WAD: Sunlust
Map: 14
Skill: 4
Category: UV-Max
Exe: Dsda-Doom 0.29.4
Time: 2:54

Author: 	Kinetic
Demo Date:	April 2nd, 2026
Attempts:       696
Practice:	20 min
Grind:		7 hr 58 min
Goal:           2:59
Satisfaction:   :D :D

- complevel 9

Comments: 

I had gotten a 2:58 about 90 mins into the grind, and I called it there since sub 3 was my goal. But the run bothered me, since I noticed when watching it back that I had missed 4 rockets at the top of the elevator, which caused a huge timeloss during cleanup with the HKs and mancs by the start. It was such a critical error on my part, that I decided it wasn't good enough on my part and needed to be redone. Redoing it ended up being a pain in the ass, because I did nearly a 4 hour session of grinding on St Patrick's Day, and couldn't get anything. Today I tried the run again and got it, although this demo has some warts as well.

The starting movement is very clean, so that is very nice, but the entire duration of the invuln both looks pretty bad and went pretty bad. I didn't want to chaingun the vile, and I slipped down into the chaingunners, instead of climbing through the windows, and then I had bad movement by the SSG and a shit SSG shot there. I am able to climb through the chaingunner windows at a 95% success rate basically, so I'm kind of mad I fell down in the winning run, makes it slower and uglier than it should have been, since window climb looks nice and smooth.

After that though, I stopped playing like ass and locked in for most of the middle of the run. I got a quick escape out of the cyber secret, which made up a few seconds for some time loss I had during the invuln run. Then the 2 BFGs on the enemies at the pier and boardwalk went really really good, and a 1:03 YC switch press for the green armor secret is a really good split there.

This descending temple room is basically the most ass part of the run. Getting to kill all the revs, HKs, and everything else in 3 BFGs and a few shells/rockets while getting out in a timely manner is much harder than it looks. It's not crazy inconsistent, but attempts die often there. You kind of want good BFGs there on the HKs so you don't have to use too many rockets on them, which was the case here. Only used 3 rockets down there this time. The first 2 were to clear out enemies, in hopes of having HKs pool into the center easier for the BFGs. Sometimes the HKs just walk to the sides and that is really shit. A PE from the SSG area can also block you from getting on the lift in time, which is annoying asf when he does.

Then the next part is also kind of crappy. You have to drop down and get a good BFG on a group of a vile, 2 revs, some imps, and depending on if the PE came up to the top of the lift, him too. I got a good enough shot here, you mainly just need the vile to die, anything else is a bonus. But often the vile can tuck himself into the corner and make a good BFG shot impossible.

Rest of the run is self-explanatory. Unfortunately, a really beneficial infight did not happen, which is between the 2 HKs and 2 mancs at the start. If they infight, it saves you 4+ rockets, and some seconds. If you truly wanted to grind this map down, you would grind for this infight, probably trying to get them to infight at the start of the run when running past the mancs. You can see during the invuln run, I pause for a second when passing through the starting area to see if I can get the mancs to fire at the HKs, but it failed and I was already down on time.

The final part of the run is getting a telefrag on one of the cybers. It's technically not needed for sub 2, if the cybers lost enough HP infighting. But that will always involve SSGing and slow the run down. But the telefrag isn't too uncommon, although probably like 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 odds or something (I'm just guesstimating).

After I killed that last cyber, I saw I had 2 kills left, not knowing what else was alive besides the rev. I was bracing for a dead run, but then I heard the chaingun shoot at me. On one hand, thank god he shot at me and alerted me to his presence, but on the other, if I knew he was there beforehand, it wouldn't have slowed me down as much and it would have made for a smoother looking run. 2:54 is fine, probably something closer to 2:45 is optimal.