HP: 12
Protection: 0
Ranged Accuracy: +3
Melee Accuracy: +3
Ranged Damage: 2d5 Fire
Blast Radius: 1
Melee Damage: 1d3 (+2) Melee
Speed: 105%
Inventory: Nothing.
Experience: 32
Danger: 2
Minimum floor: 1
Maximum floor: 17
Experience per Danger: 16

Can open doors and has 25% Fire resistance.

Evasion: Base of 50%, +5% per tile of distance, making for a maximum of 90%

Attack Chance: 40%

The Imp, much like in classic Doom, is the basic demon enemy with non-hitscan projectiles who thus is generally less threatening than the zombies with guns you normally encounter first. In Doom Roguelike's system, this is represented by having Imps be very susceptible to the Dodge system, where they have a minimum 55% chance to mis-target Doomguy if he keeps moving.

Also, I should explain this 'Speed' stat on enemies, because it's not what you'd expect from eg digging around on the wiki. Enemies in Doom Roguelike don't use modifiers to time taken (Or more precisely, to Energy spent) the way most of Doomguy's time-interaction-modifiers work, but rather have different Energy generation, just like Berserk and the Scout's innate quickness. This has less innate jank to it than when that behavior is applied to Doomguy, but still means it can be a bit of a headache to wrap your head around how Doomguy's actions will compare against enemies whose Speed is anything other than 100%.

Imps having 105% Speed is one of the more subtly wonky cases, because it's such a small value that the overwhelming majority of the time an Imp is indistinguishable from an enemy with 100% Speed, but over 20 game seconds it will be 1 second 'ahead' of a no-modifiers Doomguy, resulting in random-feeling (But not actually random) moments where an Imp gets two turns in a row, or acts before Doomguy's next action when most of the time Doomguy would've gone first.

Also, the Imp is representative of a non-obvious quirk to how several ranged enemies are designed: their melee damage is designed to be roughly equivalent to their ranged damage, even while cleaving to that odd rule of 'roll a d3 and modify the result by a fixed number'. That is, an Imp's ranged attack is 2-10 damage, while its melee attack is 3-5 damage, but an Imp's ranged attack largely ends up rolling in the vicinity of 5 damage in the first place, so the result is that the melee damage is only a bit lower on average.

This exact implementation is opaque from the player's end and so some of its implications are very counterintuitive. First of all, because the tuning is for the average damage to be similar, but with melee ranges having tighter damage ranges, this makes melee combat against such enemies generally more predictable than ranged combat, especially since (most) ranged enemies will always attack Doomguy if in melee range but only might elect to fire when there's space between them and Doomguy. Second, for a few of the later-game enemies, this has the result that they can trigger Berserker with their ranged attack but not their melee attack. (eg Barons of Hell) Third, Angel of Max Carnage runs forcing all damage rolls to be max at all times makes 'get in melee range to reduce enemy damage output' much more absolute of a rule, because it no longer matters whether the average damage of an enemy's melee and ranged attacks are similar.

Outside Angel of Max Carnage, though, closing to melee with an Imp actually tends to improve their damage output, simply because they'll launch attacks much more consistently and don't have to worry about Dodge checks anymore, contrasting heavily with the zombie enemies who are pathetic at melee combat.

On that note, I should point out that melee attacks are a case where the game has oddly misleading audio, in that enemies have specific noises for attacking in melee (Pulled from classic Doom, of course) that play regardless of whether the attack hits or misses, even though in most cases the audio sounds very specifically like a hit. This applies to the player attacks too, for that matter, so make sure you pay attention to the text logs and/or check if your target's HP description changed, rather than assuming you hit just because you heard the punch impact sound or the Chainsaw revving or whatever.

Also, I covered this in the Boots and fluids post, but I should once again point out that Imps will in fact survive Lava for a turn (Or two turns, down on I'm Too Young To Die) thanks to their innate resistance to Fire damage.

On a more general note, something I'd like to point out is that Doom Roguelike's AI really prefers to move diagonally when it's unaware of Doomguy's position. It kind of stands out: I'm used to games that allow diagonal movement having a noticeable preference toward orthogonal movement when it comes to pathfinding and AI doing its thing. Even the 'when unaware of Doomguy's position' thing is sort of misleading, in that the AI defaults pretty heavily to moving diagonally until it's horizonal or vertical coordinate is within one tile of Doomguy's, at which point it goes orthogonally because diagonal movement wouldn't accomplish anything. (Well, it would accomplish things since Doomguy's ranged attacks are subject to Dodge, but the AI pretty clearly isn't coded to leverage that and in fact I suspect the devs don't actually realize Dodge is applied to Doomguy's attacks)

Also, Imps are one of the enemies most heavily changed by Angel of Max Carnage in practice, due to their ranged attack being Fire-typed, exploding in an area, and able to roll up to 10 damage. In a standard run, an Imp will semi-regularly knock Doomguy around with its ranged attack, and very occasionally destroy items on the ground with its explosion, but in an Angel of Max Carnage run every toss that isn't fouled by a Dodge or hitting something else first will knock Doomguy about and every fireball will annihilate every non-Unique item in its blast radius every single time. Maintaining an awareness of what's behind Doomguy gets a lot more important so you don't get a valuable Exotic deleted instantly by an Imp; this can happen in a standard run, but an Imp rolling max damage is sufficiently rare that ignoring the possibility entirely will only rarely backfire.

I should also point out that while Imps have a unique death sound, their pain sound and their random noises while wandering about are shared with Former Humans, Former Sergeants, and Lost Captains. As such, you shouldn't give all those noises too much weight as far as planning goes: a plan assuming you heard an Imp might get you unnecessarily hurt because it was actually a Former Sergeant.

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Next time, we move on to Lost Souls.

See you then.