How to Dominate in Doom Eternal

This guide will teach you how to turn Eternal into your plaything and whoop some demon ass.

General tips and principles

0) MOVE! Your dashes are not there only to dodge attacks, so keep using them for constant movement around the whole arena. Why are you doing this? If you just stay in one place all enemies in the arena are gonna gather up on you, and then you will have to engage them all at the same time, which would most likely lead to getting your teeth kicked in. So keep your feet moving, and preferably move vertically as well - enemies slow down as they go up or down platforms, giving you more time. But don't just move aimlessly you also need to:

1) Know where to move! You want to prioritize positions with a lot of escape routes in there (bonus points for boost pads, monkey bars, and the position being a high ground). But you also want to move with a purpose - either trying to close in on fodder to gather resources, or closing in on a high threat to eliminate it. Oh, but which target you should choose to eliminate, for that you should know about:

2) Target Prioritization! The whole time you wasted to shooting at that hell knight, which would never really catch up to you, if you follow step 0) and 1), the archvile spawned a whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ army. Enemies like the Pain elemental and the Archvile become a bigger threat with time, so they are generally your highest priority. However enemies in Eternal are very well balanced so your priority will always depend on the current situations, but the end goal will still be to eliminate those high threats. So if the Archvile is on the other side of the arena, and you are currently surrounded by ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of demons, you won't just shoot at 'im, while you get mauled to death by everything around you. You want to escape the dangerous situation you are in first and then close in on the main threat. Thanks to your amazing ability to move and shoot at the same time without any movement inaccuracy (this ain't CS) you can both close in to your desired target and attack the threats around you! As for the rest of the targets the harder they are to kill the lower on your priority list they should be, and the more threatening their attacks the higher they should be. This is why you don't focus on knights and the barons. A lot of health, and if you are already following step 0) they are not a threat. Similarly you will focus on the Mancubi and Arachnotrons, before the Tyrant, not only because he has tons of health, but also because his inaccurate attacks are a bigger threat to other demons than to you. The revenant, pinkies and cacos are useless - the revenants are a glorified imp that you can kill in a split second, the pinkies are only dangerous on the ground, and if they are a threat to you, you need to go back to step 0), and I assume you know how to deal with cacos by now. Last, but not least you have to be wary of enemies like the Prowler,
Carcass and the Whiplash. While they are not a huge threat by themself for your health and are generally easy to kill (the Whiplash is an exception), they have abilities that will hinder any plan you had, either by a Carcass putting a shield between you and the target you are trying to glory kill, a Prowler teleporting behind you to block your backpedaling and a Whiplash attack completely taking control over your movement for a second or two. This is why you should always be careful around them, and if possible eliminate them as soon as you can, as they will hinder you when trying to eliminate anything else. Don't forget that you can also use the weakpoints to quickly reduce the threat of an enemy without killing them, especially useful on the Anachrotrons, but when you are trying to eliminate a demon you shouldn't really go for the weakpoints (outside of the armored weakpoints of the Archvile and the Cyber Mancubi) you should:

3) Count your shots! Why count your shots? When you are just shooting randomly at a target, you need to waste time reacting to them dying and also you can't factor the time to kill into your planning. This is all time that you wasted not shooting or closing in on another high priority target. This is why you should know how much damage you need to kill each and every enemy. But you don't just directly remember the damage, you just count the shots, approximate the time you shoot with weapons with a high rate of fire and get a feeling for the range damage fallout of the shotguns. Example of this would be the simple combo of killing the Mancubi - 1 rocket, 1 ballista and 1 point blank SSG. If the SSG is a bit further apart you get a glory kill and this is important - you should know how to either kill or get enemies into glory kill state, the latter especially important for fodder enemies. You will be able to figure it out - you are smart. Oh but if you are having trouble to get a feel for the dps of high rate of fire weapons, don't worry because:

4) Weapon Switching BABY! Instead of waiting for the whole reload animation of your burst weapon (the shotguns, the rocket launcher, the ballista or the sniper) you can just switch to another weapon and fire away, effectively increasing your dps through the roof. What you just need to know is where to use each of the weapons. The Ballista is the easiest - it can be used at any range for a switch, but don't forget about its movement capabilities. You can close onto an enemy with a SSG for a point blank shot and then use the ballista momentum to back away from the enemy avoiding any melee attack from it. Preferably use its momentum to close in to the target you want while also damaging another enemy. The SSG is obviously only useful at close range - don't waste your shells shooting at higher ranges, and always try to get as close as possible with it. The rockets are your midrange weapon, technically you can use it on other ranges as well, but you will eat your own splash at close range, and the low speed will make them likely to miss at long ranges. And the sniper is only useful for the long ranges, while you can use it at closer ranges, all the other choices outdamage it, so there is no reason to use it instead of them. Oh and don't forget to quickscope with it - you don't have the time to take a careful shot with it. Now all of this is fine and dandy, however when you start fighting tankier demons they will have more time to retaliate, so then what you need is:

5) FALTER FALTER FALTER FALTER! One way to deal with any enemy is to just completely stun lock them. Generally triggering their weak point will falter them, but that is not nearly enough to keep them stun locked. The other tools you can use to do so are nades, glory punch, remote detonate and the microwave tap. The nades are useful since you can use them while firing another weapon, so you don't waste time of your dps to use them. However they are also limited and kill fodder around the target (which you would generally want alive to gain resources from them), so you need to use them for big targets. The glory punch is always great, since it both deals good amounts of damage and is a fast stun, however you need to close in on an enemy first. This could be troubling on some targets like the Mancubi, because of their AoE attack so you might want to falter them with another tool before hand (you can still manage to glory punch them for a falter before they are able to use that attack with a good dash in timing). The Remote Detonate is another amazing tool, since it allows to falter any demons and even better big groups of demons. The Microwave tap is the least known one, but it is incredibly useful (for example the Mancubi example of before is a good example - god I love tautology). Essentially if you lock on on an enemy with it and just tap the fire button once, you will falter them immediately. Then you can just switch to another weapon for damage and/or close in the distance safely.

Following all those tips and principles is more than enough to bully demons in hell.

Movement Specifics

Some words about different movement techniques you can use. First and foremost, if you don't use both dashes and only 1, the dash regenerates faster. This way you can rhythmically "spam" the dash, keeping you extremely mobile at all time - so learn the rhythm. Another small quirk is that the double jump and the dash resets your vertical velocity. This means if you want to stay in air for longer you need to time your dashes and the double jump with equal intervals between to cancel more falling momentum. Air control rune is extremely essential to the movement in Eternal, you can use the jump pads and the monkey bars to reach many different locations using them instead of just the intended ones, and it also makes the hook much more useful weapons.

If you just during the hook you get a super jump, again combined with the air control rune you can use this as a super jump towards any direction, regardless of which enemy you hooked. The downside of the hook jump is that you don't retain any horizontal momentum of the hook doing that. If you want to retain the horizontal momentum you can either "jump" over an enemy with you shoot it, or use the air control rune again to strafe while in the hook. While strafing keep looking directly at the enemy so that you don't break the hook - you will get amazing speeds using it, and you can also use it to close in to enemies faster if you hold the forward key as well.

Consider the rune that adds more range on glory kills, while compared to Doom(2016) it doesn't have the same horizontal reach, and you even have other tools that does the same, now that rune is really useful for vertical movement. While you have great tools for horizontal movement and going up, you don't actually have good tools for going down - your falling speed is generally really slow. This is where this rune shines, it allows you to use glory kills to quickly get back on the ground to regain your dashes and double jump. It can also be useful when an enemy is just outside of your reach when you are going up.

Last, but not least learn to use the Ballista, compared to Doom (2016) the double jump does not cancels the momentum, so you can use it to cover bigger distances, even if you were on the ground when you decided to use it.

Weapon Specifics

The first shotgun is something you will use just for fodder enemies later on in the game, with the idea of putting them into glory kill state. The sticky nades are also good for dealing with with weakpoints, however they don't really have the damage they had in Doom(2016). Oh and the auto mod is a bullet wasting machine, outside of the first 2 levels it is useless.
The Machinegun is again something you would use to glory kill fodders, however the sniper mod is really good for it, and it is essential to your long range dps, when combined with the ballista. The other mod is good against clearing fodder, but then again you don't want to kill fodder - you want to keep them alive for resources.

The Plasma became kinda weak later on, because of the weapon switching potential other weapons have. The heat mod suffers from the same issue that the micromiscles suffer - you don't really want to kill fodder later on. The Microwave mod is really good though, the tap I explained earlier is great, but also the explosion can be really good. It can allow you to stagger the whole arena, which is amazing crowd control. To use it effectively on top of learning how much damage you need to deal to put an enemy into glory kill state or to kill them, learn how much damage you need to take them to low health without putting them into glory kill state (putting them in that state REGAINS some of their health). That will allow you to blow them up with the microwave rather fast. it is a mod that becomes better, the better you are.

The SSG, the Rocket launcher and the Ballista strong points were already covered in here or in the game tutorial.

The Chaingun is the only weapon that can go uppar to the weapon switching potential of other weapons, due to its mobile turret. But on the downside, it does not tie that well with your mobility. As for the shield mod, it is more of a thing you can use to style on. The only thing you should know about it, is that it gets charged up not only by the chaingun damage, but also from all damage you do while you have it equipped. This means that using rockets or rocket lock-on on a far away target and combining it with a delayed nade, you could charge the shield the moment you equip it and fire it away.

Essential about resource gathering: While it is mentioned in the game tutorial some people miss the fact that the chainsaw first pip actually recharges. To have enough ammo in Eternal, you need to keep using it once it is off cooldown - this is why you keep the fodder alive when you can. Similar thing for the flame to gain armour. It might be hard to check if those tools are on cooldown while playing in the mayhem of the game, and this is where the glory kill long animation can be useful since you can use it to check your cool downs (consider that glory kills are still a dangerous tool as you are sitting duck while using them - you can't be damaged, but enemies will gather around you).

Enemy Specific

The important things about most enemies were already covered, but I still didn't mention 1 enemy - the Marauder.
He is a pretty dumb enemy - he has a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ projectile attack that will probably never hit you, he and his dog are slow and deal really bad with verticality so if you follow step 0) you will probably never know he was in the encounter by the time you kill everything else in it. He is only dangerous to you, when you try to parry him. You don't actually need to parry him, you can use nades and remote detonate to falter him and then damage him with a weapon switch. However if you go for parry here are several things you should know. First thing when you are in mid range this doesn't mean he will only use the attack you can parry - he can use EVERYTHING, and you should expect everything. It is unlikely that he will immediately attack you with the parriable attack, so you need to spend some time dodging other attacks while keeping the mid range. Then for the parry itself you can use different damaging sequences. One is a simple ballista into SSG or vice versa, the order doesn't matter really - this gets him in 2 parries. But for most damage you can do Ballista > SSG > Ballista - this gets him in 3 parries. You can actually kill him in 1 parry, with well timed glory punches, nades to keep him stun locked, but it isn't necessary. There is even a meme kill with 2 BFG shots :D

About me

You could say I play games, here some gameplay of mine in Eternal:
https://youtu.be/TqtKsb2RDzg
https://youtu.be/k_EBaO8Tr_g

[Dawido]

Eng : Kurwa too long

[Dawido]

Kurwa za długie

[large frog]

I like Doom 2016's atmosphere more and the fact that the Hellwalker
has less backstory but Doom Eternal's gameplay is way more aggressive and violent

[cowa]

DOOM 2016 is shit compared to Eternal

[Kleerex]

...or just play Doom 2016, problem solved.

[FlyBoogy]

what a waste of bfg ammo

[Marzo]

Nice thumbnail.

[myfriendmichael_gothitbyacar]

no you have to spam pbolt ballista you fool