What is the least useful demon when mapping?

My answer is Baron.

• Way too chunky.
• Slog to kill with beginner weapons.
• Too easy to kill with endgame weapons.
• Really boring Imp AI.
• Not super useful as a turret.
• It's job can be accomplished better with multiple Hell Knights in almost every situation.

Pain Elementals since I find them to be an ammo waster style of enemy.

Hell Knights and barons are similar but can be used for surprise attacks or for later maps in a map-pack, Archviles as annoying as they are can be deadly if they teleport to an earlier point in a map where a bunch of dead enemies are and as for spectres, just dim the lightning.

The short answer is none, because I never place a monster solely to fill an empty space. They always get a role, at least that's my intention, whether they function or not goes evident with proper testing. If you play my stuff, chances you'll see things like a lone HK around every corner, or dozens of high-HP groups to kill with weaker weapons without options, or a SMM and more than two 16-wide static pillars of cover, are most probably zero. Nothing against people who like that, but I prefer it when all (or most) actors add "something" worth of looking at.

Though my output is limited to three and a half maps to this day, I believe my usage got better with each one since all that playing in four years must have taught me something good. I've yet to hit a wall with the "least used enemies" by popular agreement, be it the baron, spiderdemon and lost soul, precisely three that could use some tweaks to represent their species a bit better imo.

Agreed on all the smm points for the babysitting aspect of it, referring to having to design encounters around them more intricately, and in the end most of my smm usage has been doomcute memery, like use imps/bulls to get it stuck cause you don't have enough ammo type things. Otoh I love seeing inventive approaches to smm arenas so the potential for great interest offsets the babysitting aspect for me in terms or usefulness.

Thus, for me it is the spectre, source of many frustrations and face-rockets. I just dont like the idea of punishing the player for rocket use that they bring to the table, and even for their primary use of being a quick gotcha monster, that ability falls off with preknowledge, which makes them seem even more like a dick move to fda players, and all this is coming from somebody who's maps have been repeatedly described as "dickish" and "rude," heh. Of course that's not to say that they dont have their place and that there arent good uses for them, it's just to say that I find them less useful than any other monsters. If not for using them thematically in wormhell, I wonder if I've placed more smm's than spectres in my maps... heh. 

Definitely the baron. If the revenant is a glass cannon then the baron is a titanium nerf gun.

Probably the spider mastermind due to all the reasons Nine inch nails mentions.

That said, my recent maps feature more spider masterminds than barrons :p

i think that the Lost souls have to be the worst enemy type there is (imo) since i feel like a ambush of LS are a dick move for a mapper to make since they swarm you and you almost 99% don't have the ammunition to take them out (even if you do you would rather waste it on something more dangerous like a Baron or Cacodemon.)

I just wish the Baron did something cool and unique, like an alt attack where it flings two/three fireballs at once or something, combined with the increased projectile speed they already have it'd keep you on your toes - I just think the Baron looks and sounds really cool and I love placing them in important rooms with geo built around them but when it comes down to it fighting them is often kinda boring or underwhelming :P

to me i make it harder the farther the level goes, so for instance, lots of zombie men and imps in the first few areas, slowly leaking out some stronger enemies and multiplying the load, new weapon gains balance out the difficulty

so at nearing end of my map i'd say lost souls, due to pain elementals placing them for me.

13 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

SMM

/thread

SMM, easily. Barons are quite useful anti-cheese by blocking / slowing access to key progression points (and serve that purpose much better than hell knights)

ss nazi. I love barons, masterminds and pain elementals. Spectre would be my least favourite of the "regular" beasties too, for same reasons as Fonze.

The S.S. nazi soldier is tragically underutilized due to not fitting in with the rest of the monsters very well, and many have wished for there to have been made custom sprites for him so he could fit in better. I'm pretty sure there's been such things made, but I can't recall where.

Then there's the question of how useful the nazi is as an actual enemy, but I don't feel qualified to analyze that.

Commander Keen.

5 hours ago, DSC said:

Commander Keen.

But it is not a demon though.

Least useful, hmm maybe Hell Knights and Barons in small doses, quite easy to deal with on their own but are useful when it comes to infighting, they can help you save ammo.

The Zombiemen are too weak, ridiculously weak. They are useless.

In PSX Doom they do a bit more damage. I guess they realised how useless they are and wanted to buff them up since you can have a limited number of enemy types in that port because of the VRAM limitation. I was surprised when shot by *one* Zombieman for 20-25 damage and got pushed back!

I'm 90% sure the spectre only exists because it was a "different" enemy they could include in Doom Shareware with minimal code and no extra assets.

Still I think I agree with VGA about the Zombiemen. In small numbers you can practically ignore them, in large numbers they all kill each other.

SMM is up there, but I find lost souls to be the least useful. Spectres are also rarely useful. But although I can think of good spectre fights (sunlust map24 & 25) and good smm fights (stardate20x6 map05) I can't think of a single time that souls on their own (not PE-related) have created a fun or interesting situation for me.

People who answered baron or pain elemental are foolish and I hope they see the error of their ways.

28 minutes ago, Grain of Salt said:

I can't think of a single time that souls on their own (not PE-related) have created a fun or interesting situation for me.

pnano18.wad map02? There are still PEs, but enough non-PE lost souls to be a hassle.

Anyhow lost souls are kind of interesting from a demo point of view because you don't need to kill them for uvmax.

I'm not gonna pretend I'm an expert map designer or that I know the technical points of Doom enemies by any means, but I'd have to go for the Lost Soul.

I can't really think of any situations where Lost Souls on their own would be useful (unless mixed with other enemies, which I guess adds some extra challenge and something else to look out for, but for example the Lost Souls in E2M8 really don't add much when you're focusing on the Cyberdemon).

If I'm gonna put Lost Souls in a map, I'll have a Pain Elemental instead, since (I feel) there's something satisfying about killing the source of them for that area. Pain Elementals also add more incentive to take them out before they create more Lost Souls and eat all your ammo.

I also have to agree about the Spider Mastermind. She takes one fireball and suddenly she's focusing on that Imp halfway across the map.

Specter. All the enemies have their uses, but the specter is just a hard to see version of a pinky. And pinkies are just kind of irritating enemies to fight anyway, they're easy to kill in small groups, but the larger the group, the more likely they are to just push you into a corner. Or you just find a doorway, open it, chainsaw one, close it, rinse and repeat. They're not bad enemies, and they fill a nice, but having a semi-invisible version of the same enemy seems like overkill. 

I think in the contrary , SMM and lone lost souls are criminally underrated and underused. SMM can be deadly in large spaces and without BFG. Lost souls are flying pinkies , so they can deal a lot of damage and easily reach the player in most of cases.

Every monster can be useful.  It is the mapper who does not know how to place them effectively.

What about custom monsters? Those can also be poorly implemented or unlike vanilla monsters, inherently unfair by deisgn. A spiderdemon might be kind of a pain to use properly but at least it's not a bullshit monster to fight, unlike the Annihilator, a cyberdemon type monster that has twice as much health, the same attack pattern, except it shoots two homming rockets instead of regular ones, and each of those rockets do the same damage as a regular one. 

@Solmyr I think you're gonna love Scythe 2's Afrit and Stardate 20x7's custom flying Baron (whatever its name was) :p .

As for the topic, SS and the SMM, the latter particularly because you have to design around using it instead of the other way around, it's too impractical.