(Doom II) Speed of Doom: Map 20 - The Path to Hell (UV-Max Speedrun in 8:39)
3Runner: D0M0
Date: 2023-11-24
IWAD: Doom2.wad
PWAD: SODfinal.wad
Category: UV-Max
Map: 20 (The Path to Hell)
Source Port: DSDA-Doom v0.24.3 (MacOS Build)
Time: 8:39.40
Complevel 21 (MBF21 Compatible)
Attempts: 550
After a rusty month i'm slowly getting back into the rhythm of speedrunning. Just a heads up that uploads from now till next summer will be pretty minimal. If you can't tell I have had barely any free time from school as of lately and it won't stop there until I finally finish my A Levels (they suck btw).
As many of you know, I have been struggling a lot with Fire and Ice, so much to the point i've crossed over 1650 attempts trying to beat it. I obviously burnt myself and had tried to keep making progress, but alas I needed a break. And what's better than a break? The Doom Bingo Event that was hosted in Meowgi's Discord Server!
I did have a slower run beforehand which was done within the Bingo week, however little did I know I was going up against Kinetic for the tile that said "Speed of Doom Map 20 UV-MAX". Obviously, being the lesser player, Kinetic managed to outright beat the record that Tatsurd held for this map, whereas I was a lot slower. Oh well! At least I got a demo out of it that i can upload.
Enough talking about the Bingo event and onto the map. This map in terms of difficulty is pretty hard to juggle. With good infighting, you can beat this map super quick, in which i rarely had ever gotten attempts like those. The start consists of an archvile jump, at which I was very consitent with, and it's rewarding too since you get the BFG. Not many of my runs would end here. The arch vile tower can be a little problematic at times since half of the time, the lift got stuck. An arch vile somehow can wedge itself into a window and can mess up the lift through it's hitbox. The secret here is also a pain to hit, just mash space until you hit some sort of switch and you're all good.
The post-red key fight was something out of a spectacle. It throws an element of slaughter at you with the hordes of hell nobles and cyberdemons. However through infighting you can practically make the fight a joke. My strategy is to wear down a great number of barons so that the cybers have the upper hand. Although you could leave them to infight (however your odds of getting through to the exit become much slimmer).
Then it's your choice where you go, left or right? Well, the right section is easily the hardest part of the map for me. A fairly populated cave with damaging lava, several high tier enemies, 2 arch viles that can ruin your day along with a gatecrashing cyberdemon. Use your BFG ammo wisely here. Try and dance the cyberdemon and grab the remaining ammo before you leave. If you've left the arch viles alive, good luck getting out, it can be severely hard to!
The left section on the other hand is a lot easier. Hordes of pinkies, hell knights and sniper enemies. Prefire the BFG and let loose. Get rid of as many cells as you can, since you can just rocket the rest. The secret here gives you enough BFG ammo to squeeze through back to where you left the infighting party. But be careful that triggering this secret releases a cyberdemon. One attempt I had completely forgotten about it and lets just say it didn't end well.
Finally, it's just clean up from there. The map isn't all too bad if you perform the arch vile jump at the start, however I can imagine how gruelling it can be if you're willing to do it the intended way.
The main question you're probably asking is whether I will be doing Speed of Doom in the future. And my answer to this is no. I will not be speedrunning SOD, nor do I have any plans on doing so. Although if you guys really want me to provide SOD content, I could always do commentary videos on these maps. This was a really fun map to play, even on my break, and i'm much more refreshed to attempt Fire and Ice again. Hopefully we can beat this gauntlet at the end of this year, just like I did with Comatose!
Link to download WAD (idgames): https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/sodfinal
Link to DSDA leaderboards: https://dsdarchive.com/wads/sodfinal
Link to download port (DSDA): https://github.com/kraflab/dsda-doom
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