Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Elite Former Captain (0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8)

HP: 25

Protection: 2 (Technically)

Ranged Accuracy: +1 or +10, see below

Melee Accuracy: +1

Ranged Damage: Varies

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+5) Melee

Speed: 90%

Inventory: Equipped Blue Armor, and 10mm ammo*200 or Power Cell*50

Experience: 320

Danger: 10

Minimum floor: 70/67/64

Maximum floor: Infinite

Experience per Danger: 32

Can open doors, equip Armor, and pick up and use Medpacks, Phase Devices, and Homing Phase Devices. Always spawns equipped with Blue Armor, bringing their effective base Protection to 4 and giving them 20% Plasma resistance. Leaves no corpse when killed.

Additionally spawns equipped with one of the two following weapons, which are never dropped;

Minigun: 1d6*8 Bullet damage, +1 accuracy, clip size is 200 allowing for 25 shots before needing a reload

Laser Rifle: 1d7*5 Plasma damage, +8 accuracy, clip size is 40 allowing for 8 shots before needing a reload

Attack chance: 75%?

The Elite Former Captain is unfortunately wonky on the level that the Minigun vs Laser Rifle is just wildly uneven in threat level. The Minigun fires twice as many bullets as a regular Former Captain, but with worse average damage and worse Accuracy, so a Minigun-equipped Elite Former Captain is unreliable about being a big increase in threat over a regular Former Captain. (Unless playing on Angel of Max Carnage) On Ultraviolence, an edge-of-vision shot from a regular Former Captain hits 83.79% of the time, vs the Minigun hitting only 62.5% of the time: a Chaingun's 4-28 averages to about 3.35-23.46 vs the Minigun's 8-48 averages 5-30, which is roughly a 30% increase in damage.

Meanwhile, the Laser Rifle basically always hits every shot (So its 5-35 damage is basically exactly correct), and since it does Plasma damage it's unimpressed by modest Protection values, not to mention will be a nasty surprise to a player expecting their Bullet resistance to have any relevancy. Which is to say that not expecting the Laser Rifle can get you abruptly killed. Its average base damage per se is actually pretty similar to a Minigun's, but once you take into account Protection and potentially resistances, the gap can get quite wide: just a Green Armor knocks the Minigun down to a maximum of 32 damage and makes its average more like 13~ damage taking into account that 1/3rd of its damage rolls will be 1 damage and that it will still miss around 40% of its shots, whereas the Laser Rifle will be totally unaffected by a Green Armor and so still expect to do almost exactly 5-35 damage, averaging around 22.5~.

This is also weird on the level that Plasma Rifles are a Former Commando thing. Why does the Elite Former Captain get to infringe on that turf, rather than the Laser Rifle going to the Elite Former Commando? I get that the Minigun is the only Exotic rapid-fire weapon that isn't a Plasma Rifle variation, but it's not like the game felt the need to shove an extra weapon on the Elite Former Human. So?...

The fact that Elite Former Captains are wearing a Blue Armor is, when talking the Military Base, normally a mild upside to fighting them. You're probably not relying on Plasma damage so early in a run and so don't care about the Plasma resistance, whereas getting a Blue Armor as a drop can be nice, even considering it'll be pre-shredded; looting a Blue Armor or two off Elite Former Captains in the Military Base may be what gives you the ability to leverage Blue Armor in early Deimos at all, and if you're doing Assembly stuff or getting lucky with repair opportunities you won't necessarily mind that it was shredded when you first picked it up.

From an Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 perspective, it has better odds of being more nuisance than aid, but still.

Like the other Elites, 0.9.9.8 tweaked Elite Former Captains. Firstly, it bumped their melee damage from +1 to +5, but just like with Elite Former Sergeants that's still far less dangerous than their ranged attack. Second, their Danger got knocked down from 12 to 10 and their experience payout got knocked down from 452 to 320, in turn resulting in their Danger-to-experience ratio lowering from 37.66 to 32. Like Elite Former Sergeants, I'm a bit confused by this, though much less dramatically so; in this case, I can compare them against Nightmare Arachnotrons and see how the devs might've felt that it was inappropriate for the Nightmare Arachnotron to have the same Danger/experience stats as an Elite Former Commando when a Nightmare Arachnotron is inarguably way more dangerous. I'd have raised the Danger and experience on the Nightmare Arachnotron, personally, but it's not completely baffling a line of reasoning.

Incidentally, Elite Former Captains are one of the more obvious examples of the game's strange willingness to ignore ammo stack limits in some contexts, as a Minigun-toting Elite Former Captain does in fact drop the 200 units of 10mm ammo in the form of a single stack even though that's twice the normal limit on how much can sit in a single stack. The Elite Former Sergeant also drops more than the stack limit for Shells or Power Cells, but it's easy to overlook that the 60 they drop is slightly over the normal max of 50.

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Next time, we wrap up Elites with the Elite Former Commando.

See you then.