Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: The Angel of Death (0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8)

HP: 260/290/340/410/500 (250 base, plus 10*difficulty number squared)

Protection: 10

Ranged Accuracy: N/A

Melee Accuracy: +8

Ranged Damage: N/A

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+15) Melee

Speed: 150%

Inventory: Nothing.

Experience: 1000

Danger: N/A

Minimum floor: N/A

Maximum floor: N/A

Experience per Danger: N/A

Immune to Acid and Lava on the floor. Hunts Doomguy precisely.

Only ever fought in the Unholy Cathedral, where ranged weaponry is disabled.

The Angel of Death doesn't really provide much room to talk strategy or the like. Basically, either you've built as a melee fighter and will handily rip through all the enemies in the Unholy Cathedral, including the Angel of Death, it's just a question of whether you use up any Medpacks in the process, or you're not a melee fighter and have absolutely no business entering the Unholy Cathedral at all.

On paper, it's really, really powerful, one of the most powerful enemies in the game. 10 Protection is absurd, it has hundreds of HP, it'll get three turns for every two turns you get, and it hits for more than a third your base HP per slash with essentially no miss chance...

... but a Proper Melee Build is (Ignoring Malicious Blades being weird for the moment) expecting to be Berserk for the entire fight, and wielding a Chainsaw (or something better!), while having Brute 3. (Or potentially higher than Brute 3) Berserk's innate resistance boost knocks the Angel of Death's melee damage to 40% before Protection (ie a high roll would do 7.2 damage before rounding and Protection; if you have 4 Protection, then you're taking at most 3 damage per hit, which would take more than 16 slashes to kill Doomguy from 50 HP), Berserk's Energy generation boost means the Angel of Death only gets 1 turn per Doomguy turn, and Berserk's damage boost on top of Brute 3 on top of a Chainsaw's base damage means an average hit would do 42 damage before Protection. (So 10 Protection is less than 25% of Doomguy's damage shaved off)

Even on Nightmare! where the Angel of Death has 500 HP, that means Doomguy expects to kill the Angel of Death in around 12 hits while the Angel of Death expects to need more than 16 hits. And these are conservative figures; Doomguy can have his Armor or Ironman ranks providing Melee resistance or have more than 4 Protection, can have Ironman and/or Badass ranks to have yet more HP, can have improved his Chainsaw or potentially replaced it with a Unique that's more deadly than the Chainsaw, can have ranks in Finesse to dish out damage even faster...

... any and all of which will tilt things even further in Doomguy's favor. All with no tactics to employ in the fight itself; just click on the Angel of Death until it dies, maybe eat a Medpack if for some reason you run a bit low on HP during the mayhem. So seriously, not a lot to say here.

Ranged-wise, since the Unholy Cathedral disables all ranged weapons at all times... you'll die if this is your plan. Don't enter the Cathedral. Seriously.

On a more interesting note, the Angel of Death is our second enemy who can't actually show up in an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run. Which is very understandable; the Angel of Death is built too heavily around the Unholy Cathedral forcing a melee brawl. If it could show up randomly late in an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run, it would be basically a random chance of a game over for some builds (Shot-spam builds with low-to-modest damage per hit would struggle, for example) while other builds would still find it a boring speedbump. So even though it's more unique than, say, the Arena Master, I can't be too bothered by it not being allowed to appear outside the Unholy Cathedral; it would need to be designed differently for that to be both interesting and not horribly problematic for the design.

As an aside:

This is the Angel of Death's corpse graphic: I'm mostly sure it doesn't actually see use in-game? Which is too bad. The purple blood is pretty striking and all.

Anyway, 0.9.9.8 made a couple of tweaks to the Angel of Death. The first tweak is graphical; the bigger sprite on the right is new to 0.9.9.8, bringing the Angel of Death more in line with eg the Cyberdemon in size. The 0.9.9.7 sprite was already on the large side, mind, but not as large. I do like this new sprite; the Angel of Death's mouth in particular is more clearly interesting, where I can see how the old sprite was probably trying to depict the same structure, but it's just not as readable.

The second tweak is to audio. The Angel of Death uses the same cry as a Baron of Hell in both versions, but in 0.9.9.7 it spammed the sound constantly, literally every single turn. In 0.9.9.8, it uses it at something more like the normal rate, which is appreciated. The sound-spam was pretty grating!

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Next time, we cover Hell's second boss, the Lava Elemental.

See you then.