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 ticks 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 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.