Chopper

Chopper
Regular Psychos Rednecks Police
Woodcutting skills are still useful to this day. Can heal 50% of his health while eating.
Main Stats
Type	Heavyweight
Rarity	Stars Reward
Health 120 Melee Damage 24
Crit. Chance	30%
Crit. Damage	10%
Speed	7
Courage Cost	30
Special	Self-healing: 12.5% of max. HP Self-healing pulses: 4
Behavior Stats
Agility	80
Aggression	100
Detection Range	80
Agility Penalty	50%
Aggression Penalty	50%
Morale Stats
Charisma	400
Valor	600
Charisma Radius	120
Abilities
Perks
Knockback Strength	5 (normal) 15 (crit.)
Ability Cooldown	60s
Special Ability	Adds 30% health
Unlock Requirements
Stars	80
Player Level	Any

Chopper is a lumberjack who uses his woodcutting skills for survival in the apocalypse. He is armed with a woodcutting ax and dressed in a red and black plaid short-sleeved shirt, blue pants, gray gloves, and a red cap. He sports a blonde beard. When healing, he pulls out a labeled can of food.

Clown Chopper is Chopper's first exclusive skin. He is armed with a double-sided ax and dressed in a gray short-sleeve clown suit with red buttons, a ruffled white collar, and gray gloves. He sports a blonde beard, his face is painted with red and white clown makeup, and his hair sticks out towards the sides with ends resembling horns. When healing, he pulls out a labeled can of tomato soup.

Clown Chopper has a different idle animation.

Rural Chopper is Chopper's second exclusive skin. He is armed with a woodcutting ax and dressed in a white T-shirt, blue overalls, and a yellow wide-brimmed hat. He has a piece of straw in his mouth. He now sports a brown beard. When healing, he pulls out a labeled can of food.

Mountie is Chopper's third exclusive skin. He is armed with a woodcutting ax and dressed in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Red Serge uniform consisting of a scarlet tunic with shoulder sleeve patches and black epaulettes, midnight blue breeches with yellow highlights, a dark brown Sam Browne belt with a yellow buckle, a dark brown satchel, black boots, black gloves and a beige campaign hat. He now sports a light brown mustache. When healing, he pulls out a labeled can of food.

He is a star reward, obtained for free when players collect 80 stars.

Overview

Chopper is a melee Heavyweight, and has average stats for his class. His attack speed is sluggish, with critical hits being especially slow. His preparation time is anomalously high for a melee unit.

Chopper has a manual ability that activates four healing pulses. Each burst of healing is equal to 12.5% of his max. health, totalling into 50%. The ability can only be activated if Chopper is below 50% HP himself.

Chopper's attacks cause slight knockback. It becomes stronger on critical hits. Chopper himself is also fully immune to knockback. Some time after dying, he will turn into a Ram.

Special Ability

Chopper's special ability boosts his base health by 30%.

Getting this ability can prove fruitful if you are frequently using Chopper in any of his teams. It's especially useful because of its synergy with the two item sets that are most optimal for him (see item section for more).

Gameplay

Main Campaign

Chopper is a powerful melee unit for low-medium level players once he's unlocked thanks to his huge base health and high damage. He has a slightly longer range of attack and knocks enemies back with every hit, which compensates for his slow attack speeds. Enemy attacks are also unable to push him around. This makes him suitable as a tank against a small horde of enemies or a strong one that can knock the units back, notably Ram and One-armed Soldier.

Despite his strengths, Chopper quickly becomes unviable, mostly due to his lack of any useful damage resistances, a common disadvantage most heavyweights have. While his healing ability is good on paper, it is impractical and largely inefficient as the time it takes for him to heal is enough to get him killed, to the point where support from Medkits would be preferred, not to mention the 60-second cooldown. His slow attack and movement speeds, the fact that he turns into a dangerous zombie on death, and minute-long preparation time end up hindering his overall effectiveness to the point players would rather use disposable fighters or damagers instead.

Skirmish

In League, he is one of the worst units to use in any level of Skirmish due to a multitude of reasons. His awfully slow movement makes him a slow and easy target for all ranged units. His lack of any useful resistances renders his very high health almost worthless. His manual healing ability activates automatically at half-health, and is mostly useless as it will make him both target practice and a punching bag for enemy units who can easily negate any healing he does, likely leading to his death since he can't retaliate while standing still to heal. All of his attacks are very slow, making it difficult for him to land even a single hit. His high courage cost hinders team composition. Finally, his special ability, if unlocked, is useless as any damage increase will hardly be able to make a difference in any and all cases. At best, he can serve as a unit in only the lowest levels of skirmishing since there, his role as a tank may at least be of use against low-level enemy ranged units and actually being capable of fighting some enemy melee units competently enough.

Item Sets

The only currently viable sets for Chopper are either Surgery, or Big Boy, both taking advantage of his high HP and survivability. However, Big Boy is more appealing out of the two, as it can consistently keep Chopper's damage boosted by up to 45% with the use of substats and his SA, which is also beneficial as it encourages the user to take advantage of Chopper's one and only strong aspect – his health.

For obvious reasons, preparation time watches are the best choice for Chopper. Boosting his agility a little is also recommended. +% Health increases are highly beneficial for reasons discussed above. +% Melee damage buffs are also acceptable. Books of those two kinds are also the best options overall. Because of how sluggish they are, focusing on Chopper's criticals will result in overall DPS decrease, while also making the canadian more vulnerable.

Skins and Synergies

Chopper, along with his respective skins, is a part of several teams: Northerners, Psychos, Rednecks and Police.

Name	Chopper	Clown Chopper	Rural Chopper	Mountie
Skin
Unlock Req.	–	Obtain via gacha during Halloween Event	300 money	Obtain via gacha during Christmas Event
Team	Northerners	Psychos	Rednecks	Police

Chopper tends to be a poor choice for most of the teams he is a member of, because of his inadequate preparation time and attack speed. This is best demonstrated in Northerners, the crit. focused powers of which end up limiting Chopper's viability by crippling his DPS. The effect of 5/5 tier is also not significant enough to offset Chopper's courage cost.

For Rednecks, Chopper's high health doesn't compensate for his very long cooldown. Even if the courage drops from 2/2 and healing from 3/3 are factored in, Redneck is generally a better option to roll with unless Paramedic Nancy is also in use. Rural Chopper only gets to shine in the 5/5 decks, since they tend to have an excess of resources.

Chopper also fails to add anything to the already strong Police team. His very high health might greatly synergize with the 3/3 power, but Policeman Diaz can fulfill the tank role more effectively. His slow attack speed also prevents him from causing a great impact in 5/5 builds. As for 2/2, he is a bad choice even as a filler, since there are better ways to get access to this power on a budget.

Psychos are the only team where Chopper can see meaningful use, which is thanks to most other units in the deck being even worse than him. He can be used to kickstart spamming of Saw and Berserker through the 2/2 power, acting as one of the better tag-alongs for them in 3/3 decks. He can also be used together with Austin in a "budget" tier 1 build, allowing to use the otherwise-unplayable shooter for general purposes.

Trivia

• Before version 3.6.3, Chopper's special ability increased his damage by 5% for each kill, and it could stack infinitely. It was later repurposed for the Big Boy set.
• In the game files, the frames related to Chopper's healing ability are referred to as "tomato".
  • The overall design of Chopper's can, while much simpler in appearance, is fairly similar to an unused tomato can item in the game files.
• The Clown Chopper skin is a reference to It, also known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, from Stephen King's 1986 horror novel of the same name. Its design, in particular, is inspired by the recent film adaptations of the novel.
• Chopper's Clown skin features and shows his eyes being visible. While Dead Ahead's artstyle has every human character's eyes hidden in some way, Clown Chopper breaks this format, which means he has the only visible eyes in the entire game.
• Before update 2.7.0, Chopper had to be purchased with coins. The bus had to be level 4, and his price was 350 coins.
• During the 3.7.4 Update, Chopper's ability cooldown was accidentally removed due to a bug, allowing him to heal indefinitely under ideal circumstances. This got fixed soon after.
• Chopper's Mountie skin and its association with the Police Team are based on the RCMP, the national police service of Canada.
• With his Special Ability factored in, Chopper has the highest base health of all units.

Gallery

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  Chopper's prerelease sprite

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  Chopper's sprite prior to update 1.4.3

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  Chopper eating.

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  Clown Chopper eating.

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  Clown Chopper's unique idle animation.

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  Chopper as seen in a Christmas preview image alongside Runner and Fast Zombie

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  Sheriff Charlotte and Chopper in the Christmas update teaser image.

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  Maria and Mountie posing together in a festive forest, made in the leadup to Christmas 2023.

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  Xmas 2023 art with Maria and Mountie.