So exactly how does the Pinky fit in?

After years of Dooming, I've come to consider them more as meat bags designed to soak damage/distract you while other -more capable- monsters target you from afar, and also to disrupt infighting.

Come think of it, they are not particularly powerful in melee: they don't do significantly more damage than an imp, on average, if you factor in how ofter their attacks miss (which also makes them worthless at infighting, which results in them just chasing other monsters around and uselessly biting the air when they stop to attack and their targets just move on).

In more detail: if a Pinky catches friendly fire, he will mostly wander aimlessly if the attacker was on a ledge, or pointlessly chase him around missing most of its ultra-delayed melee attacks, while the attacker still concentrates on the player.

They are also quite easily dispatched by SG, SSG and berserker pack/chainsaw, to the point that a sudden Pinky flood has become a staple once the player picks up the chainsaw/berserker pack, and HAS to waste two minutes dispatching them one by one.

So, do they have any other uses other than fun gimmicks/distractions/meat shields? OK, I concede that Spectres (which are essentially the same monster) can be much more dangerous, and that in Nightmare mode they suddenly become a threat, but in normal play they feel pointless: they are going to be killed anyway, are hardly gonna be a threat, and all they do is take damage from the player and other monsters, fail to fight back, and die O_o

They are demon sergeants. They have a big mouth and aren't afraid of using it.

In the original plans, there would be stronger versions of them with a ranged attack -- some sort of floor-boiling magic or however Tom Hall described it.

Mostly, though, they're dumb and their only tactical value is in their ability to impede the player's movement by surrounding him. This is why Doom II started using them in big hordes instead of having just a handful here and there like Doom "1" did.

They're there to occasionally kill spiderdemons in packs... or even singlehandedly

As long as i have the ammo i don't mind them being there just to give me something to shoot at.

The problem is that they are slow and have limited movement, contrary to the other melee monster in game, lost soul, that can be a pain. As Gez said, I think they work better in groups. I always thought of map where you have to run from a huge group of demons, solving little puzzles to open doors, raise bridges and stuff like that, before they reach you. Maybe some day.

The hounds of hell. Work better in packs, swarming the player. When they do get you cornered, they can put a hurtin on ya.

PRIMEVAL said:

The hounds of hell. Work better in packs, swarming the player. When they do get you cornered, they can put a hurtin on ya.

This reminds me of being cornered by specters in a dark room and not knowing what was hitting me until it was too late. :(

Darch said:

The problem is that they are slow and have limited movement

This is one of the main reasons I almost always play with -fast. With "normal" settings they are annoyingly slow.

Maes said:
So, do they have any other uses other than fun gimmicks/distractions/meat shields?

I'm not sure if this counts as a fun gimmick, but they can be used to good effect as rewards - downing a pinky with a single SSG (and multiple pinkies, one after the other) is one of the most satisfying actions in DOOM - in large part, I think, due to the sound sequence - and so it's one of the key things that a mapper can offer the player when constructing their cycles of punishment and reward.

myk said:

They're there to occasionally kill spiderdemons in packs... or even singlehandedly

Or cybs. But masterminds are extremely vulnerable to demons! Plutonia 2 map27 is a pretty good example, the spider almost never wins.

They are a very threatening kind of enemy in -fast monsters. Especially in Doom 1 and/or in big packs.

durian said:

[b]I'm not sure if this counts as a fun gimmick, but they can be used to good effect as rewards - downing a pinky with a single SSG (and multiple pinkies, one after the other) is one of the most satisfying actions in DOOM

Well, that's a special kind of gimmick -a "gamism" if you will. Of course it's satisfying to down them, hence the practically RNG-guaranteed 1-shot SSG kill, the easy stunning by the chainsaw (hey, after all, you need to find some MEAT!), and the hordes deliberately released each time you pick up a chainsaw or berserker pack -which, incidentally, can just one-hit kill them). This is also part of what makes Doom so fun to play.

But IMO, this still boils down to a gimmick: they are there just to get slaughtered by the dozens or even hundreds, just so that the player can get a satisfying "hunt" :-)

In this sense, they are not much different than semi-feral, purpose-breeded prey animals released in game reserves, e.g. wild boars.

It still leaves the question open if it's indeed possible to use them in a more strategic way, other than blocking the player's view and line of fire.

PRIMEVAL said:

The hounds of hell. Work better in packs, swarming the player. When they do get you cornered, they can put a hurtin on ya.

Agree. Despite my years of Dooming, I still suck. I usually get cornered by a pack of them. Sometimes there's hitscanners (usually chaingunners) shooting me from high platforms far away to make these situations worse. The only ways out for me is to either die, hurt myself by shooting a rocket, or wasting cell ammo with the BFG.

Sometimes I use them as mobile cover. I may run alongside a pinky or two and let them soak up a fireball from a baron that I can't avoid. All the while, I may be picking off some hitscanners that are chipping away at my health. Once they've served their purpose, I will finish them off and move on to the baron. This is just one way I use them to my advantage.

Well, the pinky is the last finger on a human hand. It fits right on the end after the ring finger.

hisss*snort!*sss...!

Yeah, this thread got me thinking of what a flying Pinky might play like. Turns out it plays like a poor man's caco in the little test map I souped up. Still just cannon fodder.

Still kinda cute, though. :3

schwerpunk said:

hisss*snort!*sss...!

Yeah, this thread got me thinking of what a flying Pinky might play like. Turns out it plays like a poor man's caco in the little test map I souped up. Still just cannon fodder.

Still kinda cute, though. :3

That'd make a great avatar. :3

I'm not the first person to say that arch-vile(s) and many demons can be a devastating combo. Unlike with imps,revenants,barons,cacos, (put your non-special monster here) you can't use this tactic:

              PLAYER      -   ARCH-VILE    <----- hit scan or projectile   -    MONSTER
                              ATTACKING

Yeah. One of the Community Chest maps had an area with two archviles and a horde of demons. Man, did I have to reload a lot for that. It was a devastating combination.

That's the first thing I thought, but still falls in the "blocking the player's view and line of fire" department, I think.

schwerpunk said:

hisss*snort!*sss...!

Yeah, this thread got me thinking of what a flying Pinky might play like. Turns out it plays like a poor man's caco in the little test map I souped up. Still just cannon fodder.

Still kinda cute, though. :3

Oh hey, its Serious Sam

Pinkies are dangerous in packs! A lot of slaughter maps utilize them because they have pretty quick juking abilities, and in large packs tend to back players into corners much better than most other monsters. They're often good as distractions from a much more potentially dangerous threat, since they get all up in your face, while a pain elemental could be spitting out tons of lost souls, or a chaingun guy or archvile could snipe you out from afar.

I cant stop laughing about the "dont quote images" thing appearing, over a tiny image. Well done, the replacement image is bigger!

I think they're as worthless as imps, especially in Doom 2. But otherwise I don't consider their role as meatshields worthless. I've never encountered demons and thought "oh, this is just silly".

Their melee-only attack makes them appear intelligent too, especially on nightmare, where they always seem to intercept you if you try to run past them.

I remember in Doom's E3M1 (Hell Keep) there's that cramped and narrow corridor with the Pinkies that run AWAY from you lol.

Pinkies: HE GUNNA KILL US!

Doomguy: Hey get back here!

space. they have good uses for restricting player movement.

In a slaughter context they also make good meat shields: ex. plasma your way into a pack of them while waiting for other monsters to infight or relocate.

So most opinions seem to converge on that they are essentially sacrificial space hogs/view blockers/meat shields, while not particularly formidable per-se. Even if a player gets literally cornered by them, they still have to attack one by one, thus leading to yet another 100-in-1 pile of chainsawed demon corpses. They only really chew on a player if they manage to actually surround him, not just corner him.

If their melee attack was not as delayed and their pain chance wasn't so high, they'd be much more dangerous: even chainsawing an imp is more dangerous in terms of potential retaliation.

Often, pinkies aren't about dealing direct damage as much as adding another ball to the bunch you're already juggling so you finally make a mistake, i.e. by moving right in the trajectory of another projectile as you back away from a pinky chomp, or forcing you into a position when taking a good shot is harder.

RL and BFG, the two most devastating weapons in ideal conditions, can see that potential significantly lessened from a simple melee meatshield; and the pinky's relative harmlessness makes it possible to use them liberally for that purpose.

Besides, as easy as they might be to dodge, it's still possible to slip up. No matter how high your probability for success in dodging a pinky is, it's never quite 100%, and the more attempts you take the more likely you are to fail. It's unexpected damage, but in a good way; not dumb randomness caused by a dice rolling against you, but a mistake of your own resulting in punishment.

Also add we're not playing Doom in a large square box room against a lone monster. Pinkies can come from your blind spot, from behind architecture, can get to you while you're focused on other monsters, etc.. For you to chainsaw 100 pinkies to death with your back against a corner, there has to be a corner to start with.

Edit: actually, this sounded like a fun map idea. So here goes: BMLWINC (Boom compatible) (v2)

Demons started out as the "toughies" of Knee Deep in the Dead, and I think we all have childhood memories of how scary they were back then when all you had was a peashooter or maybe a shotgun. But yeah, now they're way too slow and their attack way to easy to predict to be much of a challenge.

They should come in hordes!

Speaking seriously, I think Pinkies may be one of the most iconic demons (lower-case 'd') of Doom, especially to people who haven't played the game as much as we have. For instance, it was only after I got into mapping, that I knew one could juke them so effectively, even when surrounded by a horde! Like many others, I used to find them terrifying rather than endearing, and so they left quite an impression upon me.

That said, getting surrounded is still a uniquely 'oh fuck me, this is bad' experience, especially when one is low on ammunition!

P.S. agreed on the 'coming in hordes' bit. At least unless they aren't just there to serve as an ammo sink (guilty).
P.P.S. speaking subjectively as a community, I think Hissy is probably the most iconic to intermediate-and-up Doomers.
P.P.P.s so I'm pretty into Decorate these days - how best might one reinvigorate his Pinky (I ask for a friend of mine...)? Perhaps add in a second type of Archvile that freezes the player instead of lighting them aflame? After all, movement is the player's primary defense against these and other mobs.
P.P.P.P.S. pardon the improper use of post-scripts. :P