Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Nightmare Pinkie Demon

HP: 80

Protection: 3

Ranged Accuracy: N/A

Melee Accuracy: +5

Ranged Damage: N/A

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+10) Melee

Speed: 140%

Inventory: Nothing

Experience: 212

Danger: 8

Default minimum floor: 40

Experience per Danger: 26.5

Immune to Acid and Lava on the floor. Vision range is 2 less than standard. (ie 6 tiles)

Nightmare Pinkies are more design-sensible than Nightmare Imps, as they lack the 'Nightmare Imps are Bad Hell Knights, but for some reason only show up after Hell Knights' type of problem. They've still got wonkiness to them, mind, but not that wonkiness.

They unfortunately do inherit the regular Pinkie funkiness where their vision being lower than average is true but almost impossible to infer in-game. They're arguably worse than standard Pinkies about it since in a standard run you expect to see Nightmare Pinkies primarily in contexts like Phobos Lab and the Phobos Anomaly, where they're placed to not be at the edge of vision in the first place. You tend to only be able to use it in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs, honestly.

Also, I should emphasize that all Nightmare enemies are completely silent, rather bizarrely. I don't really get why they don't just use the audio of their non-Nightmare counterparts; while Doom Roguelike is using audio from classic Doom and this clearly shapes its decisions in many ways, the game is willing to reuse audio in novel contexts, such as how Shamblers use Arachnotron pain/death sounds even though they're not a Doom-based enemy at all, and Nightmare enemies using the audio of their non-Nightmare counterparts is just... obvious?

I bring it up with Nightmare Pinkies, though, because they have some of the worst wonkiness on this topic.

Like, in the Phobos Lab you get regular Pinkies mixed in with Nightmare Pinkies once you're high enough in difficulty, and so it's easy to not realize Nightmare Pinkies don't do audio at all. In Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs, Nightmare Pinkies being silent produces a vicious newbie trap with vaults; it's easy to get used to IDing vaults by sound, because with regular Pinkies and Cacodemons (And to a lesser extent Lost Souls) vaults end up really conspicuous about constantly hearing the one enemy type overlapping itself, particularly as Pinkies and especially Cacodemons don't tend to come in large groups like that outside vaults. If you're not used to keeping an eye out for the layout peculiarities of vaults, it's easy to not hear anything, open a door, and be caught off guard completely by the legion of Nightmare Pinkies pouring out to murder you.

I really don't like Nightmare enemies being silent, and don't get why it's a thing.

On a visual note, Nightmare enemies used to be very janky, as prior to 0.9.9.8 the way they arrived at their blue palette overruled the Berserk/Invulnerable color modifications. This was not only visually just clearly funky but also meant you were way less likely to overlook Nightmare enemies while in those states as compared to their regular counterparts, producing an odd component of lesser danger when Berserking. (And more indirectly to fighting while Invulnerable, in that you were more likely to eg not notice a regular Pinkie coming up behind you, and if it only got next to you about when your Invulnerable timed out, this could mean taking a good chunk of damage you could easily have avoided if you'd realized it was there sooner)

Whereas in 0.9.9.8, when you're Berserking a Nightmare Pinkie will look like...

... this, which still stands out a bit more than regular Pinkies, but not so starkly.

0.9.9.8 also made more mechanical changes. They of course benefit from Nightmare enemies all being immune to Acid and Lava on the ground, and in fact are by far the biggest beneficiary of this change. I'm... not a fan of how carelessly this was implemented: Phobos Lab using Pinkies and especially Nightmare Pinkies in the top room and just past the west doors is made reasonable by the ability to get them running through the pool of Acid in the central room. As of 0.9.9.8, entering Phobos Lab on Ultraviolence is drastically more dangerous, because if your build can't personally gun down multiple Nightmare Pinkies before they close to melee, you're going to die.

Less obnoxious is how it makes their appearance in Limbo a more meaningful threat. Instead of running through Lava and dying in it and ceasing to be a problem, you have to actually throw damage their way yourself. If Nightmare Pinkies didn't show up in Phobos Lab, I think I'd be pretty purely positive on this change, but as-is I feel that Phobos Lab shouldn't have so many of them if they're going to be immune to hostile fluids. Maybe shouldn't have any, frankly.

Lastly, 0.9.9.8 thankfully noticeably reworked their experience payout. In 0.9.9.7, Nightmare Pinkies cost slightly less Danger (7) and gave a lot less experience. (95) Notably, this meant they actually were a worse Danger-to-experience payout than regular Pinkies: regular Pinkies are 17 experience per Danger, whereas Nightmare Pinkies were 13.57~ experience for Danger in 0.9.9.7! This wasn't ruinous to the design, mind, as in a standard run they only show up in Special Levels, in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 they don't show up until you're pretty solid on leveling, and vaults don't use the Danger system at all, but it was a weird exception to 'more elite enemies give more experience per Danger', and even in their Phobos Lab/Phobos Anomaly appearances it was genuinely obnoxious how they were a huge jump in threat over regular Pinkies that gave... less than 50% more experience than Pinkies at the time.

So it's nice it got fixed.

Anyway, I'm, uh, not a fan of Nightmare Pinkies picking up even more Speed over regular Pinkies. The game's willingness to mess with enemy Speed is frankly janky in general, but with Nightmare Pinkies it's frustrating because the ways it's important are mostly janky edge-case ways for an ignorant player to get screwed by details they'd never expect. The greater durability already does plenty to make Nightmare Pinkies better able to close to melee than regular Pinkies, and their near-perfect Accuracy and much higher damage make them plenty deadly in-close. Slightly more Speed is this detail you will never ever notice except when they get two turns in a row when you were sure they couldn't, or when you descend a floor and they start charging a turn earlier than you thought they would, or otherwise you had a perfectly fine plan fail due to a factor that's not communicated and not obvious the overwhelming majority of the time. I really wish they just had the same 130% Speed as Pinkies. (Or that enemies didn't use variable Speed at all and instead had move cost modifiers and the like, but that would be a big overhaul to many enemies, not a quick tweak to one enemy)

Other than that and the previously-covered jank with 'no sound' and 'unreasonably dangerous in Phobos Lab as of 0.9.9.8', Nightmare Pinkies work fine enough overall, though.

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Next time, we cover Nightmare Cacodemons.

See you then.