Lava demon has annoying habit of messing with player aim/movement with melee

title. can't move mouse around and am frozen in place.

I can't reproduce that. What engine are you using, and what version of said engine?

gzdoom .4.1 or so. may have something to do with the context of using with doom rather than with hexen/heretic, but the maps somewhat called for it.

I managed to reproduce it, but I needed to be invulnerable.

Okay, so what's going on you may ask? Well, the projectiles fired by the monster's attack in melee are the same as the ones used by Heretic's powered-up Phoenix Rod: upon hitting players, these projectiles render them immobile for a very short period of time. The more they're hit, the longer it'll take before they regain their mobility. The odd thing here, is that this doesn't happen under normal circumstances. Being invulnerable is one case where it'll happen.

Again, it's one of those where I can't say for certain whether it was an oversight on the part of the monster's author(s) or an intended behavior.

I sincerely doubt it's intentional; not to mention not requiring invulnerability normally when it happens; at least in these maps

the wiki also implies that it's supposed to be the shooter frozen, not the target.

SArais wrote: the wiki also implies that it's supposed to be the shooter frozen, not the target.

That's an error on the wiki's part.

With this change implemented, due to this report , it should now happen even if the player isn't invulnerable. I'll see about submitting an update for the monster that gets rid of this behavior.