Lionheart

Lionheart
He feels safe by a naked flame
Main Stats
Type	HeavyWeight
Rarity	Common
Health 80 Melee Damage 24
Fire Damage	4-6 (gas spill)
Crit. Chance	40%
Crit. Damage	10%
Speed	8
Prepare Time	35
Courage Cost	30
Behavior Stats
Agility	60
Aggression	95
Detection Range	170
Agility Penalty	10%
Aggression Penalty	10%
Morale Stats
Charisma	750
Valor	800
Charisma Radius	120
Abilities
Perks	Non-documented: Knockback resist
Special Ability	Melee Damage is increased by 30% for each enemy on the battlefield he sets on fire.
Resistances
Fire	100%
Bullet	90%
Explosion	50%
Knockback	50%
Unlock Requirements
Price	30000
Player Level	12

Lionheart is a fire-wielding warrior armed with a red pike pole and a small red drip torch, and dressed in a yellow firefighter suit with white reflective strips, faded green pants, a wildland firefighter pack with a chest strap and waist belt, and a black firefighter helmet. He sports a black goatee.

He can be unlocked by spending 30,000 coins and upon reaching player level 12.

Functionality

Basics

Lionheart is a Heavyweight, meaning he engages in close-quarters combat and can destroy the barricade. He primarily attacks using his spear to stab and impale enemies.

Despite being in the Heavyweight class, Lionheart has stats (perks, health) close to a typical damager, being average, the movement speed and cool down of a heavyweight, slow. He also has a decently high crit chance and a fairly fast attack speed.

Upon death, he will turn into his unique undead form, Forest Firefighter.

Perks and Abilities

Enemies struck by any of Lionheart's attacks will be knocked back.

Lionheart has full fire resistance, 90% bullet resistance, 50% knockback resistance and 50% resistance to all kinds of explosion damages.

Lionheart's manually activated ability is to take the drip torch strapped to his waist and use it to spray flaming fuel over a small area in front of and to the side of him, setting the affected area on fire and any non-fire-resistant enemies with it. This ability has a 7-second cooldown that begins after the fire spray animation is complete. Lionheart is fairly useful for burning corpses, especially when dealing with reviving enemies such as Sergeant and Undead, ensuring that they will remain permanently dead. Naturally, fire immune enemies such as Firefighter Zombies and Small Insectoids will render it completely ineffective. Additionally, since his ability’s damage is as low as a level 0 Molotov Cocktail, it is unrealistic to use it as a damage method, which means that burning corpses is likely the only purpose of it. If used unwisely, it can also harm friendly units. This can be partially negated by bringing along a fellow emergency team unit to activate the 2/2 synergy, though it is ill-advised to do so solely to avoid friendly fire.

Upon reaching level 13, Lionheart's special ability can be unlocked, increasing his for each enemy on the battlefield he sets on fire through his manually activated ability, and the bonus is stackable and individual between different Lionhearts. Thanks to his manual ability, the ability's benefit is always a button press away. However, in order to maintain and stack said ability, he must constantly activate his manual ability. In situations with fast enemies that can rush down Lionheart, it just backfires, and it's also completely useless in rain or against fireproof enemies, which becomes noticeable in later locations.

Gameplay

Main Campaign

On paper, Lionheart design intention might be an attempt to make a jack of all trades unit. Unfortunately, in practice he falls short, failing to outclass any of his predecessors’ functions. His resistances are mostly useless by the time the player obtain him. His ability is outclassed by the existence of Red Barrel, which only takes two more seconds to get the same result while having more uses as a obstacle and as a damaging method. He is also very slow, which is problematic since by the time he arrives the fight is either mostly settled or too hard for him to make a difference, making his utility questionable. Players might want to consider replacing him with Red Barrel if the sole purpose is to avoid reviving enemies. His moderate cool down, despite being average among heavyweights, is superseded by damagers and his fellow fighter class units, therefore also failing to improve his utility. His special ability doesn't help him much either as it only serves as a late-game damage boost on demand, while not doing anything else to address his noted issues. This makes him overall completely useless.

Skirmish

In League, he works similarly to other damagers and heavyweights, that is to protect the ranged units as a fireproof bullet sponge, which theoretically makes him useful. However, within the same price range, there are more versatile options such as Guard and Turbo, who despite lack fire resistance, are better units in general as they are faster, forcing enemies to concentrate the firepower and can manage better on their own as a single unit. On the other hand, Lionheart only works well against a few specific decks, such as Flamethrower based compositions, in which he can fully negate its attack with his perk unlike a typical damager. However, once again his speed hinders him, not to mention his ability that is simply a deadweight, since it activates automatically once encountering an enemy unit, doing a pitiful amount of damage while idling in the middle of the battlefield, making him an easy kill for any incoming unit that can still take Lionheart down with it even with the burn debuff.

Item sets

As one of his few perks, Lionheart has rather high crit chance among other units of his kind. Therefore he benefits most from items that boosts crit chance and damage and the item set Gentleman, giving him a 50% added bonus apart from his special ability, while the Surgery set offers similar benefits at the cost of having to maintain his health below half. Since Lionheart isn’t particularly bulky, the latter can’t offer him as much as the first.

Skins and Synergies

Lionheart is a part of Emergency team.

Name	Lionheart
Skin
Unlock Req.	–
Team	Emergency

As a part of this synergy, Lionheart's performance is decent. He gets zero use out of the 2/2 synergy, however it can be useful for keeping his non-fireproof team alive if he happens to accidentally ignite them. As a pseudo-damager, he does benefit from the survivability of 5/5 and the damage of 3/3, since he is the the tankiest member of the team. The only thing keeping him back though is the fact he is a damager, which tends to be more useless as time goes on for the team, outshined by |Climber.

Level Stats

Base Stat Upgrades

Level	Health	Melee Damage
0	80	24
1	88	26
2	97	29
3	106	32
4	117	35
5	129	39
6	142	43
7	156	47
8	171	51
9	189	57
10	207	62
11	228	68
12	251	75
13	276	83

Gallery

• 

  Lionheart spraying fire.

Trivia

• During a 2023 Reddit Developer Q&A:
  • It was stated that Lionheart (or his name) was apparently a reference to a movie. It was never stated which movie it was initially, though, leaving fans to speculate what he references.
    • A 2024 interview with Mobirate artists posted in the official Dead Ahead: Zombie Warfare Discord server subsequently revealed that the movie in question was the 2017 biographical drama film Only The Brave, which retells the true story of a crew of firefighters in Arizona, the Granite Mountain Hotshots which lost all but one of its men to a wildfire in 2013. Lionheart's uniform is based on those of the real firefighters.
  • It was stated that Lionheart is classified as a Fighter due to not having enough health to be a Heavyweight. This answer still does not explain why he isn't classified as a Damager then, since his stats line up with the unit from the Damager class.
    • This was later retracted in update 3.9.4, which set him as a Heavyweight. This is possibly because he received a minor health buff.
• Lionheart's ability was changed in update 3.9.4. Previously, it gave him a 100% damage increase when fire was on the field, regardless of what caused it or ignited enemies.