Doom Roguelike Analysis: Angel of Shotgunnery Dual Challenges (0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8)

As this is the first Dual-Angel Challenge post I'm putting up, I'll also be providing an overview of the system and touch on some of its non-obvious rules.

Dual-Angel Challenges are of course the straightforward-sounding concept of 'pick two Angel Challenges to have active at the same time for your run'. This is cool! I like this kind of concept!

The actual execution is unfortunately clunky. You don't simply pick any pair you like: instead, clicking into Dual-Angel Challenges gives you an abbreviated list to choose as your 'base' Challenge, and clicking one of those then gives you a dev-designated list to tack onto it. This for one thing makes the whole thing pretty opaque: you have to do a lot of clicking to figure out what the full range of possibilities (And non-options) actually is. This includes that there are in fact several 'symmetrical' choices, where you can get a specific pair using either part as the base challenge, adding further cognitive load to understanding your range of options.

So part of the point of this intro is to reconstruct this in a summarized form for readers and spell out some of the implications.

Of the game's 15 Angel Challenges, only 9 can be selected as your base challenge: you can't pick Angel of 100, Angel of Confidence, Angel of Overconfidence, Angel of Red Alert, Angel of Light Travel, or Angel of Masochism as your base challenge.

Conversely, 6 Angel Challenges can never be your second choice: Angel of Shotgunnery, Angel of Berserk, Angel of Marksmanship, Angel of Max Carnage, Angel of Pacifism, and Angel of Humanity never show up as a sub-option for another pick.

The intersection of those two lists has some implications right there.

First of the very understandable decisions is that you can't combine the weapon specialization Challenges: what would Berserk+Shotgunnery even mean? What, you'd get both? That'd be the opposite of the 'make things EVEN HARDER on yourself' that Dual-Angel Challenges seem to be shooting for!

Second of the very understandable decisions is that you can't mix together Confidence/Overconfidence/100, which makes perfect sense. Again: what would that even mean?

Third of the very understandable decisions is that you can't mix Pacifism with any of the weapon specialization Challenges. That would just be nonsense.

More confusing is that Angel of Max Carnage thus can't be combined with the weapon specialization Challenges. Nor can Angel of Humanity be combined with weapon specialization Challenges.

For that matter, you can't combine Max Carnage with Humanity, but to be fair that sounds like a recipe for extreme frustration for anybody who isn't one of those players who can beat the game without ever being hit by anything. So even though it doesn't have any mechanical compatibility problems, I suspect not many players are upset to hear this.

Also slightly odd is that you can't combine Red Alert with Confidence/Overconfidence/Angel of 100. Nor combine Light Travel or Masochism with Confidence/Overconfidence/Angel of 100. I'm not sure why. Angel of Light Travel combined with Angel of 100 would be difficult, but I'd have liked the option to try, personally.

Non-obvious is that the custom lists have further implications: of the 9 base choices, only 5 actually have every sub-choice available to them. (Angel of Darkness, being one of the 3 Challenges to exist as both a main option and a sub-option, has one fewer option than the other four base Challenges using the maximum valid pool since of course you can't pick Darkness+Darkness)

Pacifism and Humanity both refuse to be combined with Light Travel, and Pacifism furthermore refuses to be combined with Red Alert. (Which is fair: it wouldn't reliably impact Pacifism play. You're already beelining for the stairs and leaving, not trying to explore thoroughly. You'd only care when you were slow enough in doing so to get blown up)

Impatience and Purity both refuse to be combined with Masochism, which... is pretty fair. Item usage and Powerup usage is most important for the aspect of healing, which Masochism renders irrelevant: an Impatience+Masochism run would have some meaning (You'd be denied healing and not be able to cart around Envirosuit Packs, for example), but Masochism is genuinely mostly overruling Impatience and Purity.

Impatience and Purity also refuse to be combined with each other. I kind of suspect a coding motive given Impatience's effect amounts to 'used items are Powerups': I wouldn't be surprised if simply smushing the two together would result in 'Powerups and used items are both useless' rather than 'Powerups are useless while used items activate on pickup'.

Overall, the list makes a fair amount of sense: it's mostly the inability to combine Max Carnage and Humanity with weapon specializations that's just bizarre of an omission. I am puzzled by the inability to combine Angel of Red Alert with Angel of 100: that sounds much less janky than Angel of Red Alert on its own is. Admittedly I can imagine it wearing down players...

Anyway, the game itself will inform you that only the base Challenge is counted for score. What it actually means is that your high score list's summary won't mention that a dual-Angel run is such, and only marks such a run with whatever the base Challenge is. The detailed post-mortem file will in fact explicitly mention that the run was a dual-Angel run and list both Challenges selected. So if you want to share your achievement with people, you just upload the post-mortem file is all.

Also, I'll not be replicating the difficulty rating format for these. Dual-Angel Challenges are obviously quite dependent on the details of the intersection for how hard they end up, and there's way too many of these for me to provide a truly informed opinion on all the permutations relative to each other. I doubt I'll ever get around to even trying every permutation, especially given how easy it would be to just not realize I haven't gotten around to X or Y exact combo.

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So now I start talking about Angel of Shotgunnery's specific options and what I think of them.

A warning before I start: Dual-Angel Challenges are one of the aspects of Doom Roguelike I've explored least. This is thus speaking less directly from experience than most of my Doom Roguelike commentary. Don't be surprised if I suggest something as A Good Idea and you recoil in horror because you've done it and it was a horrible idea.

Anyway.

Reminder that Angel of Shotgunnery is...

Doomguy may only attack with Shotguns and his fists.

... and so all the following challenges additionally labor under that limitation.

Angel of 100

Effect: Completely removes all fixed floor generation cases, with the game ending upon completing your 100th floor.

Angel of Shotgunnery actually makes that first floor a bit less prone to being a death roulette since you start with a Shotgun. This is particularly pertinent when talking higher difficulties -on Ultraviolence, you can meet Hell Knights on the first floor! Fighting one of those with a Pistol is a bad time. Fighting one with a Shotgun is much more doable.

Of course, conversely you're going to have to worry about ammo starvation more than usual. It's a good idea to Assemble an Elephant Gun, as it's very ammo-efficient, and I would strongly recommend getting Brute and Berserker at some point: Brute 3+Berserker is enough to make punching surprisingly effective at killing enemies, allowing you to save ammo here and there. Arachnotrons are also melee-vulnerable enemies you want in melee range so they don't use their deadly Plasma bolts, so being able to just punch them to death instead of knocking them away with your Shotgun blast is a big help. Combined with Assembling an Elephant Gun, you become pretty unlikely to be killed by ammo starvation -I had a run get 100% kills this way, and even though it was lucky enough to Assemble a Nano-shrapnel Combat Shotgun in the latter third, I actually never reached the point of having to fall back on it for ammo reasons! (I mostly used it for radar-shooting and on Cyberdemons, actually)

Compared to a 'plain' Angel of Shotgunnery run, I'd say that this is actually a bit easier overall. You don't have to worry about the Containment Area/The Wall being usually inaccessible to you, you don't have to worry about the Arena Master being pretty difficult to kill with just early Shotguns, you don't have to worry about Shotguns being unreliable at being able to destroy corpses in Limbo/The Mortuary, you don't have to worry about the Cyberdemon's scarily high Protection stonewalling you... there's a lot of pieces to a standard run that are hostile to Angel of Shotgunnery in ways that Angel of 100 simply doesn't replicate. Having to worry more about ammo starvation as a risk is a pretty minor trade by comparison.

Overall, I enjoy Angel of Shotgunner+Angel of 100 quite well. The combo is a good example of the potential the dual-Challenge concept has to be interesting.

Angel of Light Travel

Effect: Doomguy has only 5 slots for carrying items, but he generates 20% more Energy per game tick.

In Angel of Shotgunnery runs, I generally don't feel comfortable with my ammo reserves unless I have at least 4 inventory slots filled with Shells, which of course is almost all your slots in Angel of Light Travel, so... You could get lucky and get a Nano Mod Pack and breeze on through with a Nano-shrapnel Shotgun, of course, but it's not exactly expected.

If you are going to give it a try, I'd recommend trying to Assemble an Elephant Gun as quickly as possible, as it really is very ammo-efficient, and that's desperately important if you don't luck into a Nano Mod Pack. My own experience is this isn't really enough on its own to remotely approach reliability, mind, especially since it can take a while to get the two Power Mod Packs you need, but it does help.

Getting Brute and Berserker online can also help, of course, just as with Angel of 100. You can't use a Chainsaw, but you can still punch! Compared to Angel of 100, though, this is more build-burdensome; you're likely to have to make a noticeable sacrifice, in terms of skipping other Traits you'd also like to have, whereas in Angel of 100 you'll ultimately have plenty of points to spare on non-core functionality.

Angel of Impatience

Effect: Medpacks, Envirosuit Packs, and Phase Devices are immediately used on pickup, like Powerups.

This notably makes it almost impossible to enter the Containment Area/The Wall, since you can't bring in a few Phase Devices and a Homing Phase Device, and can only blast your way in if you arrange a Plasma-damage Shotgun one way or another.

The inability to commit inventory space to Medpacks does make it harder to ammo-starve yourself by virtue of not committing enough space to ammo, so the difficulty getting the Backpack actually doesn't sting that much.

Overall, I don't have much to add beyond that.

Angel of Confidence

Effect: You start the game in Deimos 1. (ie floor 9)

Of the weapon-restricting Angel Challenges, I suspect Angel of Shotgunnery is the least suicidal to combine with Angel of Confidence.

I could be totally wrong, though. I haven't messed around with Confidence in dual-Challenges much. I'm actually not sure I've ever tried this particular combo at all.

Angel of Purity

Effect: Powerups do nothing.

As with a standard Angel of Purity run, this is most significant for the reduction in free healing. Shotguns are kings of corner-shooting and radar-shooting, so you'll be well-positioned to minimize the harm from that loss. In the long haul, it may even save you from yourself if you're prone to shunting out ammo for Medpacks, by virtue of you not suffering ammo starvation because you had to eat Medpacks so aggressively you didn't end up deciding to stuff in Medpacks over ammo.

The low odds of getting the Backpack do increase the inventory crunch a bit compared to a standard Angel of Purity run... but compared to Angel of Impatience+Angel of Shotgunnery, it's much more realistic to manage it, since you retain the option of Phase Device usage. I suspect this is overall the easier Angel of Shotgunnery combo.

Angel of Red Alert

Effect: A nuke with a five minute timer is placed at Doomguy's feet upon entering each new floor. Scouts also don't get to passively know stair locations.

I actually did this as my first Angel of Red Alert dual-Challenge, expecting Shotguns to be smoother and easier than Pistols for getting through things quickly. I hadn't realized the degree to which Shotguns are actually pretty time-inefficient, especially when fighting individual enemies or small groups that aren't closely-spaced; it did not end well.

You can ablate the issue by defaulting to aggressive movement so Shottyman reloads are occurring alongside advancing to stairs and all, but outside Shottyhead Scouts a Shotgun build is always going to be a bit of a time hog compared to the alternatives. 0.9.9.8 buffing Reloader makes it a bit more acceptable to stand in place and corner-shoot at times, but it's still dangerous.

Shotgun builds also just have a fair amount of message spam that makes it especially easy to miss when a timer warning does pop up. I've had multiple runs end in failure not because I couldn't have made it to the stairs in time safely, but because I got through a hectic fight, didn't realize how little time I had left, and moved away from the stairs when I really needed to be charging toward them. I gave up on this combo predominately because this is a pretty frustrating reason to be dying; if the clock were visibly tracked at all times as its own UI element, I'd probably enjoy this combo a lot more even if I still tended to fail it.

Angel of Darkness

Effect: Doomguy's base line of sight is reduced by 2 tiles (ie from 8 to 6), the game doesn't display tiles not currently in line of sight, and corpses Doomguy can't currently see have a chance to resurrect periodically. By extension, 'You feel relatively safe now' will never display. Scouts also don't get to passively know stair locations. Experience is gained twice as fast.

Angel of Shotgunnery is less negatively impacted by a reduced vision radius since Shotguns can't miss even when firing into the darkness, but you'll probably have poor/nonexistent corpse destruction, so that's a notable concern.

Ultimately, I dislike Angel of Darkness enough I haven't tried this combo more than a handful of times, so... I don't have much in the way of informed opinions to offer here.

Angel of Masochism

Effect: Almost all healing fails to increase HP. (The Marine's Vampyre Mastery still functions) Gaining a level heals Doomguy to 200%.

It's worth pointing out that the Vampyre point is in fact meaningfully relevant to an Angel of Shotgunnery run since using melee combat supplementally can be a good idea anyway when focusing on Shotguns.

I personally have not tried this combo and have doubts I'll ever get around to trying it, but to be fair I default sufficiently heavily to Shotgun-focused play that I haven't tried many Angel of Shotgunnery Dual Challenges in general, because it often ends up as pretty similar to me doing the non-Shotgunnery Challenge on its own, just probably missing out on the Backpack and all.

Angel of Overconfidence

Effect: You start the game in Hell 1. (ie floor 17)

On the plus side, the whole 'you can't get the Backpack' point is pretty whatever since Angel of Shotgunnery makes getting the Backpack a low-odds event in the first place.

I haven't actually tried it, though. So... not sure how it works out.

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Next time, we move on to the Angel of Marksmanship Dual Challenges.

See you then.