Regular
Military
Builders
Psychos
"I'm still worth it!"
Skin "Bombardier" was inspired by a Reddit user u/just_suzz777
Skin "Bulldozer" was inspired by the contest winner on Reddit: u/JustaWallnut
Skin "Court Jester" was inspired by a Reddit user u/soroka5
Health
1070
Melee Damage
300
Fire Damage
50 (fire pool)
Explosive Damage
- Equal to critical melee damage (crit. slam)
- 750 (on-death explosion)
Crit. Chance
20%
Crit. Damage
10%
Speed
5
Prepare Time
35
Courage Cost
35
Agility
70
Aggression
95
Detection Range
80
Charisma
500
Valor
600
Shield Points
Equal to 50% of maximum health
Special Ability
Crit. Damage is increased by 5% for every kill
Bullet
90%
Price
17,000
Juggernaut is a hulking patriot armed with a self-constructed, electric-powered exploding sledgehammer, and dressed in a black T-shirt, grey pants, gray elbow pads, yellow kneepads, a black belt, a gray motorcycle helmet with a yellow icon above its visor, and a homemade suit of heavy dark gray armor. His armor consists of a pair of front and back chest plates with a USA flag print decal on the front one, a set of shoulder plates with the right one having a yellow lightning bolt decal, a loose groin protector plate attached to the front of his belt, and a grey motorcycle helmet. His armor, helmet, and hammer all have splashes of blue paint on them. He carries a gray car battery by his waist with the wires attached to his belt.
Bombardier is Juggernaut's first exclusive skin. He is wearing a heavy bomb suit, and heavy anti-bomb padding, with a car battery on it's hips, and cables connecting to his hammer*
Bulldozer is Juggernaut's second exclusive skin. He wears a gray t-shirt with straps over his chest, a yellow construction helmet, a mask, ear protectors, brown pants, an apron, and a car battery with wires attached to his hammer.
Court Jester is Juggernaut's third exclusive skin. It can only be obtained from the Halloween Event. he has his torso exposed with tattoos on it, wears a full-head white jester mask with red markings including red and blue frills, a black collar, black sleeves, yellow shoulder-pads with a small red square on them, yellow elbow protectors, red gloves, black pants, a toolbelt with various objects attached along with a car battery that attaches to his hammer. His hammer is styled after ones used by court judges.
He can be unlocked for 17,000 coins after reaching bus level 17.
Overview
Juggernaut is a melee Heavyweight. His health is slightly below average for his class, meanwhile his melee damage is the opposite. Juggernaut's movement and attack speed are sluggish, but his preparation time is fairly swift for a melee heavyweight.
Juggernaut's critical hit generates an explosion ahead of him with a ~100 pixel diameter, while also granting him a few invincibility frames. After slamming his sledgehammer, he moves several paces backwards, additionally ignoring hazards like fire pools. Since this critical hit is considered an explosion, it's unable to damage barricades and supply run caches.
Juggernaut always spawns with a shield by default. The amount of shield points he has is equal to 50% of his total max health.
Enemies struck by Juggernaut's regular melee attacks and his on-death explosion will be pushed back. However, his critical slam does not apply knockback.
Juggernaut is immune to knockback and has 90% resistance to bullet damage. When killed, Juggernaut does not turn into a zombie. Instead, he takes a second to fall to his knees, then produces an explosion and a fire pool on the spot.
Special Ability
Juggernaut's special ability adds flat 5% to his critical damage every time he gets a kill. If he manages to kill someone with his explosive slam while striking multiple targets, the bonus will get applied immediately after, and the next registered enemy will take respectively increased damage. The bonus is individual to each unique instance of Juggernaut.
This ability helps with boosting Juggernaut's offensive output, but only marginally, since it can be properly taken advantage of only in missions with an abundance of low-health enemies. It's not useless but, depending on how you are planning to use this unit, it can also be safely ignored.
Gameplay
Main Campaign
Stats-wise, Juggernaut can be considered as the strongest melee unit in the entire game thanks to him having the highest base health in the entire game, high damage, bullet resistance, full knockback resistance along with an ability to knock the enemy back on regular melee attacks. These are compounded by his highly damaging critical hit, giving him an exceptionally high AOE burst damage output. His critical attack is also performed relatively frequent thanks to his high base critical chance. Additionally, unlike other melee heavyweight units, his critical attack is also delivered noticeably quicker, rather than being a hinderance in a certain situations.
Juggernaut's uses are somewhat versatile, being able to be used as an offensive or defensive tank. He can be sent out in advance to clear out a large horde of zombies with his critical attack, while simultaneously delaying their advances effectively thanks to his massive base health. Since he immediately moves backwards after performing a critical hit, it improves his overall survivability when faced with greater threats that possess high damage attacks such as Crank, Prisoner, and Blue, thus prolonging his lifespan considerably. He can also counter Twins decently, with his attacks knocking them back before they can attack him. However, because he moves backwards after performing a critical attack, it makes him more suited as an offensive tank than a defensive tank. Nonetheless, if used defensively, he will perform adequately.
Despite his promising strengths, Juggernaut, much like all melee heavyweight units, quickly becomes a lackluster unit due to multitude of reasons. Obviously, he suffers from his very slowly movement and regular attack speed, rendering him unable to deal with running hordes effectively. His bullet resistance is useless by the time he is unlocked. Since he explodes himself upon dying, this can sometimes cause a problem, especially if the player’s team is consisted of multiple melee units, as it can potentially harm or kill any melee units that are brought along with Juggernaut, potentially jeopardizing mission completion progress. To add insult to injury, his special critical attack can sometimes be a hinderance, as his hitbox doesn't register properly until he finishes moving backwards, making him very vulnerable to attacks, especially to those with extended melee attack range, making it somewhat impractical. This is especially noticeable when fighting against Cranks. He is also highly discouraged from bringing him in missions with Energy Spheres, as they can render his sheer strengths useless upon approaching and are relatively common throughout the end-game progress. And, as a final nail in the coffin, his unlock price, and how late he is available makes him feel underwhelming and possibly redundant to use in spite of his impressive strengths. Overall, Juggernaut proves to be a mediocre unit overall. Therefore, purchasing him solely for the main campaign may not be a wise investment.
Skirmish
In League, he is an amazing unit to use in any level of Skirmish thanks to his bullet resistance, massive health, high damage, and highly devastating critical attack. He is able to tank a whole lot of bullets, being able to handle piercing shots from a level 30 maxed Sniper Polina with her ability more effectively than most widely used bullet-resistant units, such as Guard. In melee combat, his critical hit can even kill units behind the other melee/shooters, given he has enough upgrades to his damage and/or critical damage. Since he moves backwards after landing a critical hit, it often prevents him from getting attacked by enemy melee units, extending his lifespan exponentially. His on-death explosion also ensures that any enemy melee unit who manage to take him down will, at very least, get heavily damaged, or even burned. The fire pool on death will also help making any nearby melee units reposition due to it blocking their path.
However, he is not a perfect unit. His cost is high, which can hinder the team composition. Although his massive health and high damage allow him to survive in most situations, against enemy melee units with fast attack speed, he is likely to lose a considerable amount of health due to his slow regular melee attack speed, which combined with his slow movement speed, it allows enemy ranged units to chip him away. Flamethrower can quickly burn him to death thanks to his very high DPS, which can also negate his on death explosion and fire pool as he will turn into ashes instead. Finally, his critical strike can prove inconsistent or completely useless if his targets somehow negate it, such as against the TMF 2/2 team power (50% chance to ignore explosive damage), as well as other opponents with full explosion resistance, even if they are few and far between.
Item Sets
The only two sets that can properly benefit Juggernaut's explosive crits are Gentleman and Gambling. Gentleman offers 50% damage boost to Juggernaut's crit attack, and Gambling allows him to land AoE slams much more often. It's important to note that the crit-focused tactic is mostly oriented for PvE. It's also worth mentioning that Gentleman is effectively unable to improve Juggernaut's regular damage, since its buff only lasts for 2 seconds, which is bound to end before he reaches his next target.
For Skirmish, it's better to equip him with survival-oriented sets due to his tanky nature. Builder is one of the best options, despite it capping at epic tier. Fast Food and Lucky Guy are also acceptable.
Like most melee heavyweights, Juggernaut can get use out of +% Health bonuses, from both books and extra buffs. They are especially important to him in context of PvP. In PvE, any form of melee buff is also highly recommended for him, although +% is best used at his higher levels. It's advised to give Juggernaut at least a few agility buffs, because 70 is still quite low for a melee unit. If you aren't planning to use him outside of Skirmish then it's acceptable to give him an agility watch, which also alleviates need for min-maxing other items' extra bonuses. However, prep. time is still more preferable if you are interested in using him in regular missions.
Skins and Synergies
Juggernaut, along with his respective skins, is a member of multiple teams: Patriots, Military, Builders, and Psychos.
On average, Juggernaut is a below-average option for all of his teams.
In Patriots, while he might be the bulkiest member of the team, he can't offer much else to it, and generally struggles to keep up with everyone else (except for Farmer and Charlotte, who obviously can't be frontline fighters anyway). However, Juggernaut's snail pace might prove useful for keeping 3/3 condition active, without a need to rely on constantly spamming Private Rodriguez or using other units that stay behind.
For Military, Bombardier is only useful for 3/3 and 5/5 formations in Skirmish, as he is a generally good unit in this mode. Otherwise, he can't take proper advantage of any of the teams' powers in regular missions.
In Builders, Bulldozer's situation is effectively the same as in Military, being a great tag-along for Builder Abby in Skirmish, but otherwise not so good on his own.
With Psychos, Court Jester only serves as a gimmick. His critical hit allows him to easily benefit from 2/2 and 3/3 at the same time, but his integral issues are preventing him from aiding Psychos' preferred gameplans.
Trivia
- Juggernaut is referred to as "hammer" in the game's files.
- Internally, Juggernaut's slam doesn't make him move backwards. Instead, it teleports him once his crticial attack animation is finished.
- This is why he has a modicum of invincibility frames during this attack: his hitbox doesn't move with him immediately, making him vulnerable to attacks that manage to slip in.
- Juggernaut's unit card uses an earlier design of the character, sporting a big "V" on the front of his helmet instead of the current symbol.
- Juggernaut's description is a quote that references Marvel Comic's Thor. His quote is a slight alteration of a similar one uttered by Thor in the MCU film Avengers: Endgame after managing to successfully summon his hammer Mjolnir, happily announcing, "I'm still worthy!"
- Blue crackles of electricity can be briefly seen during his critical hit animation, further cementing this reference.
- Juggernaut's Bombardier skin is inspired from a Reddit post by u/just_suzz777.
- Juggernaut's Bulldozer skin is inspired by a Reddit post by u/JustaWallnut
- Juggernaut's Court Jester skin is inspired by u/Soroka5
- Before update 3.7.9, Juggernaut used to have a large number of invincibility frames during his critical hit that allowed him to avoid damage during most of its duration. The same update has also accidentally broke Juggernaut's special and his interaction with the Hunter set (back when it was able to work on melee units). The former would only work if Juggernaut killed anyone with his regular attack, meanwhile the latter was unable to grant any damage increases at all. Both issues were resolved in update 3.8.3.
- Prior to update 4.0.0, there existed a bug that was triggered by Juggernaut performing a crit. slam during wave transition in supply runs, Halloween Event, and Christmas Event. If it happened, Juggernaut would get propelled to the right at the start of the next wave. The distance he could travel varied greatly, and his speed would adjust to match the regular time he spends on his fallback animation.
- In addition, if Juggernaut faced left during the attack, his sprite would get "corrected" into facing right. This resulted into an additional visual glitch that made it look like he does a sudden teleport to the right.
Gallery
Juggernaut's critical attack
u/just_suzz777's fanmade sprite used for inspiration for Bombardier's design.
u/JustaWallnut's fanmade sprite used for inspiration for Bulldozer's design.
u/soroka5's fanmade sketch used for inspiration for Court Jester's design.
Juggernaut is a hulking patriot armed with a self-constructed, electric-powered exploding sledgehammer, and dressed in a black T-shirt, grey pants, gray elbow pads, yellow kneepads, a black belt, a gray motorcycle helmet with a yellow icon above its visor, and a homemade suit of heavy dark gray armor. His armor consists of a pair of front and back chest plates with a USA flag print decal on the front one, a set of shoulder plates with the right one having a yellow lightning bolt decal, a loose groin protector plate attached to the front of his belt, and a grey motorcycle helmet. His armor, helmet, and hammer all have splashes of blue paint on them. He carries a gray car battery by his waist with the wires attached to his belt.
