Undead warrior



The Undead Warriors are tall skeletons in armour with horned helmets and red capes. When attacking from a distance, they throw green enchanted axes. At close range, they slash with their axe.

Description from the manual: ''As part of the Order's insidious plot to control your world, they've recruited the dead, gave them armour and armed them with deadly magic axes. Now they guard the evil cities and toss their infinite supply of axes at any elf who passes by.''

Tactical analysis
Arguably "the jack of all trades, master of none" foe in Heretic. The Undead warrior is fairly fast moving, but not as fast as a Sabreclaw and fairly healthy, but not as much as an Ophidian. At range, the Undead Warrior throws a pair of axe projectiles at its target, choosing one of two possible axe types at random. The primary type, thrown most often, is a green spinning axe which deals moderate damage. Occasionally, it will instead throw a red axe which does not spin, and which leaves a blood sprite trail behind it as it travels. Red axes deal significantly more damage and, unlike green axes, are not affected by wind sectors. Both types of axe pass through any ghost variant monster, as well as a player under the effect of a Shadowsphere.

In melee, the Undead Warrior slashes at targets with its axe.

One may encounter the ghost variant of the Undead Warrior, which always throws red axes. As with all ghost variants of Heretic monsters, it is translucent, and intangible to mundane weapons such as the Staff or the Firemace's projectiles.

A normal Undead Warrior is not immune to axes thrown by an Undead Warrior ghost, and will retaliate against its ghost counterpart if accidentally struck by it. Such fights are usually extremely one-sided as the only way an Undead Warrior can harm a ghost is with its melee attack.

When killed, its body bursts into green flame and burns away, and its armor falls to the floor in a pile.

Data

 * 1) These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and smoke trails 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) Hardcoded exception to infighting negates damage (excepting indirect damage caused by exploding puff pods).
 * 3) While an Undead Warrior is immume to Red Axes thrown by other Undead Warriors, it isn't immune to Red Axes thrown by Undead Warrior Ghosts.

Appearance statistics
The undead warrior is first encountered on these maps:

The IWAD contains the following numbers of undead warriors:

The undead warrior ghost is first encountered on these maps:

The IWAD contains the following numbers of undead warrior ghost: