Lost soul

The lost soul is a flaming, flying skull first introduced in Doom's second episode, The Shores of Hell.

Doom II made additional use of the lost soul by utilizing it as the projectile attack of the new pain elemental monster. The Doom manual gives this description of lost souls: "Dumb. Tough. Flies. On fire. 'Nuff said."

Combat characteristics
Arguably one of the most frustrating enemies in the Doom games, lost souls float at a leisurely pace until they decide to attack, at which point they launch themselves towards the player at high speed with a hissing breath sound, often the first audible warning of their presence. If they miss, they will continue careening through the air until they hit a wall or other object.

It is uncommon to find a lost soul on its own — they are more often found in groups.

The lost soul is the only monster in Doom that does not make any sound when it is alerted, sometimes surprising careless players because of this.

The lost soul is one of two monsters that do not leave a corpse (the other being the pain elemental); they simply explode. Because of this, the lost soul does not normally respawn when the Nightmare! skill level is chosen or the -respawn parameter is used.

Note that the lost soul sprite always remains fully bright in the same way projectiles and lamps are lit up, to represent the light emitted by their flames.

In Doom II and Doom v1.5, lost souls were modified to no longer affect the player's kill score, so it is possible to achieve 100% kills without destroying any lost souls found in a level. This was undoubtedly due to the addition of the pain elemental.

Tactical analysis
The player can stop a lost soul's charge by shooting it while it is attacking. Because of their 100% pain chance, it is often safer to use the pistol against them, rather than the slower-fire shotgun, so the lost soul will not have enough time to retaliate. Also, lost souls will stop when they cross an object in their charge path, such as a shotgun or a medikit, which stops them as if the objects were a wall. Using rockets against groups of lost souls is strongly discouraged, as there is a considerable chance that a lost soul will suddenly fly towards the player, causing one of the rockets to explode too close to the foolish marine, causing serious blast damage to the player.

In early versions of Doom (pre 1.9?, it happens in 1.666), the Lost Soul also had a special ability to dodge rockets; If a rocket was within a certain distance of it and it wasn't already attacking, the Lost Soul would sometimes "sidestep" by darting left or right very quickly (it would quickly turn 90 degrees and then perform its distance attack in that direction for a fraction of a second).

One unique characteristic of lost souls is that after they attack, they do not retain their target, and instead pursue the player, unless hurt by their previous target. This makes them somewhat unreliable when a player provokes and attempts to sustain monster infighting, or at least unpredictable in such situations.

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 lost soul is first encountered on these maps:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of lost souls:

Doom RPG
In Doom RPG, the lost soul appears as a class of monster. There are three variations, identified by color:


 * Phantom (green)
 * Lost soul (normal colors)
 * Nightmare (blue)

Lost souls can move three panels in a single turn instead of one, and will attack automatically once they are in an adjacent panel to the player, even if it has already moved. It attacks three times consecutively and can be damaged by the fire extinguisher.

Doom 64
These variations of the lost souls look somewhat different and there is fire only on the top of their skulls.