The Mindweaver is a new monster from Doom II's expansion, Legacy of Rust. Here, it is the earlier version of the Arachnotron with the Spiderdemon fused together. It obviously functions as a weaker version of the Spiderdemon, as it shares the same amount of hp, speed and size as the Arachnotron.
Combat characteristics[]
The Mindweaver emits a scream that sounds like a slightly higher pitched version of the Spiderdemon's roar when it becomes aware of the player. Its chaingun weapon behaves like the Spiderdemon's, despite its scaled-down size, shooting three pellets at a time due to using the same attack function as the Shotgun Sergeant. When it dies, its death sound is again a higher pitched version of the Spiderdemon's, but a different, smaller explosion sound is heard at the end. Its constant walk sound is again similar to the Spiderdemon's, but its roaming sound, when heard, is like a sped up version of the Arachnotron's rarely heard roaming sound. Here, its name is a play on "Spider Mastermind".
Tactical analysis[]
The Mindweaver is basically a blend of the Arachnotron and Spiderdemon. It has the health, mass, and hitbox size of the Arachnotron, but the attack mode, rate of fire, and pain chance of the Spiderdemon. It shares the same movement speed as the two other brain spiders.
Due to using hitscan attacks, Mindweavers can infight among themselves, as well as with other enemies. A crowd of Mindweavers is capable of inflicting extremely high damage, but are also likely to thin itself out very quickly. Their relatively low pain chance makes them harder to stunlock than the Arachnotron.
Inspiration and development[]
The sprites for the Mindweaver were an intermediate step of development for the Arachnotron: they are the sprites of the Spiderdemon already re-scaled to the Arachnotron's size, but not yet recolored and edited to have a different face and a different weapon. A later version of these sprites with the face redrawn but still possessing a chaingun weapon and the more saturated brain could previously be seen in a series of Doom II beta screenshots from John Romero's demo of the game at the Austin Virtual Gaming tournament, and the behavior of the Arachnotron as coded in pre-Doom-II-release versions (such as v1.4) of the executable file matched the behavior of these sprites as well.
Like other Legacy of Rust monsters, the Mindweaver's sound design was carried out by id Software audio designer Chad Mossholder. It uses some modified versions of the Spider Mastermind's effects.