Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Elite Former Sergeant

HP: 25

Protection: 2 (Technically)

Ranged Accuracy: N/A

Melee Accuracy: +0

Ranged Damage: Variable, see below

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+5) Melee

Speed: 100%

Inventory: Equipped Green Armor, plus either Shotgun Shells*60 or Power Cells*60

Experience: 212

Danger: 8

Minimum floor: 60/57/54

Maximum floor: 90

Experience per Danger: 26.5

Can open doors, equip Armor, and pick up and use Medpacks, Phase Devices, and Homing Phase Devices. Always comes equipped with Green Armor, effectively giving them 3 Protection and 15% Bullet and Shrapnel resistance. Leaves no corpse when killed.

When generated, randomly picks a weapon to equip from the following possibilities: Assault Shotgun, Super Shotgun, or Plasma Shotgun. Never drops the chosen weapon on death, but does drop the associated ammo type. Base damage values work out to...

Assault Shotgun: 7d3 Shrapnel

Super Shotgun: 8d4*2 Shrapnel

Plasma Shotgun: 7d3 Plasma

These all have the same physics as the player weapon versions, and thus can't miss, have an area of effect, and suffer drop-off to damage for each tile out, as well as having favorable knockback calculations. This includes that if they're carrying an Assault Shotgun they can fire 6 shots in a row before needing to start reloading, and that they can fire 10 times in a row between reloads if carrying a Plasma Shotgun. This also includes that the Assault Shotgun and Plasma Shotgun suffer less damage dropoff than the Super Shotgun.

Where Elite Former Humans are in practice only a modest bump in threat over regular Former Humans, Elite Former Sergeants are terrors. Outrageous lethality no matter what Shotgun they roll, and until they open fire you don't know what you're dealing with. 2/3rds of the time, good Protection and/or modest Shrapnel resistance will help a lot with surviving, but if they're carrying a Plasma Shotgun your only good defense is high Plasma resistance!

Incidentally, Elite Former Humans are actually weird for having a fixed weapon type. All the other Elites have this random weapon aspect. Notably, while Special Levels are normally pretty non-random, Elites rolling for their weapon type still occurs even in Special Levels, making the Military Base unpredictable in a way that can absolutely get a player killed, especially since Elites are the only enemy with this behavior and the game doesn't overtly communicate that it's a mechanic. I imagine plenty of players have gone through the Military Base a couple of times, found the Elite Former Sergeants manageable enough with anti-Shrapnel defenses, been very confused when they get splattered by an Elite Former Sergeant, and continued to be confused when a following run doesn't have that experience again.

The main reason I don't consider this aspect of Elite Former Sergeants seriously problematic to the design is because Doom Roguelike has so firmly anchored itself to corner-shooting as a core skill that every Elite Former Sergeant should be responded to with either 'corner-shoot them to death' or 'you're a melee build, get in melee and kill them there', regardless of their gear. Even so... it's not ideal.

Also, I call Elite Former Sergeants a 'terror' pretty heavily due to their damage potential being incredible no matter what. Super Shotgun is probably the meanest as far as the potential to take a stop near a corner and suddenly be hit with theoretically up to 55 damage (Y'know, more than Scouts and Technicians have in max HP), but Assault and Plasma being both spammable and retaining more of their damage at long range means that they can output a scary amount of damage if you're just trading shots at line of sight. This then gets exacerbated by the increase in bulk, where unlike regular Former Sergeants they're not trivially pasted in one turn, but seriously, they're crazy-lethal.

In Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 it's not so stark because odds are good you have a strong defensive setup by the time they're spawning at all, and/or a strong enough offensive setup to delete them in a turn, but in standard runs that roll the Military Base? Be very careful.

Like Elite Former Humans, 0.9.9.8 made some tweaks. First of all, they got the same bump to melee damage, going from +1 to +5; you still should get in their face if you can do so trivially, because their Shotgun far outstrips their melee damage, but they're not a complete joke in melee the way they were in 0.9.9.7. (Y'know. When they hit, which is still only 50% of the time...)

Second, their Danger got knocked down from 10 to 8 and their experience payout got knocked down from 360 to 212, resulting in their Danger-to-experience ratio dropping from 32 to 26.5. Which. What? Why?? They're incredibly dangerous and I would've absolutely understood increasing their Danger rating. Why did it go down?? The experience payout going down is particularly impactful to the Military Base, which doesn't use Danger and so slashing over 40% of their experience payout per-head is a much bigger reduction than in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 where the Danger-to-experience ratio is overall the important part. (Where it still lost about 27% of the payout, mind)

I'm also not sure why Elite Former Humans and Elite Former Sergeants get phased out so close to the end of an Angel of 100 run. Notably, Elite Former Captains and Elite Former Commandos never exit rotation, so whatever the logic is, it's not about Elites as an overall category. It's especially bizarre in Archangel of 666 where you'll thus get a very long period where half the Elites are still in rotation but the other half are gone. This parses okay with Elite Former Humans (Who are genuinely a bit of a joke by then), but with Elite Former Sergeants I don't get it; the Elite Former Sergeant is only clearly less dangerous than Elite Former Captains and Elite Former Commandos if you have such a strong defensive setup you're mostly reducing damage to 1 point in general, and Doom Roguelike's construction doesn't look to me to be prioritizing that particular scenario all that heavily when it comes to assessing late and ultra-late threats.

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Next time, we cover the Elite Former Captain.

See you then.