Demon/Doom

"Sorta like a shaved gorilla, except with horns, a big head, lots of teeth, and harder to kill. Don't get too close or they'll rip your fraggin' head off."

- Doom manual description The Demon (also known as Pinky) is a recurring enemy found in the classic games. Alongside their partially invisible counterpart, they are one of the most common enemies the players will come across, second only to the Imp. Demons makes their first appearance in the third level of the first episode and makes their return in larger packs in the second game.

Physical Appearance
Demons are two legged monsters with relatively big bulky, muscular body frame. Appropriate to their nickname, "Pinky", they are pink in color. They have a large mouth armed with sharp teeth, two white horns on their head, glowing yellow eyes, digitigrade legs, and three claws on each foot.

Combat Characteristics
Demons let out a loud growl, similar to a lion's roar, when they become aware of the player's presence.

Demons do not have a ranged attack, instead preferring to close in on their target as much as possible to bite at them. To make up for this, they have a huge advantage over many other monsters: speed. They can outrun any other beings except the charging Lost Soul, the Cyberdemon, the Revenant, the Arch-vile, and the player. They also run in a zig-zag pattern, presenting themselves as difficult targets, in order to corner their victims. Under Nightmare difficulty or with the fast monsters setting, the Demon moves and attacks twice as fast, thus becoming the fastest monster in the game, and the second quickest to attack, after the Cyberdemon.

When killed, a Demon emits a loud pig-like snort and spits up some teeth and blood, its forehead and stomach also burst open in two bloody gutting holes.

Tactical Analysis
Despite being more dangerous than an Imp, a Demon overall, should serve as a very minor threat for the player. As they are only melee-oriented enemies, players can take advantage of this by taking them down from a distance. The shotgun is pretty effective to take out an individual Demon from mid range, as two-three shots will guarantee to take them down.

While Demons possess amazing speed and are able to zig-zag around to present themselves as harder targets, they still possess a large body structure, making them easy targets nonetheless. Demons possess very high pain chance, making them prone to stunning while being under attacked. The chainsaw can actually work well for this reason, especially if the player is need to conserve ammo.

In Doom II, Demons have now taken the habit of coming together in larger packs than before. This makes them more dangerous than ever. But players are also introduced to the super shotgun, which evens out the odds. It generally takes two shots from the super shotgun to annihilate a single Demon, but one shot at point blank range will instantly put a Demon out of its misery. In extreme cases, it is advisable to avoid having multiple Demons surrounding you and possibly cornering you.

In monster infighting, healthy Demons are able to make short work of former humans and Imps. Since Demons move faster than most other enemy types, they tend to be hit by projectiles from slower monsters located further away, and thus are generally the easiest monster to trick into attacking other enemies - however, the short range of their attacks make it difficult for a distracted Demon to provoke other monsters into counterattacking him. Demons actually appear to be considerably less intelligent (or more oblivious) than Imps, as they often run around for quite a long time aimlessly before attacking the player.

Data
Attributes = Melee
 * -|Bits list =
 * -|Sprites & sounds =
 * -|Melee attack =
 * -|Bite damage =


 * 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 the classic Doom, the Demon is first encountered on these maps:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of Demons: