Difference between revisions of "Maulotaur"

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Revision as of 13:53, 7 November 2022

A major load of bull: Maulotaurs in Heretic E5M8.
A Maulotaur in Hexen's Castle of Grief Hub.

The Maulotaur is a creature from the Heretic-Hexen series. Maulotaurs greatly resemble the mythological Minotaur, except that they wield giant hammers (or mauls), which they use to smash their enemies into a pulp. They also have several ranged attacks. One is a scatter of small, flaming pellets summoned with side-swipes of their hammers. Another is the ability to summon 'snakes' of flames that crawl along the ground and up ledges in a line formation. The third of their ranged attacks is to dash forward from a distance and gore their opponent, which seems to be used most often at medium range (usually when a player is trying to make optimum use of the Phoenix Rod). Maulotaurs are tremendously strong and tough with 3000 health. Like the Iron lich and D'Sparil, Maulotaurs cannot be transformed using the Morph Ovum or instantly killed by a Firemace under the influence of the Tome of Power. Like D'Sparil, the Maulotaur also has a 50% resistance to the powered up Hellstaff's rain and immunity to splash damage.

In Heretic, they sometimes drop a Flame Orb worth 10 shots, and on rare occasions, drop a Mystic Urn when killed.

They first appear as final bosses in The Portals of Chaos and again as final bosses in the Field of Judgement, and occasionally as "normal" enemies in episodes three through five.

As a Heretic boss, any monster that is hurt by him will not fight back. However, the boss will attack any non-boss creature that hurts him.

Maulotaurs also appear in Heretic's sequel, Hexen, as summonable creatures that will fight for the player, created by an artifact known as the "Dark Servant". The Maulotaur will attack enemies without question, but each summoned Maulotaur fades from existence after roughly 30 seconds, or if they are killed first (they have 2500 hit points). Also, they have 'notoriously bad aim', and will not consider withdrawing their attack even if the player is directly between them and their target. It's possible for a player to be killed accidentally in this way.

Tactical analysis

The Maulotaur is invincible during a charge, thus it is a waste of ammo to attack when they are performing the attack.

Bugs

One of the maulotaur attacks is bugged. When hammering the ground to create a trail of crawling flames, if the maulotaur is standing in water, sludge or lava, the flames will fail to spawn. This is a side-effect of the terrain code in Heretic: to create the visual of monsters and other objects being partially submerged, a "floor clipping" effect is used which lowers the actor by 10 units. The maulotaur spawns the flames at its feet, so if it has been lowered by the terrain's foot clip effect, the flames end up being spawned below the floor and the engine fails to create them.

This bug can be used deliberately to represent a maulotaur being unable to create flames in water, although it is not only the water flats that are affected. For this reason, a compatibility option or proper support for it is generally offered by source ports which fix the bug, such as Doomsday and ZDoom.

Heretic data

Hexen data

Attributes
Thing type 9
Enum MT_MINOTAUR (309)
Hit points 2500
Speed 16 map units per frame
(112 map units per second)
Radius 28
Height 100
Mass 800
Reaction time 8 tics
Pain chance 25 (9.77%)
Bits 00440006 (hex)
00441020
Bits list

1: Obstacle

2: Shootable

18: Partial invisibility

22: Affects kill %

5: Feet can be clipped

12: Pass over/under mobj

18: Can stomp (Telefrag)

22: Can push walls

Sprites & sounds
Sprite name MNTR
Alert sound MINSIT1
Active sound MINACT2
Attack sound HAMBLO8A
Pain sound MINPAIN4
Death sound MINDTH4
Melee attack
Damage 4-32
Sound HAMBLO8A
Flaming Pellets ranged attack
Type Projectile
Enum MT_MNTRFX1 (310)
Speed 20 map units per tic
(700 map units per second)
Damage 3-24 (times 5)
Radius 10
Height 6
Sprite name FX12
Sound ?
Ground Flame ranged attack
Type Projectile
Enum MT_MNTRFX2 (311)
Speed 14 map units per tic
(490 map units per second)
Damage 4-32
Radius 5
Height 12
Sprite name FX13
Sound ?
Charge ranged attack
Type Projectile
Speed ?
Damage ?
Radius 28
Height 100
Sprite name MNTRF
Sound ?

Appearance statistics

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

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

Sources

  • This article incorporates text from the open-content Wikipedia online encyclopedia article Doomworld (archived 🏛).