Uh, the Doom Slayer could already face tank Cyberdemon/Tyrant rockets and survive.
Only if he was bloated at 200% health and armor and\or got lucky with the damage rolls; original Cyberdemon rockets do 20-160 direct-hit damage and 0-128 splash damage, for a total of 148-288 damage on a direct hit, one third of which would be absorbed by armor. Cyberdemons also fire three rockets in rapid succession, so even if you survived the first one you'd probably catch at least some splash damage from the second and third rocket, which would often be enough to kill even a 200%\200% Doom Guy.
2016\Eternal Doom Slayer is measurably more robust in comparison.
Granted, not many of them. But some.
One. Even if both rockets rolled minimum damage and Doom Guy had full armor, armor would only absorb 48 points of damage, meaning a direct hit from a Cyberdemon rocket does 100 points of health damage
at minimum. Two direct hits are thus a guaranteed kill on Doom Guy no matter what.
He was also able to take out demons with just a single spiked brass knuckle. Not very efficiently, mind you. And at high risk. But he was able to do so. The brass knuckle is your default "melee" weapon in the original game, replaced by the chainsaw when you find that. And what an upgrade that is.
Exactly, post-Divinity Machine tearing Hellspawn apart with his fists is both efficient and relatively
low risk, to the point of being one of the primary methods of Hellspawn murder that the Doom Slayer employs. Pre-Divinity Machine Doom Guy's fists were only properly viable weapons when he was amped up on Berserk Pack juice.
Does Taylor at any point in this story recover health after killing a demon? Or does she use those healing nanite stims to recover?
I don't recall, but even if she doesn't that just indicates that she's using the wrong kind of Glory Kill; depending on how the Doom Slayer kills a demon he can get either health, ammo or armor from doing so.
Taylor definitively does absorb Argent Energy from the Hellspawn she kills; it is mentioned several times.
Exactly what is happening with the absorbed energy is unclear, beyond that her suit definitely does have Argent Accumulators and that they are absorbing Argent Energy for
something.
Whether the Wretch is the originator of Argent Accumulator tech which the 2016 UAC then reverse-engineered from the Praetor Suit, or whether Argent Accumulators are a product of the 2016 UAC's Argent Energy research which the Wretch somehow got a hold of, or whether both of those things are true and it is in fact a stable time-loop (because Hell gives
no fucks about linear time) is unclear. This is further complicated by the potential semi-canonicty of Quake III Arena, with the Vadrigar being a possible explanation for how original Doom Guy ended up in Argent D'Nur millennia into the past and sideways across realities; the Vadrigar really did not give a shit about putting their abducted gladiators
exactly back in the same space\time as where they picked them up, near enough is good enough by Vadrigar standards.
In short; it's a massive continuity snarl that will likely never be unraveled because
Hell Just Does Not Give A Fuck About Causality.
