YMMV / DRL

• Awesome Music: While DoomRL mostly uses music from the Doom games, it has original tracks in some of its bonus levels, a few in particular that stand out:
  • The Unholy Cathedral's theme, a Castlevaniaesque theme that really sets the mood of the melee-exclusive cathedral.
  • The aptly named Something Wicked, the music for the infamous Mortuary and its sibling level Limbo, that lets you know they aren't an ordinary bonus level.
  • A recent update added a track for the Chained Court, Rage. It certainly fits, as you'll either be ripping and tearing through multiple weak enemies, or getting your own huge guts ripped and teared if you completed Hell's Arena.
• Breather Level: Some of the special levels are these.
  • If one did not complete Hell's Arena, the Chained Court. It starts you out in a room with a Chainsaw and four berserk packs, and the only opposition are 20 Former Humans (10 can be Former Sergeants or Captains on high difficulties, though you'll still easily plow through them with the berserks), and two groups of two Cacodemons/Hell Knights/Hell Barons (depends on difficulty), that are sealed away and only have to be confronted if you choose so. If you did complete Hell's Arena, the level layout changes to approach a Brutal Bonus Level, with two of the berserks not being there, the zombies being focused on one side (instead of being evenly split), the stronger monsters being right outside the room you start out in instead of being sealed away in a distant room they can't escape, and there now being a boss that can easily slaughter the player at their low level, due to him being a freakin' Arch-Vile.
  • Hell's Armory, if not on Ultra Violent/Nightmare. The only high level threat are two Arachnotrons, and the level has many places to corner shoot from, while having a long 1 tile wide hallway to chokehold enemies. There is a boss you must kill to get the level's full reward, though this boss is easier than the previous bosses you fought, and easier than the bosses to come, regardless of the build you use. The rewards for the level are also quite large, even if you choose not to fight the boss (and if you do fight him it includes the only guaranteed rare mod pack in the game). The only healing item being a hidden Supercharge that you have to travel through lava to get can keep this from being a breather level, if you don't use the many opportunities to corner shoot and soak up damage.
  • Halls of Carnage pre-0.9.9.7, a straight forward level whose gimmick is that it has a lava flood that will overrun the player if they're too slow. However, the lava flood is pretty slow, and even a poor player getting repeatedly knocked back the Sergeants in the beginning will make it to the end with time to spare. Besides that, the only other parts of concern are the locked doors in the middle (which will only be a potential problem for new players), and the small maze at the end filled with some strong enemies (which isn't much of a threat due to the many corner shooting opportunities). What really makes the level a breather though, are that there are three Supercharges in your path to the stairs (one right in the beginning, one in the midway point, and one in the end), which should prevent any player from having to expend any medkits on the level to complete it. Plus, there's a guaranteed BFG (one of two in the game) at the end of the level, and any build will get through the level easily.
    • Halls of Carnage is not as much of a breather level anymore in version 0.9.9.7 however, where not only does the lava flood faster (up to a ridiculous rate of a column every 2 seconds on Nightmare! difficulty), the first two Supercharges were replaced with Large Health Globes, and the third Supercharge was removed with nothing to replace it.
  • For those running Shotgun builds, the City of Skulls can be one, as Shotguns tear through Lost Souls and excel at fighting large groups of weak enemies (the only concern Shotgun builds will have here is the rather sizable expenditure of ammo). If you have Vampyre and some form of indestructible armor it's even easier, except for a tight spot right at the beginning.
  • For those running melee builds, the Unholy Cathedral, as a moderately sized group of Lost Souls and Demons are little threat to a melee build at this point in the game, and even the incredibly powerful Angel of Death is no match for a melee build that's berserked.
• Breather Boss: If you have the Dodgemaster trait and know how to utilise it, the Cyberdemon can be rendered this, as you have a guaranteed way of dodging its rockets, while you can attack it freely between its reloads. If he hits you even once it was probably a cheap shot before you could see him. Coming into the battle with fireproof Red Armor, which is easily obtainable by this point, also greatly nerfs the threat of the Cyberdemon. Finally, a melee build capable of Berserking and a solid piece of armor can just tank the first hit, go berserk, then just close in and tear him apart.
  • As noted above, if your character build is fully tailored towards melee the Angel of Death is barely a speed bump.
  • The Shambler in Hell's Armory under normal circumstances. His teleportation can be annoying, but he isn't fast, he doesn't match the durability of the combined Bruiser Brothers nor the Arena Master you fought prior to him, and his attacks aren't stronger than an individual Bruiser Brother's, while his projectile is a single shot that produces no explosion on contact, making it really easy to evade. He's a lot tougher than any normal enemy, especially on higher difficulties, but he's not dangerous enough to be a big threat at this point alone and about any build can easily out-DPS him or dance around him to death.
• Demonic Spiders: There are several demonic spiders in DoomRL:
  • As known by the DoomRL community, the VMR (Archviles, Mancubi, and Revenants). Archviles have the most HP of any non-boss and non-nightmare monster, are one of the fastest monsters, have a very powerful attack that can only be dodged if your speed is fast enough, and most importantly, are capable of fully reviving any dead monster in their sight. Mancubi have very high HP and high natural armor, and have the deadliest attack of any monster in the game (which consists of them firing three rockets that individually deal very high damage, and have a large splash radius that can result in you getting hit by all three if you're near a wall, resulting in extreme damage if not an instant kill), though they are hindered by their extremely low speed and being easy to corner shoot. Revenants, while not having as high of HP as the other high tier monsters, are fast and shoot a powerful projectile with a splash radius that aims at the tile the player was standing on, which results in their attack never missing. The threat of the VMR can be easily nerfed though, as they all deal fire damage in their projectile attack, and fire damage is very easy to gain resistance to (a simple fireproof armor assembly on Red Armor will give the player a Red Armor with 55% fire resistance, which can even make the full brunt of a Mancubi blast easily brushed off). There's also the Fireangel perk if you really, really, really hate these guys, which makes you completely immune to splash damage, nerfing them even more at the cost of other master perks.
  • Arachnotrons, which while lacking any special traits, are fast, have high HP and armor, and have a rapid fire weapon that can deal high plasma damage and is difficult to dodge all the blasts. Fortunately for the player, Arachnotrons are extremely weak in melee (having a weak melee attack and taking 100% more damage from melee attacks), which can be enough to keep them from being demonic spiders. They also can't open doors, which can leave a group of them closed off that the player can then deal with on their own terms.
  • The nightmare versions of Archviles and Arachnotrons. The original versions were already capable of being demonic spiders by themselves; the nightmare versions have substantially more HP, speed, and even stronger attacks. Nightmare Arachnotrons additionally do not have the double melee damage penalty normal Arachnotrons have, and once they fire, they will always fire a second time on their next action, even if the player is in melee range, thus mitigating the main weakness that kept normal Arachnotrons in check.
  • Barons of Hell can also qualify. They aren't fast, and their attacks isn't as immediately dangerous as the attacks from the monsters above, they have two traits that make them a huge threat to your survival. The first trait is that they're the only monster whose projectile deals acid damage (besides the Bruiser Brothers, which are a boss form of Barons). Acid damage is by far the most difficult type to obtain resistance to, and acid deals double damage to your armor (just two to three hits from a Baron is enough to possibly bring Red Armor from full to below 50% durability). As such, Barons will nearly always hit you hard, with a projectile that isn't so easy to dodge near walls with its 2-tile wide explosion radius, and will brutalise your armor (which in turn, softens you up for them and the other demonic spiders). The other trait Barons have are that they can pick up and wear armor themselves, as well as pick up and use healing items, which has a twofold effect. Combined with their already high HP and natural armor that is equivalent to a Mancubus' durability, an armored Baron can take a ridiculous amount of hits to kill, especially if you're unlucky enough for them to find a strong exotic/unique armor before you do. And when you bring a Baron to near death, they can use a large medkit and bring themselves back up to full health instantly. Besides this making them capable of taking even more hits to kill, it deprives you of armor you may need (upon their death the armor will be severely damaged if not destroyed), and of the medkits that are vital to survival. Overall, while they may not provide the immediate threat the other demonic spiders do, they provide a greater threat to your long term survival, and a bad encounter with them can cripple your chances of ultimately winning even if you survived the encounter. Then there's also the fact they show up earlier then the above enemies, and pretty much every level will be full of them once you reach Hell.
• Game-Breaker: In past versions the Ammochain master trait gave you infinite ammo for rapid fire weapons (even removing the need to stop and reload), letting you spray plasma fire everywhere just in case there might be an enemy past your range of vision. Plus not having to carry any ammo meant carrying a lot more medkits, phase devices and the like. The only catch is that rapid fire weapons aren't all that useful unless you either have the Eagle Eye trait(which you can't get if you want Ammochain), or agility mods(which were rare random drops at that point).
  • Ammochain was nerfed in 0.9.9.4, slightly. Now it uses one ammo. Per burst. It wasn't that much of a nerf, but you can't just fire blindly every step of the way and you do need a space or two reserved for ammo again.
    • Unless of course you have the Nuclear Plasma Rifle, which has infinitely self-recharging ammo in exchange for a small clip and inability to manually reload. That "small clip" still means twenty four consecutive turns of rapid fire with ammochain.
  • Mods (including agility ones) are much more common as of the newest version, which predictably makes Ammochain more powerful. This change seems to affect other weapons just as much, however.
  • Tacking the Sniper mod onto a Plasma Rifle - especially if you have Ammochain - can make a good portion of the game a cakewalk. Guaranteed hits with a weapon that is only balanced by its sheer inaccuracy makes for piles upon piles of dead Barons of Hell. In addition to this, you can simply fire blind and be guaranteed to kill something if there is, indeed, something in the way of your firing line.
  • The nano modpack can be used to make some incredibly broken assembled weapons, especially when you are lucky enough to have an exotic like the Super Shotgun for a nano assembly. But you need to be really lucky to find a nano mod at all, and then even luckier to find an exotic compatible with your build to apply a nano assembly to.
• Genius Bonus: "You hear the trumpets of Jericho in the distance..." is one of the messages you can get at the start of a floor. Some knowledge of The Bible can let you guess what this means...there's a lever somewhere that'll knock all the walls down.
• Goddamned Bats: Lost Souls pre-0.9.9.7; they have ridiculously high speed (with 220% speed, they're by far the fastest enemies, and can get 2 to 3 moves for every move the player has at base speed), and can quickly swarm the player, inhibiting the player's movement and distracting them from other enemies. They're even worse for pistol users and chain gunners, as they have a massive 50% bullet resistance and can take many hits from these weapons before dying. 0.9.9.7 adjusted their AI; instead of behaving like a normal melee enemy who happens to be ridiculously fast, they now behave like their normal Doom counterparts, where they wander around at a slow speed, and then charge at the player in a straight line at their ridiculous speed until they hit something or are hit. This AI change made them a lot less obnoxious and not as much the threat they were in swarms, but they are still very annoying.
  • Former Sergeants can be this. Since they use Shotguns, they'll never miss the player, and they'll keep knocking back the player with their attack, which is especially annoying for melee builds. It's very common for a player to be moving around and then suddenly get shot back by a Sergeant they unknowingly stepped into the vision of. The spread of their shotguns also has a tendency to blow up barrels near the player, making being near barrels when Sergeants are around a perilous situation. Their extremely low HP and speed, and shrapnel damage being double reduced by armor, keeps them from being real threats to the player beyond the very early game, unless you happen to be near barrels.
• Good Bad Bugs: In the Angel of Marksmanship or Shotgunnery challenges, you can't use any weapons except pistols or shotguns, respectively, but can still attack with the Emergency Weapon of your fists. In some versions, when you attack with a melee weapon wielded, it will cancel the attack and the use of time it would have taken, then go ahead and punch the monster anyway. You could kill anything by revving up a chainsaw and then punching them a few dozen times in an instant.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The difficulty rating for the Archangel Of Humanity challenge, the hardest Archangel challenge in the game, is listed as "TwoDev", in honor of a player on the Chaos Forge forums named 2DeviationsOut, the supposed best DRL player pre-0.9.9.7. In particular he was known for being the only claimed player that obtained every badge in 0.9.9.6 and for having posted mortems of many absurd feats. However shortly after 0.9.9.7's release he would deactivate his account and disappear, while years later it's now accepted by the remaining players that he cheated his accomplishments, with the complete lack of any video evidence, 2Dev's own posts discussing any strategy being sparse and of dubious quality when he did try talking, and for his "accomplishments" simply appearing bullshit when scrutinized by experienced players, especially when combined with the inhumanly fast playtimes all his runs had. He was also once caught editing one of his mortems back when he was active, and while overlooked at the time, it's looked back now as a big red flag that he wasn't honest about his accomplishments.
• That One Boss: While the sole Shambler of Hell's Armory is a pushover, the dual Shamblers of the counterpart level Deimos Lab is a whole other story. With two of them together, their threat level increases immensely, as their teleportation means you can't keep them together and they will surround you, while their regeneration is a much bigger deal when you can't so easily focus on one, and two of them attacking you from different angles makes it not so easy to dodge their attacks. With such factors combined with their high armor and very high HP, it becomes really difficult to just kill one of them, let alone both of them together. And the area you fight them is not conductive to fighting them either, giving you little cover. Melee builds will still have it easy thanks to their resistances and their really high DPS allowing them to still out DPS even the two of them together, but other builds will have it really rough, especially Shotgunners. The two Shamblers are pretty much the sole reason Deimos Lab is considered such a Brutal Bonus Level instead of a Breather Level like its counterpart Hell's Armory. It is worth your while to beat them though, as beating them rewards you with two rare mod packs, that could potentially win you the game.
• That One Level: As regular levels get randomly generated, any level can potentially end up this, though some that standout in particular:
  • The first boss level, Phobos Anomaly, ironically even moreso on the Hey Not Too Rough rather than on the Hurt Me Plenty and Ultra Violent difficulties. On HNTR, the ambush in the beginning consists mostly of Lost Souls, who'll surround the player unless (or more likely even if) they immediately run for the beginning or right area. If the player does not run and tries fighting them in the open, the player will either die, or be left severely weakened while still having the Bruiser Brothers to fight. This area is an even bigger obstacle for those running pistol and rapid fire builds, due to the Lost Souls' extreme bullet resistance. For these players, rocket jumping (which may not even be available if playing on a challenge that restricts weapon usage) or getting lucky with a Phase Device to teleport them past the ambush is pretty much the only somewhat reliable way to get past this part without sustaining heavy damage. Then on Nightmare difficulty, while there are no Lost Souls, the Demons, Imps, and Cacodemons are replaced with their nightmare variants to make a very brutal ambush for a relatively low level player, with the Nightmare Demons being especially terrifying; like Lost Souls they're very fast and will surround you quickly, but unlike Lost Souls they're extremely durable and hit muccchhhhhhhh harder. Getting surrounded by the Nightmare Demons here will practically be game over.
  • Among randomly generated levels, Arachnotron caves are notorious. Caves are small open levels, with barely any cover, and consist of a single enemy type. In Arachnotron caves, you often start with multiple Arachnotrons around you in your line of sight, with even more not that far away. With barely any cover (which is vital for avoiding Arachnotron fire), you have little protection from their plasma volleys, it's difficult to approach them to exploit their extreme melee weakness, and you can't run away unless the stairs are nearby. Arachnotron caves are also not uncommon in deeper levels, and on higher difficulties, you're about guaranteed to run into at least one. Then in Angel of 100/666, you can even run into Nightmare Arachnotron caves, which even if you'll be at a ridiculously high level and loaded out with ridiculously powerful gear, are going to be really hard to survive unless you can get to the stairs ASAP. Fortunately adjustments to the level generation in 0.9.9.7 made Aracnotron caves no longer ridiculously common, and having to go through them is no longer a nigh-guarantee on deeper levels.
  • Also among randomly generated levels, mazes. Mazes are levels that have no rooms, and are filled with short-length thin walls all over the place. Besides making them annoying to traverse, there will rarely be a safe spot in them as the player will be left wide open in some direction, while corner shooting opportunities will be very limited. Then on top of this, the "danger level" in a maze level is increased by 50% (what the game uses to generate enemy spawns), so a lot more enemies will spawn than usual, and more of the spawned enemies will be what you don't want to fight, than what would be typical for the depth the player is at.