Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Bruiser Brother (0.9.9.7/0.9.9.8)

HP: 63/72/87/108/135 (60 base, adds 3*difficulty number squared)

Protection: 2

Ranged Accuracy: +5

Melee Accuracy: +5

Ranged Damage: 4d5 Acid

Blast radius: 1

Melee Damage: 1d3 (+8) Melee

Speed: 100%

Inventory: Nothing.

Experience: 608

Danger: 14

Minimum floor: 50/47/44

Maximum floor: Infinite

Experience per Danger: 43.42~

Can open doors, equip Armor, and pick up and use Medpacks, Phase Devices, and Homing Phase Devices. Immune to Acid and Lava on the ground. Base Acid resistance is 50%.

Hunts Doomguy precisely.

Evasion: Base of 50%, +3% per tile of distance, making for a maximum of 74% (This is a guess, where I assume they use Baron numbers)

Attack chance: 40%

The Bruiser Brother is of course hearkening back to classic Doom having a pair of Barons as a major boss fight, which the devs liked to call the 'bruiser brothers', like 'the Mario brothers'. By extension, Doom Roguelike's Bruiser Brothers are a pretty close variation on its regular Barons of Hell, up to and including that they actually have Baron audio. (Making it all the odder that the Arena Master doesn't use Archvile audio)

The primary deviations are their HP and the less obvious point of their AI. The HP point is kind of interesting in that on I'm Too Young to Die, they're actually only barely tougher than a regular Baron, having only 3 more HP, but higher difficulties rapidly climb to a more significant difference, all the way up to Nightmare! bringing them to over double a Baron's HP. So down on I'm Too Young to Die, they're genuinely basically just a couple of early Barons, whereas on higher difficulties where you've probably already fought Barons (If nothing else, they show up in the Chained Court on higher difficulties), they instead distinguish themselves by being a lot tougher than regular Barons. The whole thing is a neat little balancing of several different design concerns.

The AI point is that Bruiser Brothers are our first example of a semi-common behavioral tag, normally referred to as 'hunts player precisely'. The name is pretty accurate: enemies with this tag simply always know exactly where Doomguy is, and are obsessively focused on pursuing him from anywhere on the map. The tag itself has several not-immediately-obvious implications, though.

First and least surprising is that such enemies will never wander disinterestedly nearby Doomguy, ignoring him. If a Bruiser Brother is in view of Doomguy, attacking it won't provoke it into becoming interested in Doomguy, because it's already interested. That simplifies things a bit. By extension, enemies with this tag are actually much easier to manipulate into favorable-to-you scenarios, because ducking out of sight doesn't risk them forgetting Doomguy exists and going back to random wandering.

Second, and pretty funny, is that all that stuff I've got up there about picking up and using gear? It's functionally a lie. Bruiser Brothers have the correct tags for such behavior, but they're so obsessed with chasing down Doomguy that normally they simply ignore items on the ground. They won't intentionally path over them, and normally even if they happen to end up standing in a tile with a relevant item, they won't take a moment to pick it up. I suspect it's possible for conditions to push them into doing so, like maybe they'd bother to pick up an item they were standing on if they were trapped by terrain/other enemies completely surrounding them, but I've personally never seen any of the 'hunts player precisely' enemies pick up or use an item, nor be mysteriously super-tough as if they're wearing a relevant Armor. This has the funny effect that Bruiser Brothers are actually kind of nice to start seeing as regular enemies in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 -they can't steal stuff from you!

Third, it should be noted that enemies with this tag are not very good at long-term navigation. Doom Roguelike endeavors to minimize the relevancy of this through several mechanisms, such as preferring to place such enemies into fairly open terrain, and having such enemies generally immune to fluids so they can respond to a river of Acid or Lava by just wading right through it instead of getting stuck against it, but it can come up pretty readily in Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 regardless. For example, one floor design you don't start seeing until you're in Hell has 2-3 large rooms that are surrounded by Lava and thin walking paths through the Lava, and Bruiser Brothers spawning inside those large rooms often end up huddling against the wall, wishing they could just walk right through it to get at Doomguy. Even though they totally could just go through the door in the opposite direction, or sometimes even by just traveling a few tiles north or south.

Fourth, a minor detail I find interesting is that this obsession actually overrules the AI's usual preference to move. Normally, enemies almost never choose to skip a turn; aside the bugginess with Pinkies and Nightmare Pinkies, enemies obsessively change tile every turn, and if they don't move on a given turn it's because they're attacking, opening a door, picking up or using an item, or using a special action. (eg Pain Elementals spawning Lost Souls, Archviles reviving allies, etc) Normally the only way for an enemy to skip its turn entirely where it can legally move is when it's an enemy that fears Acid and Lava and is surrounded by such, but 'hunts player precisely' enemies are so obsessed with running down Doomguy that if they're up against a wall and can't figure out the long-term path to Doomguy, they won't pace in front of the wall, they'll just skip their turn until things change so they now want to go to a different tile in pursuit of Doomguy.

Fifth, I should point out that 'hunts player precisely' is normally tagged by enemy type (Specifically, on some bosses), but there is a level feeling where a 'weird alarm' is heard by Doomguy, which will have about half the regular enemies tagged with this AI toggle. This is meant to be menacing, but, uh, it tends to be a good thing, making it easier to lure such enemies to preferred corner-shooting positions, not to mention it will prevent any affected enemies from scooping items up. This level feeling can happen on basically any randomly-generated floor, but in my experience you most often see it via the 'arena' floor type, which is a rare floor type premised under it, where Doomguy always starts in the center of the map, there's 4 regular exit stairs (One in each corner), and the point is enemies are supposed to come charging in from every direction. The 'weird alarm' works a little better in that context, but I still tend to find those floors easier than average.

Anyway, backing up a bit, in a standard run you will only ever see Bruiser Brothers once, as a pair in the Phobos Anomaly. They're kind of meant to be the stars of the show, so to speak, and on lower difficulties for a new player, they probably are the toughest part of the map, but once you're an experienced player running through higher difficulties, it's usually the first part of the map that's the problem.

So okay, the Phobos Anomaly starts Doomguy on the west side of the map, specifically in a small room, standing atop a Red Armor, with a couple Large Medpacks and some ammo and Large Health Globes along the walls. Through the door to the east is a larger corridor room, which if you're on I'm Too Young to Die is just... an empty corridor, building drama I guess on your way to confront the Bruiser Brothers.

On every other difficulty, though, you'll be hearing enemies right away, and halfway down the corridor the walls blow away and reveal more enemies. The timing of this is such that the newly-revealed enemies will get a chance to attack Doomguy immediately if they have ranged attacks, so that's nasty. You're also surrounded, so that's also nasty. The exact composition depends on difficulty, but broadly you're looking at Lost Souls, Pinkie Demons, Imps, and Cacodemons... upgrading to Nightmare versions on Nightmare! difficulty, by the way. (This is one of several reasons why I haven't actually played on Nightmare! very much: this ambush is already one of the toughest spots in a run, and Nightmare! makes it so much worse) If you're a melee build, you usually just shrug and kill everything, no big. For ranged builds, though, it's typically best to Run back to the room you started in, preferably zig-zagging, and then corner-shoot from there, strategically using the Large Health Globes as necessary. Keep in mind that usually there'll be at least a couple of enemies all the way in the eastern side of the ambush room that never join the fight; don't assume you cleared the room just because there's nothing in sight of the door. On rare occasions, an Imp will end up wandering east to the door and opening it, potentially complicating the second half of the map, but I've had this happen only a tiny handful of times. (Like, maybe three times, across hundreds of runs)

Speaking of that second half, that's where the Bruiser Brothers are. Specifically, you go through the far east door of the ambush room, pass over a river of water, and there's a wall blocking your way further east. Much of it is bloodstained, and when you get close enough, the bloodstained sections disappear. The Bruiser Brothers are actually contained in a pair of walled-in cells even further east, which each lose a wall segment simultaneously to the wall collapsing, freeing them to come pursuing you, so the Bruiser Brothers don't actually ambush you, and in fact will take a few turns to come into view.

If the corner-shooting bug didn't exist, I imagine this would be a tense and difficult affair. It does exist, though, and in conjunction with the Bruiser Brothers hunting Doomguy precisely, it's really easy to super-reliably corner-shoot them with a Combat Shotgun (Hopefully a Tactical Shotgun, but you can't count on the relevant Mod Packs), even if you're not investing into Shotguns and are up on Ultraviolence. Every once in a while you'll roll low enough consistently enough one actually gets in range so you have to do something other than blind-fire your Shotgun until everything's dead, but not often. It's pretty underwhelming compared to the prior ambush.

Up on Nightmare! you should probably actually retreat toward the ambush room (Assuming you properly cleaned up the corpses in there...) and corner-shoot from there, hopefully killing the Bruiser Brothers on the river so they have no chance of reviving. (I'm kind of curious if that's why this river exists, actually; I honestly didn't really register the river existing until the first time I got past the ambush on a Nightmare! run)

Regardless, once that's done, you... normally ought to actually go around the exit, as several Rocket piles are hidden behind the room containing the exit, and you'll want those to assure your ability to bash your way into The Wall/Containment Area. If you've got plenty of Rockets or are doing an Angel Challenge that can't use Rockets, go ahead and skip this step, but for most runs it should be the default.

Then it's time to enter the portal and move on to Deimos!

The portal itself is oddly weird. It's the only time in Doom Roguelike in which the exit to a floor is not a staircase, with it instead behaving more like a regular teleporter: the instant Doomguy walks into its tile, he's whisked away to the first floor of Deimos. A particularly obnoxious implication to this prior to 0.9.9.8 was that you couldn't clear the Phobos Anomaly and then save, as Doom Roguelike only let you save when standing on a staircase prior to 0.9.9.8. I'm glad 0.9.9.8 incidentally did away with that bit of jank.

Even aside that, it means it's possible to accidentally walk into it, such as if you attempt to order Doomguy to travel somewhere past the portal's room and the auto-pathing gives up on the idea of pathing around it. (Notably, portal tiles are not something the auto-pathing logic considers bad to enter: it's easy, when near regular portals, to walk into them on accident because you click somewhere and the auto-pathing logic decides the quickest route is right through a portal's tile)

I've also long wondered if the portal slightly affects your arrival time to floor 9. That is, descending a staircase takes 1 second (Well, spends 1000 Energy, but work with me), which factors into how long it takes for enemies to get their first turn. If entering the portal has a different time cost, that would make for a different delay to enemy turns in floor 9. Notably, entering a regular Teleporter costs 1 second plus the amount of time it took to enter its tile; if this portal uses the same logic, enemies would act sooner in floor 9!... but I've never figured out if this is so, so it's just theorizing.

Also, while we're on the topic of the Phobos Anomaly, I should point out that it uses a specific tune every time, and this actually does apply to Angel of 100/Archangel of 666 runs, resulting in floor 8 of those runs having non-standard music even though nothing special is going on in their version of floor 8. I personally don't find it very noticeable in this case, but this applies to a later floor where it's a lot more striking...

Also, 0.9.9.8 updated the Bruiser Brother sprite. The one on the left is the old sprite, which is basically just the old Baron of Hell sprite but a bit darker for the red. The new one is on the right, and is bigger; while the Baron of Hell switching their flame color is much more impactful for differentiating the two, Bruiser Brothers being bigger does help with noticing the difference, especially when under the effects of an Envirosuit Pack, or while Berserking or Invulnerable, since all of those minimize color differentiation. The bigger sprite also has the side benefit of making it more 'readable'; the old sprite's horns don't look as horn-like, and the overall head shape and nose ring are actually comprehensible on the new sprite, which is nice.

It's probably motivated more by a meta point, mind. A bit of a 'signature boss flourish' is that some of the bosses have sprites so large they exceed the bounds of their tiles pretty noticeably, and the new Bruiser Brother sprite does that, where they noticeably cover up the tile directly above their own tile. I kind of suspect the plan is to do this with all the boss enemies, such as the Arena Master, though as of 0.9.9.8 the Bruiser Brothers are the only new case of this happening.

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Next time, we cover the earliest Deimos boss, the Shambler.

See you then.