Doom Roguelike Analysis: Basic Angel Challenges (0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8)

'Angel Challenges' are variant modes in Doom Roguelike, comparable to 'conducts' in various classic Roguelikes in that many of them are specifically about restrictions on your behavior/options, with a tendency for the final result to be that they are harder than a plain run. A lot of them provide some kind of compensation so they're not clearly harder than a default run, and there's a few I'd argue are overall easier than a default run, but generally speaking if you're still struggling with default runs, Angel Challenges will be even harder.

The game itself offers a difficulty rating for each Angel Challenge, out of 5-ish possibilities: Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard, and then some have their difficulty named after a specific individual in the Doom Roguelike community. (In 0.9.9.7, this was always 'Blade', but in 0.9.9.8, one of them got its difficulty labeled 'Sereg') This last type of label is the game's highest difficulty rating, basically indicating the devs considered it a nigh-impossible challenge that you should only attempt if you're the sort of player who thinks '100% Nightmare! without ever taking damage' is a reasonable thing to do for fun.

I personally tend to disagree with the game's assessments of the comparative difficulty of different Challenges, so I offer my own rating in addition to the game's rating.

On to the 15 basic Angel Challenges!

Angel of Berserk

Game's Rating: Medium

My Rating: Very Hard (Initially)

Effect: Doomguy may only attack with melee weapons. (His fists count) Large Health Globes give 50 actions of Berserk when picked up.

All the weapon-focused Angel challenges additionally modify your starting kit and a few Special Level rewards. In the case of Angel of Berserk, you start with Blue Armor, an equipped Combat Knife, and two Large Medpacks, instead of the usual Pistol, 20 10mm ammo, and two Small Medpacks. Hell's Arena similarly upgrades its Blue Armor reward into a Red Armor.

In Angel of Berserk, Hell's Arena is generally best off skipped, especially as you rise in difficulties. It's almost impossible to have Berserker online in time for it, and you're very unlikely to be able to go in with a good supply of health/Medpacks/Armor, and the payoff is mediocre. This in turn means you do miss out on the Arena Master's Staff, but the main consequence of that is being unlikely to loot the Vaults. While that's somewhat annoying, Angel of Berserk has poor odds of the Vaults being a good payday: you don't care about the ammo, and any ranged weapons that spawned are irrelevant too, leaving only the possibility of good Armor and/or Boots spawning as particularly realistic a scenario. Most runs that make it into the Vaults simply don't loot anything of note from the perspective of Angel of Berserk.

Angel of Berserk also has extremely poor odds of being able to (meaningfully) enter the Containment Area/The Wall, but aside missing out on some experience this isn't really a big deal. The main prize is the Backpack, and Angel of Berserk has no use for the Backpack: it only affects ammo!

Angel of Berserk itself is kind of awkward in its current state. The very early game is very, very hard: the normal way to do a melee build is to start out shooting things and investing toward your Mastery in whatever way is most immediately useful (eg grabbing a rank of Badass early, when playing a Marine going for Vampyre), and only start trying to leverage melee combat once you reach the Chained Court and more specifically its Chainsaw. Angel of Berserk takes away that option, forcing you to knife things and basically mandating just focusing on Brute/Berserker, and there's a lot of threats you're basically guaranteed to die to if you find them. Higher difficulties especially are very death roulette-y, where running into a Baron of Hell is liable to boil down to 'you successfully run away, or you die'.

In theory, Large Health Globes providing Berserk offsets this, but, well, they're rare. Not seeing one prior to reaching the Chained Court is entirely unsurprising. This benefit often doesn't meaningfully kick in until you already have Berserker and so don't have need for free Berserks. It's also very specifically Large Health Globes: you might expect any or all of Supercharges, Megaspheres, and Invulnerability Spheres to count, but nope.

Once you're over the hump of the early game, however, Angel of Berserk turns... boring? A bit less so for Technicians, but melee build Marines and Scouts have little cause to use their ranged weapons anyway once the Mastery comes online; it's perfectly normal for my melee Marines and Scouts to just stop carrying around ranged weapons somewhere in Deimos, aside generally some kind of Rocket weapon to provide wall-smashing utility. Angel of Berserk enforcing such behavior isn't an imposition. Especially in the Unholy Cathedral, where ranged weapons never work.

The final result is that you're liable to have a bunch of Angel of Berserk runs that fail very early on, and then when you finally have a successful run it only briefly is Interestingly Different from a default run. Nnnnot ideal.

I personally wish the Berserk was triggered by Large Medpacks, honestly. It would more meaningfully help with surviving the early game, and would open up options later in a run, in a manner that Large Health Globes providing Berserk doesn't tend to do. You'd still end up with the midgame-onward not being terribly different from a no-Challenge run, but that's kind of fundamental to how powerful melee gets once invested into and all, so I'm not sure it can be addressed in a manner specific to the Challenge.

Angel of Marksmanship

Game's Rating: Medium

My Rating: Medium

Effect: Doomguy may only attack with Pistols and his fists.

The Marine has to basically constantly worry about running out of ammo. (Unless they elect to ignore Bullet Dance entirely, which is very worth considering) For any class, it's a good idea to Assemble up one or two Energy Pistols so you can use Power Cells alongside 10mm ammo, minimizing the odds of ammo starvation. (Unless Nanomachic makes the point moot)

Like Angel of Berserk, Angel of Marksmanship runs are unlikely to successfully enter the Containment Area/The Wall. Unlike Angel of Berserk, this hurts! You want that added ammo storage! You do at least have more ability to try to work around the issue: an Energy Pistol or Demolition Ammo can enable the ability to cut through terrain (In conjunction with Son of a Gun ranks), and you can also get lucky with a Blaster as a surefire way to cut your way in. (Albeit a slow, tedious way) This is particularly relevant to the Technician, since they can get Whizkid ranks online without having to work their way through Eagle Eye ranks, and it's worth pointing out that their Mastery lets them cut through terrain faster and more ammo-efficiently.

Also like Angel of Berserk, skipping an early Special Level or two is worth considering. Hell's Arena isn't so bad, but the Arena Master's version of the Chained Court is rather difficult to overcome with just Pistols; the Arena Master is really designed around the idea you have a Rocket Launcher. I personally tend to hit Hell's Arena and then skip the Chained Court, but I wouldn't argue this is clearly superior to the alternative.

Also similar is that the early game tends to be particularly rough, though much less drastically than in Angel of Berserk. The inability to use Shotguns while you're waiting to get to Son of a Gun 3 does sting, especially up on Ultraviolence or Nightmare! where you can encounter alarmingly early Barons of Hell and all, but unlike Angel of Berserk it's not a death roulette, it's just... moderately rough.

Unlike Angel of Berserk, Angel of Marksmanship stays a distinct experience into the midgame and late game. A Pistol build normally wants to hold onto at least one non-Pistol option, to work around the Bullet resistance on Lost Souls and Revenants, to quickly deal with big hordes of enemies of any kind, and of course to diversify ammo usage so a 10mm ammo drought isn't a death sentence, so missing out on the ability to carry a backup Combat Shotgun noticeably impacts how one plays. The City of Skulls in particular is often not worth visiting at all, and even the Abyssal Plain is a bit dubious to enter a lot of the time. Similarly, the probability of missing out on the Backpack and the probability of not being able to open up the Vaults both matter a lot to an Angel of Marksmanship run, making ammo starvation even more of a risk and meaning the run is noticeably more likely to miss out on useful gear from the Vaults.

One thing that's kind of frustrating is that your Pistol quality is heavily down to luck. Non-standard Pistols are never guaranteed in any form in a standard run, and Angel of Marksmanship doesn't change this any: it doesn't spawn a Combat Pistol in Hell's Arena, or replace the guaranteed Assault Shotgun in Limbo/The Mortuary with a Blaster, or anything else like that. This is a unique bit of jank to Angel of Marksmanship: Angel of Berserk and Angel of Shotgunnery don't suffer from this because a standard run already has multiple guaranteed upgrades to both weapon types, and there aren't any other weapon-specialist Angel Challenges. (You'd think there'd be a rapid-fire Challenge, but for whatever reason... nope)

I'm actually not very fond of Angel of Marksmanship personally precisely because of this; having one run go smoothly because it got lucky and got a Combat Pistol and a Unique Pistol while a different run crashed and burned pretty substantially because basic Pistols were all it ever had to work with isn't a feel-good experience. This is part of why I don't do Pistol runs very often in general, really, but I've had the occasional standard run where I wasn't planning on going Pistols, but swerved because a good Pistol spawned early enough I could still switch tracks to Pistols and get my Pistol Mastery; Angel of Marksmanship locking you in to Pistols makes the swingy RNG aspect of 'did you get a better Pistol?' much more fundamental and unavoidable.

This touches on a more general point: that I wish the weapon challenges just removed unusable gear from the pool of random gear generation. There's an argument to be made that the 'conduct' experience is meant to be built around intentionally non-optimal play and so spawning junk you can't use is Supposed To Be Part Of The Experience, but a player booting up a normal run intending to hold to a conduct can reach the second floor, spot the Butcher's Cleaver, and go 'never mind, I'll commit a different run to an Only Pistols conduct, this run is a melee run now'. It's very frustrating to do one of these weapon-restricting challenges and then have great Uniques spawn in... of completely the wrong type, so they're just taunting you.

Anyway...

My original point, though, was that I really feel like Angel of Marksmanship should tweak stuff so there's at least a guaranteed Combat Pistol squirreled away in one Special Level pair. It's funky how it's the only weapon-constricting Challenge that is entirely reliant on RNG to move up its weapon chain.

(To be fair, Pistols have fewer 'steps' than other weapon types: only Rocket weapons are comparable in terms of 'you have a basic version, an overall superior Exotic version, and then you go straight to unreliable Uniques'. So that's a baked-in bit of awkwardness to Angel of Marksmanship)

Still, while it's a bit janky, I don't think it's (reliably) hard. And it is interesting to give a full try at least once; I don't do it very often, but it's been a neat change of pace when I'm not getting frustrated by the RNG.

Angel of Shotgunnery

Game's Rating: Easy

My Rating: Really easy

Effect: Doomguy may only attack with Shotguns and his fists.

You outright start with a Shotgun and some Shells, making the first floor noticeably easier than in a standard run.

Shotguns are the default best weapon out the gate, requiring no support to be quite good yet still having good potential to support them. The game is also fairly generous with them in terms of guaranteed gear drops, with Combat Shotguns guaranteed to show up in multiple early Special Levels and even an Assault Shotgun guaranteed eventually if you can cope with Limbo/the Mortuary.

As such, while Angel of Shotgunnery is certainly harder than a default run, I'd rate it as one of the easiest Angel Challenges, and possibly the best one to ease yourself into the Angel Challenge system.

The main thing I find worth pointing out is that fully clearing Hell's Arena and hitting the Chained Court is very close to a death sentence, especially on higher difficulties: as I've said before, the Arena Master is pretty clearly designed around the idea of using the Rocket Launcher you pick up in Hell's Arena to deal with him, and while it's possible to kill him in an Angel of Shotgunnery run, it's difficult to do so ammo-efficiently, and difficult to do so without getting him resurrecting one or two of the Cacodemons/Hell Knights/Barons of Hell that surround the building to start. I've managed it all the way up on Ultraviolence, but it's a rough time and the payoff is pretty dubious.

Anyway, it's worth pointing out that the Containment Area/The Wall are often basically impossible to enter in Angel of Shotgunnery... but if you lucked into a Sniper Mod Pack to Assemble a Plasmatic Shotgun or lucked into a Plasma Shotgun, you can potentially blast your way through the wall to the enemies and loot without too much difficulty. So your odds of getting in are poor, but overall better than Angel of Marksmanship or Angel of Berserk. (I should also point out that all three can semi-reliably handle the Containment Area/The Wall with a Homing Phase Device coupled with one or more regular Phase Devices. Though this is really dangerous with The Wall...)

Overall, Angel of Shotgunnery tends to be pretty straightforward if you have a handle on completing a run with a Shotgun build. It's overall harder than a standard run, to be clear, with more susceptibility to ammo starvation, risking being put in a situation where you'd normally blast a path through a wall and instead you have to wade through Lava to get somewhere, and the aforementioned Special Level qualifiers (Including that the Vaults are probably useless to enter since getting the Arena Master's Staff is such a dangerous task), but it's generally only lightly harder than a standard run. Also in its favor is that, unlike an Angel of Berserk run, you generally don't reach a point of it being basically indistinguishable from a standard run; while Shotguns are broadly great and you can potentially get through a run not using other weapons basically at all, it's uncommon for a run to reach a point of having barely any reason to care about other weapons at all.

Angel of Light Travel

Game's Rating: Hard

My Rating: Medium-hard

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

Note that by default you have 22 inventory slots. Angel of Light Travel doesn't affect your equip slots, so your total carrying capacity is dropping from 26 to 9, not 22 to 5, but that's still losing around 2/3rds your overall carrying capacity, and over 75% of your capacity to carry ammo, Medpacks, and everything else that can't be loaded into an equip slot.

The game itself says you get a '20% speed bonus', but just like the Scout's 'speed bonus', this is actually an increase to Energy generation. As such, Angel of Light Travel has the same implications as with Scout 'speed' and Berserk 'speed', such as making even actions that take 0.1 second effectively faster in a non-obvious and janky way. Since Angel of Light Travel strongly pressures you toward melee combat (Which usually involves Berserking) and/or relying heavily on quick-reload items, it has this wonkiness come up really readily. (A Berserking Angel of Light Travel Technician who uses Small Medpacks three turns in a row will spend 0.3 seconds of Energy but generate 0.51 seconds of Energy in that timeframe, and so their next action will effectively occur 0.21 seconds faster than it's supposed to)

Angel of Light Travel itself is one of the more dramatic or obvious examples of affecting starting inventory, as you start with a 10mm ammo chain in inventory.

With those technical details covered: the Challenge itself is one of the more genuinely interesting Challenges. The low inventory limit makes Mod Packs pretty substantially 'use it or lose it', where you can't cart around three Mod Packs and a weapon in hopes you'll find the right thing to Assemble whatever it is you're hoping to leverage down the line, because that's 80% of your inventory space. This makes the entire way you approach Mod Packs and Assemblies very different, encouraging a pretty cavalier attitude to Mod Packs where you just slap them onto something immediately useful even if you intend to ditch the modded gear at a later date, possibly quite soon. Better that than just leaving it on the floor, right?

This particular aspect makes the Technician's easy access to Whizkid a lot more interesting and stand-out of an advantage. The ability to 'wastefully' supermod your current weapon because the alternative is leaving the Mod Packs behind is a very useful advantage, making Mod Packs more reliably useful to find compared to when playing a Marine or Scout, and Technicians are more likely to be able to build toward an Advanced or Master Assembly using early Mod Packs as well. I quite like this effect: Angel of Light Travel is the only context I find the Technician a strongly distinctive class. Especially in 0.9.9.8, where Whizkid 3 letting you put another Mod Pack on Assemblies further exaggerates this point of distinction.

Anyway, Angel of Light Travel is, unfortunately, pretty impractical to clear except in one-and-a-half ways, giving it somewhat low replayability.

The main way is to do a melee build. Constricted inventory size does still impact melee builds, but they don't need space devoted to ammo like ranged builds do. They tend to need more Medpacks and Armors, but the latter can be quickly resolved by Assembling a Nanofiber Armor (Or getting lucky with an Onyx Mod Pack, Nano Mod Pack, or Onyx Armor), and you generally don't need a ton of Medpacks in a burst. Using a couple in combat conditions and then going and scooping up a couple that are lying around before getting into a new fight often works fine. Vampyre Marines especially tend to just need indestructible Armor and the Chainsaw to be set; anything beyond that is gravy.

The 'and a half' way is to be specifically an Ammochain Marine. I call it 'and a half', because if you reach the point of Ammochain being online, it's sufficiently ammo-efficient and ammo-flexible that it can in fact pretty reliably make it to the end and win, but it is so easy to die before Ammochain actually comes online. The period of time where Triggerhappy ranks have been grabbed but not Ammochain itself is especially easy to suffer ammo starvation, both in the global sense of dying by virtue of running out of ammo entirely, but also in the local sense of running out of bullets mid-fight and having to scramble to go pick up more, possibly dying during that scramble. (Such as because you opened a vault full of Pinkies) It's neat when you make it work, but if you try to go for it, you're probably going to have a lot of failed attempts before you reach Ammochain.

I've tried making do with Shotguns in that period, but while it was less prone to running out of ammo, it was still a very severe risk.

I've similarly experimented with Sharpshooter Technician runs since they're pretty ammo-efficient, but while they tend to get farther than eg Shotgun builds of any type, I've yet to actually pull off a win that way. I wouldn't be surprised if someone else has, though.

Angel of Light Travel also makes it deeply impractical to bother with the Arena Master's Staff, and makes breaking into the Containment Area/The Wall notably problematic. Carting around a Rocket Launcher and an inventory slot of Rockets to blow your way in is possible, but risky. Hoping you find such shortly beforehand is more practical, but is of course luck-based. This difficulty directly contributes to the impracticality of most ranged builds, since of course the Backpack improving your ammo storage capacity helps a lot with evading ammo starvation, but the very act of trying to pursue the Backpack is quite likely to get you killed by ammo starvation!

Pursuing a full victory is also tricky. Doable, and fortunately the necessary gear is all placed sufficiently late you may well be set and able to spare a couple of inventory slots on it, but tricky and unreliable. Mount Erebus/The Lava Pits in particular is very problematic since carting around Envirosuit Packs is difficult to justify, arranging a Lava-proof pair of Boots is difficult to do and carrying them as a swap is still quite demanding, and solutions like 'use a Phase Device and then a Homing Phase Device' are also problematically inventory-intensive. You might luck into straightforward immunity, though, such as getting both parts of the Inquisitor's Set.

Perhaps the most frustrating/disappointing aspect to Angel of Light Travel is how Nano Mod Packs can solve ammo such that theoretically any ranged run can manage it, but the most probable point for this to happen at (Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory) is placed so late your build should already be pretty committed. I broadly think the game would be better if it wasn't so insistent on not spawning Exotics and Uniques early in a run, but this is a particular stand-out example of how frustrating this aspect of the design is.

Angel of Impatience

Game's Rating: Hard

My Rating: Very hard

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

Note that the Technician using items in 0.1 second does in fact still apply to all these items. It's a lot less useful in Angel of Impatience, but it can be good to know when eg standing atop an item with an enemy in view, trying to decide whether you should attack, run away, or use the Medpack.

Angel of Impatience is most reliably significant for taking away the ability to have an 'HP buffer' in your inventory. How rough that is depends in part on your build, playstyle, difficulty, and overall competence; if you're prone to aggressive positioning and just eating Medpacks as necessary, well, expect to die a lot. If you're much more focused on defensive play and rely heavily on corner-shooting, and you're pretty good at the game, you might find the difference from a default run pretty small. A Marine's easy access to Badass lets them build a pretty solid HP buffer regardless from quite early on, and a Vampyre Marine often gets the majority of their healing from kill-strikes anyway. Higher difficulties tend to make the disadvantage more significant, particularly the jump to Ultraviolence and then Nightmare! as avoiding damage entirely gets more and more challenging as you go up in difficulty.

I found it nigh-impossible when I was relatively early in learning the game, but as I got better at corner-shooting and more aware of AI tendencies and all, I found that sometimes I got through without ever really being hampered by not being able to carry Medpacks. (Least often with a Technician: Badass lets Marines stockpile HP, while Intuition makes Scouts great at minimizing damage taken, where Technicians don't have any comparable easy tool for extending HP) I'm still rating it as 'very hard' because the skill/experience level I needed to reach that point is quite high, but 'medium to easy if you're already very good at the game' isn't an unfair assessment.

Anyway, the inability to carry Envirosuit Packs makes it very much a luck-based mission to try to get a full victory, as you basically have to either luck into one of the boots that happens to be immune to Lava damage (Very unlikely) or construct Lava-proof boots yourself. (Less unlikely, but requires lucking into an Onyx Mod Pack or going for Wizkid 2 and not getting RNG-screwed on the necessary basic Mod Packs) I wouldn't call it hard to get a full victory in Angel of Impatience, but it's not something you can do fully reliably.

The inability to carry around Phase Devices is probably the most minor penalty. There's uses for Phase Devices and Homing Phase Devices, but you can easily do an entire run without ever picking one up and be fine. It does contribute to a full victory being heavily a luck-based mission, though, since you can't hope for Mount Erebus and plan around going in with 1-3 Phase Devices and a Homing Phase Device in place of Lava protection. And you can still use Phase Devices from the ground to shake pursuit, attempt to get across a river of Acid on a floor, etc; don't discount them entirely.

Something I should point out is that a fiddly implication it's easy to not think about is that in Angel of Impatience you should actually prefer to eat Medpacks first, before Health Globes and so on. After all, a Small Medpack can't overheal you (Unless you're a Survivalist Marine), whereas a Small Health Globe can. This has the funny implication of reversing the relationship of the two healing sets, in the sense that normally Medpacks are something you can carry into the future while Health Globes can't be, whereas in Angel of Impatience it's Health Globes that might help you on the next floor, not Medpacks.

I should also explicitly point out Angel of Impatience skips the 'pick up' part of these items; you don't spend a second invisibly stuffing them into your inventory and then eat them, you just use them straight off the ground, same as if you used the input for doing exactly that in a normal run.

Angel of Confidence

Game's Rating: Very hard

My Rating: Medium, but death roulette beginning

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

Angel of Confidence really isn't that hard overall, as the experience curve is backloaded and equipment quality is sufficiently tied to depth that usually the gear you end the game with is stuff you found past Phobos anyway. What will generally happen if you're serious about completing Angel of Confidence is you'll have a dozen or more runs die within the first three floors, and then one run gets past that initial hump through blind luck and the rest of the run rapidly becomes basically indistinguishable from a standard run.

That said, Angel of Confidence does have few non-trivial Special Level-related implications that do make it a bit harder on average even once you get past the early portion. First of all, you can't count on arranging access to the Backpack, since there's no guarantee you'll find a Rocket Launcher and enough Rockets to blast your way into The Wall/Containment Area. (Or count on any other ways of getting in) For builds that care about ammo, this has a noticeable impact on your gear management concerns. Second, you just plain won't have the Arena Master's Staff, and so won't be able to guarantee access to the Vault's goodies. It's actually possible to break into two of its three rooms with just wall destruction, but the middle room will require getting lucky with a Phase Device, and is where the best goodies of the Vaults are generally found. (0.9.9.8 adding the House of Pain reduces this jank: 50% of your Angel of Confidence runs will get the House of Pain and not mind that they don't have the Arena Master's Staff) Third, the only guaranteed source of an Envirosuit Pack in a standard run is in the Military Base/Phobos Lab, which Angel of Confidence skips past, making getting a full victory noticeably more luck-based.

Additionally, melee builds are very unreliable in a Confidence run, as you're past a normal run's opportunity to get a guaranteed Chainsaw. Even getting a measly Combat Knife is pretty unlikely to happen! You shouldn't completely discount melee builds -you can still find powerful melee weapons randomly generated, after all- but if your heart is set on a melee Confidence run you're probably going to die a lot.

One nice thing about Angel of Confidence is that it provides more opportunity to actually adapt yourself to your circumstances instead of committing to a Mastery and ignoring Exotics and Uniques that can be great but not for your Mastery. It starts you late enough a lot of them can spawn on your first floor outright (If only through a vault), and importantly Hell's Armory/Deimos Lab is right there and has four weapons that have abnormally high odds of being Exotic or Unique: you'll be no more than Level 3 by the time you get to them, so if you're willing to spend your initial Trait points into 'safe' Traits (eg Hellrunner and Intuition on the Scout, Tough as Nails and Badass on the Marine...) you actually have pretty good odds of finding something unpredictable to build yourself around! Stuff like 'my Marine finds a Laser Rifle, so goes for Ammochain' vs 'my Marine finds Mjollnir, so time to go Vampyre' actually gets to happen semi-regularly!

It's also kind of nice to skip past Phobos. Overall Phobos is pretty well-designed, but it's pretty tightly-designed. Over the years, I've tended to play Doom Roguelike intensely for a few weeks, then lose interest, then come back to it months later to play intensely for a few weeks again, and most of what causes me to lose interest is getting bored of running through Phobos yet again. Phobos just tends to be very same-y in a way that Deimos and Hell don't suffer so badly from. I sometimes play Angel of Confidence simply because I'm still interested in Doom Roguelike overall but Phobos Fatigue is setting in.

Angel of Purity

Game's Rating: Blade

My Rating: Medium-hard

Effect: Powerups do nothing.

I am baffled that the game considers Purity not only harder than Impatience, but specifically two full verbal tiers higher. I can somewhat understand rating it higher, even though I'd disagree, but this much higher?

First of all, Purity only indirectly affects the danger of some of the early dangerous parts of the game. Hell's Arena is consistently one of the biggest hurdles to any run that isn't Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666, and it offers absolutely no powerups until you've fully cleared it: Impatience thus makes the Arena much harder, whereas Purity only means there's no possibility of going in with overhealing and/or Berserk (Invulnerability Globes can't spawn that early!) and okay the guaranteed Megasphere at the end is useless to you and so you're a bit more likely to die on the next floor, I guess. Similarly, the Phobos Anomaly's ambush is incredibly dangerous, and while it has a couple of Large Health Globes those aren't going to help if your problem is dying before you can get out of the crossfire/kill enough enemies to be safe, whereas the two Large Medpacks also guaranteed to appear would normally help you in surviving the ambush but in Impatience are reduced to bad Large Health Globes -when the Phobos Anomaly ambush is the game's last serious hurdle you're not allowed to opt out of or cheese.

Second of all, high-level play will consistently end up with more healing than it can make real use of in a standard game. Past a certain point in a run, Purity just leads to you more regularly using Medpacks that in a standard run would've been left behind from lack of inventory space to carry them. The loss of access to Berserk Packs and Invulnerability Globes is inconvenient, but erratic in how much it really matters -if you're not playing a Marine or on Nightmare or I'm Too Young To Die (Which the latter is forbidden in challenge runs anyway), it's pretty easy to end up with these powerups tucked away in corners too far from the stairs to last into the next floor and where you didn't use them on enemies on their own floor for one reason or another. (Saved them just in case you needed healing and ended up killing everything without needing healing, picked them up right away but happened to not find any enemies before they timed out, etc) And even for a Marine you'll still intermittently have them time out before they're any use -it's only really a Marine on Nightmare! where loss of powerups is super-consistent about hurting your run, and while the challenges give exactly 1 difficulty value without specifying what difficulty is being targeted it's pretty obvious Nightmare! is not the intended reference point.

Later in a run the inability to use Supercharges and Megaspheres is generally a small to modest loss, I guess? But overall, I'd say Angel of Purity makes the early game moderately more difficult and has its overall impact fade away as a run progresses. If you're a big fan of Badass, you might struggle more, I guess, since it letting you keep overhealing HP forever becomes much harder to get good use out of...

Class-wise, Purity is obviously biased against the Marine. It renders one of his innate benefits almost worthless (He does still get extended Envirosuit Pack times, but that's the only powerup extension he can leverage), it renders his easy access to Badass close to worthless (He can still overheal via Survivalist or Vampyre, but if he goes for any other Mastery Badass is merely 'reduces enemy knockback', which is... not a great investment), leaving only his innate HP edge, his energy resistances, and his Masteries to stand out.

The Technician is also subtly hurt by Purity, though less blatantly and strongly, in that his effect of treating Computer Maps as Tracking Maps is worthless because Computer Maps are a powerup. This is a hit -the Tracking Map effect is very useful when you get it, and it does tend to come up at least a couple times in a run- but a Technician is overall not that bothered by Purity's particular effects, relatively. His ability to rapidly heal with Medpacks also becomes a lot more valuable, since they're now your sole source of healing and you can't build buffers via overhealing, making it a lot more likely you'll drop into a dangerous state and need to heal while visible to enemies.

Overall, though, Purity is the Scout's game. The Scout doesn't care about Badass being made worthless since he's already barred access to it if he takes any of his Mastery skills since they all bar Tough As Nails. Meanwhile, the Scout is king of managing damage by engaging enemies when they can't fight back and avoiding stumbling into ambushes, between his easy access to Intuition, the possibility of using Cateye to get a further edge, and his innate Energy advantage just generally meaning he's prone to getting a chance to respond to bad situations and able to rapidly escape them. If you just want to complete Purity -as opposed to 'want to complete Purity using a specific class/specific non-Scout Mastery'- the Scout is the default choice.

Note that armor shards and Megaspheres are your primary tools for repairing armor damage, and of course don't work in Angel of Purity. Levers that roll as being armor repair stations are the only other external armor repair source. As such, Purity encourages you to be more aggressive about picking up backup armors and abandoning shredded armors instead of hoping to repair them at a later point, and also even more heavily encourages relying on indestructible and/or self-repairing armors where possible. (Especially if you don't take Intuition ranks and so can't reliably go for safe Levers) Consider making a Nanofiber Armor at some point. (Assuming you don't get an Onyx Mod Pack fast enough to make the point moot, of course)

Also note that, even though Berserk Packs do nothing in Angel of Purity, the mechanic where picking up the Chainsaw for the first time Berserks Doomguy and heals him to 100% does still function. If you go into the Chained Court, you can use the Chainsaw as a one-time free heal, making the whole thing a bit less difficult.

Angel of Red Alert

Game's Rating: Medium

My Rating: Medium to Hard

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.

It's sufficiently easy to be unsure how long you normally take to clear a floor that Angel of Red Alert is difficult to anticipate how bad it is, especially since game seconds are practically the opposite of real seconds: the intense fight that took you five minutes to work through probably went by pretty quickly in terms of in-game seconds, while the walk to the stairs at the opposite end of the floor that takes just a handful of real-life seconds might need a solid 10% of the five minute timer.

If you're the sort of player who often leaves a floor without fully clearing it anyway, it's mostly some of the Special Levels that might get you killed outright by a nuke: finding the stairs generally occurs pretty quickly by game time, after all. If ending with less than 100% kills is a rarity for you, you're going to find this more intimidating and problematic; 100% kills takes a while to achieve a lot of the time!

Angel of Red Alert does of course broadly reward a focus on speed. I already heavily prioritize Tactical Boots and speed modifiers like Reloader, so...

... well, honestly, I'm not personally a fan of Angel of Red Alert. Broadly, its incentives are to focus on what I do anyway; Angel of Red Alert runs are more stressful than normal runs, but I largely don't experience them as strongly different. And when I do, it's typically in the form of 'entering this Special Level at all was a mistake and has gotten my run killed because the nuke went off before I could get out'. Phobos Lab/The Military Base especially are Special Levels you can't readily bail out of once entered and which are pretty heavy time-hogs in terms of in-game seconds, but the Chained Court is also pretty risky to enter, particularly if you cleared Hell's Arena earlier and so can't leave without killing everything.

Doing it once in a great while as a change of pace isn't terrible, but overall Angel of Red Alert isn't something I do terribly often. It's just not that interesting, and stressing about the clock is not fun, especially since you can't easily check how much time is left. You'll get a warning in red text every in-game minute, but these warnings are easy to overlook, especially if they occur during combat; I'd like this Challenge a lot more if there was a dedicated clock UI element somewhere that always showed the remaining nuke duration. I've had a couple runs blow up because I thought I had two minutes left and it was actually less than a minute, and so I could have made it to the stairs and instead thought I was fine and next thing I know my run is over. Nnnnot a great experience.

Angel of Darkness

Game's Rating: Very hard

My Rating: Extremely hard

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.

That's right, this brings in one of the major mechanics of Nightmare! on top of lowering your vision and eating your mapping info! Bonus points: the in-game description makes it sound like the vision reduction is its only effect, so a new player is going to be blindsided by resurrecting enemies and the loss of mapping. Not ideal!

That said, Angel of Darkness can be a nice tool for easing yourself into Nightmare! letting you get used to prioritizing killing enemies on fluids and in doorways and so on without the intense pressure Nightmare! puts on you through its other difficulty modifiers. Doing the Phobos Anomaly with resurrecting enemies but without Nightmare!'s particularly vicious ambush really is just a smoother introduction, for example. In 0.9.9.7, it also had the added benefit that you could save, unlike in a Nightmare! run in 0.9.9.7.

Personally, I rate Angel of Darkness as very possibly the worst of the Angel Challenges. The reduced vision range is, on its own, actually neat, and I'd love to play an Angel Challenge that was just it, but when combined with enemies resurrecting and especially with mapping not working...

... well. Enemies get in lots of cheap shots, the player can easily waste a lot of time getting turned around because they don't quite remember how things are laid out, or because they broadly remember where the stairs are but not quite the correct location and end up circling in its vicinity over and over, unable to find it, and it's so much easier to get punished in janky ways because a plan was made to swing back and use a Medpack or Supercharge or the like after taking some more damage, only to forget about the plan and not use the thing on the way to the exit stairs. I don't find the resulting experience terribly interesting; it's pretty heavily an experience of being punished for non-mistakes.

The inability to tell whether you've killed a given enemy before or not also just leads to a lot of frustration, where you still ought to try to mostly-clear floors to maximize experience, but you just plain cannot tell if you've fought an enemy before or not. This technically applies to Nightmare! difficulty, but you can see corpses vanishing in the fog and can keep track of the layout and all; it's possible in a Nightmare! run to be confident you're only going to be fighting new enemies as you move into a given part of the map, whereas in Angel of Darkness... even if you're a lot better at holding the map in your head than I am, it's still not truly feasible to have that degree of confidence, by and large.

It's also pretty bluntly janky on more of a coding level. While no graphics are displayed to the player outside Doomguy's line of sight, the game's own routines regarding what Doomguy does and does not know are actually entirely unaffected by Angel of Darkness, where clicking in a shadowed tile can result in Doomguy happily pathing right to the spot because he's seen it before and seen a viable path to it before. Never mind that all the relevant info is not visible to the player when the click is performed.

Angel of Darkness could use work on a number of levels.

On a different note, my one big criticism of 0.9.9.8 is that it added a level feeling that applies the 'darkness' effect to the floor. Including shutting off a Scout's ability to see stairs (but not Intuition 1 revealing Powerups??), and preventing the 'last three enemies are revealed' and 'all items are revealed when all enemies are dead' effects from kicking in. (It doesn't add in resurrecting enemies, to be clear) I'm not a fan of the darkness effect overall, but in the context of Angel of Darkness I can gloss over it because if you don't like it you can just not play the Angel Challenge (As I largely do), but letting this happen at random? Awful.

I really hope this level feeling gets removed outright.

Angel of Max Carnage

Game's Rating: Easy

My Rating: Extremely Easy (But unfriendly to learning players)

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

A few non-obvious implications:

First of all, knockback is defined by damage rolled. Thus, if a weapon will sometimes roll high and knock back a target, in Max Carnage it will instead always knock back anything that can be knocked back. This can make it disproportionately valuable to attach a Power Mod Pack or take a rank in Son of a Bitch if your weapon happens to be one point short of a knockback checkpoint. Partial exception: Shotgun knockback is defined by damage after distance-based drop-off has been calculated.

One result of this is that Demons are generally not a threat on Max Carnage runs. After all, if they get adjacent to Doomguy, you're guaranteed to knock them back 2 tiles, giving you more breathing room to reload and shoot in, in addition to the max damage ensuring they die sooner in general.

Second, walls and whatnot will end up torn apart a lot more often. Normally, various enemies can break walls but will do so only rarely, because proper walls have 10 or 15 HP to chew through and 10 Protection that can, in fact, reduce damage to zero. (And which is not halved by Plasma damage attacks!) As a concrete example, Barons of Hell do 4d5 damage: in a normal run they'll regularly do some damage to walls, but unless you're fighting a group of them all at once (Such as in The Wall) it's pretty uncommon for them to smash even one wall tile. In Max Carnage, however, they'll always roll their full 20 damage, and so always instantly annihilate frailer walls they hit and even for tougher walls they'll only need 2 hits to break it; that can easily happen in a single turn from just having 2 Barons in line of sight firing at you.

So overall in a Max Carnage run you shouldn't treat walls as reliable cover the way they usually are in a normal run. Though of course the converse is that it's easier for you to bore through walls; while Rocket Launchers are still the overall preferred tool for cutting through walls in a hurry, you can get away with stuff like your Pistol guy using an Energy Pistol to cut through a wall, because it will reliably cost just a few Power Cells. This is especially important to keep in mind when talking Dual-Angel Challenges... but that's for later.

Anyway, Angel of Max Carnage is the one Angel Challenge I would in fact argue is overall easier than a standard run. I wouldn't try to argue a new player would find it good for easing them into the game, mind, but once you have a decent handle on the generalities of the game and have gotten decent at corner-shooting and otherwise engaging enemies with minimal opportunity for them to fight back, Angel of Max Carnage producing reliable and reliably high damage output tends to favor the player. This is particularly so with melee combat (Enemy melee always has a max roll exactly 2 damage over a minimum roll, whereas the player's melee weapons can have much wider damage ranges) and when fighting all Archvile variants (Since their ranged attacks skip Accuracy checks and have fixed damage anyway, so Max Carnage does nothing for their ranged attacks), but is pretty generally accurate.

Do keep in mind that Former Captains, Elite Former Captains, Former Commandos, Arachnotrons, and Nightmare Arachnotrons all spike up noticeably in threat potential relative to other enemies. Former Captains especially jump up hugely in danger since Max Carnage fixes their poor Accuracy; instead of a Hurt Me Plenty Former Captain expecting to whiff two shots at line of sight and do around 5 damage between the two shots that do hit, they expect to hit for 24 damage, which is 4 more than a Baron of Hell will be doing!

It's also easy to not correctly anticipate how Protection goes quite a bit less far. Say you're wearing a Blue Armor when a Former Captain and Baron of Hell open fire on Doomguy: in a standard run, the Former Captain is losing 2 damage on each bullet and so expects 50% of what bullets do hit to only do 1 damage, so hitting with two bullets really expects to be 2-3 damage. The Baron of Hell expects to do around 10 damage on the roll, which will be around 8 damage after Protection shaves off damage, meaning they expect to do in the range of 3-4 times the Former Captain's damage. In Angel of Max Carnage, your Former Captain is still hurt more by 2 Protection than the Baron of Hell, going from 24 damage to 16 vs the Baron going from 20 to 18, but that's only slightly less threatening than the Baron, not massively less threatening like in a standard run.

This cuts both ways, mind. Without investment, a basic Chaingun is normally a dubious weapon, prone to missing and generally doing sad damage to enemies with innate Protection even when it is hitting them, vs in Angel of Max Carnage only enemies like the Cyberdemon have enough Protection to make a Chaingun genuinely bad at damage. A Baron of Hell's 2 Protection produces exactly the numbers I just gave you above, and their 60 HP will die to 4 Chaingun volleys in Angel of Max Carnage. In a standard run, I generally only pick up a Chaingun at all if I'm intending to go for a rapid-fire build, or occasionally as an interim solution if I'm doing a Pistol build but for some reason am not prioritizing Son of a Gun ranks but am picking up Son of a Bitch ranks. In Angel of Max Carnage, I tend to pick up a Chaingun as soon as I can no matter my intended build and use it as a preferred swap for at least a time; a basic Shotgun and a basic Chaingun both have the same on-paper max damage of 24, but at line of sight a basic Shotgun is only doing 11 damage per pull of the trigger and has to reload between shots, whereas the Chaingun can fire ten times in a row and will almost always do 24 damage. The Shotgun is still better at clearing out groups and its radar-shooting potential is superior, but when eg an early Baron of Hell walks into sight when I'm in the open, the Chaingun is a lot more able to kill it before it kills me.

Also easy to underestimate is the negative impact on Medpacks, specifically as a tool for in-combat healing. Normally in the early portion of a run, popping a Medpack will pretty reliably result in Doomguy having more HP at the start of his next turn than before he used the Medpack, even when it's a Small Medpack, unless Doomguty is being mobbed or is fighting something pretty out-of-depth like the Barons of Hell that show up in Hell's Arena on Ultraviolence. Large Medpacks especially retain this effectiveness even quite late into a run, since Doomguy's max HP is higher than the maximum damage any one enemy can output in a single turn...

... but in Angel of Max Carnage, many enemies will individually do more damage than a Small Medpack will heal, and what early-game enemies do less don't do much less. (eg a Former Human will do 8 damage with their Pistol, vs a Small Medpack healing 14 HP for a Scout or Technician; just two Former Humans will do more damage than a Small Medpack. Even with Green Armor, they'll be only slightly behind) Large Medpacks hold up better, but are still easily overwhelmed; just two Barons of Hell in view will do 40 damage out of Doomguy's 50 default HP, where using a Large Medpack to not die can be 'running in place' if they promptly attack again. Medpacks losing so much effectiveness as a combat heal can be very difficult to adjust to if you're used to using them to bull through tough fights.

This is all slightly less true of Marines, particularly with 0.9.9.8 adding energy resistances to them (eg two Barons will do 32 damage to their 60 HP if they have no other defenses, so even a couple points of Protection mean they can alternate Large Medpacks with attacking), and Technicians getting to use Medpacks extremely quickly is actually pretty strongly valuable in Angel of Max Carnage, as they can still use Medpacks in combat conditions and expect to be HP-positive when their next action rolls around. Technicians should still endeavor to minimize opportunities for enemies to attack, mind, Angel of Max Carnage increasing damage means Medpack supplies will go less far for a given amount of enemies running around, but Medpacks hold up better for them than the other classes as combat healing.

Assembling a strong defensive kit can bring Medpacks back into relevance for combat healing, mind, but in the early portion of a run it's generally best to prioritize killing targets, breaking line of fire, or at least setting up to hopefully Dodge before using a Medpack.

I should also point out that the 50% chance for shots to miss if a target isn't visible to Doomguy still fully applies in Angel of Max Carnage. +12 Accuracy is absurd and means that even targets that are several dozen tiles away expect to be hit otherwise, so it is more viable to do stuff like take Intuition 2 and fire on enemies with a Chaingun who are outside line of sight, but this bit of RNG isn't actually removed by Angel of Max Carnage. I should similarly emphasize that Accuracy-respecting attacks still do have a chance to miss; it's very low and you can largely play as if that chance doesn't exist, but for example if you're on the edge of death and so is the enemy you're in front of, there is a real risk that swinging your Chainsaw will whiff and then they kill you. Maybe use a Large Medpack instead, if you can.

Similarly, I should emphasize that the Dodge mechanic is entirely unaffected by Angel of Max Carnage, remaining a random chance of causing a mis-targeting. Reminder that enemies can in fact Dodge Doomguy's non-Shotgun ranged attacks if you aimed directly at their tile; particularly for a Gun Kata Scout, RNG can still influence combat through the Dodge mechanic.

Conversely, with melee weapons the always-maxed-damage effect means that Power Mods vs Bulk Mods is a bit more favorable to Power Mods. Every moddable melee weapon has dice size larger than dice count, mind, but for example the Chainsaw will gain 6 damage from a Bulk Mod and 4 from a Power Mod, where the Bulk Mod is better but you may feel justified in throwing a Power Mod on anyway instead of holding out hope for a Bulk Mod Pack.

I should of course also emphasize that the Technician's Sharpshooter Mastery is literally worthless in Angel of Max Carnage, since its effect is just part of what Max Carnage does with everything. Relative Mastery viability shifts around in general, mind, where I could point out how Army of the Dead becomes less good because always-max-rolls overcome Protection more effectively and so ignoring Protection is less good, but Sharpshooter is the one case where you should seriously never do it in Max Carnage. I wouldn't recommend doing Survivalist in Max Carnage, for example, but if you want to give it a try, it's not literally a dead point the way purchasing Sharpshooter is.

Overall, Angel of Max Carnage is one of my favorite Angel Challenges. It's very distinctive and interesting, and it tends to be quick too, which is nice. 

Angel of Masochism

Game's Rating: Blade

My Rating: Very Hard

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

Note that all other effects of healing will still trigger: you can Run anew by using a Medpack or the like, Berserk Packs will trigger Berserk, Invulnerability Globes will make you invincible, and Megaspheres will repair your armor. It's just the healing per se that you lose.

Incidentally, this is another layer of weird to me about Angel of Purity's rating, where it gets rated the same as Angel of Masochism even though Angel of Masochism is close to 'Angel of Purity mixed with Angel of Impatience and then made harder'. Like Angel of Impatience, you can't stockpile Medpack healing, and like Angel of Purity you can't leverage powerups for healing; it's not perfectly harder than those two, as you can still use Phase Devices and Envirosuit Packs, unlike Impatience, and you can still get durability repairs, Invulnerability, and Berserking from powerups, unlike Purity, but there's enough overlap in implications it's just very weird to me that Angel of Masochism isn't rated as Harder Than Both Of Those by the game.

'But you've rated it as equal to Angel of Impatience!' a reader might reasonably complain. This is true, but it's because Angel of Masochism does have the upside of healing Doomguy on levelup. Angel of Impatience and Angel of Purity are both particularly prone to making the early game difficult; my runs of both those Challenges typically either die in Phobos or get past it and then sail on through the rest of the game without much issue. Angel of Purity especially just tends to replace 'use free Supercharges, then leave behind Medpacks' with 'ignore the Supercharge, eat a Medpack, and pick one up off the ground' once I'm past Phobos. Angel of Masochism actually tends to make the early game a bit easier than a standard run, because you level early and often initially; an Ultraviolence run can easily hit Level 2 in floor 2 and Level 3 partway through Hell's Arena, and getting two 200% heals in that timeframe is way more healing than you normally expect to find! Getting a level inside Hell's Arena especially can easily take it from a tense affair to a breeze, depending on its timing and all.

Later in a run, Angel of Masochism's big heals are occurring more intermittently and a standard run would expect to have a stockpile of Medpacks and more regular opportunities at Supercharges and all, and so Angel of Masochism is more clearly harder than a standard run. At the same time, Angel of Impatience is also having its impact more noticeable, since, again, you'd normally have a stockpile of Medpacks, and not in Angel of Impatience! Angel of Masochism is overall a bit rougher at that point, but the much greater ease of surviving to that point in the first place means I have difficulty seriously arguing that it's clearly harder than Angel of Impatience.

Anyway, Angel of Masochism itself pretty heavily skews toward the Marine and away from the Technician. Easy access to Badass lets the Marine much more reliably maximize the value of a heal-on-levelup, instead of risking the HP rotting away before new combat is seen, and of course Vampyre is the only melee Mastery that can heavily shrug off losing access to external healing, whereas the Technician's instant use of Medpacks is... not literally useless, but limited. You could use them to spam the Arena Master's Staff, I guess? I've not actually tried that myself so I can't speak to its viability, though. The Scout remains good at avoiding damage in the first place, but his Masteries all blocking Badass is inconvenient...

... though this comes with the caveat that it is in fact possible to play such that enemies rarely, if ever, get a chance to attack Doomguy. I've never managed the perfect play some have and doubt I ever will, but I usually get the post-game award for getting a 50-enemy killstreak without taking damage, and I suspect that if there were higher versions of that award that I'd tend to get such instead. If you're able to do that sort of thing reliably, well, healing isn't necessary if you're not taking damage, right? And from that perspective, the Scout is just king of the options, simple as that.

I've not done Angel of Masochism too often as I don't find it strongly interesting, but it's a nifty little challenge overall. Planning around the levelup heal is an interesting minigame in its own right, for one.

Angel of 100

Game's Rating: Hard

My Rating: Medium

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

Angel of 100 is easy to dismissively guess is a Boring Mode, but it's actually quite distinct from a standard run.

First of all, the first floor experience is actually pretty tense. Doom Roguelike is designed pretty heavily around the idea that you will have a Shotgun before you face anything worse than a Former Human or Former Sergeant, which in a standard run is made true by the fixed first floor ensuring access to a Shotgun before you reach procedurally-generated floors. Since Angel of 100 has you go right into a standard floor, you can easily start in sight of a Pinkie Demon or the like with nothing but a Pistol to defend yourself with! Skulking around, trying to find a Shotgun on the ground or a Former Sergeant to mug, can make for a pretty tense, distinct experience.

It does unfortunately mean that you'll sometimes start an Angel of 100 run and be mulched with pretty much nothing you could have done to play better, and I kind of wish Angel of 100 just started you with a Shotgun and 30 Shells to minimize this possibility, but it is a distinct aspect of the experience.

Second, an easily-overlooked implication of the removal of Special Levels is that the pacing changes pretty heavily in terms of what Level you expect Doomguy to be by a given floor. Late-game enemies like Revenants and Archviles tend to be scarier when they first show up in an Angel of 100 run than a standard run, because Doomguy isn't as strong! Stuff you might be used to only ever fighting with your Mastery online may well show up before that particular power spike...

Third, the removal of Special Levels does away with a lot of inventory burden a standard run is normally saddled with. No Arena Master's Staff, no early Rocket Launcher and Rockets that you need for busting into the Containment Area/The Wall, no full victory inventory shenanigans... it actually tends to be easier, in Angel of 100, to cart around 'maybes' and whatnot, because you don't have a pile of inventory slots pre-committed to Standard Run Essentials.

Fourth, while most bosses can show up, as can all the non-boss enemies that a standard run can only see in Special Levels (such as Nightmare enemies), they all only show up much later, and furthermore are mixed into regular floor generation. Encounters with such enemies are thus quite different experiences from encountering them in a standard run. Plus a couple bosses normally drop special loot, and they won't do so in Angel of 100.

Speaking of loot, the lack of Special Level special-casing on loot has various implications as well. Shotgun builds can't count on getting an Assault Shotgun at any point, and will sometimes actually not find a Combat Shotgun (Or even just take a very long time to see one), and Exotic Mod Packs can't be counted on to show at all. (Whereas a standard run hitting Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory is going to get an Exotic Mod Pack perfectly reliably, at least once Schematics stop showing up) Melee builds will only sometimes be able to do better than Combat Knives; I'm down on Malicious Blades in a standard run compared to the other melee Masteries, but in Angel of 100 I'd argue it's much more reliably viable than its counterparts. BFGs are an actual rarity, and common Mod Packs will tend to be spaced out over the course of the run, where in a standard run they're often pretty frontloaded due to how frontloaded their placement in Special Levels is.

Less mechanically interesting but worth mentioning is that every floor past 24 gets labeled 'Beyond' (As opposed to the Phobos, Demios, and Hell labels), and on the 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th, and 100th floors, you'll get a bit of text before actually entering the floor, starting out from talking about how it 'only gets tougher from here' and increasingly going 'not far now!' I actually find it pretty funny that the first message speaks as if the hard part starts now; my experience is that the roughest, tensest part of most Angel of 100 runs is in roughly floors 15 to 30. New enemies are done entering rotation well before floor 25, up until much later when Elite zombies and whatnot start showing up, and by the time super-elite enemies and bosses are showing up, Doomguy is getting very high in Level and very possibly has gotten the gear end of his build pulled together such that he's a nigh-invincible killing machine, where even Cyberdemons are speedbumps instead of a serious escalation in danger.

This also extends to other realms, in that for example one of the bigger risks of an Angel of 100 run is ending up with a map generating such that Doomguy must wade through Lava to get to the exit stairs. If this occurs comparatively early, Doomguy is unlikely to have Cerberus Boots or the like, and may well have never found an Envirosuit Pack or Homing Phase Device, and so end up taking massive damage or even dying through no particular fault of the player's. If you're at floor 85 and you've still not gotten Cerberus Boots Assembled or the like, that's probably on you, not on the RNG. (I have had a run that generated a skewed array of Mod Packs such that I could only have Assembled Cerberus Boots if I'd not Assembled Tactical Boots, but this is atypical) More esoteric dangers like this are just... less likely to be a problem if they occur later.

Indeed, I kind of wish Angel of 100 was something like... Angel of 80, or Angel of 75. It's a distinct and interesting experience I quite enjoy overall, but 100 floors drags on for a while in general, but in particular most of my runs that did well enough to reach floor 70 or so were a formality for the remaining floors. Sometimes there remained the risk of suffering ammo starvation, but typically that was the only real possibility for the run to fail, making a good third of the run kind of pointless busywork.

At least it's not as bad about this as Archangel of 666...

Angel of Pacifism

Game's Rating: Easy

My Rating: Hard

Effect: Doomguy is unable to attack. Every third staircase descended gives a Level-up. Doomguy starts with a nuke for use on the final boss, and the first floor generates as a standard randomized floor instead of the Phobos Base Entrance fixed floor. Scouts don't passively see staircases.

I don't really get why Pacifism is rated easy by the game.

On the one hand, yes, you get to ignore a lot of the game's elements and focus on only the things relevant to you: don't bother picking up ammo and weapons, descend the stairs the instant you find them, and the only Traits you care about are the defensive ones unless for some bizarre reason you're considering a Master Trait that forces you to pick some offensive traits. Which has the problem that you gain levels very slowly, and can't gain very many relative to what a standard run expects to get if you're diligent about clearing floors. (On Nightmare! you can be quite sloppy about clearing floors and still level faster than Pacifism) By the time you can even reach a Mastery, you're most of the way done with the game, and most Masteries aren't worth whatever their requirements demand. The Marine's Survivalist Mastery is the only Mastery whose requirements don't involve spending points into Traits of no use to a Pacifism run... and then Survivalist blocks Hellrunner, which is a very important Trait to a Pacifism run and honestly probably a lot better than Survivalist's effects. And of course a lot of Masteries are directly useless to Pacifism runs; firing your Shotguns three times as fast doesn't help when you can't fire Shotguns in the first place.

I have the impression the devs treated 'how much time you have to spend on this Challenge when winning' as a notable factor in how difficult they rate a given Challenge. It would fit to Angel of 100 getting rated as harder than Angel of Pacifism, for example.

Anyway, Angel of Pacifism does have an unusual capacity to just... have you get lucky, where staircases spawn right on top of you or a single room over multiple floors in a row. Only unavoidable fixed levels like the Tower of Babel don't have this possibility, and of them only the Phobos Anomaly has that as an actual issue.

But on the other hand you can very easily get into impossible situations, where you just auto-lose and there's nothing you could do differently. So... 'easy' doesn't seem terribly accurate to me...

One weird change Pacifism makes is that the Tower of Babel -where you fight the Cyberdemon- remains in its stock form, except a staircase is added in the lower-right corner of the map, allowing you to just run to it and exit the floor immediately.

Also, a weird aspect to Pacifism is that its challenge relative to a standard run rises noticeably as you climb difficulties because of its different level-up mechanics. A standard Ultraviolence run is overall harder than a standard Hey, Not Too Rough run, but the higher density of enemies and the fact that more elite enemies show up sooner means Doomguy levels noticeably faster on Ultraviolence than on Hey, Not Too Rough, where eg the Phobos Anomaly can actually be noticeably easier on Ultraviolence because you get your Mastery online in time for it...

... but not in Angel of Pacifism, since Doomguy's leveling is entirely disconnected from enemy composition/density. Higher difficulties are thus just plain harder than lower ones, no qualifiers.

Anyway, returning to Masteries, the only Masteries that meaningfully do anything for Pacificism Doomguy are:

Survivalist on the Marine, Cateye and Gunrunner on the Scout, Malicious Blades, Fireangel, and Scavenger on the Technician.

In terms of Masteries, the Scout is probably the most dubious class. Cateye providing more vision is useful, and Gunrunner giving 50% more Running per use is something, but both Masteries require investing into offensive Traits that are of no use in Angel of Pacifism (3 points for Cateye, 2 for Gunrunner), and Gunrunner's payoff especially is just sad. And of course they all block Tough as Nails and by extension Badass, which is a problem in Angel of Pacifism. The Marine only has one Mastery that's relevant, but its requirements are all usefully relevant to Angel of Pacifism, so pursuing it doesn't require 'dead' points. The Technician's Masteries are also all burdened by requiring investment into offensive Traits; 3 ranks apiece for Malicious Blades and Fireangel, 2 for Scavenger.

That said, Angel of Pacifism takes forever to reach a Mastery regardless, so I'd say the above only mildly bumps the Marine over the other two classes. In practice, everybody really ought to just focus on taking what regular Traits are directly useful in Angel of Pacifism: Ironman, Tough as Nails, Badass, Hellrunner, Whizkid, and Intuition. (Okay, and I guess Dodgemaster) Berserker is technically also nice if you can get it, but unreliably so, and hampered by having to invest in Brute ranks.

From this perspective, the Marine is actually the worst-off class. Whizkid requires working through Finesse while Intuition requires working through Eagle Eye, both of which are useless in Angel of Pacifism; the Scout and Technician getting to skip their requirements is a big bump in the appeal of those advanced Traits. The Marine getting easy access to Badass isn't useless, but the other classes will probably want to take Tough as Nails at some point regardless, so it's less of a boost compared to the alternatives.

0.9.9.8 is particularly impactful on Angel of Pacifism as a mode, even though as far as I'm aware it made no direct changes to Angel of Pacifism itself. Firstly, the Marine is bumped up a bit in appeal by gaining the passive energy resistances. More importantly, Ironman picked up physical resistances; in 0.9.9.7, I preferred to take Ironman ranks overall later, generally prioritizing Hellrunner above everything else, then either prioritizing my class Trait or Tough as Nails, and only then get around to Ironman ranks. In 0.9.9.8, an early dip into Ironman is disproportionately valuable; I'd argue that a rank should be taken no later than Doomguy's third levelup, and if somebody felt that spending the first level on it was superior to spending it into Hellrunner, I'd be a little doubtful, but... only a little. And I do suspect that in the current state that taking it on the second levelup may be better than getting a second Hellrunner rank.

Overall, I've not done very many Angel of Pacifism runs. It's an interesting change of pace, but also very frustrating; it's easy to get screwed by enemies blocking doorways or hallways, to get pinned between pursuers and an enemy in front of you in a hallway, etc, and be left totally helpless. Jankily, these problems are at their worst in the early game; I don't know the exact rules, but some of the most open floor designs like 'city' and the 'walkways through Lava' one simply can't occur in the earliest floors. When I'm in the mood for Angel of Pacifism, what tends to happen is that I die a dozen times in Phobos, and then the very first run to reach Deimos wins.

I've previously complained about how the Combat Translocator would be much more useful if you could shoot yourself with it, and commented that it would make a lot of sense for it to in fact be your starting weapon in an Angel of Pacifism run in such a case, but a big part of my point is that Angel of Pacifism is the Angel Challenge I most wish had more custom accommodation; it's a neat Challenge, one of the clearer examples of Challenges drawing inspiration from classic Roguelike 'conducts', but as a 'slapped-in' Challenge it fits to the core gameplay very poorly in ways that aren't so much Interesting Challenge as 'you're going to die a lot through no fault of your own, because the game is not designed to support style of play'. The Combat Translocator idea would be a cool little thing to do and help, but it would also help a lot if floor generation rules were tweaked so you didn't specifically have the 'pinned and die' scenario not only exist but be concentrated in the early portion of a run.

Angel of Humanity

Game's Rating: Blade

My Rating: Blade

Effect: Doomguy's base HP is 20% standard, including that Ironman has only 20% its normal benefits. (ie Scouts and Technicians have 10 HP, Marines have 12 HP, and Ironman adds 2 HP per rank)

I've personally never beaten Angel of Humanity. I once got a Scout partway through Hell by grabbing Intuition 2 as fast as possible and playing ultra-cautiously, never letting enemies in sight if at all possible, and surviving the Phobos Anomaly ambush by virtue of having a Phase Device I used immediately after the walls went down, but then at one point I descended into view of a group of enemies and my attempt to retreat to cover ran into more enemies, and I promptly died.

Admittedly, part of why I've never beaten it is lack of motivation. It's very demanding, but it doesn't feel very different from a standard run in terms of the types of decisions one makes. A standard run can already die pretty suddenly from stepping around a corner incautiously into an Arachnotron mob and similar, Angel of Humanity just raises the bar so that 'incaution equals death' applies more widely. Like yeah, there's a few implications such as how melee builds are much harder to make work, but my most successful runs were pretty consistently 'so it's like a regular run, just more tense'.

If you just want a challenge, I guess it does that just fine, but I may well never beat it just 'cause of the boringness.

Angel of Overconfidence

Game's Rating: Very Hard (Sereg, as of 0.9.9.8)

My Rating: Hard, but extremely death roulette early game

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

Same basic scenario as Angel of Confidence: you're gonna die a lot while trying, but once you get past the first 2-3 floors it's generally not that bad.

That said, Overconfidence has the particularly unpleasant aspect that Hell's floor generation very much assumes several things about your kit that Overconfidence does not have you start with. A normal run will usually have one or more solutions to Lava being all over the place by the time it's a concern: Overconfidence starts you with no Envirosuit Packs, no protective Boots, no Rocket Launcher for blasting open alternate paths. It's entirely possible to have a floor generate where you have to run over 5 tiles of Lava to get to the stairs, while having not generated the tools to make that a bearable obstacle.

Since the Backpack is back in Deimos, you can't have it at all in Overconfidence. You'll also be doing very poorly on Mod Packs compared to a standard run: you don't start with any, and you're missing out on most of the Special Level-derived guaranteed opportunities for them. Confidence technically suffers from this as the Chained Court and Military Base/Phobos Lab both have two guaranteed Mod Packs, but Overconfidence is missing out on not only those but the guaranteed Exotic Mod Pack in the Deimos Lab/Hell's Armory, not to mention those both provide four common Mod Packs if fully cleared, and with little time left for random Mod Pack spawns and the remaining Special Levels either not providing Mod Packs or only providing 1-2 common ones. I'd generally recommend not going for a Technician Overconfidence run unless you're bored of Overconfidence and are looking for a new challenge.

Melee is still horribly unreliable as a build, overall more so than Confidence as the Unholy Cathedral is literally on Hell 1 and so you have nearly no opportunity to prep for it and so can't count on the Longinus Spear on top of having missed the guaranteed Chainsaw. The Combat Knife you start with is very unlikely to cut it....

... in 0.9.9.7. Your odds for this are noticeably better as of 0.9.9.8, as the Unholy Cathedral got moved to Hell 3, so you can plausibly get Berserker online in time for it. (You'll probably have a lot of runs die before reaching it, mind) Still not a great scenario, but much more plausibly doable.

Overall, Angel of Overconfidence is well-named (Even more than Confidence, you're going to die a lot...) and does its job just fine, but I personally find it less compelling than Angel of Confidence. So... I don't really have much to say about it.

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Next time, we cover the game's handful of Archangel Challenges.

See you then.