I don't think it would work in Quake. The doctor would be dead in seconds - he'd never reach a downed enemy. 

This idea is somewhat related to what Zwiffle said...

I once thought that the scattered gibs of Shubby could turn into smaller, bud-like forms of the Hell Mother -- but with little nubs for tentacles -- still lacking movement and having only the defensive ability to repel non-melee attacks, leaving the Quake axe or the Quoth hammer as the only effective weapons against it. In combat, it would give an added "push" to grenades / nails / rockets / monsters in its vicinity causing extra unpredictability in already tense fighting situations.

Or maybe something similar to a Shrieker in Dungeons and Dragons: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/alumni_shrieker1st.jpg 

Something like a HellKnight or a DeathLord or something. Imagine an enemy with a crazy projectile attack, like fireballs or something, some sort cool coat and armour, and also a savage mele attack.

A room with a hoard of Knights that could be easily taken down, and then two fo these Apothecarys turn up, and whilst you battle one, the other has healing the downed knights as a higher priority than attacking you. 

I'd like to suggest that the apothecary get an appropriate weapon, probably a polearm as those are large enough to be memorable in close combat. Probably a scythe or lochaber axe, the lochaber axe being preferred if the apothecary is supposed to be good at combat.

The crazy projectile attack should serve the purpose of suppression. If one is trying to give the other time to revive enemies, then make that attack more of a "threat" than an actual danger. It'll be easy to avoid but only if you stay the hell away. If you start getting close and it does that attack, you can expect to be damaged severely. (Unless, of course, you can close the distance fast enough to get it into melee.)

Melee should, IMO, be a combo attack to make shambler-dancing possible but either risky or with awkward timing (depending on the risks the player is willing to take).

Lastly, I'd like to say they should be exceptionally weak to melee. That's your ticket to killing the bastards, an axe in the face. That would make them fearsome, but not a total hindrance to someone willing to take the risk of some damage.

I really do enjoy the idea of armor under a long coat, maybe with a hood too (sort of like the Necromancer of Hexen 2).

Of course, these are all just suggestions, albeit exceptionally in-depth ones, for an idea that doesn't even belong to me. Hope Ricky doesn't mind that I sprinted away with the concept so fast that we crossed the Pacific in ten minutes. (If you do, sorry.) 

Another suggestion, before I forget, although I don't know if it's possible in Quake: a "swarm" enemy, where every individual enemy will be killed by a single shotgun pellet and do very little damage, but you're facing, like, 30 of them at any given moment. And they're fast.

--Cait 

Thats pretty much exactly the kinda idea I had.

I mean TBH im no monster designer, just a daft Quake mapper who comes up with daft ideas sometimes but rarely follows through with them.

'Twas a good idea though methinks ;)

I mean there will be people reading this (hopefully) who do make monsters and know how to code them and stuff.

Problem is I can think of a few reasons why this could be difficult do 'do' in Quake:
1 - it would meddle with the killcount. I would say that a revived monster could either count as one more overall count, or on revivng a moster the killcount would drop by one, to be raised again if the moster was killed again.
2 - Navigation - How does the apothecary know not to kill the opponent if the other one is fighting the player......

(lol "stream of consciousness")

cutting myself short - if the one which is on revivng duty wanders off to earlier parts of the map healing loads of corpses, is may or may not know when to stop, but wouldnt it be cool having monsters coming back towards the player from earlier parts of the map. When they are revived they are already aware of the player and (lol Quake AI) running towards him.

Imagine the glorious chaos...... !!! 

Well it could be just as simple as attacking the player, check to see if there's any corpse in a 128 units radius (or something), if so try to revive it, attack player. Something like that.

Then it doesn't have to run off to find corpses. You can spawn a medic at the beginning if you needed the player to go back through there again.

You could solve the kill count a number of ways - going over the kill count (200/25 kills!), killing the monster once is the only kill that counts (not sure if that's possible) or adding another monster to the total number of kills, etc, as you've said.

Or the medic could just spawn a monster using a corpse - ie uses the monster's soul to spawn a ghoul or something different. 

I don't know how coding works in Quake, so I'm going from what little knowledge I have of scripting and etc in other games.

It might need to be set up so if the player is "targeted" by one, it triggers a switch/flag/whatever that is shared by both of their AI routines, which sets the second apothecary to ignore the player and simply attend to healing duties. You could also make pairs of apothecaries be controlled somehow by just one AI routine, so that you could have, say, 4 apothecaries with two attacking and two healing. I'm not sure if this is possible, but if it is, similar routines could be used for other "cooperative" monsters, including my swarm-enemy idea.

Oh, an idea just came to mind, could the apothecaries be set to be immune to in-fighting, given their place as healers? Perhaps they could only infight with the (clearly mindless) zombies, making that a possible way to deal with them if the player has too low health/ammo to do so directly?

As for monsters able to be revived... I dunno, I'd limit it. I can easily see if you activate the apothecaries, but don't see them and walk out of the room... you could quickly have literally the entire goddamn level biting your ass before you can blink. This gets worse in Quoth. And it could get to the level of literal impossibility in a Quoth "miniboss-rush" style level.

Lastly, regarding the monster kill-count thing, I want to say revival would subtract from the kill counter so that killcounts would still have some kind of meaning. But at the same time, I think you deserve SOME reward for beating the same vore in a tiny room 4 times in a row. 

I like the uber-damage medic idea, although it does seem like they'd need to be forced use in groups (with, as Ricky points out, code to work as a team), else they'd merely be high dmg, weak def enemies when used alone (and there're already those in Quoth).

I'm not dismissing the idea, it's very good, I just think you'd also need a more 'solo' medic monster, possibly something with high survivability but low dmg that prioritises ressing monsters over attacking the player. It'd give the mapper more variety of situations/monster groupings to use it in (depending on the numbers of high dmg monsters grouped with it and their relative damage absorbion the threath/'kill priority' of the player would vary more than with the Apothecary) 

These are supposed to be high def, middling-damage healers. The damage is only dangerous if you let it be dangerous (e.g. are an idiot), but avoiding it means letting the other one heal other nasties to its hearts content. They're supposed to take awhile to kill unless you get right in their face and chop it off. But yes, I agree they'd probably be forced to work as a team. 

Heh, posts while posting...

But at the same time, I think you deserve SOME reward for beating the same vore in a tiny room 4 times in a row.

Possibly have respawned enemies drop small health packs rather than their normal ammo drops. Certainly I agree beating the same enemies several times deserves increased reward, although there is the 'risk' of players farming relatively easy, respawning enemies if they drop extra items.

And Quoth has a fast, weak swarm enemy in the Vorelings. 

How about one with low health and damage, but taking from a previous suggestion of mine: extreme speed? Runs like hell away from the player, ressing anything it can get its hands on, but it only takes one good SSG blast to put the damn thing down. Problem of course, being that you'll have a hell of a time getting that good SSG blast in. 

THe vorelings don't seem to follow the same idea as what I mean. They take two shots from an SSG to put down, do decent damage, and only appear in groups of roughly 5-6 to my knowledge. I'm talking enemies sort of like the Parasites from Metroid Prime: great, huge swarms of little things that can barely touch you and you can kill pretty much by running into them, enemies where the ONLY danger comes from the sheer numbers. 

Keeping it simple could have its advantages from a practical point of view.
Imagine an enemy as tough as a shambler, suddenly arrives in a room you just cleared and starts reviving the corpses whilst you try and kill it. It ignores your attacks and keeps on bringing back the other dead foes. And as it revives more and more dead enemies you are forced to attack them rather than it. And as you kill them, it keeps bringing them back multiple times. The player would have to adjust its tactics to "avoiding the attacks of the minions/other enemies and concentrating fire on the apothecary until its dead" 

Yeh, seen. Was going off of Ricky's initial description, didn't see the bit about making the attack a suppressive threat rather than a damaging attack. Same effect on gameplay then, and the team idea makes for an interesting element to what is effectively one monster.

Unfortunately I'm not a coder either, but I imagine it'd be relatively easy to code AI for 'just' healing if the monster is in a team of it's own (either through design or death of the other apothecary(ies)) 

I don't know. That's not quite what I saw, Ricky, I saw the apothecaries being intelligent and working together in a way that suggests that. Maybe that could be their behavior when alone? 

I think that would work. Almost nothing for humanoids (including ogres) because it's simple to kill those without sustaining any damage. Possibly just half of the ammo normally dropped when they die. Stronger humanoids (Quoth assholes and Death Lord) maybe drop 5-10 health packs, along with weaker non-human enemies.

For stronger enemies, possibly 25 health packs, or even 50 health packs for exceptional badasses (e.g. the gug). 

This blob basically became the Q1 medic - he's about 1/4 built in terms of code and needs the mesh reeporting to fix the Quake UV's.

He's got a reasonable health count (two rockets to kill) but also undead recovery - so five seconds after non gib death he revives.

His ranged attack is basically four zombie gibs - this needs to be fixed to be a scatter attack, making him more likely to hit but with lower average damage. Like all RMQ monsters he aims with Z in mind, so can hit targets above or below him.

He's weak against the chainsaw (which is the undead buster) which will gib him after some sustained sawing.

There is no infighting amongst undead.

The features not yet in:

Revival - eats corpses transforming the remains into zombies.

Eats heads, storing them as maggot ammo.

Devour - a very slow melee attack that causes massive damage. This is supposed to be defensive, used against players who melee other targets near the vomitus.

So the vomitus is a cross between an artillery monster and a medic - he's more interested in corpses as the player but will spam chuck when he's got nothing better to do. Rockets or the Cauteriser (Q1 Railgun) will work at long distance or the chainsaw up close - anything else will just have him revive like a zombie. His final specials are the maggot ammo (earned for eating heads, produces a handful of maggots on hit) and devour melee which is slow but a nasty surprise to any player being even slower.

Maggots are worth a mention since they follow the earlier comments about swarm creatures. We actually have something called trap_swarm which releases a cloud of wasps when activated which hit for 1 damage and ignore armour.

They move in a flocking pattern, and only lack one feature - to ignore the undead, which causes some goofy stuff. A 'fear' reaction in other monsters would be funny, but will have to wait

The maggots work more like monsters (movement only, they don't affect the killcount), but otherwise have the same profile 1 damage, ignoring armour. They basically crawl towards the player relentlessly. They can be shot, but if touched then the damage is done and the maggot removed.

Monster drops: We've got these with both armour shards and small health's (5) them all being linked model wise to the world type - medievel, base or runic.

An apothecary is an interesting idea, but for us it'd be repetition to have two creatures capable of revival. Another type for knights - Chaplain. Whilst alive he incites other creatures (all of whom get a special effect) to do more damage in melee and move faster. 

Vomitus in the title there. 

The apothecary is a personal preference, and it'd be cool if it made it into other mods, so I don't think the discussion was wasted (I'm going to be compiling it into a cohesive notepad doc here in a bit).

As for your mod, what about my earlier suggestion of the wall-crawling slug beast? Usually placed on really, really high ceilings, blends in with the architecture (which might require multiple colorations to work properly). Quick, quiet ranged attacks that do a slightly below-average amount of damage but can be fired in relatively rapid succession (making it dangerous to try to get a bead on it). Initially it doesn't move, but when attacked it will start to crawl down the wall toward the player, gaining speed as it loses health. If it reaches the player, it detonates for a large amount of damage. 

The attacks would be hitscan but they'd also lag slightly behind the player. 

it would be kind of cool to give a monster regenerating shields.

it would work just like halo or any of those ww2 games. shield points would go down as it took damage (this could be represented with a series of skins that progressively get darker or something (or with entity alpha getting more and more transparent)) but if the monster didn't take damage for maybe 5 seconds, it would begin to slowly regenerate back to full and the player would have to begin damaging it all over again.

you get 3 alternatives with that:
1. lots of shields, very little health.
pretty much when you get through the shields, it dies.
2. decent shields, decent health
probably the most annoying because it would both take a not-insignificant amount of time to take down the shields and then be expected to do the same for the health.
3. low shields, high health
the is probably the most favourable of the options available.
you are penalized for leaving the monster alone, but not as badly as in option 2. at most, you'd have to break through another 50 points of shields before getting back to work on the monster's health. 

Well we've got plans for a hanging (Voreling style) spawnflag for the Spawn . . . although I know that's not what you mean.

We have to be careful with new introductions since we're revising everything, but the wall crawling you mention could easily be applied to existing creatures - the maggot seems a reasonable candidate. The Fiend has been considered as well, but the organic buzzsaw is still tabled for now about how it will be remade.

Shields make me think again of a tank type enemy, though not necessarily mechanical 

 

I just had an epiphany.

The Apothecaries could be our turret monsters.

Say their ranged attack is slow and, perhaps, very lightly homing until it passes the player. It does LOADS of damage, but it's sort of easy to dodge. The attacking Apothecary, IMO, wouldn't move except to block the player from getting to the healer one -- but both Apothecaries would be capable of some pretty damn fast speeds when they DID move.

This makes one's role as "defender" more useful, as it can, with the right amount of speed, actually take long range sniper-rockets for the sake of the healer. Furthermore, it means that running away from the apothecaries isn't necessarily a working tactic because they'll follow -- and fast. This makes them multipurpose enemies, a VERY big danger. A pair of apothecaries and a room full of corpses could be easily equal to a gug or a full-on boss in terms of pure "WTFPWNtential".

At the same time, a brave enough player won't have much trouble plastering both of them, adding a strategic layer to their encounters -- do you have enough health/the balls to axe them or enough ammo to scrap them at range?

With this set-up they work VERY well as end-of-episode minibosses. Have a gauntlet of normal enemies in a big room initially, setting you up for (after all enemies are dead) the appearance of two apothecaries, who immediately show up their rather frail appearances with punishing hails of returned enemies and slow-but-hard-to-keep-track-of balls of pure condensed pain. The panic... it's almost PALPABLE.

--Caitie, the -evil- game designer