Disciple of D'Sparil

The Disciples of D'Sparil are enemies in Heretic. They are dark wizards with black robes and faceless hoods.

Description from the manual: The pupils of D'Sparil's dark magic, these wizards have mastered flight and blink out of the shadow world long enough to cast a crushing wave of magic missiles toward their enemy.

The whispered incantations that the Disciples of D'Sparil say are actual phrases played backwards:
 * WIZSIT - "Destroy the Heretic"
 * WIZACT - "Succumb to us, Heretic"

Tactical analysis
The ability to fly grants the Disciple a high level of mobility.

Disciples attack by firing a spread of three magic missiles making their attacks harder to dodge than most other foes. The magic missiles are also fast and cause heavy damage. However the Disciple has to remain stationary for a second or so to prepare an attack giving the player plenty of advance warning and a chance to counterattack. However, the Disciple flickers in and out of ghost state when preparing; hence, certain attacks may go straight through it.

When killed, they sometimes drop a Claw Orb, and may also drop a Tome of Power on rare occasions.

Data

 * 1) These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and smoke trails are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Hardcoded exception to infighting negates damage (excepting indirect damage caused by exploding puff pods).

Appearance statistics
The Disciple is first encountered on these maps:

The IWAD contains the following numbers of Disciples:

Trivia

 * A screenshot on the back of the Heretic mail order box shows that the disciple's robes were blue instead of black, at some point in the game's development.