Iwad:      Doom II
Pwad:      ThePact_1_2.wad (Pwad Name: The Pact)
Map:       MAP05
Skill:     4
Complevel: 21
Category:  UV Max
Exe:       dsda-doom 0.29.4
Advance Hud: YES

Time:      37:51.00
Recording Date: 19/07/2026 (DD/MM/YYYY)

Author:    Random Person

YT Link: https://youtu.be/uyMqgEcZvYY

Comments:
Another amazing map by Laocoön. Like with MAP04, this is a lot more casual and so I wasn't really going for speed but rather just completion. Honestly a lot of the fights went pretty badly and I almost died to the stupidest thing, but regardless this was the first exit I got. Though, poor demos can still be more interesting than clean ones. I wouldn't even consider this wad particularly hard for my skill level, this demo just had a few sloppy fight here and there. Getting facerocketed by a Cyber, almost dying to a Revenant punch, running out of cells in the final fight, and other silly things that happened really made this an interesting run.

The Plasma Gun fight was interesting. The intended method I believe is to use the pillars at the beginning to hide from the Archvile and Cyberdemon. By hiding from the Archvile, you expose yourself to the Cyberdemon and vice versa. You have to juggle hiding from the Cyberdemon and Archviles while fighting Revenants. The main issue is how inconsistent this strategy feels to me. It's a bit unpredictable if the Cyberdemon or Archviles attack and can have patterns that are completely unavoidable. So instead, I decided to cheese the fight by pushing through with the Plasma Gun. Unfortunately the Archvile in the Revenant hoard zapped me, but that's honestly not the biggest deal. Sometimes you just got to accept that you'll get zapped. Doing this cheese strat I found to be really consistent and simplifies the fight significantly.

For the BFG fight I mainly rely on infighting just because of how tanky the Archon's of Hell and Cyberdemons are and that Monster Infighting would be less tedious for me than to do it myself. The Hell Nobels are great for shredding these monsters. Aside from that the fight isn't too difficult, but the sniper Cyberdemons can be annoying

The Blue Key fight is pretty fine, but I want to comment on how annoying the sniper Hell Knights and Revenants are. It's the only thing I would remove in the fight. I criticized the invlun secret before but now I definitely understand the whole risk-reward aspect to it.

For the Penultimate fight you need to backtrack all the way back to hit a second switch to progress, so I just leave after hitting the first switch to make cleanup a lot easier for myself. I also do the final secret before hitting the second switch to get a fresh megasphere.

The Final Fight went mostly smoothly based on my strategy. The only thing that went wrong was running out of cells. There was definitely a lot of bad BFG shots but the layout of the arena and the Cyberdemons caused me to be a bit more reckless with the BFG. Not that it's an excuse for poor BFG shots.