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

Now for Angel of Max Carnage's dual challenges!

Reminder of its actual effects:

All Accuracy is increased by +12, and all damage rolls always produce max results. (These effects apply to both Doomguy and his enemies)

So combat is pretty clockwork, yeah. Mostly. Usually. Other than Dodges and AI decision-making, of course.

Angel of 100

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

This combination is a lot rougher than I intuitively expected.

First of all, Special Levels provide a disproportionate amount of healing, and also provide reliable early access to good Armors, not to mention provide opportunities to gain Levels in relatively predictable, controlled circumstances. In a regular Angel of Max Carnage run, it's pretty easy to use many Special Levels as 'safe' areas to stockpile Medpacks, HP, and Armors, so that when things go wrong in regular floors you have more of a buffer. With Angel of 100 added in, those Special Levels go away, so if you're not the kind of player who can clear Nightmare! Angel of 100 without ever being attacked, you can easily find yourself burning through your resources overly-quickly, very possibly unable to figure out why it's even happening in this run when it wasn't happening in your non-Angel of 100 runs.

Second, the functionally-accelerated pace of enemy progression is a lot more reliably punishing with Angel of Max Carnage in play. In a regular Angel of 100 run, it's possible for the 'strategic dice' to give you really bad outcomes, but get through such a bad patch because the 'tactical dice' happen to be kind to you in that period. With Angel of Max Carnage in play, that scenario isn't possible: if you can't skill your way through a given type of bad strategic luck, you're gonna die!

I'd actually expected this combo to be easier than a plain Angel of 100 run, mostly because I figured the greater ammo efficiency would minimize the odds of ammo starvation. This is true-ish, but the prior points overall 'outweigh' it, in my experience. The Medpack starvation especially is something I've run into as a hurdle, where I have a rough patch and die because my healing buffer is never very large in the first place. I think if you get to around floor 30, healing Powerups are common enough this particular concern dies away, but that's a pretty stretch to potentially suffer 'healing starvation' in.

Angel of Light Travel

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

This is a very strange, very rough combo. Angel of Max Carnage is heavily skewed toward rapid-fire weapons, as they benefit massively from its effects, but while Angel of Max Carnage improves ammo efficiency, it doesn't improve it by enough to offset Angel of Light Travel's severely constricted carrying capacity. Angel of Light Travel heavily favoring melee builds gets funky alongside Angel of Max Carnage; while melee builds are doable in Angel of Max Carnage, they're not straightforward. (Except when you're in the Unholy Cathedral, or otherwise fighting only dedicated melee enemies)

It's a pretty cool combo, to be clear, encouraging a very divergent experience, but also easy to have things go wrong because it's so odd a combo you can make mistakes that really don't feel like they ought to be mistakes.

... you know, I just realized I've never tried this combo with Ammochain. Huh.

Angel of Impatience

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

This makes for pretty volatile runs, but it's often not too bad? Angel of Max Carnage already makes combat usage of Medpacks vastly less appealing (Unless playing a Technician), so having the option taken away entirely is less impactful on your play relative to 'plain' Angel of Impatience contrasted with a completely standard run. Losing out on the ability to carry Medpacks into later floors means you're at greater risk of descending to a new floor and dying because you happened to be in a wasteland of no healing and many enemies, and the inability to cart around Envirosuit Packs and Phase Devices means descending into Mount Erebus/The Lava Pits is not viable unless you've got passive permanent immunity to Lava, but plenty of floors will end up distinguished mostly by having to run back to pick up healing more often.

I assume the combo would be horrific on Nightmare! difficulty, but as I've said before I've barely touched Nightmare! difficulty and these posts are largely aimed at Ultraviolence.

Angel of Confidence

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

Since Angel of Confidence has you start out carrying a Chaingun, this tends to have the earliest portion of the run less tense than a 'plain' Angel of Max Carnage run does. Chainguns are strong in Max Carnage!

That funny detail aside, I don't really have anything to say about this combo. It's pretty much what you'd expect from the individual pieces.

Angel of Purity

Effect: Powerups do nothing.

Angel of Max Carnage does tend to struggle more with keeping HP up if you're not very consistent about preventing enemies from getting attacks in, so if that's an issue for you... this combination might be pretty rough.

I personally find the combo mostly notably difficult in the very early game, but I also just don't find it a very interesting 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.

As Angel of Max Carnage speeds up combat, this combo is overall a bit easier than a 'plain' Angel of Red Alert run. Only a bit, though; as I said in the first Angel Challenges post, you tend to run the clock down most heavily when walking from Point A to Point B, not in combat. Still, if you find Angel of Red Alert interesting but a bit too much, combining it with Angel of Max Carnage might make it more accessible to you.

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.

Reminder that shots fired into darkness have a 50% chance to miss independent of Accuracy, and so Angel of Max Carnage doesn't make it easier to hit enemies attacking you from just out of sight. There's a fair argument it resents Angel of Darkness more than usual!

I tried the combo precisely once, figuring Angel of Max Carnage making the game overall easier would offset how much harder Angel of Darkness makes things. I had not considered how Angel of Darkness making it easy for enemies to get the first strike, and not staying dead, would make it much easier to get ground down over time or outright murdered with no warning because you didn't actually know three Barons of Hell were standing 7 tiles away. It wasn't fun!

I imagine there are players who'd enjoy this combo, probably, I assume. I'm certainly not one of them, though.

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%.

If you're really, really good at killing things without letting them ever attack -something Max Carnage makes a lot easier- then this is probably a bit easier than a plain Angel of Max Carnage run. To be clear, I don't mean 'if you're perfect' -if you are perfect, Angel of Masochism doesn't matter- but rather if you have a very low but still existent rate of enemies making attacks, then Angel of Masochism providing intermittent free healing while you just ignore Medpacks and so on is a lot of inventory space freed up for other stuff while still getting to shrug off being dinged here and there.

I've personally never been able to work myself up to trying it because I only sometimes approach that kind of reliability and it seems likely to be miserable at my range of reliability. So take the above with a grain of salt.

Angel of Overconfidence

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

You wanna die on your first floor with basically no ability to prevent it? I mean, that already happens with Angel of Overconfidence, but Angel of Max Carnage squashes out the potential to survive something you shouldn't because a bunch of enemies had an improbably high rate of missing, so it'll happen even more consistently.

Mind, I haven't actually tried this combo, so I suppose it's possible I'm overestimating how bad it is, but... eeeh...

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Next time, we cover the Angel of Impatience dual-Challenges.

See you then.