DOOM 2016 Basic Guide

This guide is made to help new players with DOOM 2016 and playing it. Everything you need to know is listed.

Controls

These are the things you should know before you jump in. DOOM 2016 is extremely difficult for those who are new to first person shooters, so keep these in mind.

Movement

WASD: Move around

Spacebar: Jump

Ctrl/shift: Crouch

Weapons

Number keys: Weapons

Q: Weapon wheel

LMB: Primary Fire

RMB: Mod Fire

R: Switch mods

Melee

F: Glory Kill/Punch

C: Chainsaw (you will have to click to chainsaw)

These can be adjusted to your liking in the settings, but this is the default configuration and I generally use this.

Important Mechanics to Know

This is a list of important stuff to know, aside from controls. Usually this is stuff you'll learn later on in the game, or with experience in the later installment, DOOM: Eternal.

Glory Kills:

Glory Kills are a mechanic where you can press F to execute an animated finisher move against enemies glowing bright orange/blue. Orange indicates that you are close enough to do a glory kill, blue indicates that you need to get closer. Glory Kills will always drop health regardless of if your health is full or not.

You can change up your glory kill animations by jumping, moving from left to right, forward or backward, etc. More specifically, your direction must correlate with the enemy's. What I mean by that is that your direction to glory kill is not your direction, but their direction. So for example, if you want to do a left glory kill on an Imp, you need to face the Imp's left, not yours.

Weapon Mods:

Weapon mods are modifications to your weapon's primary fire that give them unique ways to change your firepower so you can keep ripping through demons. You can usually find them with secrets or as part of the straightforward path through a level. They are really good for quickswitching, which will be expanded on much later.

Argent Cells:

Argent Cells are a type of pickup that allow you to change your stats by increasing the values of your Ammo, Armor and Health. These are really important, because if you skip Argent cells, you will be very squishy and it will be almost impossible to survive.

Runes:

Runes can be obtained via Rune Trials. These are also very important, as they allow you to change how you play the game in a fundamental way, such as making jumping while moving faster and less dangerous, better and faster glory kills, giving speed boosts on glory kills, etc.

Quickswitching

Quickswitching only really comes into play in the much later levels where you're more beefed up for demonkilling. Essentially, quickswitching is a thing where swapping weapons after they're fired cancels the animation for preparing to refire them. This means you can switch between different weapons in short amounts of time to do insane damage. These are best used with weapon mods.

Quickswitching isn't easy, but once mastered can double your damage output significantly. It's all about flow; if your quickswitching is inconsistent, it won't work as well. Practice and pace your quickswitching and try to incorporate it frequently into your gameplay. If you really want to get it down, play Doom Eternal.

Observe how fast you quickswitch depending on the situation, and learn the time it takes for other weapons to recover before you start quickswitching again. Practice what combinations you are going to use, as quickswitching gives you almost infinite combo potential. Here are some combos I use frequently.

Strong Quickswitch Combos

Combat Shotgun Triple Burst/Explosive Round + Rocket Launcher + Super Shotgun

Heavy Assault Rifle Mini Rockets + Rocket Launcher + Combat Shotgun Three Round Burst.

You can mix and match weapons and weapon mods as you wish, these are just my most common combos that are very applicable in pretty much any situation. However, you're really busted in this game so pretty much anything works.

And now, the meta combo that basically trivializes the entire skill aspect of this game.

The Meta

SSG + Gauss Cannon spam till enemy dies.

This combo is so busted that basically none of the things you had to learn early game will matter anymore because it's braindead and easy to be effective with. Avoid using this combo if you want to actually have fun in the video game (or if you want to improve at all).

Speed

This section is all about speed. Speed is without a doubt the most important thing to have in DOOM 2016. No matter how good you are at aiming, no matter how good you are at quickswitching, if you are slow, you're dead. Stay on the move CONSTANTLY. There are several ways to boost your speed and keep yourself moving often and trickily, making it easy to dodge projectiles or demons.

Jumping:

Jumping puts you in the air for a short amount of time, which can be extended with Double Jumps (these apply later in the game). For maximum jumping efficiency, get the In-Flight Mobility rune. This rune allows you to move freely in the air because regular jumps keep you in the direction that you're jumping in. If you prefer not to play with it so you have other runes to play with, be careful.

Frequent Glory Kills

Glory kills can also accelerate you forward massively if you use the Blood Fueled rune, but even without it they give you invincibility and time to think about where you should position yourself. You also get time to check your resources if you don't use the Savagery rune, and with Armored Offensive, you'll have a consistent source of armor by just glory killing.

Gauss Boosting

The Gauss Cannon has very high pushback, but this can be exploited. To gauss boost, jump and while you're in the air, shoot the Gauss Cannon anywhere. This will send you a lot farther than normal Gauss cannon kickback would normally send you. This doesn't work with the mods, so use the base fire.

Stay on the move, always. Hell devours the indolent.