Demon


 * For the Demon in Doom 3, see Demon (Doom 3).

The demon is a relatively big, bulky, vaguely humanoid monster. The Doom manual refers to it as: ''Sorta like a shaved gorilla, except with horns, a big head, lots of teeth, and harder to kill. Don't get too close or they'll rip your fraggin' head off. The id Software staff has called the monster pinky'' in reference to its coloration, especially during the development of Doom 3, when a new version of the monster was designed, although they made it grayish instead of pink, probably because they got sick of it pink.

Combat characteristics
Demons do not have a ranged attack, so they are no threat at long range. However, they have a huge advantage over many of their counterparts: speed. They can outrun any monster except the charging lost soul, the cyberdemon, and the arch-vile. Due to its speed, the demon closes distances very quickly, often running towards the player in a zig-zag pattern, making it harder to hit, and helping corner the player. Under Nightmare! or with the fast monsters setting, the demon moves and attacks twice as fast, thus becoming the fastest monster in the game, and the second quickest to attack, after the cyberdemon.

In the original Doom, demons were usually found alone or in small numbers, but in Doom II, which offers the player the powerful super shotgun, they are often found in larger packs. They emit a loud snarl when they are killed.

Tactical analysis
A very useful weapon against demons is arguably the chainsaw; the demon is unable to attack the player when being damaged with the chainsaw, and the chainsaw does not use up any ammunition. However, the shotgun is also effective since it can cause damage at longer ranges, and the super shotgun can kill a demon at close range with one blast. Another quick way of killing them without wasting ammo is to punch them to death when in berserk mode (generally taking anywhere from one to three such punches).

In monster infighting, healthy demons are able to make short work of former humans and imps, and are generally the easiest monster to trick into attacking other enemies. Demons actually appear to be considerably less intelligent (or more oblivious) than imps, as they often run around for quite a long time aimlessly before attacking the player.

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, and blood splats 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) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.

Appearance statistics
In classic Doom, the demon is first encountered on these maps:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of demons:

Doom RPG
In Doom RPG, the demon appears as the "pinky" class of monster. There are three variations, identified by color:


 * Bull demon (olive green)
 * Pinky (normal colors)
 * Belphegor (blue)

A pinky will attack automatically the moment the player steps into an adjacent square, even if it has already moved that turn. They are resistant to rockets and susceptible to shotgun attacks.