Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Pain Elemental

HP: 40

Protection: 1

Ranged Accuracy: N/A

Melee Accuracy: +2

Ranged Damage: N/A

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+6) Melee

Speed: 100%

Inventory: Nothing

Experience: 128

Danger: 8

Minimum floor: 12/9/6

Maximum floor: 40

Experience per Danger: 16

Immune to and ignores Acid and Lava tiles. 25% chance each turn to 'attack' by spawning three Lost Souls around it. (Assuming it can see Doomguy) Will also usually do this if injured without being able to see Doomguy. When killed, spawns 3 Lost Souls rather than leaving a corpse. (Being gibbed prevents Lost Souls from spawning) All Lost Souls generated by a Pain Elemental provide no experience when killed.

One of classic Doom's weirder enemies is, unsurprisingly, one of Doom Roguelike's weirder enemies.

Though the weirdness is, oddly, kind of opposite-land to classic Doom. When a Pain Elemental spawns Lost Souls in Doom Roguelike, the Lost Souls suffer the usual newly-generated-monster penalty of spawning low on Energy so they effectively miss 54 turns. This creates severe divergences from the likely intuitive expectations of someone who's played Doom II or Doom 64; in those games, when Pain Elementals spawn Lost Souls they immediately are charging at full speed, behaving essentially as the Pain Elemental's ranged attack projectile. If Doom Roguelike's Pain Elementals worked equivalently, then sidestepping exactly once immediately after the Lost Souls appeared would cause them to go zipping past you. In actual Doom Roguelike, trying this will generally result in generated Lost Souls beelining right toward you a couple seconds later.

In a particularly bad situation it's good to know you can spend a few turns focusing on other threats before sweeping away the Lost Souls, but... counterintuitive for Doom players.

Doom Roguelike also does not suffer from classic Doom's funny percentage measurements. That is, in classic Doom, killing everything on a level with Pain Elementals about would generally result in the game crediting the player with a kill rate above 100%, because the Lost Souls they spawned weren't accounted for by the game's 'expectations'. In Doom Roguelike, killing everything on a floor is 100% kills, regardless of whether additional enemies were spawned in the process.

I should also note that the Chaos Forge wiki has long claimed that Pain Elementals avoid melee, but this is incorrect. (Maybe just out of date) In 0.9.9.7 and 0.9.9.8, at least, Pain Elementals actively pursue Doomguy, attempting to close to melee when they aren't spawning Lost Souls, and won't try to back off if Doomguy gets in melee.

Pain Elementals themselves are defined much more heavily by Lost Soul parameters than anything else since they inevitably end up producing at least a few Lost Souls and can easily swarm you if you're slow to kill the Pain Elemental. That is, a Pain Elemental's own stat profile is basically a slightly less threatening Cacodemon (The Cacodemon has better melee Accuracy, and more obviously has a real ranged attack), but where Cacodemons are pretty great targets for Pistols, Chainguns, and to a lesser extent Rocket Launchers, Pain Elementals are usually better to respond to by whipping out a Shotgun, so their Bullet-and-Fire-resistant Lost Souls don't act as worryingly effective ablative armor by eating bullets in place of the Pain Elemental. Even Plasma Rifles are a little awkward against Pain Elementals due to losing shots to the Lost Souls, though this is viable to ignore. (Particularly for Ammochain Marines)

Less extreme but worth noting is melee effectiveness: Cacodemons are one of the more awkward enemies to leverage melee against since they can hover out over Lava and Acid (And are reliable about doing exactly that in several Special Levels) and pepper Doomguy with ranged attacks, being in fact one of the nastier enemies at times for an Angel of Berserk run, whereas Pain Elementals are generally good news for melee runs! Vampyres love all the free healing and Berserk ramp-up time from Lost Souls, Blademasters love these easy instant kills for Berserk ramping, and Malicious Blades isn't as enthusiastic about fighting Pain Elementals but still far prefers fighting melee threats to fighting Plasma damage threats.

So even though in direct terms a Shotgun is mediocre when you spot a lone Pain Elemental... you should often break out the Shotgun in such a case anyway.

Pain Elementals are in fact one of the earliest painpoints to Angel of Marksmanship runs: if a Pain Elemental ends up randomly spending 2 or 3 turns in a row spawning Lost Souls, this can be a serious uphill battle for a dedicated Pistol build!

A funky, unfortunate bit of design is that Pain Elementals are only slightly better than Lost Souls in terms of Danger-to-experience payout, when Lost Souls are weirdly depressed in experience payout. Thankfully, there are no Pain Elemental caves, nor is there anything like a monster group of 9 Pain Elementals, so you're very unlikely to actually end up shorted on experience by too much Danger being paid into Pain Elementals, and in fact Pain Elementals are a bit of a rare sight overall. (Especially in 0.9.9.7, where their minimum floor was 10 and their maximum floor was 20; they can't spawn quite as early in 0.9.9.8, sure, but no longer do they disappear outside the one monster group once you're midway through Hell)

Even so, it's still wonky, and notably the City of Skulls is a Special Level populated entirely by Lost Souls and Pain Elementals. (Plus a boss) Since the City of Skulls can alternatively be replaced by the Abyssal Plains, this funkiness is very design-relevant, where which of the two you get factors into your level curve and by extension deciding whether it's worth the bother of going into the Special Level at all. When I'm not doing a Shotgun or melee run, the City of Skulls is in fact the Special Level I'm most prone to skipping, because for other builds it's shockingly dangerous and the payout is pretty terrible. And I don't just mean experience here: the Abyssal Plains has multiple Medpacks, Health Globes, Supercharges, and one of almost every special ammo item, and so can be a good haul for those reasons. The only advantage the City of Skulls has over the Abyssal Plains is that it's generally less likely to kill Shotgun and melee runs.

Overall, the Pain Elemental's design could be better, but its wonky design is mostly pretty unobtrusive. Most runs, I find it a memorably interesting enemy that's not a big issue. The jank only really leaps out intermittently.

It would still be nice if the jank was smoothed out, mind.

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Next time, we cover Hell Knights.

See you then.