Firemace

The Firemace is a weapon from Heretic. Although it looks like an ordinary mace, it is used as a ranged weapon.

When fired, its spikes rotate and it launches one Mace Sphere every 3 tics in volleys of four; each sphere is either small or large. The small mace spheres have an ~89% chance of being spawned, and deal 2-16 damage. The large mace spheres only have a ~11% chance of being spawned, deal 6-48 damage, and spawn two small mace spheres when they bounce (however, the small mace sphere spawned on a bounce does 4-32 damage).

Using a Tome of Power causes the Firemace to slowly launch huge metal balls that bounce around, seek enemies, and kill any non-boss (including other players, even in invulnerability mode) in one hit, but deal only 18-144 damage to bosses. The power mode shots may also travel through teleports and can even telefrag the one who fired it.

If a player has a Chaos Device in his inventory when a powered sphere hits him, he will automatically use a Chaos Device and lose half of his health. Neither mode is capable of hitting ghosts and spheres will simply disappear when they bounce into a liquid. Maximum capacity is 150 shots, or 300 with the Bag of Holding.

A notable feature of the Firemace is that it only has a ~75% chance of appearing in a level when not in the deathmatch gamemode; also, when multiple Firemaces are placed in a level, only one has a chance to appear, allowing for some minor randomization in Heretic maps. In Heretic v1.0, the surplus mace spots would spawn other objects, depending on the episode number of the map: Disciples of D'Sparil in E1, Weredragons in E2, Ophidians in E3, and (through a bug) Shadowspheres in the E4 secret slots. However, later versions removed this substitution effect, placing nothing on the extra mace spots.

If the weapon has appeared, it can be first found at one of three possible locations in E2M3: The River of Fire, all of them being in non-secret areas. Depending on the player's choice, the next map where the weapon can be obtained is either E2M9: The Glacier or E2M6: The Labyrinth. Both levels have four different locations for the Firemace.

Appearance statistics
In the IWADs the firemace spawner is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of firemace spawners per skill level: