Hoo boy. Things were eventful today.
A maze level. We like maze levels, more or less. Few enemies become visible at a time, so we can mow them down easily.
Only takes a couple kills to get us to level 8. And level 8 means...
This is a game changer. The bottom 5 traits on this list are called 'master traits'. As you can see, they have hefty requirements and are mutually exclusive with lots of shit. Between their requiresments and exclusions, you can only get one master trait at a time. However, they all tend to let us do really awesome shit.
Like say, dish out 8d7+16 plasma damage in a single action at a cost of just one energy cell. We are fucking GOD right now.
This baron actually died in a single attack. Thats how good this weapon is. And now we can fire it as much as we want. Well, almost, anyways. Technically, in previous versions, the ammo cost was nothing, so people used it to clear whole levels from one side of the map without ever seeing any enemies. But that was retarded.
By the way, in case you didn't manage to figure out, these napalm barrels...
...do this when you shoot them. Note that a lot of enemies actually die in lava (very quickly at that.)
Right, even though we're only using 1 ammo per blast, we still got no reserves. So we're in trouble right?
Nope! We can unload the lovely BFG we found in the previous level. We got tons of ammo. Yeah, you probably wanted to see me use the BFG right away, but 40 cells per shot is insane. Those same 40 shells can dish out 640d7 damage with the rifle. Slightly better mileage.
Welcome to yet another special level. We should be ok here. It's open except for all these rooms, none of which have doors. Also, the sounds of dozens of hissing demons.
So doing this makes lots of sense.
In retrospect, swapping to the shotgun first would have been a good idea.
We activate running and head east. The lost souls are still slightly faster than us, but not enough to hit us more than once a turn, and we clump them up pretty quickly.
Shotgun takes out more than a dozen at once. This group is soon gone.
You didn't think this level would have just lost souls did you? I haven't been showing these images/descriptions because... well they're ugly as fuck, even for ascii.
Pain elementals follow you and spawn lost souls. They also spawn lost souls when you kill them. This results in a lot of fucking lost souls.
We try out the staff one more time. We actually manage to kill a pain elemental with all the splash, but none of the lost souls, since they're too resistant.
Gah. Back to traditional methods.
Another epic shotgun blast.
This is from the same blast btw, and those two closest to us are dead too.
We switch to the rifile to clean up stragglers and start looting the energy cells. We don't give a fuck about the other ammo.
This though, is nice. BFGs actually hold more ammo than a stack of cells does anyways, and all weapons start fully loaded.
We add a bulk mod to this one, giving us even more storage capacity and letting us fire it 3 times in a row if shit really hits the fan.
Meet the boss. Agony elementals are like pain elementals, except they spawn pain elementals.
They also melee real fucking hard and have about a billion hp.
Medkit and running sees us through the day. I decide to pull out the BFG rather than lose more life trying to herd them more.
It clears our screen. No special graphics for the blast yet though.
So what the fuck are those exotic things the boss dropped anyways?
Well, it is called 'The City of Skulls'. We mop up and move onward.
Chumps don't know what hit them.
Another level. We pick up a melee trait. This is a huge benefit for melee, but obviously melee in general isn't such a hot idea when you have an awesome plasma rifle to us. So why grab this instead of more defensive traits? It's a secret!
We grab this box of rockets too, though we probably won't need it. I just want to make absolutely sure I have enough rockets for the next level.
Because this place is a REAL bitch. There are way more of these fuckers on harder difficulties, btw.
The teleporters warp you to predetermined locations behind these walls.
However, the spiders can use them too.
I lure this poor stupid fuck into melee range and pull out the chainsaw. Arachnotrons are almost harmless in melee and suffer double damage from melee attacks.
So it pops like a zit.
I decide to mod up the chainsaw too. Making it faster is a major benefit.
The battle continues. It takes a lot of time, but eventually I wipe out almost all of them.
I pull out the BFG when I stop waiting and move east, in case we get jumped by lots of spiders at once, the knockback could save us.
Finally the level is clear. We're pretty much set for energy cells for the game now, since these fuckers drop them when they die, they're all over, plus rewards for clearing the level.
Including an ammo case equivalent for them.
New boots. Though we don't switch, since ours have a speed buff.
New weapon.
Alas, it doesn't really recharge quickly enough to be terribly useful. We'd drain it in 3 seconds, and wait another 20 to fill it back up. It's really only useful for incredibly mobile characters with intuition. But we keep it, because it serves another purpose as well.
7th floor. Lost souls, pain elementals, firey death.
Lots of firey death in fact. Lava and acid pools show up a lot in later levels. It's the main reason to worry about knockback.
Largely because of fuckers like revenants. These bastards fire rockets, which cause knockback easily, hurt like a bitch, and NEVER miss. Ever.
We tactically retreat, use a medpack, and circle around to blind fire at them from below.
The AI does not approve.
But the AI is also stupid enough to get into melee with us instead of using it's rocket launcher.
We pull out our friendly neighbourhood chainsaw.
It doesn't even move after our first swing. These guys are slow, and our chainsaw is fast.
BAM! Plasma rifle would have worked as well, but the game records your kills, so I like collecting melee trophies when it's easy.
Oh man. This place was the fucking boss room of the game previously.
We bring out the BFG to deal with this monster.
But it barely scratches cybie, and he doesn't get knocked back at all.
Two direct hits and he's barely injured.
We switch to the rifle to whittle him down. We try dodging most of his rockets, but don't have the best of luck.
In fact, he nearly kills us, because I'm too stubborn to waste a medkit on this shit.
Last episode. Final destination. Some other lame cliche.
This poor fuck. Why would you stand there?
The light amp power up we got 2 levels ago is still active.
We've really been tearing our way through.
We find another exotic item. This is actually a new item in .9.9.5 that I haven't seen before. It's WAY better than a normal pistol. The damage, accuracy, and ammo clip are all significantly better. Should help out pistol experts a lot when they can't find the rarer pistols like we did.
Fuck I hate these guys. Easily second most dangerous enemy in the game, and probably the one that kills me the most, though that's more due to my incompetence.
Mancubi fire trios of rockets. You can dodge them (in fact, dodging is guaranteed, their shots are coded to never directly hit a dodging player) but at this point in hell, chances are theres always a wall next to you, and a good chance there's a pool of nasty to be knocked into. We back up and it blows a hole in the wall, letting us hide in ehre to lure it close.
Where we take it's head off.
And gain another level. We get Brute again.
Melee accuracy is now quite respectable.
Another new enemy. Archviles are basicaly like the arena master, but faster and with less hp. They revive enemies if you don't giv the corpses.
And blast the shit out of you. They actually do double damage now compared to last version, although it's fire now instead of plasma. Still, between the direct hp loss and the hp hit to repair the armor, this hurts like crazy.
This is NOT a good place to stand.
We unload the rifles of enemy commandos right off the ground. We could have done this with other weapon types earlier, but never had a need to.
More fun situations.
Nearly died here. I could have avoided this and just gone on to the next level too, but noooo. I debate whether to use a large medkit or a phase device here, and decide on the medkit. Landing within sight of an enemy and dying would really suck.
Of course, we lose over half our health right away (remember to factor in the cost to repair the armor.) Getting pelted by these things hurts SO bad.
We manage to clear the level, but are now entirely out of medkits.
I use a blood skull here, even though it's mostly a waste, because we need every scrap of health we can get for the next level. Though in retrospect, it might have been better to save it for that level. Skulls provide effects by gibbing corpses in line of sight. The blood skull heals us, and can even go over the health cap, but the corpses here are too scattered so we get a tiny benefit from it.
Oh man. I can't believe I'm trying to take this place on with no medkits and a build horribly unsuited for it. I
think I can pull it off, just barely, with the equipment and traits I have. If we get decent rolls. Wish me luck. Scads and scads of luck.