masteries get extra benefits from killing things with melee per se: killing enemies with a Shockwave Pack can easily be a noticeable downgrade in performance compared to just wading in and Chainsawing everything to death. Only a Malicious Blades Technician has the right combination of qualities for it to be plausibly worthwhile and survivable on multiple occasions to charge amid the enemy and set off the Shockwave Pack... and it will still only occasionally be feasible, productive, and so on.

If explosion damage didn't drop off so harshly the instant you're 3 tiles from the center, the Shockwave Pack would be a fairly strong tool with a solid enough place in your arsenal. As-is, I'd argue it's primarily a newbie trap, where a new player is liable to expect the Shockwave Pack to be a useful panic button when facing a big group and not realize a Shotgun blast is liable to be more helpful.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's outright a waste of an inventory slot, as for one thing it can be used to clear corpses at an arbitrary area and that can be really significant, but I do suspect most players start out overestimating its utility by a lot, unfortunately.

Hellwave Pack

Explodes on Doomguy's tile for 20d10 Fire damage with a 15-tile blast radius when used. Doesn't affect Doomguy.

Minimum floor: 10

The doubled base damage and much larger blast radius makes the Hellwave Pack easier to justify carrying in hopes of a good opportunity to use it. If nothing else, it's a very good option for making Limbo/The Mortuary easier by setting it off to clear out a bunch of corpses, as it will pretty reliably do so out to a decent distance.

But even outside that, the damage is high enough to be significant even at a distance; at 3 tiles it averages 50 damage, when only a few regular enemies go above 50 base HP; Mancubi, Barons of Hell, and Archviles. Even some of the Nightmare enemies (And all the Elite ones) have 50 or less base HP! And explosion damage is harshest at that first step of drop-off; a high roll at 4-5 tiles out will do roughly 66 damage (as opposed to 100 at 2-3 tiles) and so can get lucky and instantly kill any regular enemy short of an Archvile.

You still shouldn't expect the Hellwave Pack to be a panic button that instantly clears out every enemy you can see unless they're very much clustered atop you (Such as because you descended the stairs and found yourself adjacent to a big blob of monsters), but it's genuinely worth considering committing an inventory slot to it and using it in a moderately bad situation involving a lot of enemies. Even at standard line of sight, it averages 25 damage and can do up to 50 on a high roll, which is respectable damage at every stage of the game.

(Though keep in mind that if you build something like a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun the Hellwave Pack may still be less effective than just continuing to fire)

As an aside...

... there's actually only the one internal graphic for the phase device and shock/hellwave graphics, with the game engine dynamically coloring in the top bit and adding in the glow for the wave packs. That's kind of neat to me.

Envirosuit Pack

When used, adds 70 actions of Envirosuit benefits. These benefits are perfect protection from Acid and Lava on the ground, and 25% more Acid and Fire resistance against other damage sources.

Minimum floor: 5

If you're not doing an Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 run and are shooting for a complete victory. you'll probably want to hold onto at least one Envirosuit Pack until you're done with Mount Erebus/The Lava Pits. It's not remotely an ideal choice for that -it's better to have permanent immunity to Lava- but the Phobos Lab or Military Base will always set you up with an Envirosuit Pack, whereas permanent immunity to Lava requires lucking into a specific Unique, or a specific pair of Uniques, or a specific Exotic Mod Pack, or getting rank 2 in Whizkid and assembling Cerberus Boots. The Envirosuit Pack can easily be your best option in a given run.

Outside that particular utility and some specific Special Level-based use-cases, Envirosuit Packs have two primary use-cases. Their most obviously significant one is crossing Acid or Lava unharmed when floor generation contrives to block access to the stairs with fluids. (Or to block access to half the floor, if you're wanting a full clear or know there's a Unique on the floor or whatever) Within a standard run, this is actually somewhat unlikely to occur; floor generation does make something of an effort to avoid fluids trapping the player, and it's reliable enough at this that a standard run never having it come up is unsurprising. Still, if it does happen it can be devastating and cost multiple Medpacks to compensate for; carrying a single Envirosuit Pack as a just-in-case is normally a small price to pay for being prepared for this possibility.

Within an Angel of 100 or especially an Angel of 666 run, it's essentially guaranteed you'll have to deal with such lethal fluid barriers at least once, and in fact probably several times. In the long haul you really ought to just be planning around having Cerberus Boots (Or one of the Unique-based immunities), at which point Envirosuit Packs become largely irrelevant for this utility, but the Level and Mod Pack requirements for Cerberus Boots are sufficiently demanding it's easily possible to hit such a floor before you have Cerberus Boots online, so it's still worth holding onto at least one Envirosuit Pack prior to that point if you can. And after that point, the combat utility remains.

So! Combat utility! 

A player making use of Envirosuit Packs in combat early in a run is liable to be disappointed; only one beginning-of-game enemy uses a damage type that Envirosuit Packs affect, and even when Hell Knights are added in a 25% reduction in damage is pretty unlikely to save the day.

In the late game of a run, however, basically all the biggest threats do Fire or Acid damage, and the player's defenses are much more likely to be significant enough for a 25% reduction to be a really big deal. There's two layers here; the first layer is that damage type resistances are stacked additively, and so the more you have the bigger the proportionate impact. Adding 25% resistance to 0% resistance of course reduces damage taken by 25%. Adding 25% resistance to 50% resistance instead halves the incoming damage. (Because now you're only taking 25% of the base damage)

The second layer is that Doom Roguelike applies Protection after damage resistance has done its thing. Say you have 7 Protection and are being hit for 20 Fire damage while having no Fire resistance; in that case, you take 13 damage. If you apply an Envirosuit Pack, suddenly the base 20 damage is knocked down to 15 and then the 7 Protection reduces it to 8 damage; compared to the 13 damage you're taking without the Envirosuit Pack, this is a bit more than a 38% decrease in damage taken.

With both factors in play, it's entirely possible for an Envirosuit Pack to temporarily make various threats do only 1 damage (And only that much because of Doom Roguelike's rules on 'chipping' damage) where they'd otherwise do a non-trivial amount of damage. If you descend the stairs and find you're surrounded by Fire-using and/or Acid-using enemies, an Envirosuit Pack can thus very possibly trivialize an otherwise-dangerous situation!

That said, do note that it's possible to be passively taking only 1 damage from such threats. If your defenses have reached such a point, spending a turn eating an Envirosuit Pack isn't helping at all! If you also have passive immunity to fluids on the ground, then Envirosuit Packs are just a waste of an inventory slot and you really shouldn't be picking them up at all. (And should ditch any you might be carrying)

Blood Skull

Destroys all corpses within 8 tiles and heals Doomguy by 5 HP per corpse destroyed. This can heal Doomguy past 100%, and will reset Doomguy's Tactics to Cautious if any corpses were destroyed.

Minimum floor: 5

The Blood Skull is the first of a brief series of 'skull' items that all destroy all corpses nearby in exchange for benefits derived from how many corpses were destroyed. These are collectively sort of low value if you're doing an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run that is below Nightmare! difficulty, but in a standard run that intends to hit Limbo/The Mortuary and/or any run that is on Nightmare! the ability to destroy corpses is heavily useful for denying revives. And anytime Archviles are around, of course.

Note that for all skull items, the game will in fact let you waste them by using them when no bodies are in sight. So make sure there are bodies before you actually use a skull!

In the Blood Skull's case, it grants HP, which means it's worth directly comparing it against Medpacks. At base non-Marine HP, a Small Medpack is 14 HP of healing (Or possibly 15 if it rounds up, contrary to my expectations: I've never tested this precisely), and so a Blood Skull only needs 3 corpses to be competitive with a Small Medpack just on raw healing. It's slightly worse off for a Marine, who gets 17 HP from a Small Medpack and so needs 4 corpses for a Blood Skull to not be inferior to a Small Medpack in raw healing. And of course investing in Ironman makes things that bit harder for the Blood Skull; in the worst case scenario of a Marine with 5 ranks in Ironman and so 110 HP, a Small Medpack heals 29 HP (or 30 if I'm wrong about the rounding direction) and so the Blood Skull needs 6 corpses to not be inferior healing.

Overall, a Blood Skull is probably a better use of an inventory slot than a Small Medpack; as a run progresses it's increasingly common for lots of bodies to be in sight unless using certain strategies that are really prone to destroying bodies or actively endeavoring to destroy bodies. Ranks in Ironman is also generally a low priority (Even with 0.9.9.8 buffing Ironman, getting more than one rank isn't something you should be in a big hurry on, generally speaking), and 4 bodies in view isn't a particularly high requirement. Just keep in mind that various monsters don't leave bodies, fluids and doorways destroy bodies, and bodies can't share space; killing a dozen enemies doesn't necessarily mean you have a dozen bodies of healing in reach. Actually count corpses!

Large Medpacks are a trickier comparison, since they just set HP to 100%. It's tempting to treat that as 50-110 HP of healing (Depending on Ironman ranks/Marine or not), but very inaccurate; firstly, even in ideal conditions it's 1 less than a given such number. Second and more important, you'll almost never get 'full value'; a player only willing to use a Large Medpack when at or below 10% HP is a player who will regularly die with unused Large Medpacks. There are plenty of individual enemies who can take Doomguy from 20% or less to dead in one second, even through some Protection, and of course with groups of enemies even relevant resistances and multiple points of Protection can allow Doomguy to be decent on HP one turn and then dead on the next one. 

So say you're a player who tends to use a Large Medpack anytime your health dips below 40% with danger still about. (Which is a decent enough rubric) In that scenario, a non-Marine is healing 30 or so HP, and a Marine is healing 36 or so HP. In that case, a Blood Skull will be better value if you expect to be able to use it with somewhere in the range of 6-8 corpses in view. That's modestly demanding, but still quite plausible to have organically occur in regular combat in the mid-late portion of a standard run, and is liable to be constantly happening in an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run well before being at all close to the end of the run.

The Blood Skull also has the advantage of overhealing. Even with only, say, 5 corpses, the ability to overheal before descending into a tough encounter -such as a Special Level- is worth keeping in mind. It's also relevant to the combat healing point, in that a Blood Skull can be used in expectation of shortly being hit by a bunch of damage, where a Large Medpack has to be used reactively; healing for 35 HP to over 100% HP is a smaller value than managing to use a Large Medpack when it will provide 40-ish HP, but it's a lot safer than hoping the damage rolls work out to putting you dangerously low without actually killing you. Points in Badass make this usage of a Blood Skull especially straightforward to leverage.

On the other hand, in Doom Roguelike it's possible to reach a state where Doomguy can reliably shrug off enormous amounts of damage such that even large numbers of hard-hitting enemies will only slowly wear Doomguy down. In such conditions, the risk in the strategy of waiting to get low before healing is a lot less; if you have a good sense of the game (Or are willing to double-check stats and manually crunch numbers), you may be able to 100% safely plan around letting a turn pass at 17% HP and then healing. If you're in such a state, Large Medpacks will tend to be a better use of an inventory slot as far as raw healing goes.

So overall whether a Blood Skull is worth carrying over another Large Medpack in terms of the healing per se is a pretty variable question whose answer is liable to change over the course of a run.

It's worth pointing out that if you decide to leave a Blood Skull behind, you probably should use it before descending the stairs, not simply drop it and forget about it. Especially if you have a rank or two in Badass so the overheal HP won't 'rot'. This makes the Blood Skull arguably the easiest skull item to get at least some use out of.

Fire Skull
Destroys all corpses within 8 tiles, with each destroyed corpse setting off a radius 3 explosion of 7d7 Fire damage. These explosions can't harm Doomguy, but can destroy corpses, resulting in the Fire Skull doing less damage than counting corpses would suggest.

Minimum floor: 7

The Fire Skull is a cool idea with wonky execution. Like a few other things we've covered before, such as the Double Shotgun, the crux of the issue is that we've got a mechanic you'd intuitively expect to resolve its multiple outputs simultaneously, but where the game actually resolves them sequentially.

In this case, using a Fire Skull causes the game to select a corpse, blow it up, apply damage to everything in range of that corpse, work out the consequences of that and apply them, and then start searching for another corpse in range to do this again with, repeating until there are no bodies in range... when explosions can destroy corpses, and so a body detonating will usually destroy all nearby bodies, at which point they can't be blown up anymore.

As such, even if an area is carpeted with bodies that are themselves being trampled by legions of enemies, the Fire Skull won't do the expected thing of hitting every enemy with hundreds of damage from the wall of bodies around them. You'll instead get a weirdly-distributed smattering of explosions that only sometimes overlap.

Oh, and in spite of the sequential resolution, no, the game will not detonate any bodies that generate over the course of sequentially detonating bodies. So you can't even chain-explode weak enemies.

As such, the Fire Skull is surprisingly underwhelming. If it resolved simultaneously the way you'd expect, the player would be able to clear out a bunch of not-too-threatening enemies, then spot something dangerous, catch its attention, retreat to the previous fight area, and then blow up the target for easily over 100 damage; basically any regular enemy would be deleted by this, and even a number of bosses would be really unhappy with that much damage being sprung on them. In actuality though, even if there's 6+ bodies in reach of a victim, they may well be hit by just one explosion. 7d7 is decent damage, but plenty of regular enemies are very likely to survive that -or are even guaranteed to. The 49 damage this does if all dice roll max is 1 short of a Hell Knight's base HP! And generally the best-case scenario is catching a given enemy with 3 explosions, not, say, 9.

This all really drags down the Fire Skull's potential, and annoyingly makes the obvious condition to use it actually a pretty bad time to use it, because the sequential order is in no way communicated to the player and I have no idea what the game's internal rule is here. As such, using a Fire Skull when a lot of bodies are clustered in an area can easily fail to detonate the body you want detonated because a body nearby detonated first and destroyed it; this can result in enemies who are nearby multiple bodies unexpectedly taking no damage at all!

This has the slightly more positive implication that a Fire Skull use might unexpectedly leave items on the ground intact instead of annihilating them, but you can't count on it. (Not unless you know the details of the game's 'blow up bodies in a specific order' routine, anyway)

Altogether, I personally rate the Fire Skull as the lowest-value of the skull items. It's functionally a significant gamble in a lot of conditions it really ought to be a sure thing in, and its damage potential is just not as high as it first looks. With the right Traits and gear, just spamming shotgun blasts or rocket launcher shots or some such can easily outdo it in practice, in part for time efficiency reasons (That is, a Shottyhead Scout firing a Nano-shrapnel Super Shotgun's damage per shot per target might be lower than a Fire Skull's per-use damage, but such a Scout will shoot multiple times in the 0.91~ seconds that using the Fire Skull would take that Scout), not even getting into stuff like the BFG existing. You can of course find a Fire Skull before getting to the point of having surpassed its potential, but even getting a Fire Skull early is often underwhelming... and Skulls all generate quite rarely, so it's not a common event.

You should of course keep in mind the option of holding onto a Fire Skull for body destruction purposes if you don't have any significant spammable options for body destruction, but outside that I'd recommend keeping your expectations low.

Hatred Skull

Destroys all corpses within 8 tiles and gives Doomguy 5 actions of Berserk for each corpse destroyed.

Minimum floor: 9

Something I should point out right away is that while a Berserk Pack heals the player when picked up, a Hatred Skull does not heal the player when used.

It's also pretty difficult for it to be comparable to a Berserk Pack in terms of Berserk duration. It requires 10 corpses are consumed to equal a Berserk Pack's duration -for Scouts and Technicians. For a Marine, Powerups last 50% longer, but not Berserk derived from other sources, so a Marine needs 15 corpses in view to match a Berserk Pack. That's possible to have happen, but it's not a strongly expected scenario. (Outside Limbo/The Mortuary, of course)

Of course, you can't carry a Berserk Pack, so this isn't some big strike against the Hatred Skull. But both elements can be an unpleasant surprise, where a player incorrectly assumes it'll heal them, saves it until low HP, and so dies... or has strongly internalized the Berserk Pack duration and gets caught out by the Berserk ending much earlier than they expected.

Anyway, the Hatred Skull's utility is notably dependent on whether you have Berserker or not, and especially whether you're actually playing as a melee build or just dipped in for Berserker but are playing purely as a ranged fighter. If you're playing as primarily a pure melee fighter (Excepting Malicious Blades), the Hatred Skull is not very valuable: anytime combat lasts long enough for you to produce a bunch of corpses to leverage the Hatred Skull with, you're going to have dozens of actions worth of Berserk from Berserker. Since you need to have dead things about to get started, there's a bit of a 'the key is in the safe' issue: it's nice to be able to trigger Berserk before you're in melee to get the defensive benefits, but if you're relying primarily on melee combat to kill things, you can't use the Hatred Skull this way outside some specific contexts. (Like using it just before you descend stairs, because you killed a bunch of enemies fairly close to the stairs) All this clunkiness means it's often better to try to keep an eye out for a merely okay opportunity to use it rather than saving it for a great moment, because it's so hard to have such a great moment occur organically. (Exception: Limbo/The Mortuary)

If you're playing as basically a pure ranged fighter, the Hatred Skull is worth keeping in mind as a way to trigger Berserk defensively, especially in Limbo/The Mortuary, and can actually be quite useful in the middle of a rough fight. Just keep in mind that if you're using a Plasma Shotgun, Plasmatic Shrapnel Shotgun, or any kind of exploding shots, that you should actually make sure there are corpses before trying to use it.

If you're playing more of a hybrid fighter -particularly a Malicious Blades fighter, who is barred from Berserker but is forced to be a competent melee fighter regardless- the Hatred Skull becomes arguably the best of the skull items, where you fight from range for a bit in a tough fight (Generating some corpses), then swap weapons and use the Hatred Skull to start chopping up in melee. (Or if you have Juggler and aren't Malicious Blades, you can just keep your Chainsaw stowed in the Prepared slot and make a melee attack directly, no need to explicitly swap)

Overall, the skulls are kind of an interesting idea (If clunky execution, especially the Fire Skull) and a neat attempt at alluding to the classic Doom thing where keys were skulls in some levels. (Mostly more Hell-type environments) Given that key mechanics per se would be a nuisance to have function sensibly in Doom Roguelike -you'd need to have logic for making sure keys and their doors can't put the player in an impossible situation- it's very understandable that Doom Roguelike elected to not even try and go for a different way of making the allusion.

I am a little frustrated the skulls are red/orange/yellow, though. Hatred Skulls and Fire Skulls are difficult to tell apart at a glance, and the allusion would be a bit more obvious if they held to the red/blue/yellow trifecta of key colors used by classic Doom. Having one be blue would be a big improvement.

Adding to this frustration is that...


base skull graphic

... the coloration was not thrust upon the devs by the original sprite artist. (Doom Roguelike's sprites were originally made by Derek Yu just showing up in the Chaosforge forums and shoving a complete spritesheet at them that he'd made all on his own without telling anybody beforehand: the dev team didn't get an opportunity to give input on sprites at the time!) There's just the one skull graphic that the engine dynamically colors in and wraps with the Exotic aura.

So seriously, why isn't there a blue one?

Hell Staff

Teleports user to a random unoccupied tile. Will not teleport into Acid or Lava tiles. Cannot be used if Tired or Running and makes Doomguy Tired, but can be reused unlimitedly otherwise.

Minimum floor: 15

It's a Phase Device, only instead of being usable exactly once, it makes you Tired instead. Also, I'm mostly-certain enemies won't pick it up. (I've never seen them do so, and they don't have Tactics, but I've seen the Hell Staff so rarely I'm not willing to assume they can't)

Unfortunately, the Hell Staff's realistic utility is lower than I'd like. I covered earlier how many problems there are with regular Phase Devices, and you might've noticed that 'you can only use a given one once ever' was not something I listed as an important flaw. The Hell Staff being multi-use is really a pretty mild advantage, and it's not like it's a clear improvement over a Phase Device since it switches the cost to 'makes you Tired'. If its cost was instead something like 'the Staff becomes an Uncharged Hell Staff on use, which is useless until you've done (thing) to switch it back to the charged Hell Staff', where the recharge process was itself not a burden to fulfill (Maybe it would recharge when descending stairs, or after enough kills), then I'd at least be able to say it was clearly superior to a Phase Device. As-is, activating the Hell Staff costs you the ability to Run or activate other special effects (eg the Longinus Spear's alternate attack), which can be a very significant disadvantage relative to a Phase Device!

Also not helping is that it's not allowed to spawn until quite late. (It can just barely spawn in Deimos, right before the Tower of Babel) If you could expect to find it before the Containment Area/The Wall, it could be a semi-reliable way to get through their respective initial walls, especially for a player willing to burn Medpacks on canceling the Tired state. As-is, though, I think it might actually be impossible to get it that early; The Wall/Containment Area is accessed from Floor 11, which is of course 4 floors before the Hell Staff can spawn normally. The main qualifier here is that I don't understand the formula used for vault room item generation beyond that vaults are allowed to generate items earlier than their minimum floor; as such, it might be possible for a vault room to generate the Hell Staff early enough to actually have it for the Containment Area/The Wall.

I suspect the vault formula isn't actually generous enough for that to happen, though, and in any event the Hell Staff is furthermore burdened by being absurdly rare. It has an 'item weight' of 4; this is the same as each of the Exotic Mod Packs, which collectively are rare enough I average less than 1 Exotic Mod Pack per standard run. (When only counting standard item generation routines) And Exotic Mod Packs are allowed to start generating sooner, too! A standard run ends on floor 24, with floor 24 itself having no random generation, and so too does floor 16 have no relevant random generation; the Hell Staff has only 7 floors in a standard run it has a chance of spawning into! (Unless maybe it can spawn into a Special Level at random; I don't think any of them allow this, but I'm not 100% certain of that) I personally have seen the Hell Staff maybe three times ever, with hundreds of successful standard runs, a dozen or so successful Angel of 100 runs, and a successful Archangel of 666 run under my belt.

So you have limited opportunities to play around with it and find what situations it particularly excels in, making it hard to identify if it has strong use-cases.

Arena Master's Staff

When used in most places, Doomguy will become Tired and trigger 15d1 Fire damage explosions on every visible enemy. (These explosions can only harm their targeted unit, making their nature as explosions essentially decorative) The Staff cannot be used again until Doomguy stops being Tired. In the Vaults Special Level, using the Staff will permanently destroy the Staff, but open up all the 'locked' rooms of the level. In the House of Pain Special Level, using the Staff will permanently destroy the Staff, but unlock all doors and prevent them from relocking. Both these uses do not Tire Doomguy.

Minimum floor: N/A

The Arena Master's Staff can never be acquired in Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 runs; it can only be acquired from the Chained Court Special Level... and only if you fully cleared Hell's Arena earlier in that run!

The primary purpose of the Staff is of course to act as an inventory tax that, if paid, will result in getting to raid the Vaults and hopefully get some great loot out of them. In this regard, it works... wonkily, honestly? The Vaults are placed so late it's not unusual for a run to have all slots filled with Exotic/Unique/Assembled gear by the time you reach the Vaults. Runs that aren't so lucky are in turn a bit on the weak side and more likely to want to skip the Vaults for being too dangerous. I kind of wish the Staff instead opened up The Wall/Containment Zone; that Special Level pair is not only placed quite a bit earlier but also provides a completely unique reward that can't be made irrelevant by earlier loot generation having gone well. It would also smooth out some of the weird unevenness with Angel Challenges centered on whether they forbid common wall-smashing tools or not.

I like the basic idea of the Staff acting as an inventory tax to later unlock fabulous prizes, but the execution?....

0.9.9.8 adding the House of Pain made this even wonkier by making this utility of the Arena Master's Staff inconsistent. If you roll the House of Pain instead of the Vaults, using the Arena Master's Staff still has a special payoff, but the benefits are minor: it just unlocks all doors and prevents the game from relocking them when it spawns new enemies. This doesn't give access to additional loot or anything, only being potentially useful if you end up ducking through a door to use a Large Health Globe mid-fight, or if you decide to run on ahead and scoop up loot from later sections while enemies still live from a prior round. (Which can make sense to avoid enemies smashing the later goods, admittedly) But it's still a very mild payoff for having dragged an item 20 floors. (Not counting any Special Levels you did on the way!)

Now, there's an argument that this means you can instead hold onto the Arena Master's Staff and use it for its own sake even past the House of Pain if you roll that, but...

The thing is, the Arena Master's Staff's combat utility looks at first glance cool and powerful but is shockingly difficult to get use out of. It does a guaranteed 15 damage to every visible enemy... when only the weakest of enemies have that little HP... and multiple of those enemies heavily resist Fire damage. (Imps, Lost Souls) Using it when many enemies are in view will basically never kill anything on use, and even just its total damage generation can easily end up surpassed by eg a well-aimed shotgun blast. And since its damage is flat (It's not affected by eg Son of a Bitch ranks), it just falls further behind as more durable enemies largely displace the early-game enemies.

Particularly obtuse is that the Arena Master's Staff's visuals and audio are of every visible enemy exploding, but these explosions are purely decorative: if you descend a floor and find yourself in view of 9 enemies standing in a square, you'd think the center enemy would be hit 9 times and so take 135 damage, and everybody else be hit 4 times and so take 60 damage, which would be a pretty good effect!... but no, they'll all take 15 damage. Minus their Fure resistance, and minus their Protection. That's... not so great.

The fact that it runs off Tiring Doomguy instead of having a limited number of charges or the like does less to prop it up than you might hope, since of course Tiredness can't be corrected except by either changing floor or by spending a turn on some form of healing. Alternating using the Staff with munching on a Small Medpack is not liable to save you in a pinch.

That said, do keep in mind that the Technician using items in 0.1 seconds does in fact apply to the Arena Master's Staff. Among other points, for a Technician you might want to use the Staff anytime you're not Tired, are intending to heal in a moment anyway, and have enemies in vision; in theory a lot of the time it'll be essentially free damage at that point. (I've never managed to get into this habit myself, mind; this is more speculative than most of my commentary, but it seems like it should be a sensible thing to do as a Technician)

Thermonuclear Bomb

When activated, starts a 10 second timer. Once the timer is up, destroys everything on the level that can be destroyed, including killing Doomguy if he's not Invulnerable at the time. Dying while a nuke is active will cause the game to credit the player all the kills of that floor, but leaving the floor will not credit the player that floor's kills, even though they'll get a message about hearing it go off behind them.

Minimum floor: 10

The primary use of a Thermonuclear Bomb is getting to a Complete Victory, which is a run-long challenge the game intends for a player to puzzle out on their own. I'll be talking about that in a much later post, though.

Outside the Complete Victory point, Thermonuclear Bombs can theoretically be combined with Invulnerability to get a bunch of experience from a floor with a minimum of resources expended. This is... pretty dubious a use in practice, as it'll also blow up ammo, health pickups, Armors, etc, with only Uniques surviving. If you'd spend 50 Shotgun Shells clearing a floor 'manually' but also loot 80 Shotgun Shells, and similar ideas for HP lost to combat vs HP gained from health pickups and so on... the nuke may well be a net negative on resource efficiency in practice! Not even getting into more notable valuables like Mod Packs and Exotics you might be unwittingly destroying.

If you happen to get a Computer Map or Tracking Map early on a floor that also has a close-by Invulnerability Sphere, you can potentially make an informed decision on this topic... assuming you also have a nuke on hand, of course. They generate pretty rarely; it's perfectly normal for a standard run that full-clears every floor to never see a randomly-generated nuke. So there's a pretty improbable confluence of events that has to happen to be able to not only make such an informed decision but have the conclusion be 'yes, this is a good time to use the nuke'.

That is, if you scour a floor, loot everything, and still have some enemies you missed, you can be confident the nuke won't be blowing up valuables and will be killing enemies, but it probably will only be a few enemies, and you probably could've just killed them conventionally at minimal resource cost anyway.

Honestly, it really kills the utility of nukes that the message about the nuke going off behind you if you descend floors while the timer is active is pure flavor; if you got full experience credit for that, setting a nuke as you're fleeing a floor you don't feel confident in your ability to safely clear conventionally would be a pretty nice use-case for nukes. As-is, it feels like it's nearly impossible for a nuke to be useful outside the Complete Victory thing.

Oh, and I should explicitly point out that nuke timers are running off the in-game clock system, which is to say that the faster you are the more actions you can squeeze into a given number of seconds. If you're really, really fast, it's possible to get yourself killed when combining a nuke with an Invulnerability Sphere since Invulnerability from one lasts 50 actions, not 50 seconds. (If you're on I'm Too Young To Die or Nightmare! difficulty, this is only possible if you grab the Invulnerability Sphere before you set the nuke: since an action's minimum time is 0.1 seconds, you can at most fit 100 actions into 10 seconds, and those difficulties double powerup duration) Fortunately, passing time (By default, by pressing the period key) always takes exactly 1 second no matter what other speed modifiers you have in play, so if you're unsure about the risk, just pass the time that way until the nuke goes off.

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There's one more used item I've deliberately excluded from this list and will be covering in a much later post, for reference.

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Next time, we cover Levers, in part because they count as 'used items' for the purpose of the Technician's 'use items in 0.1 seconds' benefit.

See you then.