Doom: The Dark Ages – Best weapon upgrades

You often have to go quite far out of your way to collect all of the gold and gems you need to buy upgrades in Doom: The Dark Ages, so it’s understandable that you want to spend them where they’ll matter most. Every weapon, including your shield and melee strikes, can be upgraded in this game, so we’ll run down the best upgrades that you should aim for as soon as possible.

Best Arsenal upgrades

Flare Up – Combat Shotgun

Upgrading the Combat Shotgun is a good place to spend your gold early on, but Flare-Up – the third upgrade on the tree – is the one you want to aim for. This weapon’s ability to ignite enmies is great, but being able to instantly ignite and explore fodder demons is extremely useful, as it lets you do easy damage to any larger demons nearby.

Speed Loader – Super Shotgun

As we explained in our Doom: The Dark Ages weapon tier list, the Super Shotgun is the weapon you should be relying on most of the time, and one of its biggest drawbacks is the slow rate of fire. This upgrade helps to negate that downside and let you open fire quicker.

Eat This! – Super Shotgun

Following on from that, the final upgrade on the Super Shotgun tree is amazing and will massively increase the damage potential of your weapon, letting you fire multiple shells at once without taking up more ammo.

Fulmination – Cycler

The Cycler’s shock ability is brilliant, making enemies more vulnerable to damage and stunning them in the process. Fulmination is where it becomes especially powerful, though, as killing an enemy under the effects of shock will cause it to chain to other nearby enemies, letting you tear through packs of demons with ease.

Ignition – Ravager

The Ravager isn’t the easiest weapon to use. It has a high ceiling for potential damage, but the fact that it slows you down and takes a while to ramp up is a huge downside. This upgrade negates both of those, and is far better than the alternative on this tree, which worsens both factors.

Cannibalism – Rocket Launcher

The Rocket Launcher is a brilliant weapon, but the splash damage can be catastrophic, that is, until you get this upgrade. As long as you’ve just parried a Hell Surge attack, the Rocket Launcher’s splash damage will heal you instead of harming you, letting you get up close and personal with demons and unleash explosions right in their face while you just get healthier.

Best Shield upgrades

Power Surge

Given that it will be by your side for the entire game, you should prioritize your shield when it comes to upgrades. Power Surge is the second upgrade on the tree and is extremely useful in large combat encounters. Energy shields can be such a pain, as only a few weapons can deal with them easily. This upgrade makes it a breeze as it will not only kill the shield barer, but bounce around and kill a bunch of other demons.

Steadfast

A little further down the tree, you’ll find this. Given that you should be parrying attacks all the time in this game, recovering faster is a must, as it will allow you to get more shots off and deal more damage to whatever’s bearing down on you.

Wavefront

Once you unlock Runes, the shield starts to become seriously powerful. Ground Fissure is the first one you’ll unlock and one of the better ones too. We recommend you upgrade it at least this far ASAP, as getting enemies to dispense armor for you in the heat of combat will help keep you alive longer.

Best Melee upgrades

Duelist – Power Gauntlet

While the Power Gauntlet eventually gets outclassed by the other melee weapons, it’s still a useful tool in the early game and this will help. As we said before, parrying Hell Surge attacks is a huge part of combat in this game, so having them accelerate your melee attack regeneration is brilliant.

Resonant – Flail

Armored demons can be a bit of a pain in this game, and this upgrade helps deal with that, letting you tear through armor a lot quicker than you can with any other weapon in the game.

Riposte – Dreadmace

The Dreadmace is extremely powerful, which is why you only get one charge instead of three. However, that downside is largely negated by the final upgrade on its tree, which will give you an extra strike whenever you parry a Hell Surge attack. While it has a cooldown, it means you can deal with demons up close a lot quicker than before, even with fewer melee charges.