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

At last we come to our final dual-Challenge set, which of course is Humanity and so all the following additionally labor under...

Angel of Humanity

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)

... that.

...

While I'm fine with Angel of Humanity as a concept, I have to admit that I'm not sure I've ever done an Angel of Humanity dual-Challenge. Humanity is very unforgiving, demanding a particular form of near-perfect play that is exhausting to sustain continuously, so while I'm actually abstractly interested in some of the combinations for it, I just... have never had a day where I felt like playing Doom Roguelike and felt plausibly up to sustaining that type of perfect play for an extended period and could count on blocking out enough time for such a run to actually fully play out, so it's not happened as of this writing, and honestly is pretty unlikely to ever happen. Alas.

Point being, the following is heavily speculative, so honestly, if you just skip this post, I don't blame you.

Angel of 100

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

This is the one Angel of Humanity combo that I just dislike the sound of. For the kind of player that has done Nightmare! Angel of 100 runs with 100% kills and zero damage taken, this is obviously perfectly doable since Humanity's modifiers have zero bearing on outcome if you can do all that reliably, and for people who can't do that and/or find that extremely anti-fun you're trying to inflict the need for near-perfect play upon yourself for a very long time. It just sounds exhausting and not really all that interesting.

Angel of Light Travel

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

Angel of Light Travel of course skews toward melee builds, while Angel of Humanity makes melee builds nigh-suicidal. So that's a nifty and/or horrifying puzzle for one to figure out if you like. At least the improved Energy generation makes it less likely you'll get pasted by enemies when you take a step into their view...

Angel of Impatience

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

Medpacks aren't exactly high in value for Angel of Humanity runs, while regular Phase Devices are a great way to abruptly die, so not being able to cart those around isn't that big a deal. Homing Phase Devices aren't as suicidal, so that's a bit of a loss, but I suspect the real killer is the loss of Envirosuit Packs. Lava kills a Scout or Technician instantly at 100% HP! You can't Medpack through that!

But hey, not tried this combo, so...

Angel of Confidence

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

Angel of Humanity and Angel of Confidence both already lend themselves to dying basically immediately, so... more deaths before getting a run going, I guess. Sounds anti-fun, honestly...

Angel of Purity

Effect: Powerups do nothing.

I'd expect this to be erratic in its impact on the Angel of Humanity experience, but meaningful. Invulnerability Spheres are normally a gamechanger for the next while to Angel of Humanity, and Berserk Packs can be such as well, but Angel of Purity takes those opportunities away. Less drastically, Powerups are the main way to overheal, and overhealing can be what lets Doomguy survive a hit at all.

On the other hand, if you're someone who can clear Doom Roguelike reliably with more or less no opportunity for enemies to get in an attack on you, then I guess adding Purity in doesn't really matter to you?

In any event, I don't see myself ever trying this 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.

This combo sounds extremely stressful. I'm not sure how nasty a combo it would truly be, though. In a real-time game, combining a challenge that demands perfection with a challenge that pressures one to hurry is a brutal crunch to put on the player, but Red Alert's nuke timer doesn't pressure the player to think faster, but rather to be economical and careful.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's people who really enjoy this combo, honestly, even if I'm unlikely to ever be one.

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.

This is our last combo I hate the very idea of. Enemies getting in cheap shots because they can attack you while you can't see them, when your HP is so low cheap shots can instantly kill you from full HP? Ewwww.

If you want to inflict this combo on yourself, I can't stop you, but yikes, I'm never doing this.

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%.

Humanity already limits the utility of healing, and unlike Purity Masochism still lets you benefit from the status part of Berserk Packs and Invulnerability Globes, so... honestly, I suspect this combo might actually be easier than Humanity+Purity?

In any event, if you're already good at Angel of Humanity I'd guess the impact of adding Masochism is mild. This is kind of baked into Angel of Humanity; since it innately demands near-perfect play essentially continuously, there's not a lot of room for other Challenges stacking on to strongly change the experience. Not when the change is focused on making things harder, anyway.

Angel of Overconfidence

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

I imagine this is another 'you die a lot' combo. I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's any players out there who are able to clear this combo with an over-50% success rate.

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And... we're done!

Yes, really. There's other stuff I could talk about, but not really stuff I want to talk about.

I did consider covering Special Levels in their own posts, for example, but... the Doom Roguelike wiki covers those in good detail if one cares, and the fact that they're mostly pretty rigid gives me less to talk about in a direct sense. Most of what I did have interest in regards to talking about them came up organically elsewhere, too.

So... yeah, we're done here. At least for now. With development unexpectedly resuming partway through me posting these, who knows what I might do in future on this topic?

As for what my next project is, I'm still unsure. Times are turbulent, and my own life is still not in a great place, so I haven't properly gotten a big project into postable condition as yet, not... in my current conditions, though I'll explain that another day.... in practice, I'm probably going to do a few one-off posts and maybe some 'reruns' of old posts I improved back when I still didn't have access to my old account and so was worried I'd lose my old posts entirely.

...

Also, the site has been experiencing some manner of outage for over a week now. I'm not sure what the issue is or why it's occurring, but while I (unsurprisingly) can access the backend just fine, I mostly can't load the front end myself, I've gotten multiple inquiries from people with no or erratic access, and viewcount is down to 33-50% of what I'd usually expect to see. So clearly access isn't completely blocked for everyone, but it's heavily blocked for a lot of people. So yeah, I'm aware of the problem, but am not sure what it is or why it's happening and by extension am not sure how to fix it. I honestly might just... move the site at some point. I've been expecting to need to move the backend at some point anyway for quite a few years now, and it might be necessary to escape whatever nonsense this is. We'll see, I guess.