Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Elite Former Human

HP: 20

Protection: 2 (Technically)

Ranged Accuracy: +5

Melee Accuracy: -2

Ranged Damage: 3d3 Bullet

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+5) Melee

Speed: 100%

Inventory: 10mm ammo*72, plus their equipped Green Armor

Experience: 128

Danger: 6

Minimum floor: 40/37/34

Maximum floor: 80

Experience per Danger: 21.33~

Can open doors, equip Armor, and pick up and use Medpacks, Phase Devices, and Homing Phase Devices. Always spawns equipped with a Green Armor and a Combat Pistol. Will never drop the Combat Pistol. Thus, Protection is effectively 3, they're normally 15% resistant to Bullet and Shrapnel damage, and the Combat Pistol can fire 15 shots before needing to reload. Leaves no corpse when killed.

Evasion: Base of 10%, +3% per tile of distance, making for a maximum of 34%

Attack chance: 75%?

Yes, the Elite Former Human is, visually, just a regular Former Human with a blue aura: they don't have separate graphics in the spritesheet. The visual discrepancy is from me making use of an in-game screenshot for my base image, as opposed to trying to reconstruct the aura myself. And yes this includes that the top part of their aura has a gap between their head and the aura in which terrain can be seen.

Elite enemies are basically Nightmare enemies, but for zombies, except for some reason they're handled very differently from Nightmare enemies. They get the blue aura rather than a blue palette, they get the standard full range of sound appropriate to their non-Elite counterpart, and for some reason none of them leaves behind a corpse. This last point is pretty easy to overlook because they also all come pre-equipped with an Armor and a weapon, and so you wouldn't expect to see a corpse when they first died regardless (Since their gear would cover the corpse sprite), but matters quite a bit.

They all drop their Armor on death, which is kind of worthless since they all have enough HP the Armor will be in dubious condition, and none of them drop their weapon on death. As every Elite is equipped with an Exotic weapon, this latter point is very notable, ensuring they don't act as reliable sources of the Exotic weapons they're equipped with. This is rather important given the primary way the game uses them in a standard run is that the Military Base sprinkles in a bunch of Elites if you're on Ultraviolence or Nightmare! difficulty; as the Military Base is right before the Phobos Anomaly, that's really early.

That really is it for a standard run's usage of Elite enemies, by the way. They're not used by Limbo, unlike Nightmare enemies, and even on upper difficulties you don't see them subbing into other Special Levels, not even when the Special Level does in fact use zombie enemies.

The other way to encounter Elites is of course Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, where they, uh, take so long to show up that they tend to not be very worrying. And they're always an uncommon, erratic sight: there's no monster groups that include Elite enemies, they don't get used by vaults or caves... I think the 'single-monster floor' can include them if it rolls to be about zombie enemies? But overall they're an uncommon sight and usually not worrying when you do encounter them.

This most basic of Elites is particularly whatever. They're technically much tougher than regular Former Humans and hit harder and more accurately, but outside the Military Base you are basically guaranteed to be able to steamroll them if you lived to reach them in the first place. Even in the Military Base, they're not that big a deal. The main qualifier is that if you're trying to rely on a Chaingun, that will do quite a poor job at killing them. (You'll do 1 damage on a lot of hits, even with Son of a Bitch 2) Pistols expect to do fine, since they have higher average/peak damage and if you're still using a Pistol you surely maxed Son of a Gun, right?

0.9.9.8 made a few tweaks to Elite Former Humans. Firstly, it bumped up their melee damage from +1 to +5, which is particularly impactful in the Military Base where it makes it rather dangerous to try to get into their face. Second, their Danger rating used to be 7 and their experience payout used to be 167, for an experience-per-Danger value of roughly 23.85, meaning 0.9.9.8 made them more dangerous, more common, and a worse experience payout. This is slightly unfortunate for its impact on the Military Base, but pretty fair overall.

---------------------------------------------

Next time, we cover Elite Former Sergeants.

See you then.