User talk:Ashley Pomeroy

good job shortening the clockwork orange section -- Jdowland 15:53, 28 Dec 2005 (UTC)


 * Aw, sucks. Just doing my job, ma'am. Mister-ma'am. -Ashley Pomeroy 20:51, 28 Dec 2005 (UTC)

Can you explain in more detail just why this is so objectionable (especially given the style of some of our WAD level articles)? Everything I added was correct AFAIK, and certainly conformed to our NPOV guideline. Ryan W 17:18, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * I kind of prefer the newer version. What is the reference to "shooting zombies in the head or ankle"? Fraggle 17:59, 29 Dec 2005 (UTC)
 * In his revisions of the Trooper, Sergeant, and Chaingunner articles, Mr Pomeroy has deleted the following information:
 * The trooper's aim when not near his target (say, at 300 units or so) is much worse than the Spider Mastermind's (e.g.), but neither does he experience the near-comical recoil of the SS Nazi's gun.
 * The non-berserk fist should not be thought of as terribly reliable against a trooper even when circumstances force the player into using it. If you go after five or six of them in a row, you're going to take a certain amount of damage.  (Whereas the chaingun, or even the shotgun, might let you escape that situation with no damage at all.)
 * Troopers are not completely hopeless causes in monster-monster battles, at least from the player's point of view. For instance, they can certainly be a nuisance to faraway demons with projectile attacks, who might have enough trouble hitting the troopers that the player can land multiple blows from behind.
 * In many stock maps, no matter how many monsters inhabit the first few rooms, the majority are zombies.
 * When you kill a bunch of troopers in the first room of a level (e.g. MAP09: Stronghold), no, you are not required to take the dropped clips. But unless you're recording a speedrun, it might be a good idea.
 * The dispersion of a sergeant's shotgun pellets is horizontal only (unlike the pellets fired by, e.g., the SSG or the Spider Mastermind's chaingun).
 * Many stock levels place sergeants directly behind doors or around corners in order to ambush the player.
 * Most third-party PWADs pay no stylistic attention at all to their monster distributions, and therefore do not share the above characteristic with regard to sergeant placement (BUILDING.WAD, and OFFICE.WAD from Maximum Doom, are far more typical than MANOR.WAD).
 * One important characteristic of such "ambushes" is the simultaneous attack from multiple angles &mdash; it is almost impossible to sneak forward and pick off just one at a time (see BLACKTWR.WAD for some examples).
 * "Slicing the pie" (a la the Tom Clancy's series) can dramatically reduce the damage the player takes as a result of well-placed sergeants. (Fraggle, this is the answer to your question.)  It is of course not really "slicing the pie", since Doom's engine is not 3D, but developing good instincts as to how the vertical "auto-aiming" behaves is far, far better than nothing.
 * INFINITY.WAD, played on UV, contains quite a few well-placed sergeants.
 * The sergeant, though fairly helpless when surrounded by a cluster of Doom II enemies, can nevertheless have a significant influence on the outcome of certain monster-monster battles.
 * Because the sergeant fires multiple pellets which spread out as they "travel", he can damage more than one target per shot.
 * One of the sergeant's main weaknesses in combat is his AI, which can result in quite unnecessarily long pauses between shots.
 * The player can of course take down two sergeants with one successful shotgun attack, but because of the shotgun's reload time, he should probably not play as though that is going to occur regularly (killing three in one blast is possible but quite rare &mdash; it will happen maybe once or twice in the course of a largish techbase level such as E1M7: Computer Station, and even that is sometimes due to one or more of them having already been hit in the back by their fellows).
 * In a stock level (not to mention a lot of PWADs whose authors are just really infatuated with the shotgun and/or SSG), playing on UV tends to unbalance the ammo distribution in favor of shells, sometimes severely.
 * Episodes I and IV of Ultimate Doom are especially prone to the "shell overload" phenomenon described above.
 * A single shotgun round at point-blank range certainly does not "almost always" kill a chaingunner.
 * The circular scatter of SSG pellets can make it easier to kill a chaingunner through a window or from below a ledge.
 * Chaingun "tapping" can make it easier to kill a chaingunner through a window or from below a ledge (it seems to allow faster vertical auto-aiming than just holding down the trigger).
 * Vertical blast damage from rockets can make it easier to kill a chaingunner who is on top of a ledge or below a cliff (see George Bell's UV -fast demo of MAP20: The Death Domain).
 * In many cases, playing a stock level on UV gives the player a chaingun noticeably earlier than on lower difficulty settings, due to all the extra chaingunners (admittedly, "20 minutes" may be overstating the matter depending on the level's size and the player's experience).
 * The chaingunner's participation in monster-monster battles is significantly increased by the recoil of his chaingun (the other monster doesn't quite have to be between you and the chaingunner in order to get hit).


 * Obviously, there is no one best style to use when writing a wiki article, but IMHO these particular pages have been changed in a way that makes them less helpful to the reader &mdash; especially if that reader is new to Doom and actually needs tactical advice for solo play. I could have just reverted Mr Pomeroy's work, of course, but instead I wanted to ask whether or not he had a good reason for doing what he did, as I can see none.  (That is, assuming I haven't already ended the thread by typing the word "Nazi".   :>     Ryan W 15:51, 15 Jan 2006 (UTC)

Regarding your recent revision to the Trooper article:


 * There is probably no way to know whether the sprite contains a carbine or an assault rifle unless we actually hear from Carmack or Cloud. Given that, I think makes more sense to use "assault rifle" since "carbine" is (AFAICT) a more technical term.


 * The pedantic description of the trooper's movement sequence will probably not be helpful to novice players because they have no way of knowing what "briefly", "randomly", or even "aims" means. If it is based on the source code and frame tables, fine, but in that case it should go into "Technical information" and include gametics and sprite names.


 * Also, I am not English, so I have no idea what "tarted up" means. Based on this revision, however, it seems to mean the opposite of "toned down flowery language", which is what you said you were doing when you revised Sergeant.  You have increased the article's length, but added very little verifiable information.

What did you have in mind here? Ryan W 15:13, 25 February 2006 (UTC)