DOOM: The Dark Ages dev id Software has made a number of balance tweaks to the game since launch earlier this month, and a new update this week adjusts the series' famous Super Shotgun - amongst making some other tweaks and fixes.
The team describes these changes as "tunables" and basically makes them on the fly; updating its ongoing blog post as a result. Considering we haven't detailed any of these adjustments so far, we'll throw all of the May 2025 changes for DOOM: The Dark Ages down below - starting with these most recent tweaks.
DOOM: The Dark Ages Xbox Patch Notes
Update from 5/29/25
- Adjustments to player forgiveness systems to decrease the frequency of "from behind" attacks resulting in death on the highest damage sliders (250% - 500%)
- Reduced effectiveness of the Super Shotgun against the Hell Knight and certain enemy armors
- Increased the ammo count for both Plasma class weapons
- Increased the amount of ammo the player receives from killing demons with the Accelerator Heat Blast
- Fixed a bug where parrying some of the Whiplash's attacks was not providing the intended rewards
Update from 5/23/25
- Adjustments to make the Hell Knight's arms tougher to sever when using the Pulverizer
- Lowered Skullcrusher Ravager damage against Bosses and Komodo
- Reduced how long certain health and armor drops linger in the world in the [spoiler] boss fight
- Reduced how long health drops linger in the world when in the Atlan
- Rebalanced the Atlan final [spoiler] boss fight
Update from 5/22/25
After a week of observing you play and hearing your feedback, we felt the game needed to be a bit harder overall, especially on Nightmare difficulty, so a Tunable pass was made live yesterday More specifically, we:
Buffed damage to certain attacks for the following enemy AI: Agaddon Hunter, Cosmic Baron, Hellknight, Komodo, and Pinky Rider
- We wanted the threat of these enemies to be increased and have higher impact when on the field, especially on certain damage scalers/difficulty settings
- As an example, on 250% damage (Nightmare default), missing a parry on the Agaddon Hunter’s overhead slash will now break your shield instead of simply doing a lot of damage to it
Adjusted certain player forgiveness systems to be less generous across most of the ‘Damage to Player’ sliders (100% - 500%)
- There are systems under the hood that are designed to give players a better chance to survive when near death, and those systems were being too generous
- Players were able to brute force their way through situations that should’ve resulted in costing a Life Sigil or death, and we want to make sure we are keeping the player in check and asking for better tactical decisions
- These changes will have an impact on player survivability and will be more noticeable the higher up the Damage Scale slider you go.