Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Agony Elemental (0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8)

HP: 155/170/195/230/275 (Base 150, plus 5*difficulty number squared)

Protection: 4

Ranged Accuracy: N/A

Melee Accuracy: +2

Ranged Damage: N/A

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+6) Melee

Speed: 100%

Inventory: Nothing.

Experience: 1220

Danger: 20

Minimum floor: 80/77/74

Maximum floor: Infinite

Experience per Danger: 61

Immune to Acid and Lava on the floor. 25% chance to spend its turn generating 2 Pain Elementals or 3 Lost Souls if it can see Doomguy. The first time it's injured while unable to see Doomguy, reactively 'attacks' with this spawning routine. When killed, spawns 2 Pain Elementals and 6 Lost Souls. Outside Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666, also drops three random Skull items on death.

The Agony Elemental is, of course, a Pain Elemental, Boss Edition.

In a standard run, you will encounter exactly one ever, in either the City of Skulls or the Abyssal Plains. Like the Shambler(s), it actually doesn't start out existent, though each map works rather differently on this point. With the City of Skulls, the map starts out functionally empty of enemies, as there's a bunch of Lost Souls and Pain Elementals but they're all locked up inside rooms with no entrances: you go to the center of the map and pull a lever, and all the walls go away, freeing the enemies. (As well as making it possible to get at the ammo and whatnot also contained in those rooms) Once you've cleared every enemy on the map, instead of getting the 'you feel relatively safe now' message, you'll 'hear a howl of agony!' marking the Agony Elemental spawning in, as well as a few Lost Souls and Pain Elementals spawning across the map pretty randomly.

The Abyssal Plains has no lever. Instead, there's a large structure directly to your east on entry, and once you get deep enough into the structure walls will pop in and seal off the exits, while an Agony Elemental, multiple Pain Elementals, and multiple Lost Souls all spawn into the inside of the structure. The walls sealing the area off will despawn after a while; this actually is specifically time-based, which always catches me off guard if I haven't touched the game in a while. I always expect it to be based on clearing out the room, but no, even if you manage that very quickly you'll still have to wait for the walls to time out.

Note that the Abyssal Plains has much greater monster variety than the City of Skulls, having Hell Knights, Cacodemons, Arachnotrons... the exact composition depends on difficulty, but the point is there's ranged attackers and enemies who can open doors. This latter point is significant because it's possible to end up with an enemy opening a door into the Agony Elemental Boss Fight Arena, potentially in turn resulting in enemies wandering in and complicating the actual boss fight ambush. As the arena is wider than Doomguy's maximum sight radius, you can end up looking in and not seeing anything before the walls pop up and trap you, and be unpleasantly surprised by a Hell Knight or something helping the Agony Elemental.

The Abyssal Plains looks to me to be intended to be the harder version of that Special Level pair, but I find it's... inconsistent about this in practice. For a straight Shotgun-focused build, the City of Skulls does tend to be more straightforward, and for a Blademaster Scout an all-melee environment is almost impossible to not be trivial, but the Abyssal Plains provides Supercharges, Large Health Globes, Large Health Packs, and it gives a much better experience payout since it's not near-exclusively Lost Souls and Pain Elementals. Pistol-focused runs and rapid-fire runs that can't main Plasma Rifles also generally hate fighting lots of Lost Souls, finding it comparatively trivial to gun down the other enemies and then maybe use a Shotgun when confronting the Agony Elemental in the structure, and for a Vampyre Marine it tends to be easier to safely fight through stuff like Hell Knights than a wall of Lost Souls. (A Malicious Blades Technician is in part difficulty-dependent, since the ratio of Plasma threats is different with different difficulties) The Abyssal Plains also notably provides a Shell Box, Rocket Box, and 10mm Ammo Chain, which can all be very nice in a way the modest amount of regular ammo scattered about the City of Skulls can't necessarily match.

The initial portion of the Abyssal Plains can admittedly be pretty rough since you start out surrounded by strong enemies, but generally if I don't die in that part, I find the Abyssal Plains an easier and more rewarding Special Level than the City of Skulls, which I doubt is the intent here.

Anyway, the Agony Elemental itself is pretty straightforward overall. It being a Pain Elemental, Boss Edition really does mostly work out to the same sorts of implications as a Pain Elemental, just more so. The most significant difference in practice is that its high Protection and high HP (Particularly on higher difficulties) mean that you ideally are able to bring to bear a non-Shotgun weapon on it anytime you have a clear firing path. You should still default to Shotgun usage when it's spawned stuff so you can clear out its spawns quickly and efficiently, but generally a Shotgun will be very slow to kill it, having to overcome effectively 8 Protection.

Amusingly, this 'basically a Pain Elemental' point extends to the Agony Elemental's melee combat performance being just as mediocre as a Pain Elemental's. Note that standing in melee with it won't stop it from spawning stuff, though, so this isn't really an argument for getting into its face. It just means you shouldn't treat it as a deadly melee threat, even though it's a midgame boss.

Also like a Pain Elemental, it doesn't leave a corpse. So no need to worry about it reviving, if you were worried about that. In a standard run, it dropping three Skull items effectively takes over that role, but in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 it just doesn't drop anything.

On the topic of the Skulls, I should point out that in a standard run it's pretty normal to have the Agony Elemental dropping them be the only time you see any in the run. It feels like the game intends for them to be the primary reward for doing the City of Skulls or Abyssal Plain, which would be unfortunate if so given they're all pretty underwhelming. I actually will semi-often skip the City of Skulls if I roll it; the Skulls items aren't worth it, the experience payout is bad, and you tend to lose ammo on the attempt even if you're a strong and ammo-efficient Shotgun build. It's mostly melee runs and Ammochain Marines where I treat it as a freebie worth going into by default. This is part of why the 'Abyssal Plains appears to be intended to be the hard version' feels so wonky to me: it's just so much more desirable!

Anyway, the Agony Elemental itself is, as far as I'm aware, one of Doom Roguelike's only Fully Original bits of content. This is possibly why it's another fully silent enemy; I don't really get why it doesn't just use Pain Elemental sounds, but I'll admit it's not actually a big deal. In a standard run, it being silent is only mildly important in the City of Skulls for making it so you might not realize you shot it in the darkness, and in general it's not an enemy where knowing it's present before it comes into view is super-important. It being silent bothers me in terms of 'feel' or consistency, but it's one of the only silent enemies where I don't feel it's important a flaw that it lacks audio.

As an aside, I quite like the Agony Elemental's sprite. Strictly speaking, it's just a recolor of the Pain Elemental's sprite, but its color palette is strikingly different, so much so I always want to read it as a 'new sprite' rather than as an existing sprite with new colors. (For one thing, the fangs in the lower jaw stand out to me more than with the Pain Elemental sprite) It's a nice little sprite and, importantly, is easily told apart from regular Pain Elementals.

Also, I suspect from experience that its 'roll for spawn' routine is actually two separate 25% chances, one for Lost Souls and one for Pain Elementals, as it seems to spawn units noticeably more than 25% of the time, but I'm not certain. If they're separate rolls, that would work out to around a 44% chance per turn to spawn something, which lines up pretty well with my experiences.

In Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666, the Agony Elemental tends to be kind of forgettable. It takes so long to show up, and a proper build spikes its power so much as it completes, that Agony Elementals tend to be uninteresting speedbumps even for builds relying solely on Bullet damage by the time you're seeing them. I kind of wish they showed up closer to floor 40, so they could basically sub in over Pain Elementals and be a more interesting and notable encounter in general.

This is kind of a recurring theme with bosses in the context of Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, unfortunately. I'd argue only one of the bosses is actually substantially striking to be used as effectively a regular enemy, thanks to how the modes heavily prefer to place bosses so late. They do need to be late, not only for the engine reason of ensuring they can't spawn as regular enemies in a standard run but also because the lack of Special Levels mean Doomguy gains power more slowly per floor than a direct comparison to standard runs would suggest (That is, Doomguy standing in floor 12 of a standard run generally has a Level advantage over Doomguy standing in floor 12 of an Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 run, as well as having more and better gear), but I feel like Doom Roguelike was overall a bit too cautious on this topic. It's too bad; I tend to like it when games experiment with demoting Interesting Bosses to regular enemies once you're far enough, but this current state is a bit bleh.

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Next time, we wrap up Deimos bosses with the Tower of Babel's resident Cyberdemon.

See you then.