Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Archvile

HP: 70

Protection: 2

Ranged Accuracy: N/A

Melee Accuracy: +2

Ranged Damage: 20d1 Fire

Blast Radius: 1

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+6) Melee

Speed: 160%

Inventory: Nothing.

Experience: 608

Danger: 14

Minimum floor: 16/13/10

Maximum floor: Infinite

Experience per Danger: 43.42~

Can open doors. 25% chance per action to spend that action on resurrecting a corpse within the Archvile's sight. When killed, leaves behind a 'bloody corpse' object, which cannot be resurrected.

Ranged attack is special: first they announce the attack, then on their next turn they spend it actually performing it, with this second action involving no accuracy check but involving a Dodge check to see if the Archvile correctly targets Doomguy's tile.

Evasion: 10% base, +10% per tile of distance, making for a maximum of 90% evasion.

Attack chance: 50%

In-game this enemy's name actually gets spelled 'Arch-vile', just as in classic Doom, but the dash doesn't change how you read the name to the point I always forget about it, and I can't be bothered to correct every instance of me writing out Archvile without the dash. So you get this explanatory note about how I'm writing it wrong but don't care enough to correct it.

Anyway, Archviles in Doom Roguelike are arguably the most unique generic enemy in the game, with a special attack behavior that is only seen on them and clear variations on them, a similarly-unique resurrection ability, a unique Dodge scaling that puts a ton of emphasis on distance, a unique corpse drop behavior... and in 0.9.9.7, they had the unique distinction that they and their variants feared Acid and Lava but weren't actually susceptible to it, though as of 0.9.9.8 their fear is now fully justified.

Archviles also break from the usual rule that an enemy is compelled to melee the player if the player is in reach. Specifically, if they start their ranged attack and then Doomguy moves adjacent to them, they're obligated to perform the second stage regardless. This is true of every enemy that uses the same ranged attack behavior as regular Archviles, but is otherwise unique.

Said unique ranged attack behavior is all kinds of weird. Archviles require vision of Doomguy to initiate the first stage, but the second stage will occur even if Doomguy breaks line of sight, including even if he gets behind a wall or the like. This is particularly counterintuitive if you've actually played classic Doom, as breaking line of sight is how you avoid being fried by their channeled attack in classic Doom, but even just within Doom Roguelike it's almost unique: the follow-up routine used by Mancubi (And Nightmare Arachnotrons) is the only case of this occurring outside Archviles and their variants. And Mancubi and Nightmare Arachnotrons fire projectiles stopped by walls, so Archviles-and-variants are still unique for being able to hit Doomguy through a wall.

Particularly counterintuitive is that, as I laid out in the Mancubus post, knockback can interrupt the process, but only if the Archvile is knocked out of line of sight and gets a turn before Doomguy re-enters line of sight. Even though breaking line of sight doesn't break the channel on its own, and knockback doesn't break the channel on its own. Wonky stuff, and I suspect there are players who have dumped hundreds of hours into the game without figuring out this particular wrinkle. For one thing, Archviles are absurdly fast, where Doomguy has to be operating extremely quickly for 'knock an Archvile out of sight' to not immediately result in 'Archvile gets a turn and walks right back into sight'. Slower Doomguy builds are never going to have the opportunity to walk forward before the Archvile gets a turn.

Their high Speed also means that Dodging an Archvile isn't very helpful unless Doomguy is very fast or using teleportation, since having the explosion occur right next to Doomguy still does full damage. Doomguy needs to get two turns between the Archvile starting channeling and completing channeling for it to help, when an Archvile gets to its next turn in less than 2/3rds of a second. Said full damage is also unique for being so reliable: only Archviles and their variants do perfectly rigid damage, in the form of technically rolling a bunch of dice that have one side.

I should also note that the 25% chance of resurrection is sort of misleading. Firstly, they skip that roll if they're channeling their ranged attack. Second, they also skip that roll if they're in melee with Doomguy, with their only valid decision being 'attack Doomguy' at that point. Third and most important, an Archvile that's unable/unwilling to move will always resurrect a corpse if the option exists and attacking doesn't get priority. (Such as because the Archvile can't see Doomguy)

This is honestly the biggest reason why it's a relief 0.9.9.8 made Archviles fully susceptible to Acid and Lava: in 0.9.9.7, an Archvile trapped in a sea of Acid or Lava would become a fountain of resurrections, instantly undoing all your hard work on killing Barons of Hell and the like 100% reliably if the Archvile couldn't see Doomguy. (And still doing it very regularly if it could see Doomguy, thanks to their middling attack chance) Mind, Archviles trapped amid Acid and Lava still do that in 0.9.9.8, but now they're on the clock, dying after some number of actions, rather than being an infinite fountain of resurrections. (Well, unless they're trapped on a safe tile surrounded by Acid or Lava, but this is a difficult scenario to contrive)

On that note, I should point out that a big part of why the Dread VMR is so nasty is Archviles: Mancubi and Revenants are plenty nasty on their own, but since all three are late-game threats prone to showing up together, an encounter with a Mancubus or Revenant is often exacerbated by an Archvile being nearby, ready to zap them back into existence the second you down them. As a comparison point, Barons of Hell aren't so fundamentally shaped by Archvile presence; Barons of Hell are actually pretty unpleasant when paired with Archviles, but they start showing up well before Archviles can, so 'Baron of Hell backed by Archvile' is not kind of the default assumption. Whereas with Mancubi and Revenants, they can show up before Archviles (By three floors, for Revenants, and one floor for Mancubi), and even once Archviles are in rotation they can spawn in without an Archvile being on the floor... but you often basically should play as if an Archvile is in the area, simply because if you're wrong it probably doesn't hurt, whereas if you play as if no Archviles are about, you're going to burn lots of ammo, get flanked unexpectedly, etc, at the times that an Archvile is in fact about.

For one thing, Archviles have a regular cry that is in fact unique to them, but it's pretty quiet and easy to have drowned out by just the game's music. Even though their pain and death sounds are very loud and distinct, it's easy to have multiple Archviles lurking in the shadows and have no idea this is so, simply not noticing their oddly-quiet audio. I imagine this is even easier to fall into for players not familiar with classic Doom...

On a different note, the wiki has long claimed that Archviles have the 'avoids melee' flag, but as far as I'm aware this has either never been true or never mattered. Archviles behave just like any other ranged enemy in terms of advancing toward the player once they're 'locked on' anytime they don't instead spend the turn on attacking (or resurrecting), and similarly once they're in melee they must melee attack. (Aside the 'completing the channel on their ranged attack has priority' partial exception) Including that this overrules spending their turn on resurrecting!

I should also point out that while Archviles are a pretty good enemy to get point-blank with, it's easy to overestimate how advantageous it is. After all, their ranged attack eats two turns, whereas their melee attack eats just one: on Angel of Max Carnage, being swiped in melee twice is 18 damage vs their ranged attack doing 20 damage in that time! This is especially important to keep in mind when resistances start coming into play: for example, a Marine wearing a plain Blue Armor will take 5-7 damage twice from the melee hit (So 10-14) whereas the Fire damage ranged attack will ram into their innate energy resistance, lose 4 points right there, then 2 points from the Blue Armor, and end up at 14 damage; that's a pretty unreliable reduction in damage taken, making charging into melee a dubious prospect, and more extreme resistance skewing (eg Fireproof Red Armor) can easily result in closing to melee increasing the Archvile's damage output.

The main qualifier to all that is that their mediocre +2 Accuracy means they miss a little over 25% of the time in melee, whereas their ranged attack can't miss. But the point remains: closing to melee isn't quite as amazing as a superficial number-crunching would suggest, and can backfire if Doomguy has heavy Fire resistance.

On the plus side, Archviles have the unusual distinction of leaving behind a corpse, but not being possible to resurrect. You don't have to worry about Archvile groups resurrecting each other. Funny thing is...

... the spritesheet actually has a unique graphic for an Archvile corpse, but they instead use the 'bloody corpse' graphic, which doesn't look like anything in particular.

Also, I should emphasize that Archviles are attached to a lot of monster group formations, and so skew much more heavily toward being around buddies they can resurrect than one might expect from the general enemy generation routine. From experience, I can say that 'lone' Archviles really are the minority in most runs.

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Next time, we start on the ultra-lategame enemies you simply can't see in a standard run outside some Special Levels on higher difficulties, starting with the Nightmare Imp.

See you then.