Runner: Zero-Master
Date: 2023-08-25
IWAD: doom.wad
Category: True UV-Max
Map: E1M8 (Phobos Anomaly)
Source Port: DSDA-Doom v0.19.7
Time: 1:51
Description:
Don't mind me, just posting my first max of E1M8.
100% kills/items/secrets from pistol start for a true UV-Max, normally you're allowed to skip the monsters at the exit, for obvious reasons.
From the doomwiki: "On each skill level, the last room contains six shotgun guys, five imps, and four demons. Although these can very occasionally be defeated using a rocket launcher, or in ITYTD using the chaingun (because all player damage is halved), the room essentially functions as a "special effect" whereby 100% kills is sacrificed in favor of plot development. As a result, a kill percentage as low as 28% (ITYTD and HNTR), 44% (HMP), or 63% (UV) can be considered maximal."
Second part of the video uses light amplification visor cheat and camera free view with pain palette disabled to show what happened in the final room.
While clearing out the monsters at the end is easy if you have 200/200 and a rocket launcher from the previous levels, doing so pistol start is a whole different challenge.
Since you are on a damage floor you are essentially on a timer. Ideally you want as much health and armor as possible while taking minimum damage from the monsters to get the most the time that you can have to deal damage. Unfortunately there's no mega armor on this level, but there is a green armor and a soulsphere leaving you with 200/100 at most.
Second there is no rocket launcher, plasma rifle or BFG, the best weapon you get is the chaingun. This means you have no chance to deal enough damage to kill all the monsters by yourself even if you were to not get hit at all.
Thankfully we are given one very useful thing, which just happens to be the powerup that everyone hates: the blur artifact. The blur artifact causes monsters to often fire hitscan or projectiles at an angle randomly away from the player, and because of how densely packed the area is there is a chance they'll hit another monster and start to infight. But even with the blur you are still very close to the monsters, so even if they aim at an angle they still have a good chance to hit you.
Most likely you are going to get hit by the shotgunners who can deal a lot of damage and the attempt is over immediately, but you can't kill them all at the start as you won't have the damage required to kill everything. The imps are similar, though they have more health and deal a bit less damage making them a better target. You can't just kill the pinkies immediately either as you'll get killed by leaving too many imps and shotgunners alive with nothing else to target. Pinkies also have the most health, largest size and are least likely to hit you, so ideally you'd want to save them for last as they are great at getting hit by the other monsters.
So a good strategy is to deal damage to the pinkies and imps at first, but not enough to kill them so that they can both deal and recieve damage from infighting. You can also kill targets that are isolated or imps and shotgunners that are between you and a pinky, as a they are likely to hit you instead of infighting. Of course this is all impossible to do perfectly since everything is happening so quickly and it's hard to see in this area.
On top of this you want to make sure that almost every chaingun bullet hits, you can't afford to miss much. A chaingun bullet can do 5, 10 or 15 damage depending on luck, so you're probably going to need better than average rolls. So a lot of infighting luck, good damage rolls while avoiding getting hit are required to be able to pull this off, which is what makes it so difficult to do.
To first try and figure out if it was even possible to do I used a script to make 5000 demos that would all turn, move and shoot in a circle, but with different direction and randomness, play through them and get the kill% and manually look at those which had the most kills. Naturally a lot of them would be shooting into an empty room near the end, so I didn't expect much, but out of those demos I believe only 1 of them reached 40/41 kills and had plenty of time to kill the final monster if focus firing, so I knew it was possible. I also figured with proper strategy the attempt count wouln't be nearly that bad.
I was very surprised to see 100% kills on the intermission screen, as I missed a few bullets near the end. Every time I kill what seems to be the last monster in practice there would always be one behind me somewhere. Not to mention I wasn't even sure if the imp I was firing at died. However the infighting here was so crazy this time and the very last bullet killed the last imp. That imp had full health at 60 before I first hit it and I dealt 15,15,15,10,10 damage, so quite lucky with the final kill.
24 авг 2023
