In a game with such a wide selection of units and special abilities, there are bound to be a few that are all bark and no bite. This is especially true for more specialized or expensive examples, although some are more nuanced than this.
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Units
- This is the case for the entire Heavyweight class, sans Policeman Diaz, but Chopper deserves a special mention. For an early game unit, he has impressive stats with very high health, accompanied by a unique self-heal ability whenever his HP drops down to a half. However, he moves and attacks very slowly, and lacks any kind of damage resistances. At first glance, it seems like a fair trade for the sake of balance. But then you realize that swifter and cheaper melee units work much better than Chopper will ever manage to, all thanks to most enemies being actively aggressive — you'd rather have your fighters go straight for the barricade and rely on shooters for holding foes back, instead of hoping that a big slob will do all these things at once.
- Willy has his taser, the only weapon in the game that both stuns on every hit without need for lucky critical hits, and can do it from a short range away. And he can fire it pretty quickly. At a glance, he might seem like the ultimate stalling and stunlocking unit, perfect for dealing with lone tanky threats. But his downsides are so incredibly harsh that this is far from the truth. First, despite Willy being labeled as a Heavyweight, he has low health. Without his shield, he has less base health than Builder and Firefighter, the first two Damagers you unlock in the game, who both have mediocre stats. Even with Willy’s shield, he only barely edges them out. And second, he’s tied for having the highest Courage cost in the entire game, with Builder Abby. Not to mention his performance in practice. His stun is much more situational than it seems, not being much better than just using melee units on the enemy. And he tends to start bashing his shield too early and gets it destroyed due to not stunning with his taser.
- Juggernaut has the highest base health in the game, with high damage, and he has his signature move with bringing the hammer down and creating a massive AOE damaging explosion. He’s able to clear hordes of any size and be a incredible damage sponge and bundle of stats. While he is the best among the melee heavyweights, it’s still not by much, due to still sharing the same problems as them; slow speed, and his attacks come out slow. And his explosive slam, while powerful, still struggles against fast enemies, and is tied to the randomness of critical hits. And even though it might seem like he’d be able to dodge melee attacks with it considering how far the explosion recoil pushes him back, it deals no knockback and his hitbox stays where he was until the attack is over, meaning Juggernaut’s opponent essentially gets a free open hit on him.
- Jailer is a good example of a starter pack unit. He has very low courage cost, moderately high health for a Fighter, free auto-upgrading, and the ability to stun on crit. Should you buy him as early as stage one, he'll make the entire early game a breeze... only to get overshadowed by Rogue, his direct upgrade. Rogue has the same weapon and crit stun mechanic as Jailer, but has a faster crit animation and higher stats, combined with the highest base melee damage in the game. Also, despite being Jailer's direct upgrade, Rogue doesn't even cost real money compared to Jailer costing 5$, which ends up being the final nail in the coffin for the latter.
- Welder repairs the bus by a small amount, eals all the Turrets and Generators on the battlefield that he can find, and then dodges and weaves through all the enemies to directly target the barrier. He might seem like a great utility and support unit, but his upsides barely mean much. Mechanic 2/2 is frankly easier to get, and repairs the bus better than Welder can. Turrets and Generators are good rage items on their own and don’t need the support, and even when they do, what he offers is minuscule by best. He can end missions early with his barrier targeting, but having the lowest base health and lacking the ability to defend himself, you're better off with other units. His level 13 Special Ability doesn't fix it either, as adding 30% of his own health is barely going to improve the Turrets and Generators' survivability. All of this for waiting through his 45-90 seconds of prepare time, and costing 50 whole Rage Points.
- Saw is a quick, deadly Psycho whose chainsaw can deal large amounts of burst damage against enemies, then destroy the barrier just as quickly. But being damage support like this is generally all he’s good for, as he struggles when he tries to lead the charge. Most of his problems stem from his critical hit. his high crit rate combined with his ability to deal 5 crits in a row is extremely powerful… as long as he’s fighting someone who is slow, as Saw has to take a second to wind up his chainsaw first before executing the crits. Since he only starts to rev it up once he tries to start attacking, he essentially runs up to a foe’s face and immediately makes himself vulnerable and open to attack. And any knockback cancels the long critical attack, sometimes leading him into a loop of constantly running in, doing no damage, and repeating it. He simply has no chance against any knockback enemies, runners, or any other fast foe. And then his death has him roll backwards and immediately turn into Monk, who both has knockback and is a runner zombie, proving to be a big distraction and nuisance for your other units. Said roll he performs on death also acts like a dodge, allowing the freshly turned Monk to roll past your teammates and make a mad dash straight for the bus.
- Queen acts as a side-grade to Grenadier, carrying a grenade launcher that allows her to fire explosives with a shorter delay. The problem is that her inferior stats are that much of a downside since there's still a big chance that some zombie will manage to come close to her. And when it comes to Skirmish and the Marauders, two things Grenadier excels in/against, her lack of bullet resistance really cripples her. It doesn't help that outright spamming her launcher will lead to friendly casualties, and isn't that much of an efficient strategy to start with.
- Builder Abby starts her fight with a minigun to shred any opponents in the way. The machine gun does amazing burst damage, able to stop entire hordes by herself. However, the key word there is "starts", as she runs out of ammo after 5 seconds and drops it in favor of using a hammer. Sadly, Abby with her tool is one of the slowest, weakest melee units in the game, making her completely irrelevant after she finishes her burst. What's worse is that she has her own unique undead form, and it's one of the most dangerous turns in the game: Zombie Abby is basically an insectoid with slightly worse stats. Considering that Insectoids are the very counters to end-game's most reliable strategies, it's easy to see why you'd rather just use a different unit.
- The Agents are two units for the price of one, created for preparing and clearing out the battlefield in the beginning. They start each mission instantly ready to deploy, and have suppressed pistols to not draw the attention of idle zombies. On paper, they can clear out any problematic zombie waiting on the battlefield without opposition. The problem is that, since this is their entire purpose, the Agents lose most of their special abilities after the first 20 seconds or so of a mission, as they become irrelevant. But to add salt to the wound, the later missions start out with enemies like Slobs, Putrids, and Cranks, which are extremely tough and near-impossible for Agents to eliminate. The only point in their favor is their special ability which saves slots for police synergies.
- SpecOps drops out of the sky on a parachute and uses an automatic rifle to burst down enemies with. Although his ability to parachute onto the battlefield allows you to put him in any specific position or location you want, the animation is quite long. This essentially extends his preparation time and prevents him from being used as a quick way to save a teammate or resolve a dangerous situation. This often results in him reaching the ground too late to assist in a fight, whether because it's been taken care of, his teammates already ended up dead, or he unintentionally landed right next to a dangerous zombie who reached his landing site. It doesn't help that he has really bad accuracy and a high courage cost, with SpecOps' guaranteed knockback on melee hits being his only consistently useful gimmick.
- Dr. Miller places down a claymore landmine upon being sent out, and you can choose where you have him place it. It works exactly how you would expect a landmine to work, blowing up and causing damage to whoever steps on it. In theory, he’s able to set up a reliable last defense for any zombie who manages to slip by. Especially with his special ability that doubles its explosion radius. However, despite all of that, it still feels like Miller barely accomplishes anything. He only has one claymore, his weapon of choice is a weak pistol which, while can be serviceable, is not nearly as good as other options, and the mine has low damage. Even maxed out, it can’t do more than 201 damage with his special ability, which is very weak by late game standards.
Teams
- Before elaborating on some of them in greater detail, it's worth mentioning that this is a trend among a lot of 5/5 team powers. There are many different reasons as to why:
- The team you run has an excellent power brought down only due to poor unit rotationnote ;
- The team itself is one large awful messnote ;
- The units could be alright, but the power is trivial and not worth usingnote ;
- The team is only useful due to extreme reliance their previous tier powersnote ;
- The team has units that don't work with each other at allnote ;
- The team could lack members who can fulfill crucial roles the team doesn't have or have too many units who share similar rolesnote ;
- The power could be irrelevant due to being too similar to the earlier tiers of the Team Powernote .
- Jailer 3/3 lets all the Jailers have a 25% chance to stun on critical hits. However, most of its value gets lost because many of their units have little to no critical chance without external boosts, reaching ~33% at best and therefore a 1/12 chance to actually stun. If a stun unit is required, Jailer already gets the job done.
- Continuing with Jailers, their 5/5 makes it so the entire deck receives a permanent 30% reduction to preparation time. This is an undeniably powerful ability, but the problem is that Jailers are really mediocre units, with little synergy between each other. Lack of shotgunners and actual useful shooters hurts the team the most, but then there are such problems as Guard having mediocre attack speed, Willy having an extreme courage cost and low damage output, and Gunslinger being slow and incapable of properly defending himself. Sniper and Jailer are the only universally useful units in the team, and even then they still have their own issues that get accentuated because of their teammates.
- College's 5/5 allows each unique instance of a College member to spawn a free unit from the team once they land 5 kills. The reason this theoretically powerful ability fails to shine is because every member of College is just too fragile to stay up on field for long enough. This could be circumvented if they had some close quarters defense abilities, but that isn't the case even for melees of the team, with both Waterboy and 1998 having mediocre attack speed, and the latter also having low chance for crits, which prevents him from using knockback often.
- The Internal Forces' 5/5 lets the Medkit do damage to enemies equal to how much healing it does to teammates. While it seems like an exciting way to do some extra damage, especially knowing how previous tiers of the team work, the IF fail to put it to use. The team generally needs outside support because of how weak or fragile most of its members are, and putting Medkit in the 6th team slot is usually a wrong approach to it. If you try to rely on Surgeon Lt. and the 3/3 tier (spawns a free medkit every 25 seconds) instead, you will likely fail to do any damage at all, since Medic's AI is very quirky and often fails to make her drop Kits, and 3/3 is not consistent enough with positions it chooses for free Medkits.
- Psycho's 5/5 power is unfortunate in being too similar to the team's 2/2 tier. It provides them with a 20% chance to spawn a 20-rage pack upon killing an enemy, which suggests extra spam of rage-evaluated units. The thing is that 2/2 does a similar thing: it allows Psychos to spawn a 13-rage pack upon landing a crit, with a 25% chance. Since 5/5 implies running many Psychos by default, the actual power becomes irrelevant because of already guaranteed crits galore. What's worse is that the full selection of Psychos includes Queen, Chopper, Red Hood, and Austin – all some of the worst units in the game, being a weaker Grenadier, two Heavyweights that have no extra resistances, and contender for the worst shooter in the game.
- Builders as a whole. 2/2 has a 10% chance to summon a free Builder whenever you summon one yourself. Sounds great, but that's a very low chance when the cheapest members of the team (Pepper and Builder himself) cost 25 Courage, and the fastest preparing unit takes 13 seconds at base. 3/3 does the same thing, but just when 3 members are alive at once and it doesn't activate again. 5/5 lets everyone deal 2x damage to the enemy barricade, which can be great for supply runs (since ranged units can attack the barrier there), but not anywhere else, since only Builder, Handyman, and Builder Abby can make use of it. And then, Builder literally gets this bonus as his special ability and gets more use out of it due to not having to be stuck on this team. And Builder Abby becomes one of the weakest melee units after losing her minigun.
- Emergency 3/3 sounds like a good deal, a 1.5x damage boost to a unit whenever they're in the radius of a Medkit. But it's too slow and gimmicky to try and commit to using its full potential. And Medic's awful AI prioritizing shooting over healing makes it wasted potential for what could've been really powerful. It's usually relegated to letting the team's melee units do extra damage to the barricade. Their 5/5 is still plain useful, but the team overall has little synergy on its own.
- The Toxic Lab Military Forces’ (TMF) 5/5 has every unit have a 50% chance to decrease in cost by 5 whenever a TMF member comes out of the bus. This was obviously too slow to make a difference in any main-game mission, but surprisingly powerful during the events of Corn Farm and The Mall, specifically the former. Their long timers allowed for constant 0-cost TMF spam units to farm items. And since the decreased cost affects non-TMF units as well, it was common to see the 6th team slot get filled by units like Juggernaut or Medic for Corn Farm (highest health and high damage AOE or infinite healing for the current TMF's on the field), or Glenn for The Mall (Fastest preparation time cooldown lets no enemy through; can revive once and is generally superior to other spammable fighters in this case). But ever since the events got time limits, the TMF 5/5 team power became nearly useless again. The main reason behind that status is having to run 4 average or even below-average units, most of which are too expensive for what they do and are all outclassed by better options.
- Scientist 3/3 is more often a liability than a bonus. When three or more unique scientists are present on the field, and one of the Scientists gets killed, a drone appears and attacks whoever killed them. While free drones might sound enticing, it doesn't when you consider that units are often clumped together, especially ranged units, which the 3 original scientists are. This makes it very easy for an Insectoid to pounce on them, and then have them all get caught in the explosion. It's common for this power to lead to situations where one of the scientists die, and then takes his teammates with him (or leaves them severely hurt). Even though the 3 original scientists have 50% explosion resist, it's outweighed by Scientists' 2/2, which doubles the Drone's damage. It also tends to wake up Eggs at the wrong time, forcing you to deal with an onslaught of energy spheres when you’re unprepared.
- Scientist's 5/5 gives a 10% damage boost for every repeated kill of the same zombie. While it is a great power that boosts the team's damage a ton, the actual team members, while good, don't get the most use out of it. Miller's low-damage pistol doesn't do much to help anyone, and while Kane is a really good support unit, he isn't great at dealing damage. While Liquidator, Sanchez and Norman can make good use of the power if played correctly, it's not the power's full potential, requiring someone else who isn't a scientist to come into the 6th team slot if you want the team at its possible best.
