Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Cacodemon
HP: 40
Protection: 1
Ranged Accuracy: +4
Melee Accuracy: +4
Ranged Damage: 2d6 Plasma
Blast Radius: 1
Melee Damage: 1d3 (+6) Melee
Speed: 100%
Inventory: Nothing.
Experience: 128
Danger: 6
Minimum floor: 10/7/4
Maximum floor: 50
Experience per Danger: 21.33
Unaffected by and ignores Acid and Lava.
Evasion: Base of 50%, +4% per tile of distance, making for a maximum of 82%
Attack chance: 40%
Functionally a substantial upgrade over Imps, except for the small detail that they can't open doors. Which is a very relevant quality, as Vaults are designed to only spawn enemies that can't open them on their own, and Cacodemons are the apex example for that purpose within a standard run. (In Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, they eventually get displaced from this slot by Nightmare Cacodemons) But when doors aren't around to foil Cacodemons, they're pretty straightforwardly Better Imps. They're even less susceptible to their shots being Dodged than Imps, albeit only a little.
Cacodemons are kind of oddly common overall. As I alluded to a moment ago, they show up in Vaults a lot, especially on higher difficulties, and Special Levels use them a fair amount, pretty clearly in part because they're the only regular enemy that's a ranged attacker able to operate freely around Acid and Lava, resulting in them being used in eg Mount Erebus/The Lava Pits to fill out ranged attackers in the no-safe-ground areas.
It's worth pointing out that Cacodemons are a ranged attacking enemy that actually tend to be more lethal if you get in close, switching from 2-12 damage to 7-9 damage; unless you're doing Angel of Max Carnage, have fairly high Protection for their ranged attack to ignore half of, or have noticeably higher Melee resistance than Plasma resistance, trying to neuter a Cacodemon by getting into its face is generally going to backfire. They'll attack more consistently, you can't Dodge melee attacks, they'll be more Accurate, and usually do more damage per hit. If you're not a melee build, it's generally better to try to keep your distance from Cacodemons.
Overall, though, Cacodemons are a surprisingly straightforward and bland enemy in practice, not giving me a ton to say.
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Next time, we cover Pain Elementals.
See you then.
One very important way Cacodemons aren't a strict upgrade over imps is that they only have 100% speed. Which is great; Cacodemons getting random double moves would be substantially worse than imps getting double moves.
ReplyDelete(Especially in Hell's Arena)
Cacodemons, for me, are an odd deviation from the original Doom; Doom's pain chance mechanism means that a lone cacodemon isn't much of a threat, and can be incapacitated by rapid fire; doomRl lacks an equivalent, and which means the Hell's Arena chaingun drop is a bit of a trap. It's much better to hide around the pillars and rely on shotgun knock back to keep them from attacking.
The Speed point is true, but the Imp Speed modifier is genuinely so small it doesn't come up very often; I very rarely see Imps get double-moves in the first place.
DeleteAh, yeah, it's been a while since I last played classic Doom so I'd forgotten they're one of the higher pain chance enemies. I guess that probably is why Hell's Arena spawns a Chaingun early; I've always been a bit confused by that, honestly. In general, the lack of a pain chance-type mechanic is one of my main actual disappointments with Doom Roguelike; it's where a lot of weird deviations occur.