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

Ange of Impatience as your base doesn't let you pick Darkness, Impatience, Purity, or Masochism as the secondary challenge, making it unusually limited in its range. Impatience is obvious enough for why, while I suspect Purity is for engine reasons, while Masochism is presumably because Masochism eliminates the relevancy of Impatience's primary impact: who cares that you can't stockpile Medpacks if they're almost completely worthless anyway?

All the following of course additionally labor under...

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

... that.

On to specifics.

Angel of 100

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

I've not tried this, mostly because it... sounds boring and frustrating? My 'plain' Angel of 100 runs tend to care quite a lot about stockpiling Medpacks until somewhere in floor 30-50, ultimately ceasing to care much through a mixture of strong Powerup-based healing becoming very consistent -if I use two Megaspheres on a floor and 0 Medpacks, I don't care about not being able to carry Medpacks- and my defensive kit completing and making it extraordinarily rare for me to want to do combat healing. Between the two points, I often go 50+ floors without eating a Medpack! Even on the worst-off runs, I've ended up not caring about stockpiled Medpacks on the last 30 floors.

As such, I expect Angel of Impatience would result in a lot of early deaths, and then most runs that got far enough would become basically 'a regular Angel of 100 run, expect I can't screw myself by carrying too many Medpacks Just In Case and suffer ammo starvation as a result'. I'd rather just play 'plain' Angel of 100.

Angel of Light Travel

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

I suspect that this is a bit easier of a jump -in the sense of 'adding Light Travel to Impatience'- relative to 'Light Travel as compared against a no-Challenge run'. Angel of Impatience runs often end up not fully using their inventory space for unusually long periods, or carrying stuff not because you expect to use the thing but just because you have nothing better to fill the slot with so why not carry it just in case? Angel of Light Travel is a sufficiently huge drop in carrying capacity to still be impactful, mind, and alternatively thinking of it as adding Angel of Impatience to Angel of Light Travel is still noteworthy since it can absolutely make sense to cart around a Large Medpack at times and Impatience denies you that option, but the point is the two Challenges have sufficiently overlapping implications as far as 'you can't carry around 10 Large Medpacks' that the two together aren't straightforwardly the sum of their parts. (So to speak)

That said, I've not gotten around to trying it, as Angel of Impatience is not my first choice to click into when considering dual Challenges, and it wasn't until fairly late in drafting these posts that I untangled the dual Challenge setup to know this was an option, and that I'd have to route through Impatience to try it. I'd like to give it a try at some point, but it hasn't happened yet.

This itself illustrates part of why I've made these posts, incidentally. Figuring out you even can do a combo you might like the idea of isn't straightforward!

Angel of Confidence

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

I'd argue Impatience is most noticeable in the midgame, but the most prone to being deadly toward the start of a run. Medpack stockpiling can easily fail to occur early on just by virtue of bad luck leading to you going through all your healing (especially on higher difficulties), but on the other hand it's not unusual in the early game to have a floor end up with a useful glut of healing in the form of adequate Powerups to get you to 100+% while also giving you some extra Medpacls... and not unusual for that to then lead into a particularly rough floor, such as if you get two vaults of Pinkies on the same floor, where the Medpacks are actually really valuable! As a run progresses, you tend to increasingly be able to get by on Powerups alone, with Medpack stockpiles being nice to have just in case bit not necessarily actually seeing use.

All this is to say that I suspect this combo isn't too much worse than just Angel of Confidence alone, and might actually be a little easier than Angel of Impatience on its own? Maybe? I've not tried it yet, though, so maybe not.

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.

Well, Impatience means you won't spend quite as much time on picking up and later using Medpacks?

I find it likely this is actually a pretty nasty combo, honestly. Angel of Impatience makes efficient usage of Medpacks involve a lot of back-and-forthing, since you have to go back to a Medpack's spawn point to be able to heal with it, and of course Angel of Red Alert is punishing to time-inefficient behavior.

As I don't like Angel of Red Alert, I'm probably never going to get around to trying this, so that's all speculation.

Angel of Overconfidence

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

See what I said about Confidence, but more so.

Probably.

-----------------------------------------------

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

See you then.