Hell Knight


 * For the hell knight in Doom 3, see Hell Knight (Doom 3).

The hell knight is a monster introduced in Doom II. It is a weaker cousin of the baron of hell, with tan rather than pink skin, and different sounds when alerted or slain. Although it is easier to kill, its attacks are just as potent as a baron's.

Being functionally equivalent to the baron of hell except for having only half as much health, the weaker hell knight serves better as a medium-strength monster, falling more quickly to small arms fire such as from the shotgun or chaingun, or offering some resistance without slowing the action down, against heavier weapons.

The Doom II manual describes the hell knight as follows: "tough as a dump truck and nearly as big, these Goliaths are the worst things on two legs since Tyrannosaurus rex". In the manual for Doom, this is the description used for the baron of hell instead.

Combat characteristics
With 500 hit points, hell knights stand as fitting elite troops of hell. They attack opponents by scratching when close or by throwing green comet shaped fireballs when distant.

Tactical analysis
Hell knight attacks are easily dodged, but are faster than those of imps or cacodemons and can do very heavy damage on a successful hit. Because these monsters take relatively heavy beatings before going down, and because their pain chance is low, use of the rocket launcher, plasma gun, or super shotgun is convenient. However, provided that the player can get at sufficient range without being hit, the chaingun and shotgun will also work well. Melee attacks against them are hazardous, as they put the player at risk of being clawed, although five berserk powered punches will generally take them down.

To kill them requires about three rockets, 23 energy cell shots or cacodemon fireballs, 50 bullets, 14 mancubus flame bursts, 12 revenant missiles, six seconds with the chainsaw, eight well-placed shotgun blasts, or three point-blank super shotgun blasts. The BFG9000 at close range can easily kill a hell knight in one shot, however.

Hell knights often pose a lesser immediate threat than some of the weaker monsters because they make a single attack without special effects and, given sufficient space, their unswerving fireballs are not too hard to dodge (especially by circlestrafing). In confined spaces, however, they are hard to move around and can be more lethal.

Data





 * 1) These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, blood splats, impact animations, and backfire checks 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.
 * 3) Hardcoded exception to infighting negates damage (excepting indirect damage caused by exploding barrels).

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

The IWADs contain the following numbers of hell knights:

Doom RPG
In Doom RPG, the baron of hell and the hell knight both belong to the "baron" monster class. There are three variations, identified by color:


 * Ogre (green torso, red hands, brown legs)
 * Hell knight (brown torso, brown hands, pink legs)
 * Baron (pink torso, orange hands, brown legs)

As in the original, the hell knight is not as powerful as the baron, though both are more powerful than the new "ogre" variation.