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

HP: 105/125/145/180/225 (Base of 100, plus 5*difficulty number squared)

Protection: 5

Ranged Accuracy: +4

Melee Accuracy: +4

Ranged Damage: 5d4 Fire

Blast Radius: 2

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+12) Melee

Speed: 100%

Inventory: Nothing.

Experience: 788

Danger: 16

Minimum floor: 70/67/64

Maximum floor: Infinite

Experience per Danger: 49.25

Can open doors. Immune to Acid and Lava on the ground, and completely immune to Fire damage. Regenerates 1 HP each time it acts. 5% chance to spend a turn randomly teleporting to somewhere nearby Doomguy. Drops a Lava Element when killed outside Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666. Doesn't leave behind a corpse at all.

Ranged attack can randomly convert tiles into Lava in its blast radius.

Evasion: ??

Attack chance: 30%

In a standard run, you only fight one Lava Elemental ever, and only if you enter the last Special Level of the game: Mount Erebus/The Lava Pits. (Whichever generated in your run) Whichever version you get, the Lava Elemental doesn't exist on the floor to start, and you'll have to fight your way through the rest of the floor to get the Lava Elemental to spawn. I'm actually not sure where it initially spawns (I think it's outright random, but I'm not sure), but normally what happens is that a few seconds after its spawning is announced it will teleport to somewhere random within your sight radius.

In theory, the Lava Elemental is a pretty vicious fight, but if your run was able to even get it to spawn in the first place, it's probably pretty trivial. It's completely alone, its damage is worse than an Archvile's (Which you should already have dealt with a fair few by this point), it doesn't attack very often, and you likely completed your build a while ago and can tear through its hit points very quickly. Its ability to spawn Lava tiles by attacking is something you're probably already trivializing, since Mount Erebus and The Lava Pits already all but demand the ability to wade through Lava safely to even get to the point of spawning the Lava Elemental.

That said, if your run only barely scraped together the tools to clear out Mount Erebus/The Lava Pits, the need to additionally kill the Lava Elemental may well prove a step too far. Generally it's not worth entering the Special Level at all if you're not confident you'll be able to clear the whole thing; you have to kill the Lava Elemental to get the Lava Element, and if you don't get the Lava Element the trip is probably just negative value. After all, the experience from killing everything probably won't actually get you an additional experience Level before the run ends, the loot is unlikely to actually improve your loadout, and clearing the place is liable to be a drain on your resources.

Within an Angel of 100 or Archangel of 666 run, Lava Elementals are a bit more meaningfully interesting as enemies. The 'you're probably very prepared if you got that far' problem remains, yes, but in this context their ability to generate Lava tiles may actually destroy resources you care about (eg a Megasphere) or contribute to friendly fire incidents (eg Pinkie Demons end up running through the Lava), their regeneration is more likely to get a chance to add up to something meaningful (Because you end up fleeing from other enemies to get some breathing room, and so an injured Lava Elemental regenerates enough damage to require one more attack to kill), and their complete immunity to Fire damage gets to be more strongly relevant. (Because they don't mind being hit by all the late-game Fire damage attacks other enemies are throwing around)

They tend to be one of the less threatening examples of boss enemies that are allowed to spawn as regular enemies really deep into a run, mind, but I'd still argue their unique qualities get to be more relevant. Even their lack of a corpse when killed gets more opportunity to matter; in Mount Erebus and The Lava Pits, there's never Archviles, and even on a Nightmare! run the fact is the Lava Elemental almost always ends up dying above a Lava tile and so any hypothetical corpse would be instantly destroyed regardless. Whereas Archviles being unable to revive Lava Elementals is strongly relevant to Angel of 100 and Angel of 666 runs.

Audio-wise, Lava Elementals are another enemy using the common fireball audio for their attack, and are also another enemy lacking pain noises, presumably because they're not an actual classic Doom enemy. Curiously, they do play audio when killed, specifically the Archvile death sound. It ends up sounding rather different from actual Archviles dying, though, since actual Archviles always play their 'pain' sound clip when hit, including when killed, and their pain noise is quite loud and tends to drown out the initial portion of their death sound.

In conjunction with the Lava Elemental's heavy preference for teleporting into vision, their audio overlap with Archviles is actually unlikely to be confusing even in Angel of 100 and Archangel of 666 runs where they can appear alongside Archviles. So that's nice. Probably not intentional, mind, but still nice.

Sprite-wise, I've always found their sprite a bit odd. How is a humanoid figure of flame a lava elemental? That said, I suspect part of the thought process was to avoid them blending in with actual Lava tiles, so while I do find the fiery man choice odd, the obvious alternative probably wouldn't be an actual improvement.

I should also point out that 0.9.9.8 actually buffed the Lava Elemental some. Their melee damage used to be +8, not +12, and their base HP was 80, not 100. They're both pretty mild bumps, but I do appreciate the HP bump: Lava Elementals are surprisingly frail for being a boss enemy placed very late in a standard run, even with this HP bump, and I generally found them genuinely a bit too easy in 0.9.9.7. It especially stood out in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666, where I often could kill them after they teleported in and before they actually attacked; in 0.9.9.8, I've found they generally get in at least one attack before going down.

Anyway, I mentioned way back in the used items post that I'd deliberately excluded an item, and here it is:

Lava Element

Used item. When used, grants 9 actions of Invulnerability. This is an indestructible item that can sit in Acid and Lava tiles without being destroyed.

The Lava Element is an odd little item that is easy to shrug off as just a disappointingly mild reward for going through a whole Special Level, much like the Skulls dropped by an Agony Elemental in the City of Skulls or Abyssal Plain. Like yeah, on-demand Invulnerability has some life-saving potential, but you're getting it very shortly before the end of the game, and it doesn't last very long at all.

A cute thing to me is the sprite sheet's organization positions the Lava Element sprite as the Lava Elemental's corpse. (The sprite sheet places corpse icons directly below the enemy that generates the corpse, specifically)

And that's all I have to say about it...

... in this post.

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

Next time, we cover the boss of the City of Dis: the Spider Mastermind.

See you then.