Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Pinkie Demon

HP: 25

Protection: 2

Ranged Accuracy: N/A

Melee Accuracy: +3

Ranged Damage: N/A

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+5) Melee

Speed: 130%

Inventory: Nothing.

Experience: 68

Danger: 4

Minimum floor: 4/1/1

Maximum floor: 20

Experience per Danger: 17

Attack Chance: N/A

Will run through Acid and Lava in pursuit of the player, in spite of having no protection from either. Vision range is 2 less than standard. (ie 6 tiles)

An oddity unique to Pinkie Demons and their Nightmare cousins is that when groups of them generate, often some portion of the group ends up sitting in place, never moving until either Doomguy enters view or they take damage. (I say 'groups of them', but while I can't recall seeing a lone Pinkie lock up, I'm not completely certain it hasn't happened) 0.9.9.8 claims to have fixed this bug, but it still happens. It does seem to generally be fewer Pinkies at a time (eg 2 out of a group of 5 locking up, rather than 4 or all 5 locking up), but the patch notes saying they did away with it entirely? Sadly incorrect.

This comes up most consistently with Vaults, but Vaults are far from the only way for this to happen. This bug is also by far the most blatant example of 'enemies can be provoked into chasing Doomguy by seeing another enemy get hurt': if you have two or more such Pinkies sitting around, and manage to blind-fire hurt one but not the other, and you have Intuition 2 or a Tracking Map, you'll get to see all the Pinkies in that spot suddenly pathing toward Doomguy.

The fact that Pinkies have a reduced vision range is true and also basically impossible to guess in regular play, thanks to the fact that enemies at the edge of vision often wander around randomly without noticing Doomguy anyway. If you do know about it, it makes early Pinkies so much easier to cope with, as you can just not provoke them and try to lose sight of them and they'll probably not wander correctly to chase you. I really wish the game did something to communicate this: multiple enemies have non-standard line of sight, and it's basically impossible to organically figure this out with the enemies whose sight range is reduced. (The ones who see farther than usual get to stand out through 'they shot at me from beyond sight!') And knowing vs not knowing makes an enormous difference with Pinkies: I had many runs before I was made aware of this fact where I just started shooting the second a Pinkie was in sight on the logic that it could lock onto me and if it did I couldn't really afford to let it get a free turn of approach, and this led to a lot of deaths where it felt completely unfair/unavoidable because I had no way of knowing that actually a Pinkie at the edge of vision can't decide to charge you unless you provoke it. Knowing this fact has made my Ultraviolence Angel of 100 runs virtually never die on the first floor!

Also, while we're on a notably fast enemy, I should cover another non-obvious mechanic with unintuitive outcomes: an initial delay for enemies being able to act on Doomguy entering a new floor, as well as when a given enemy is revived or spawned.

When Doomguy descends to the next floor, he inherits his Energy from the prior floor, minus the Energy he spent on the stairs. (As far as I'm aware, this always spends exactly 1000 Energy: you might expect Hellrunner and other modifiers to movement speed to affect it, but I'm confident at least those don't) All the enemies on the floor he arrives on are generated with 1000 Energy. As such, when Doomguy first descends a floor, he has some breathing room, where even enemies that are literally in view when he arrives won't act for a bit, because they need to pile up a few thousand Energy to get a turn.

By default, those numbers result in 4 turns of grace period... but 'by default', I mean not only 'assuming no modifiers on Doomguy', but also 'and ignoring that only a few enemies actually have 100% Speed'. Since enemy speed is simply a direct modifier to Energy generation, faster enemies start acting sooner! I'm talking about this with Pinkies because they're one of the more glaring and early examples of this mechanic having funky implications: since a Pinkie generates 130 Energy every 0.1 seconds, a Pinkie will get its first turn at 3.1 seconds in, not 4 seconds in. As other early enemies are mostly slow, the contrast is often even larger: a Former Sergeant's miserable 70% Speed results in it taking them 5.8 seconds to become active. That's almost twice as long as a Pinkie!

Note that Lost Souls have to get a turn before they can start charging. As such, even if you shoot them, they'll take 4 seconds to become active. That wrinkle aside, this generally straightforwardly results in faster enemies being a higher priority if you descend into view of multiple enemies, because a Former Sergeant is likely to take longer to be a danger to Doomguy than a Pinkie even if there's a few tiles between Doomguy and the Pinkie Demon.

On that note, the Pinkie/Lost Soul comparison is kind of funky and not entirely intuitive. It's easy to look at their respective statlines and come away with the conclusion that Lost Souls are the faster and deadlier but frailer counterpart, and that's true in various senses, but in other senses it's really not true. In particular, even though Pinkies only do 1 more damage per attack than Lost Souls, in practice Pinkies generally have much better DPS when talking 'once they've closed to melee', because the Pinkie will be attacking 30% more often. (Albeit a Lost Soul has less than a 2% chance to miss whereas a Pinkie has just under a 28% chance to miss, so RNG has decent odds of ablating the Pinkie's Speed-based advantage at damage output) This contrast gets especially stark when the Lost Soul's superior ability to close the distance is ablated in its relevancy, such as by opening a Vault that's filled with Pinkies. (You'll often have one immediately enter the door's tile)

I should also point out that Pinkies are unique (As of 0.9.9.8, anyway) for being an enemy that takes full damage from Acid and Lava tiles yet isn't terrified of walking into such tiles. I think Pinkies have some degree of 'walking through Acid or Lava is bad' logic to their general wandering behavior, but if so it's not a very strong preference, and when they're pursuing Doomguy they make zero effort to identify safe paths. Even if they could reach Doomguy just as fast by sidestepping a single tile of Lava directly between them and Doomguy, they will walk right into that tile.

This is one of the less obvious but honestly bigger reasons why it makes design sense that Pinkies eventually completely stop spawning: the further a run gets, the more common it becomes for a floor to have large swathes of the map covered in hostile fluids. In the first place, Pinkies tend to be basically free experience for a build that's gotten its Mastery online, but this is so much more true when Pinkies are managing to spawn into a floor that has a massive Lava river bisecting it, as Pinkies are really prone to getting themselves killed without ever being seen by Doomguy if they spawn even vaguely near a large mass of hostile fluids. In particular, Hell-and-onward is fond of floor designs where the map is made of a few large rooms connected by thin walking paths that are surrounded by Lava: when Pinkies spawn into such a floor and outside the rooms, they basically always die almost immediately. So it's good there's a pretty limited window for this to potentially happen in.

Overall, Pinkies work pretty well as a unique threat to watch out for in the early game thanks to their durability and speed being very high. (Especially on lower difficulties: on an Ultraviolence standard run, floor 2 is the only floor where you can encounter Pinkies and not Hell Knights, and Hell Knights are tougher and harder-hitting and have a ranged attack and more accurate, so Pinkies don't stand out so much at that point) I do wish the vision thing was actually communicated, and it's unfortunate the 'Pinkies locking up' bug still hasn't been truly fixed, but otherwise their design is very solid.

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Next time, we return to ranged threats with the Former Captain.

See you then.