Pepper

Pepper
Regular Police Builder Scientists
Road traffic patrol officer.
Main Stats
Type	Support
Rarity	Stars Reward
Health 22 Ranged Damage 4 Melee Damage 5
Crit. Chance	0%
Crit. Damage	5%
Speed	12
Courage Cost	25
Behavior Stats
Agility	80
Aggression	100
Detection Range	150
Agility Penalty	50%
Aggression Penalty	30%
Morale Stats
Charisma	350
Valor	400
Charisma Radius	120
Abilities
Perks
Knockback Strength	15
Special Ability	Inspires all units.
Ranged Data
Firing Period	4.7s
Reloading Period	1.0s
Range	120
Bullet Spread	20°
Unlock Requirements
Stars	25
Player Level	Any

Pepper is an IF road traffic patrol officer who was bullied by her colleagues. She is armed with a handgun and dressed in a light blue long-sleeved shirt with light gray highlights, gray body armor, blue pants, knee pads, a duty belt, and a blue IF cap. Some of her hair is kept in a short ponytail.

Officer Pepper is Pepper's first exclusive skin. She is armed with a handgun and dressed in a policewoman's uniform with a police badge, black pants with yellow highlights, a brown belt with a yellow buckle, and a black officer's cap. Her hair is now black in color.

Carpenter Pepper is Pepper's second exclusive skin. She is armed with a red nail gun and dressed in a dark gray T-shirt under a yellow safety vest, yellow pants, a brown tool belt with blue tools, and a red, blue, and white cap. Some of her hair is kept in a short ponytail and is now brown in color.

Carpenter Pepper has a different shooting sound.

Dr. Pepper is Pepper's third exclusive skin. Similar to the other units in the Scientists faction, she wears a yellow hazmat suit with blue gloves. She does not have a helmet and instead wears a black cap with a red logo.

She is a star reward, obtained for free when players collect 25 stars.

Overview

Pepper is a damage-oriented ranged Support, who is able to sustain herself at a cost of mediocre firerate and courage cost.

Pepper fires a semi-automatic pistol up to 10 times at a medium rate before performing a fast reload. If confronted at melee range, Pepper does a swift melee kick that can knock enemies back. Alternatively, with a small chance, she might do a backwards dodge roll. While rolling, Pepper will ignore hazards like fire pools. Unlike most other ranged units, Pepper prioritizes melee above shooting her targets.

Some time after dying, Pepper will turn into a Girl.

Perks and Abilities

Pepper's special ability allows her to provide a one-time inspiration buff to all units on the field once she comes out of the bus. The buff comes with a unique, short animation.

This helps with extending Pepper's role as a support unit and improves her versatility to almost the same degree as the less accessible Cap, although it doesn't do much to help with her capabilities as a ranged attacker. It should mainly be considered if you are actively using her in any of the teams she's in.

Gameplay

Main Campaign

Pepper is a serviceable unit for early missions as she can provide damage support for other units. Thanks to her perks, she generally has a longer lifespan, equating to a longer time spent fighting on the battlefield.

However, Pepper falls off quickly as soon as players get their hands on more competent ranged units. Despite her increased survivability, her dodge rolls can actually hinder her total damage output, and large swarms of fast enemies can overwhelm her. This isn't helped by the fact that her damage and health stats are both quite low for her very high cost, even with the special ability factored in. While upgrade items are able to remedy that somewhat, they often do much more on competent ranged units like Policeman Diaz and Farmer, or even melee units like Grenadier. For this reason, Pepper is of little to no use in general.

Skirmish

In League, Pepper is not a good choice for most levels as she will often find herself overwhelmed in battle due to lacking high DPS and bullet resistance. Her dodge roll can quickly save her from an enemy melee attack, but once she reaches near the edge of the field she will find herself cornered. Even with knockback, the high agility of most units in Skirmish will prove to be too much for her slow melee animation.

Despite all this, once her special ability is unlocked, she may prove herself to be a decent addition to any team composition as the inspiration buff can help her allies get the upper hand in the fight. Much like Cap, since she must go through the whole animation of her boosting her team, it's recommended that she's placed in the backlines, for her to apply the buff without being cut off short. While she does not have the same DPS or the bullet resistance that Cap does, Pepper is a more cost-effective alternative to him which can potentially allows room for other units.

Item Sets

Being a damage oriented support, Pepper can be useful for her team with both passive sets, and the likes of Hunter. Generally, this ends up being the best option for an offensive Pepper setup, as it often happens with all other ranged units. Purely supportive Pepper can instead find use in Chef, which is only accentuated once her special is unlocked. For obvious reasons, Boss is not as efficient, since it's difficult to bring Pepper's preparation time to lower than 15 seconds.

Like the majority of ranged units, Pepper benefits most from flat boosts to ranged damage, preparation time watches, and +% health books. Boosting her agility by a little might prove useful, since random variation might make Pepper prone to pausing if it's kept at base value. She is also one of the few gunners who benefits from melee bonuses on items, since her kick comes into play often, though it's not recommended to invest into the stat too heavily.

Skins and Synergies

Pepper, along with her respective skins, is a part of several teams: Internal Forces, Police, Builders and Scientists.

Name	Pepper	Officer Pepper	Carpenter Pepper	Dr Pepper
Skin
Unlock Req.	-	120 money	300 money	Obtain via gacha during Christmas Event
Team	IF	Police	Builders	Scientists

In most of the above teams, Pepper is an acceptable option.

For Internal Forces, Pepper is one of the better units, as she and Ranger are the only proper ranged attackers on the team, but she only realistically benefits from the 2/2, which could have been better used to support their melee attackers like Grenadier and Light Soldier instead, even if she can keep the 3/3 active.

In Builders, Pepper, being an expensive ranged unit, is only good for activating the single use 3/3 power, as the 2/2 is simply too inconsistent given the team mostly consists of very expensive units, and the 5/5 power in general doesn't affect her.

The Police Team doesn't need Pepper as much, but provides her with some much-needed benefits. Being on a team with several ranged units, both the 2/2 and 3/3 powers are able to benefit her accordingly by providing extended firing times and extra protection from Insectoids. She gets overshadowed by other ranged units for 5/5's Fury buff, but it does serve to boost her otherwise low damage.

As for Scientists, Pepper is not as useful in that team. While she is more accessible, Saw is a better alternative for activating their 2/2 and 3/3 team powers. She also faces competition from Dr. Kane and Dr. Norman, who provide superior support. The fact that she doesn't contribute to their DPS also means she gets no use of the 5/5, and is easily outclassed as a result, only being useful as a slot filler in comparison to Dr. Lilly.

Bugs / Errors

• The invincibility Pepper acquires during her dodge gets disabled with just a split second of the animation remaining to play, making it possible for enemies to damage her, if they have fast enough attack speed. If Pepper's health reaches zero because of this, she will instantly turn into a corpse upon exiting the dodge, skipping the animation of falling onto the ground.

Trivia

• Internally, Pepper's dodge doesn't make her move backwards. Instead, it teleports her hitbox once her dodge animation is completely finished. She is able to ignore damage with the dodge thanks to invincibility frames.
• Pepper as a whole was inspired by Judy Hopps from the animated feature film Zootopia. Her appearance resembles that of Judy, her deleted backstory is very similar to the plot of the movie, and she is referred to as "Judi" and "Judy" in the game files for her various skins.
  • Before update 2.8.2, the Officer Pepper skin used to be called "Policeman Judi", completely ignoring the gender pronouns of both Judy Hopps and Pepper.
• Pepper and Private Rodriguez are the only two units to receive newly unique animations for their special abilities.
  • The animation of Pepper blowing a kiss is directly copied from one of her iMessage stickers.
• Before update 2.7.0, Pepper had to be purchased with coins. The bus had to be level 3, and her price was 150 coins.
• In German localization, Pepper's info text explains that she was actually demoted to road patrol.
• In update 3.2.0.295, Pepper's sprite has been changed to replace the police star on her cap with the IF logo.
• Pepper's Scientist skin is named after the eponymous soft drink brand.

Gallery

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  Pepper's old sprite. (Before the Team Powers update)

• 

  Pepper performing her special ability.

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  Pepper's dodging animation

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  Officer Pepper performing her special ability.

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  Officer Pepper's dodging animation

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  Promotional artwork depicting Soldier, Nancy, Glenn Pines, Pepper and Swat.

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  Saw, Pepper, Witch, Zombie and Fat Zombie celebrating DAWZ's 7th Anniversary.