[SUBMISSION] Famine

Information
Name: Famine
Difficulty: Very Hard
Connection: Baron Of Hell
Summon: Famine
Melee: Yes
Distance: Projectile, Summon attack
Heal: Yes
Type: Magic Demon
Brightmaps: Yes
ACS: No
Actor modification: No

Credits
Code: Kan3
GLDefs: Kan3
Sounds: Kan3, Id Software
Sprites: Raven Software, Id Software
Sprite Edit: Kan3
Idea Base: Centaur from Hexen

Description
King of dearth and the devourer of the World,
it will drain mortals life with its hell fire and try to smash creatures
with its powerful fists. It is also able to summon the Hell Souls,
floating skulls engulfed in hell flames, that will rain from the sky and
explode on their targets.
Anyone approaching needs to be very careful when Famine gets injured,
because it will start ripping of its enemies life to heal itself!
It's very resistant to almost every weapon and that's the key...
If weapons do not work, perhaps your bare hands will!

Sprite
 

Download Link
Famine.zip

This dude sounds deadly AF. I'll test him out when I get a spare minute.

Gunslahyer_Pi wrote:

This dude sounds deadly AF. I'll test him out when I get a spare minute.

That would be great, ty! Cause I do have some tiny doubts about a couple of things

I like the concept of this monster and some of the mechanics of it. I like that it has two different healing states depending on how low health it has, one being a non-threatening healing state while the other damages the player as it heals. It gives it a nice feeling of the battle becoming progressively harder as the fight goes on, the monster fighting back more aggressively to stay alive. I also like the charge attack it does from time to time, giving the player a bit of a surprise seeing the normally slow moving monster suddenly zoom up to attack.
However, with that said, I do feel this monster is a bit off balanced. The amount of resistances to different damages it has is quite high, and with it having two healing states it's near impossible to kill it using any weapons even with full ammo. On the other hand it is very weak to melee attacks which I can see as being the balance factor to this monster, but with that I can just run up to it with a chainsaw or other fast-paced melee weapon and the monster is basically a huge pushover and no threat whatsoever. And while I do like the two different healing states for the feel of the fight becoming harder the lower its health drops, I feel that the healing is a bit too strong combined with the resistances. They erase any progression the player has made on the monster a bit too quickly.
I'd recommend lowering the resistances a bit to make non-melee weapons more viable, lower the pain chance for melee attacks so that it doesn't become a huge pushover if chainsawed, and lower the amount of healing on both of the healing states. This also might just be me, but I'd also not use the plasma sprites for the attack hit puffs. To me it just feels out of place considering this monster has more connections to hellfire and soul magic kind of atheistic rather than tech plasma.

Thanks for the testing!
What I had in mind with the melee weakness was a sort of counter to the healing, cause with the higher pain chance for that damage type, if a player wants to consistently stop him during the healing sequence he needs to punch him. That been said, I totally forgot that the freaking chainsaw deals melee damage! I'm really glad you pointed that out.
Now though I find myself in trouble x)  cause I don't know how to obtain this same effect, if I check if the player has the fist selected for the pain to happen, mod compatibility with other mods comes a bit less, on the other hand, reducing the pain chance could make hima punching bag while in the healing state.
Maybe I can find the right chance value, I'll make some testing, or perhaps add the NOPAIN flag after a certain amount of pain being triggered. Will see, and tweak resistances and healing amount too in process.
Also you might be right about the plasma sprite, cheap way to add a particle x) I'll see if I can replace it with some fire/fireball/explosion thing

Another great monster. My only gripes are appearance wise, I'm generally not a big fan of scaling up monster sprites that weren't made to look giant. Boss monsters don't necessarily need to be big, like Azazel , Terminator , Pyro Demon and the more recent Celt . I'd say it should be scaled down to 1.2 or 1.3. I also agree with doomedarchviledemon regarding the use of plasma puffs for attacks. There's also a stray white pixel on sprite FAMNL0.
Balance wise, considering its many resistances and healing attacks, I think it should have its life reduced to 2000 or 3000.

I like having a giant boss to fight, it gives a sense of oppression, though I'm not that skilled to make (or even properly upscale) decent sprites x)

I've taken into consideration every advice and here's the changes I made:

• Hp reduced to 4000
• Reduced healing for both Heal and Drain states (15-->10 and 20-->15)
• Increased damage dealt by killing Hell Souls (60-->80)
• Slightly reduces resistance to normal damage (0.35-->0.45)
• Reduced Melee pain chance (128-->96)
• Reduced size (2.0-->1.3)
• Changed the plasma puff (see below) and added a new puff for his archvile-like drain attack
• Added the NOPAIN flag during melee state
• Tweaked the Dash state (no more use of A_SkullAttack cause it was causing some issue)
• Added a sight check for the Dash to happen
• Little tweak for the flames spawned on death
• Erased wild white pixel

Here's the new particle: 

Alright, let me know what you think!

The reduced resistance to normal attacks and lowered max health definitely helps having the player gain some progression through the fight, however, I still feel that the healing is a bit too strong. Keep in mind that lowering the amount of health it regains isn't the only factor. The rate at which it regains health is also something to consider, and currently it heals itself very fast.
At its current rate it is regaining 10 health every 14 tics (about 20 per second) when in its healing state, and 15 health every 11 tics (about 30 per near-half a second) when in its draining state... if I am reading the code correctly and didn't miss anything that is. Still, that's quite a lot of healing in a very short amount of time and can still outpace a player's progression very quickly, especially as the fight goes on and their ammo starts to run low. It's a tricky balance but I think lowering the amount of health a tad more and/or maybe the healing rate a little higher might help.
I also think that both the healing and drain states trigger a bit too early. I think lowering the threshold to when these states become available to around 2000 for Heal and 750 for Drain might be better.
This is just my feelings on the balance so far though, I don't know how others feel about the current adjustments.

Every "feeling" is always welcomed, cause since I made the monster, I know how to handle him and fail to recognize off-balancing.
Now, about the healing rate I didn't want to lower it "too" much cause it would make the healing itself a negligible effect (imo), while I want it to be a fearful feature, that's why to balance it I added the "DamageMaster" to the Souls he spawns when a player kills them and the fact that they deal Melee damage, so have a high pain chance and therefore a high chance to make the monster abort the healing.
So goes for the doubled melee damage factor, a player can deal up to 400 dmg with a berserk fist and get out (almost) unscathed cause of the monster melee sequence being quite slow.
Well, that's what I had in mind, being able to transcribe it in a proper entity is a bit different x)
To "emphasize"  the soul "gimmick" and therefore the healing circle, I could make the souls deal another type of damage that has a 100% or near 100% chance to cause pain perhaps and maybe more damage.

About the hp threshold I think you're right, gonna adjust it immediatly

Minor update:

• reduced health threshold for the healing to happen (2500-->2000 and 1500-->1000)
• Reduced healing rate (+1 tic for Heal state and +2 for Drain state)
• Added a new damage type with a 100% pain chance triggered by killing Hell Souls