Thanks for clarifying. 

Is there some way you can prevent losing keys when you die in coop?

I really love the coop support, but unfortunately I have to keep noclipping through doors because as soon as a player dies after picking up a key forever it's gone forever and you have to restart. The keys alias in the quake.rc or impulse 9 doesn't work either in coop, does anyone have a good solution for that? 

Some interesting changes to Nightmare. Wondering what people think.

- Nightmare revisited as a more unique gameplay mode with role-specific monster enhancement
- Knights, Fiends, Dogs, and Rotfish move and attack faster
- Vorepods pursue more maliciously than vanilla (... until the vore dies)
- Zombies eventually return to life even if gibbed with explosives
- Grunts, Ogres, and Shamblers can fire repeatedly in fast volleys
- Ogres have their Z-awareness bumped up and rarely play their long stun animation
- Enforcers have a higher ROF and rarely play their long stun animation
- Scrags move faster when strafing, and spit bigger, faster bolts
- Death knights fire bigger, faster projectiles in two different patterns
- Spawns wake up and take flight more promptly
- Max health is 100 :P 

Just my own preference, a monster type that doesn't stay permanently dead would frustrate my enjoyment of "cleaning out" and safing an area. 

C'mon, you mean 10, right? :P

Jokes aside, do what you want. I'll never touch NM, anyway. Not my cup of tea. Never was, never will be. 

I can count on two hands how nay times I've played nightmare and that was usually testing my own maps.

So I get it. Not sure this fits at all with Lunaran's vanilla+ design ethos but I am curious to see it in action. 

How much it changes varies a bit depending on the level design - the zombies are a very easy example to imagine - as opposed to the flat health cap which is much more universal. When it does change a lot I find it a very fun challenge, and on the other end of the scale it can feel a bit similar to hard, especially in maps where you know best how to nuke everything with maximum efficiency. I'm excited at the prospect of returning to older maps in this new mode, as well as designing my own with it in mind, which is something the old nightmare mode(s) never sparked. Zombies are my new best friend.

As for how it fits with the design ethos, I think it makes sense if you approach it in terms of "What Would id Do... in some magical scenario where they had more time to polish but not add or pursue a different vision--"

Whether or not you like the 50hp cap (I liked it personally and think Lunaran has been a bit too harsh on it in retrospect), it's hard to argue that id would have favoured that solution when Doom's nightmare was fast + respawning monsters and Quake's was clearly intended to be in the same vein: the same player vs more dangerous baddies. I think individually buffing each monster is not only more consistent with that vision, much like how shamblers and vores are buffed in id1, but the buffs in question are very Lunar-ian in their design. Perhaps the addition of new assets for the zombies and the scrag + death knight projectiles goes farther than the rest of the mod, to which I suppose my most honest defense is "rule of cool"; I just think they're neat. Also something about it being necessary to fulfill the aforementioned vision while remaining player-legible.

Another consideration that hasn't yet been widely mentioned is the knock-on effect on copper-based mods that add new monsters. No longer can developers rely on a universal change that "just works", and each new enemy needs a hand-crafted nightmare buff consistent with the others. I don't think this is a bad thing necessarily, but it does add an opportunity for devs to get it wrong, potentially making the whole skill level less fun if they do. Perhaps the "Modding" page of the Copper website needs to be appended. 

The faster melee monsters and volley firing for projectile monsters are nice changes. I like how the death knight is actually a bit of a threat now with the extra projectile pattern and damage buff. All these changes are pretty nice overall and I like how they make nightmare actually more of a challenge.

But the new zombies and vores suck.

The vore having the same (or very similar) projectile tracking to vanilla basically removes like 80% of the reason I prefer copper over vanilla. In my opinion it should have just been a speed increase and maybe a small tweak to the tracking.

The zombies are just a nuisance and only make very specific situations more difficult, but in a way that isn't really fun. They pretty much are just an ammo or health tax at this point. No one but hardcore masochists play DOOM on nightmare because the respawning monster are not fun so I don't know why anyone would want them in quake, even if it's just the zombies.

Also I kind of prefer the 50 health cap because it's just a better implementation of the "double damage" of vanilla nightmare but without the enemies devolving into stationary turrets which better fits the "vanilla+" mentality that the mod started with. Plus it doesn't introduce all the modding complications that @h4724 mentioned.

I hope these changes are refined in future versions. Maybe made into a separate skill 4. For now I guess I'll just have to try and figure out how to undo the vore and zombie changes and compile my own version.