What's one thing you would change about each Doom enemy?

[SPG]

What the title says. If your answer is "nothing" then this thread is not for you. Bonus points for ideas that theoretically could have been part of their respective game's launch. We're focusing on classic Doom games (1, 2, Final, Doom 64)
 

• Zombieman: Give them the "may still shoot unless gibbed/double-tapped" attack when they're down akin to some Quake enemies.
• Shotgun guy: Give them a riot shield. Unlike 2016/Eternal, it'd just something that gives them partial cover as they move.
• Heavy weapons dude: A random chance that they lob a grenade after breaking line of sight.
• Imp: Make them a bit faster.
• Pinkie demon: A random chance for them to do a slower but more powerful melee attack (telegraphed appropriately)
• Spectre: If treating this as a distinct enemy and not maybe "have other enemies have an invisible/nightmare variant" in this case, maybe it could be a truly ghostly enemy and allow it to travel through walls and doors
• Hell Knight: Give them a "ground pound" AOE affect that does a little damage but pushes the player away when they're in melee.
• Baron of Hell: The opposite of a Hell Knight, where if you're in melee, they hold you in place, perhaps with some small constant damage (choking you) until you kill them.
• Lost Souls: Aside from making them like their Doom 64 versions in Doom 1 or 2, have an ability to "make noise" when they spot you, even when you yourself don't make noise, to alert the other monsters that can hear it.
• Cacodemon: I personally think it should be combined with the Pain Elemental and it has a half-chance of shooting projectiles or lost souls, akin to how Revenants do either normal or homing missiles. If we're keeping it a distinct enemy, though, give them a "lunge" attack when they get a certain distance to you.
• Pain Elemental: If not combining with the Caco, and aside from the Doom 64 treatment mechancis-wise, make them so they have a random chance of spewing at least 2 different types of Lost Souls (perhaps allowing both the OG version and the 64 version side by side, and different flame colors to tell them apart).
• Revenant: Aside from correcting their actual height to match their visual height, give them a jetpack that allows them to essentially "hop down" from ledges, and fly up when there's an obstacle or enemy in their way.
• Arachnatron: Similar to the Revenant in that they should be able to "crawl" up/down walls, but less drop/hop and more consistent speed.
• Mancubus: a "flamethrower" if you get too close, similar graphics to the archvile but a lower constant damage instead of the "explosion" that the archvile does.
• Archvile: The ability to "respawn" enemies instead of resurrect when there's nothing nearby to resurrect. Limit the respawn to spawn points of a certain radius from the archvile's line of sight, same "clock" as respawning on Nightmare, and if playing on Nightmare, essentially allows the "rolls" for respawning to stack.
• Wolfenstein SS: More like their original versions?
• Cyberdemon: Randomized ability to shoot homing rockets like the revenant.
• Spider Mastermind: Give it the BFG instead of the super-chaingun.
• Icon of Sin: It's basically a wall texture with the John Romero head and the cube spawner, so it's hard to think of just one thing for this. Maybe instead of the raising platform where you pump rockets in its brain, you have to "chip" parts of it off to expose various bits that eventually allow you to expose its heart or the like?
• Mother Demon: More abilities that the other enemies have to cycle through. At the very least, something akin to resurrect or respawn enemies (especially since the archvile wasn't present in Doom 64 and you've likely caused a bunch of corpses prior).

[Maximum Matt]

• Add in rocket and plasma zombies
• Give the pinky demons gib animations too
• Change the hell knight sprites to something, anything else.  Seriously, keep the attacks, HP, movement and SFX the same, just make it look different to the Baron.
• Give the arch-vile a melee "push" attack that doesn't hurt, but is dangerous (especially when positioned near inescapable pits, would give a whole new dynamic to them)
• Make the cyberdemon randomly change firing volleys of one, two or three rockets
• Give the Icon Of Sin something like Mancubus fireballs from the eyes every now and then (signposted by them starting to glow like two seconds before), or maybe a hitscan attack like the arch-vile's, but insta-death.  And give it a horrifically scary bite animation (also insta-death) if you get too close.  Oh, and make it bleed instead of bullet puffs when you shoot at it.  
• Make the Pain Elementals not exist

[G19Doom]

I would want Adrian Carmack to make gib deaths for all enemies, if they implode or whatever anyways then just make it even more extreme if they’re gibbed. Yes, I’ve seen it done, but I would love to see it done by the man himself and within the limits of the original game. 
 

I would also want nightmare mode changed to where non-demon enemies do not respawn, and demons will not respawn if they are gibbed, and I’d remove their pain frames in this mode to make them even more aggressive at their faster speed on NM. 
 

Also, I remember reading somewhere a long time ago that the Caco initially was designed to have some sort of retaliation attack that was faster and stronger than his normal attack. That would be cool. Maybe also make lost souls be able to travel through walls.

[LoatharMDPhD]

// give the archviles corpse explosion...

[Maximum Matt]

57 minutes ago, G19Doom said:

Maybe also make lost souls be able to travel through walls.

Aw HELL to the no

[RoastDoom]

Make Revenant missiles ONLY HOMING or ONLY...NOT HOMING. None of this 50/50 shite!!

Maybe shave a 100-200 hp of the ol' Baron.

[Cutman 999]

I would delete pain elementals from the game (?

[rita remton]

• archviles have less health, but could resurrect other archviles.
• mancubus moves faster by rolling like a tumbleweed.
• chaingunners have double the health.
• lost souls have less health, but could move in a curved path at speed.
• zombiemen, when killed would have moving body parts that could still damage the player (eg. hands that could strangle the player, legs that could kick, head that could bite).
• spectres could fly.
• arachnotrons and spider mastermind could actually move on walls and ceilings like real spiders.
• hellknights coloured purple with purple blood.
• imps more hairy like chewbacca.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

Hmm... okay why not!

• Zombieman: 50% chance for their attack to be a 3-round burst.
• Shotgun guy: After getting initial player LOS, they have a 15% chance to drop their Shotgun and turn into a Valiant suicide bomber.
• Heavy Weapons Dude: Their attack is a fast "tracer" projectile instead of a hitscan. Still deadly (especially in close quarters), but reasonably dodged while running.
• Imp: Resurrected Imps gain glowing green eyes, and throw BaronBalls instead.
• Pinky Demon: Can "enrage": 25% to gain it's Nightmare stats after entering it's Pain state.
• Spectre: Melee attack infects player with "blur" for five seconds; doesn't affect the Spectre's ability to target the player, but all other monsters treat player as being under the effects of the Blur Sphere (doesn't stack).
• Hell Knight: Melee attack applies a resistance debuff (player receives 50% more damage for five seconds, doesn't stack).
• Baron of Hell: Flat out replace the Baron with Eviternity's Annihilator.
• Lost Souls: 50% less HP, higher damage.
• Cacodemon: Can "enrage": 25% to gain it's Nightmare stats after entering it's Pain state.
• Pain Elemental: Give the poor bastard a strong melee bite.
• Revenant: Their melee punch does a straight 100 damage (only to the player). Doesn't affect infighting, but you better be careful when playing footsy with 'em.
• Arachnatron: 15% chance to launch into Valiant's Arachnorb form after breaking player LOS. Unlike Valiant, there's no chance to launch Arachnorb on death.
• Mancubus: "Consumes" low-tier corpses (Zombiemen, Shotgunners, Chaingunners, Imps, and Pinky Demons) when walking over them, replenishing it's HP (can't go past max HP).
• Archvile: Resurrected monsters only have half HP, but Archviles can be resurrected. 
• Wolfenstein SS: Random chance on spawn to use a Shotgun, Chaingun, RL, Plasma Rifle, or original attack. 
• Cyberdemon: In melee range, has a chance to stomp it's metallic leg into the ground applying a slowing debuff to the player (50% reduced movement speed for three seconds).
• Spider Mastermind: After getting initial player LOS, releases a burst of 6-8 Arachnorbs who maintain a psychic "shield" link to their master; SMM is invulnerable until the Arachnorbs are dead (SMM / Arachnorbs are considered the same species, and cannot infight or damage each other).
• Icon of Sin: Turns into Icon of Plutonia; Boss Cubes only spawn Chaingunners, Revenants, and Archviles (with a 5% chance to spawn a Cyberdemon).

Edited August 26, 2023 by RonnieJamesDiner

[RHhe82]

Personally I mostly like Doom's bestiary as they are -- but some tweaks could be worthwhile.

 

* Lost Souls: 50% less HP. If nothing else, lessen their health like they did in Eviternity. This is the only proposition that would probably render any wad, IWADs and PWADs alike, better.

* Cacodemon: A chance to spew three projectiles at once, much like Disciples of D'Sparil do all the time in Heretic. Did they home in on the player slightly? Make them home in on player slightly (ie. not quite as sharply as homing revenant missiles).

* Pain Elemental: If Lost Souls had less health, make spewing rate a bit higher. Alternatively make them also shoot cacodemon fireballs -- but maybe like the disciples do in Hexen, a spiralling string of fireballs.

* Archvile: This is actually something that I sometimes think: make it so that revived corpses have something like 50 % health. This needs some sort of counterside to it, perhaps have the revived enemies be faster or act as eyes for the vile that revived them.

* Baron of Hell: Replace with Valiant's Cybruisers. (In other words: I like the weaker cyberdemons present in many modern wads).

* Spider Mastermind: Maybe replace chaingun with a BFG blast (this would make the beast sort of upgraded version of arachnotron who shoot plasma). Blast and tracers would hit other monster's too. Also give ability to spawn more arachnotrons.

* Revenant: I also sometimes think the homing missiles should lose their homing ability after some period when/or the revenant that launched it has perished.

 

Edited August 26, 2023 by RHhe82
Added Revvies

[Plerb]

I would make the Pain Elementals not spawn an additional 3 Lost Souls when you kill 'em. Also I would make the Keens alive and well, though that's not really an enemy (except to Adrian Carmack).

 

edit: i don't know why i posted this, pain elementals are fine and good actually

Edited November 12, 2023 by Plerb

[Grazza]

At least no one has suggested making them anatomically complete in this thread.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

26 minutes ago, Grazza said:

At least no one has suggested making them anatomically complete in this thread.

 

 

Well, I simply refuse to download this now.

[Rudolph]

I would make it so the Revenant's attack is either not homing or can be shot down.

[Celestin]

I wanted to say "decrease lost soul's health and replace barons with something more interesting" but it seems this is a fairly common opinion.

[arsac]

41 minutes ago, Grazza said:

At least no one has suggested making them anatomically complete in this thread.

[Anarkzie]

Make all the Zombie guys more zombie like. Being able to shoot body parts off, getting back up after being knocked down etc.

 

Imps would be partially on fire. I saw this cool art work of this and its the first time that I've ever thought that they looked good. Also faster projectiles, they're too slow.

 

Demons, I think are fine but I would fix their height, when they're in front of the player they look like they're maybe 4ft tall but next to a zombie man, they look as big as a bear. Doom 2 did a better job at making heights look consistent.

 

Pain Elementals and Lost Souls, Doom 64 fixed them both.

 

Revenant, I think Brutal Doom fixed these guys. I would give them better crawling animation though.

 

Hell knights and Barons, faster projectiles and also a more varied more set. I would have them being able to smash through some walls. Also make them look bigger 

 

Cacodemons, give them more attacks.

 

Mancubus, more animation frames and random attack spread.

 

Master mind, make her Chaingun more like Brutal Doom, have her move more like a spider and have the telekinesis that was cut.

 

 

[DoomPlayer00]

I don't have an idea for every monster but two changes I'd make are:

 

• Halving the lost souls' health so that a single shotgun blast from close range is enough to kill them.
• Lower the Revenants' max damage by at least 20 or remove homing missiles. Just anything to nerf the bony bastards.

 

30 minutes ago, Z50 said:

 

Sun Tzu wrote this in The Art of War

Edited August 26, 2023 by DoomPlayer00
typo

[riktoi]

Pistol fellas: Increase their movement speed to make them way less sluggish. Give their sprite an actual pistol instead of a weird machine gun. Make their shots better telegraphed.

Shotgun person: Not too sure. perhaps increase their movement speed a bit as well.

Imp: Slight tracking to make them more menacing. Increased projectile velocity (something in-between current speed and fast monsters/NM speed). Clear indication for melee attacks rather than using the same animation as fireball throwing.

Gatling gunner: Add a slight alert sound whenever they're about to shoot. HP is at a spot that I don't think you can meaningfully change it without increasing it by a lot so it will remain at 70.

Pinky: Increase movement speed and make attacks faster, but also increase pain chance to 220 or so. Maybe hopefully making chainsaw actually usable against them.

Spectre: Increase movement speed to current fast Pinky speed. Lower health to 80.

Hell Knight: Clear indication for melee attacks. Add armor to sprite to show chivalry. Always found it strange how they're called knights, but yet have nothing to show for it.

Baron of Hell: Lower health to 800. Change attack into quick 2 fireball lobbing move. Clear indication for melee attacks. Maybe give some royal attire in the sprite.

Lost Soul: Lower health to 4. Improve AI so they waste less time hugging walls and not dashing towards you.

Cacodemon: Quadruple mass so it is at 1600 to stop annoying pinball behaviour. Make randomly scream at you a la Astral Cacodemon.

Pain Elemental: Halve health to 200. Make Lost Souls directly fired from a Pain Elemental fire at 30 map units instead of 20. Limit Lost Souls from a Pain Elemental to 5 at maximum. Change behaviour to run away from target if all 5 Lost Souls are alive.

Skeleton man: Make punch cause similar behaviour as getting zapped by an Archvile (upwards momentum from blast) because the player is a baseball and bounces up from the massive force of the downwards punch. Make homing rockets deal 20-60 damage instead of 10-80. Normal rockets retain the same damage. Fix height so it matches the sprite.

Laser Spider: Lower radius to 48 so their collision is less chunky. Give a new attack that it will do when a player is close where the spider will do a 360 and blast 16 projectiles at steady intervals.

Mancubus: Make slower, but increase the chance of shooting. Randomly make one of the two projectiles shot 1.25x speed to keep the player guessing.

Archvile: Evil laughter more frequent.

Wolfenstein SS: I've never used this enemy so lets just give it 1.5x the movement speed and call it a day.

Cyberdemon: Halve pain chance to 10, but increase pain time to 20 tics. Increase rocket speed to 25 mups.

Spider Mama: Turn chaingun hitscan into very fast projectiles. Massively nerf spread. Lower radius to 96 to hopefully better fit the sprite dimensions.

[zokum]

These are within what could be done in vanilla doom without too much work.

• Swap the health of the cyber demon and spider mastermind.
• Pain elemental can shoot imp balls when the ls limit has been hit or there is no space in front.
• Spider mastermind has a magic attack that teleports it to pre-defined spots when it cannot see the target, no more than every 10 seconds. Location is random.
• Arch-vile ressurects monsters with 2/3 of their full hp for monsters with more than 200hp or some other semi low limit.
• Baron projectiles are faster. Shoots more often. 800 hp.
• Red arch-vile color swap, all the yellow is changed red. Spawns monsters instead of flame. 2500 hp, boss.
• Non-mechanical hell monsters heal when walking on some damaging floors: Imp, demon, arch-vile, spectre, hk+baron.
• Lost souls explosion does slight damage. When PE get killed you take damage if there is no room to spawn.
• Some monsters move progressivly faster when their hp is lowered.
• Cacodemons will strafe a short distance (96 units?) after firing if the target is in los in the new location.
• Convert a few more Wolfenstein 3d enemies, including the dogs, to make 31+32 more interesting. Would be really cool to have a boss on map32.

Edited August 26, 2023 by zokum

[Plut]

I think Doom 2 bestiary is pretty much perfect, except I would make pinkies faster (they're almost completely harmless in most cases), the spiderdemon less passive, make zombiemen fire faster, lower baron of hell's health by 1/5 (so that you could kill them with 4 SSG shots) and make them fire faster than hell knights... Something like that could be cool. Also the ideas of adding AOE damage to lost soul explosions and giving the spiderdemon the BFG feel quite interesting.

[Cammy]

The original Doom manual describes human volunteers who entered the experimental Hell gateways as "babbling vulgarities, bludgeoning anything that breathes, and finally suffering an untimely death of full-body explosion" when they returned. It's a relatively common opinion for new Doom players unaware of the story to think that the zombies are actually just regular evil guys, so if you put me in the id boys' shoes back when Doom 1 was being developed, I'd request the spectres be replaced with a more corrupted and fucked-up zombie who runs at you and explodes (which is to say, literally the Valiant suicide bomber). It would enhance the horror aspect of the game by showing how drastically Hell can really affect the human body and mind, while also adding in a fun new enemy.

[tornado potato]

Heavy weapons dude: I don't like his sprite, I'd change it so it resembles the zombie and shortgun guy more

Spectre: make it its own thing instead of invisible pinkie. different sprite different sounds

Lost Souls: less hp. also I don't know how to describe it but their material feels weird. Like they're not fleshy but their not ghostly either. They're like a weird kind of rock/metal

Cacodemon: less floaty, I don't like how sometimes they float very far off after being shot

Revenant: no homing missiles, or at least make them stop tracking after certain time

Wolfenstein SS: different sound for their attack

Icon of Sin: make it not being um well a wall texture. make it an actual thing, make it shoot other stuff instead of only spawning other monsters. More like a bullet hell boss

[DynamiteKaitorn]

I'd probably make the final boss of DooM 64 tank the unmaker much better. If you're gonna cheese the game with a broken weapon, don't expect a ticket to victory. :3

[SupremeBioVizier]

I just gave the Wolfenstein Nazis a wicked scream when they see you, and better yet when you kill them now the player hears, "fritz! Get up goddamnit! They killed fritz!"

 

Spoiler

And I'm thinking of redoing my last level which is a trap level where it's just text and thanks for playing...I want to create a new icon of sin for fun...I'm not political but it's funny

 

 

Spoiler

 

Edited August 27, 2023 by nocisum