Episode 3 of Heretic - Heresiarch?

Is it just me, or is the thing you see at the end of episode 3 of Heretic look a lot more like the Heresiarch than Korax? It is implied in the text that it should be the second Serpent Rider but the Heresiarch isnt a Serpent Rider is he?

I've wondered about this myself. Maybe it's just a teaser or ominous hint at what's to come, kind of like how Doom's E3 ends with the player facing a burning city and Daisy's head on a pike? I'm not really sure how far Raven was in development for Hexen at the time, so it's hard to say.

Off the top of my head: probably the thing designed is a new monster idea they came into, which was later shaped into the Heresiarch. However, I'm not documented to Heresiarch's concept history.

Could have also been another serpent rider, before they thought something else.

It may lead uninformed SOtSR players to think he's D'Sparil's presumed commander from the expansion.

This has been discussed in several previous threads actually. IIRC Raven has actually confirmed that the Heresiarch was originally the design for Korax, but that they chose to demote him because he was too similar to D'Sparil and they wanted something bigger. It is very curious that the Heresiarch's Seminary is placed, in terms of MAPxy numbers, after the fourth hub maps. It seems pretty likely to me that this was going to be the end of the game at some point.

The funny thing is that the Heresiarch would have made a better final boss than Korax did. Isn't the Heresiarch one of the strongest monsters in a Doom engine game, not counting the Entities from Strife?

I've always found him rather easy.

I mean, it was tough at first, especially when I'd whap him with the quietus only to gib myself, then I realized how you could tell when he's got his repulsion spell on.

Korax as an individual entity wouldn't be very tough, but some of the scripts he casts can cause major problems.

And yes it's the Heresiarch.

Both the Heresiarch and Korax are jokes for boss monsters.

The only difficulty with the Heresiarch is to figure out how he ticks. Once you got that it's just hiding behind the pillars to wait until he is vulnerable and then unload your weaponry on him. If you blindly fire at him while he is invulnerable you will run out of ammo rather quickly though.

Korax should have had at least a means to overcome a player's invulnerability. Normally you will have 2 Icons of the Defender at that point which is enough to blast him to hell without ever getting in any real danger. Normally I manage to finish him off so quickly that he never gets to execute his deadly scripts.

Graf Zahl said:

The only difficulty with the Heresiarch is to figure out how he ticks.

I have tackled him so rarely that I haven't actually figured that out. How does he tick? What are the clues? I'm guessing those spinning cubes?

Personaly I like to think that the red demon at the end of Heretic is Eidolon. I also were working in a Hexen mod (never completed) where it was the creator/master/father of the Serpent Riders (not Eidolon), its sprites were going to be modified Heresiarch.

About the bosses, I like to make them a challange, I never use weapon 4, or power ups (except mana and health some times), I never hide when the Heresiarch uses his reflective spell, and I neither in the lateral rooms in the Dark Crucible. I attack a bit but wait until Korax open the door to the Dark Bishops, and he spawn some monster ghosts (these translusent ones), then I kill the minions and only then Korax, but at a low rate.

More or less the same I do when playing original E2M8 and E3M8.

But yeah I wish they were as hard as Hexen II's monsters.

Enjay said:

I have tackled him so rarely that I haven't actually figured that out. How does he tick? What are the clues? I'm guessing those spinning cubes?

If he is invunerable he has 2 purple blobs spinning around him. You have to wait until the blobs are gone and then unload everything you got onto him. Normally you will be able to do a lot of damage until his next attack cycle is complete and he gets invulnerable again. But each time he will be completely harmless in the mean time because his attacks take so long to start.

It really is a boring and tedious fight that requires no real skill except from hiding behind some pillar so that he doesn't start any more attacks than absolutely avoidable.

Enjay said:

I have tackled him so rarely that I haven't actually figured that out. How does he tick? What are the clues? I'm guessing those spinning cubes?

The Heresiarch uses four spells: reflective shield, a sweeping attack (fairly weak unless you sit there and let all of the purple balls hit you), bouncing homing skulls (also fairly weak), and dark bishop summoning. When he first wakes up, he'll be vulnerable. Chances are he'll use the reflective shield. You'll see a couple of small purple spheres orbiting his midsection. He'll then either use the purple ball spell or the bouncing skulls (much less likely). If he has the shield active, he won't use it again until it wears off, so there will be times when he's vulnerable again. When his health gets down to less than half, he starts summoning dark bishops. When he finally dies, those cubes orbiting his head will fly off and bounce around and then explode. Their explosions are far more dangerous than any of his other attacks.

And the speed of his "spell casting" animation turns faster, I'm not sure if it's when his health start decressing, or with the pass of the time (I think this is the pattern).

Vegeta said:

And the speed of his "spell casting" animation turns faster, I'm not sure if it's when his health start decressing, or with the pass of the time (I think this is the pattern).

No. That's a bug, actually. The first time he wakes up, the cubes start spinning like usual, but if he goes to the alert frame again (i.e. when he starts attacking an enemy that hit him), the whole process starts again. Since the cubes are already spinning, this makes them spin faster, which ends up shortening his spell casting time. It also means more cubes than the usual 3 will fly off when he dies.

I thought that the boss was D’Sparil. He is easy to beat with the ethereal arrows and two tomes. Just beat the lizard with the pea shooters, hidden in the secret.
Eidolon is the Hexen II boss (the red devil), isn’t he?

Quasar said:

but that they chose to demote him because he was too similar to D'Sparil and they wanted something bigger.

This has always really aggravated me. The second serpent rider is supposed to be similar to the first, and it was always perfectly obvious from the start that the Heresiarch was meant to be the bad dude and Korax just the beastie. I always considered it as an excuse to cop out on the two extra boss monsters that could have been in the game. Like maybe a big Iron Golem defending the castle throne, and maybe even a Lich placed in there somewhere.

Eidolon in Hexen 2 was even worse. After struggling through an exceptionally dull game to find that the only awesome level was right at the end, and after fighting four dudes riding on horseback because they ran out of ideas to steal from DnD, he turns out to be a stupid red devil man that gets really big when you make him mad. They could have at least given him a beastie to ride on, seeing as it worked for the other bosses.

Please try to set more descriptive titles on any future threads you make. Thanks :-)

fraggle said:

Please try to set more descriptive titles on any future threads you make. Thanks :-)

Sorry. I think that the Heresiarch is a much cooler boss monster than Korax. Personally I hate the way Korax looks. He just looks big and klunky and stupid while the whole hooded figure motif of D,Sparil, Heresiarch and the dark minions of Heretic and Hexen are a much better theme for the serpent riders. By the way, why is D'Sparil the only Serpent Rider who rides a serpent?

Because 'Serpent Riders' sounds cool even if it doesn't make a whole lot sense.

Graf Zahl said:

Korax should have had at least a means to overcome a player's invulnerability.

He sorta does, actually. One of the scripts he uses will cause a line of spikes to rise from the floor which can kill you instantly, regardless of invincibility. I know being able to get around the icon's powers with any attack would have made him more effective, though (I just saved every icon I found in the game just to see how many I could collect by the end of the game, same case with much of the game's artifacts).

I wanted to see more wads use Korax since scripts could potentially be very dangerous if used right. I'll have to agree that the Heresiarch is a better boss overall, though.

As for Hexen II... oh brother, I was around when the whole "snail boss" joke was started by Raven.

Vile said:

He sorta does, actually. One of the scripts he uses will cause a line of spikes to rise from the floor which can kill you instantly, regardless of invincibility.

He never gets that far before I manage to kill him. And since it's just one row they are easy to avoid anyway.

Graf Zahl said:

He never gets that far before I manage to kill him.

Yeah, me too.

Spase said:

(...)why is D'Sparil the only Serpent Rider who rides a serpent?

I can hardly imagine Korax riding anything.

Now you can...

I still can't. It looks like that serpent is about to keel over.

I think all of the Serpent Riders are, or at least were at some time, capable of appearing in humanoid form. The backstory to Heretic says that three *men* rode from the west on serpents and quelled the wars, winning the worship of the seven nations. Not a man, a horribly disfigured beast, and a giant red demon. They are extremely powerful sorcerers, and what sorcerer cannot change form?

Mindless Rambler said:

Now you can...

Rofl, I can see that thing come out and trip face-first into the ground when it gets to the first step in the map.

Hahah, indeed.

On the more serious side, the use of certain kinds of magic are frequently said to corrupt the user. Korax seems to employ a good deal of necromancy and other black arts, so perhaps his form has gradually grown twisted and evil as his power has increased. Keep in mind he is able to control almost every mind on Cronos through the three leaders he seduced into his service.

That being said, imagine the Heresiarch riding on top of a beast that looks like Korax -- now THAT would be something formidable indeed. I wonder if Korax originated as a mount for the Heresiarch as the second Serpent Rider?

Howcome he can say "Greetings mortal" in a perfect human voice, but when you battle him he bombards your face with WWWWWWWWEEEEERRRRRRHHHH!!!!!!!!

Even D'psarils voice is better that Korax's, and he can only talk backwards. :P

Korax would look well over a skeletal beast (I once made a sprite using the skeleton version of Cerberus from Blood and looked good).

I find the transformation of the enviroment to be more unique than the reflective spell. Now give both habilities to the same character, and you will create a true monster.

I think Hexen really needs an extra boss for the fourth hub, even a trio of minotaurs would do the trick. And the three masters really need to be more inmune to the artifacts (some extra speed wouldn't hurt neither, nor some extra missile damage to Zedek's Quietus).


The only bad thing about the Heretic/Hexen series is that the higher bosses have so much plot behind them that they look out of place in most pwads.

DJShrimpy said:

Howcome he can say "Greetings mortal" in a perfect human voice, but when you battle him he bombards your face with WWWWWWWWEEEEERRRRRRHHHH!!!!!!!!

Telepathy, or something. Who knows?

It would be pretty sad if he said anything in the battle, since he's so easy to squish like an overgrown cockroach. I would be surprised if he even got off two "I WILL CRUSH YOU, MORTAL!"'s .. or whatever.

Here's Omega Korax from that cheezy Hexen mod I slapped together. Note that in the game, he's 2x as big (512 pixels tall). I made him for the express reason that the original Korax is such an easy kill.