Good Doom/Heretic/Hexen WADs

[Average Manatee]

Hexen is obviously a lot different from Heretic, which was just a Doom clone. Overall it's not that hard, but it's a different kind of hard.

Mage is the easiest to play since you have a trusty infinite ranged attack that does decent damage and pierces multiple enemies in a line. I wouldn't worry too much about difficulty though as, like Doom, the game simply wasn't scaled for what a now-seasoned FPS player can accomplish. Hard difficulty probably won't challenge you much until the 3rd or 4th act. OTOH Nightmare is quite challenging (and unlike in Doom, it doesn't do the monster respawn shit, so it's actually playable rather than just a race to the end).

The Expansion does ratchet up the difficulty but it feels like a natural progression. After beating Hexen on Hard with the Mage I went to Deathknights of the Dark Citadel and played on Nightmare with the Warrior and got my ass kicked quite often.

 

[Sceptic]

Everything AM said.

Same advice I gave you for the previous games: play on difficulty #4 (penultimate). It's challenging, but not as tough as the highest is. The highest IS interesting this time around because, unlike Doom/Heretic, you don't get the bullshit respawning. However some of the bosses may drive you nuts if you don't know the game. If you intend on playing more than once, start with #4, and upgrade to #5 for the replay.

Not sure I agree with AM about class though. Mage IS the easiest... at first. But Warrior, while only having melee for half the game, is very very resilient and hits quite hard, so you can slaughter large armies effortlessly. And Cleric has 2 things that make him insanely powerful: poison flasks, which are absolutely ridiculous if you use them properly, and the Wraithverge, the most powerful weapon in the game. You won't be spamming it since it eats up both mana types like crazy, but it can clear entire rooms (yes, plural) in two shots. Coupled with poison flasks.... Quite frankly I find all classes equally easy after a while. Mage may actually be tougher because he's quite fragile, and while the starting wand is great for penetrating power and is also the only starting ranged weapon, it is VERY weak, so it'll still take you forever to kill things, and on hard difficulty, where you can get flanked, that can be a problem. Ultimately just pick whichever seems more like your playstyle.

Deathkings is gloriously challenging and a ton of fun, but don't play it until you finish the game and are familiar with one of the classes and the general mechanics. Playing Deathkings on hardest involves abusing your class powers to the max.

 

[octavius]

Thanks for advice; I decided to play a Mage on second hardest difficulty, and I'm having a blast so far.

 

[Average Manatee]

I wouldn't say the mage wand is VERY weak. It's still only about 5/6 shots or so for most common enemies, and as soon as you start lining enemies up for penetration (either in long corridors or through effortless maneuvering) the DPS goes through the roof. The only enemy that really takes "forever" to kill are the centaurs with shields. Even so, on one of the final levels with a fight against a dozen or so of them at a time the trusty wand performed amazing when it stunlocked the whole lot before they had moved a foot and the entire room was cleared in the time it would have taken to kill a single centaur. Ohh, and the projectile can't be repelled back at you, which is always nice.

But yeah, all classes are definitely capable, and Warriors/Clerics are probably faster if you know what you are doing.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The Cleric is probably the slowest to get started with, but in the end the Wraithverge eats everything for lunch. Shields don't mean nothing against that thing, but IIRC the Mage's final weapon deals more raw DPS than the Wraithverge.

I never liked the Mage class because the starting weapon felt feeble and pathetic, despite the penetrating shots.

 

[octavius]

I never liked the Mage class because the starting weapon felt feeble and pathetic, despite the penetrating shots.

It's feeble and pathetic, but a safe weapon if you have enough room.

 

[octavius]

Hmm...seems to be a bug with the Death Wyverns in Doomsay Engine 1.6
I reached the final part of episode 2 of Hexen - the Hypostyle map, and the end fight was rather anticlimatic due to this bug causing the little breathers to get stuck.
So far the game has been rather easy on the second hardest difficulty, and I rarely switch from using the Sapphire Wand.
The hunt for keys, switches and levers has not been as time consuming as I feared.

 

[octavius]

I'm currently playing Master Levels for Doom 2, a collection of 21 WADs of varying difficulty and quality, but on average good enough, although not as good as Doom 2 itself.

Also found a nice site with reviews of lots of Doom WADs, which may be useful:
Doomed: Doom WAD Reviews

 

[kingcomrade]

Fuck I wish I had not missed this thread.
One of my friends and I still play Doom 1-3 times a week and we have been for years. My Zdoom folder is something like 2-3 GB in size just because of sheer number of wads.
I'm not at my home computer though for the holidays. The WAD blog that octavius mentioned is useful but it's not really for coop play, and Doom is best done in coop play.

Off the top of my head I remember really liking the...Congestion 1024 set of maps. THere's Claustrophobia and Congestions, I think Claustrophobia came first and wasn't as good. THe community chest set of maps are decent (theres 4 of them, one released this year I think), a lot of the really famous megawads like alien vendetta are good. If you go onto the doom wiki and look at the megawad page most of that stuff is generally pretty decent. The only one I remember thinking was bad was Hell Revealed, it's a lot of square rooms with just lots of monsters in them, nothing clever.

THere is actually one wad with one particular map I've been trying to find again. It's driving me crazy, my friend and I wish to play one particular map again. It's a map that is quite large and you need 8 keys to open the final door (or 8 secret keys to open the secret exit), I believe. There are 8 separate areas in the level, and each one has both a normal key and a secret key. It's a large city/industrial style map. I keep thinking it was one of the community chests, but I haven't found that map again.

 

[octavius]

Recently played Memento Mori, the first (?) major Mega-WAD for Doom 2, from early 1996.
Quite variable in difficulty, and quality ranged from average to very good. Most memorable maps were the ones made by the Casali brothers (of Final Doom fame) and City of the Unavenged by Jens Nielsen. The latter is one of the most brutal city maps I've played so far, with snipers and teleporting Arch-Viles everywhere, and lots of puzzles. Showdown by Milo Casali was perhaps the highlight for me, since I love seeing the Legions of Hell in-fighting. This is the most monster packed map I've played so far. One place I was caught in a crossfire with 5-10 Archviles on either side.

According to the experts this mega-WAD would hardly have been noticed if released today, so hopefully that means that level design (and not just new cool graphics and gimmicks) will only get better in later years.

 

[AngryEddy]

20th Cacowards:

http://www.doomworld.com/20years/

 

[Astral Rag]

Figured I should also post this here:



Any of you guys tried the Brutal Hexen beta, is it worth installing or is it still too early?

 

[AngryEddy]

Figured I should also post this here:



Any of you guys tried the Brutal Hexen beta, is it worth installing or is it still too early?

Keep waiting.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Yeah, still need work. If Brutal Hexen is made by the same guy/group who made B.Doom then solution is simple - stop wasting time with it and finish this mod for Hexen ffs. Not nice when you made polishing or adding some minor stuff when other projects are still WIP.

EDIT
though Cacoward was some wadpack, seems like I need to reserve some time to download it later. Maybe tomorrow...

 

[Astral Rag]

Perhaps worth mentioning that ECWolf is an excellent, faithful and easy to use source port for Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny.

Some features:

One binary plays both Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny.
Runs on all popular operating systems. (That's Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, and other Linux based operating systems.)
Modern control schemes supported.
Widescreen and tall screen support with aspect ratio correction.
Soft-moding (no need to deal with compilers)!
Unrestricted map size with support for non-square maps.
Support for high resolution textures and mixed definition.
Support for additional image formats and archive formats.

http://maniacsvault.net/ecwolf/

If you use Steam to play Wolf you can just delete dosbox.exe and place the ECWolf content in common/wolfenstein 3D/base and rename ecwolf.exe to dosbox.exe

You can now play Wolf3D the way it was meant to be played.

 

[Astral Rag]

Is anyone able to play ECWolf full speed at a high resolution? My game slows down at 1680x1050 using a GTX 670.

Weird. I just completed the first episode of Wolf3D with ECWolf without any problems. I'm using a 560ti and my monitor's native resolution 1920x1200.

 

[Astral Rag]

Total Chaos is an upcoming total conversion mod for Doom 2 that runs on the source ports GZDoom and Zandronum.The mod is an open world survival horror where players are dropped on an island with a video camera to explore the deadly surroundings. The island was once run by a community of coal miners which one day suddenly disappeared, leaving behind the abandoned concrete jungle to waste away. Total Chaos is a sandbox mod, so the player has freedom of choice of either finding the lost community, surviving on their own against the islands deadly forces, or explore the island to uncover its most hidden secrets.

There are no guns in Total Chaos, instead the players must use their wit and the hazards they find in the environment to defend themselves.

The mod with the assistance of the source ports introduces many new graphical features, such as 16x motion blur, high resolution textures, 3D models and bloom effects.

Currently there is no set release date for the mod, but I’m hoping to have a Beta available to download sometime near the end of the year. You will need Doom 2 to be able to play the mod and either one of the source ports, GZDoom or Zandronum.

Stay tuned on the blog for more updates and videos coming in the near future!

http://wadaholic.wordpress.com/

RPS article:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/05/21/total-chaos-doom-2-mod-graphics/

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Dat bloom.
Overall it looks impressive, I wouldn't recognize that mod was made on doom engine at all. Looks more like a source one.

 

[skacky]

Speaking of cool wads, I'm now playing Vrack 2 and it's really cool. Huge space station full of monsters everywhere.

 

[Roderick]

stealth in Brutal Doom. looks fun but it should be optional for the new version in my opinion. i doubt it will work well on some levels, depends on how they implement it i guess

 

[Luzur]

 

[Luzur]

 

[Astral Rag]

This picture was taken during DOOM development in 1993. This is the DOOM chainsaw sitting in a bucket, ready to be scanned by Kevin to create the image of the chainsaw in DOOM. The reason it's in a bucket is because it leaked oil! That's also why there's newspapers all around it. Heh heh, yes, the name of the chainsaw was Eager Beaver. The little Post-It Note next to the chainsaw says "Borrowed from Ann Graver Holz". Ann was Tom Hall's girlfriend at the time and since she had a chainsaw (Most of us apartment-dwellers did not own a chainsaw!), she let Tom borrow it. Tom, um, forgot to give it back to her.....so........it's still around. Tom is going to do something with it, probably sometime this year!

The original Doom chainsaw

 

[Luzur]

 

[AngryEddy]

The new flamethrower looks amazing.