Ophidian



The Ophidian is an enemy in Heretic. They resemble snakes and carry pointed staves. When attacking, they fire a chain of three purple shots from their staff, pause, and then fire a more powerful red fireball.

Description from the manual: The Ophidians slither in the darkest chambers of the Dome of D'sparil and protect their lairs with deadly, energy tossing tridents.

Tactical analysis
Ophidians have high health and a low pain chance making them formidable as meat shields. However their missiles do not cause great damage (though being hit by all four still adds up). Ophidians re-target with every missile so the player has to keep moving until it has fired all its shots. The three weak shots are affected by wind but the final, more powerful shot is not.

Ophidians sometimes drop a Flame Orb when killed. These particular Flame Orbs are worth 5 shots instead of the usual 1 shot.

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
In the IWADs the ophidian is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of ophidians per skill level: