Weredragon

Weredragons are big, half-beast, half-dragons. They make their first appearance on E2M1, The Crater. Weredragons, like the player and the gargoyle, can be gibbed if killed by an attack that inflicts significant damage.

Description from the manual: ''The Weredragons infest the darkest lairs of the Order. Possessing all of the strength and agility of a tank, these lumbering creatures belch a body-blasting fireball.''

Note: The Heretic manual incorrectly states that the player will encounter ghost Weredragons.



Tactical analysis
Their skin colour allows them to blend in somewhat in caves and dark areas. Weredragons attack the player by spitting out fireballs which inflict up to 32 points of damage. Weredragons do not have a melee attack.

Despite the manual's indication that the Weredragon is sluggish and not very mobile, which is somewhat reinforced by the creature's sloth-like appearance, it is actually as fast-moving as a Sabreclaw, making it the joint fastest opponent in Heretic.

When killed, they fall flat on their back, swinging their arms and sloth-like claws in a wide circle while doing so, releasing a copious amount of blood. Their corpses are among the goriest in the game. Weredragons sometimes drop Ethereal Arrows giving twice as much ammo as the normal arrow items.

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).

Appearance statistics
The Weredragon is first encountered on these maps:

The IWAD contains the following numbers of Weredragons: