Policeman Diaz

Policeman Diaz
Regular Desperado Mechanic
A lone wolf.
Main Stats
Type	Heavyweight
Rarity	Common
Health 60 Ranged Damage 10 Melee Damage 2
Crit. Chance	0%
Crit. Damage	5%
Speed	6 (base) 8 (ability)
Courage Cost	30
Behavior Stats
Agility	90
Aggression	100
Detection Range	140
Agility Penalty	50%
Aggression Penalty	50%
Morale Stats
Charisma	400
Valor	600
Charisma Radius	80
Abilities
Perks	Non-documented: Knockback resist
Special Ability	Gain a 30% speed bonus to all actions.
Ranged Data
Firing Period	3.6s (base) 2.5s (ability) 0.9s (close range, base) 0.6s (close range, ability)
Reloading Period	2.5s (base) 1.8s (ability) 0.8s (close range, base) 0.6s (close range, ability)
Range	80
Bullet Spread	35°
Resistances
Melee	50%
Knockback	100%
Unlock Requirements
Price	1,250
Player Level	6

Policeman Diaz is a police officer who prefers to work alone. He is armed with a stockless pump-action shotgun and dressed in a policeman's uniform with a police badge, black pants with yellow highlights, and a black officer's cap.

Desperado is Policeman Diaz's first exclusive skin. He is armed with a stockless pump-action shotgun and dressed in a black charro vest, a white charro shirt, a small red charro bow tie, black pants, and a wide-brimmed sombrero. His face is painted in the style of a sugar skull.

Mechanic Diaz is Policeman Diaz's second exclusive skin. He is armed with a stockless pump-action shotgun and dressed in a gray short-sleeved mechanic shirt with a dark grey and blue name tag, blue pants, a brown utility belt with a gray buckle and pouches, black shoes, and a black automobile repair shop cap. He sports a brown circle beard goatee.

He can be unlocked for 1,250 coins after reaching player level 6.

Overview

Policeman Diaz is a ranged Heavyweight that functions similar to Shotgunners. He has relatively high stats for the latter class, with the exception of his very slow walking speed.

Policeman Diaz uses a pump-action shotgun that fires 4 pellets in a cone at decent speed. In close quarters, when his gun is empty, he'll quick load a single shell and fire it. He doesn't have a proper melee attack, and will instead try to shoot like this over and over until either he, or his attacker dies. Should he finish reloading, but his attacker is killed by another unit, Policeman Diaz will simply have a single shell in his gun to fire normally.

Diaz is immune to knockback, and has 50% resistance to melee damage. Some time after dying, he turns into a Cop.

Perks and Abilities

Policeman Diaz' special ability grants him a 30% speed bonus to all actions. This applies to his movement, firing, and reload speeds.

If you are actively using Policeman in your decks then this SA becomes a great buff for him, especially thanks to its improvement of Diaz's movement speed. There's generally no reason to skip this SA unless you use Diaz very rarely.

Gameplay

Main Campaign

Policeman Diaz is often considered one of the best units to use throughout the entire campaign. This is mostly thanks to his melee resistance and his nature as a shotgunner. Nearly all enemies in the game rely on melee damage and have to get close, where he then has an advantage. He is one of the few rangers who can easily deny special abilities from Insectoids/Demons, and the only one capable of surviving a Charged Zombie's attack, even without any upgrades. Policeman's tankiness becomes even greater if he is supported by a Medkit due to his already high health.

Aside from his good survivability, Diaz's appeal also lies in his playability. Although he is somewhat expensive, his moderate preparation time allows him to provide meaningful support often. He is only superseded in such area by Lester and Farmer, which can accumulate DPS better but are fragile, as well as Ranger, who can be equally powerful in his own right due to his higher speed and lower cost. The optimal formation is still generally dependent on player preference.

Like the majority of shotgunners, Policeman works well in both defensive and offensive roles. However, the latter is done worse than the former, since he has slightly slow reload speed, and his single burst damage is lower than of his colleagues. Nonetheless, it's a marginal downside in practice.

Skirmish

In League, Policeman's modest courage cost, high health, and fairly useful melee resistance makes him an alright choice for Skirmish. His unique resistance combined with his high HP make him able to survive Carol's charging attack and potentially tank Mechanic's sledgehammer. With Carol, in particular, he can bait her into an unfavorable position with health to spare, allowing him or other ranged units to easily kill her. In general, he acts as a strong meat shield against most enemy melees, but can have trouble against them should they posses bullet resistance. What's worse, he lacks that perk himself, and has slow movement speed, ultimately becoming vulnerable to opposing ranged units. Policeman's special rarely comes into play there as it only takes effect after losing half of his total health. Due to this, he's likely to be killed before the bonus can do anything. In this respect, players may want to consider the cheaperRanger as a shotgunner due to his bullet resistance and higher speed.

Items

Like most shotgunners, Diaz can meaningfully benefit from every ranged-damage oriented item set, be it Hunter or Military. While the former might sound like an odd choice, Diaz's short range doesn't prevent this set from greatly increasing his single pellet damage. Military is only preferable if you struggle with getting items that can improve Diaz's range. Tactical is also a valid option for mid-game, as it allows Policeman to properly deal with such threats as Armored Skeletons, Lubbers and Sappers.

If you manage to unlock Diaz early into the game's progression, Adventurer and Startup are both valid options, with the former being more preferable thanks to its damage boost; although the latter might be more appealing if you want to make Diaz faster, and can compensate for lack of bonus damage through regular upgrades since it's one tier higher than Adventurer.

Although +% health books are preferable for all rangers, Diaz benefits from them more than anyone else, as they accentuate his role as a damage sponge in late game. However, it's still acceptable to use +% crit. chance instead, as they still boost Diaz's overall damage output, while not being risky to use thanks to his natural tankiness. +% Ranged damage books can be viable too, but only when Diaz is close to being maxed out.

Diaz benefits most from flat damage boosts, while his health could benefit from either flats at lower levels, or percentages at higher ones. Preparation time watches are the better option as usual, especially since Policeman has very high base agility.

Skins and Synergies

Policeman, along some of his skins, is a part of several teams: Police, and Mechanics.

Name	Policeman Diaz	Desperado	Mechanic Diaz
Skin
Unlock Req.	-	300	300
Team	Police	-	Mechanics

In all of the above teams, Policeman Diaz is usually a good option. Thanks to his very high survivability, he can keep the "three unique units" requirement fulfilled for a long time. This is especially important for Mechanics, since most others are pretty frail and suicidal. However, Diaz is not as great for abusing their 2/2 power as Redneck and Mechanic, and he shines most in 3/3 teams instead, usually when used together with Welder or Sniper Polina.

Diaz is more notable in Police team, because together with Charlotte they can enable a very powerful 2/2 synergy that benefits all ranged units (and Turret) without players having to spend any green cash. The 3/3 synergy accentuates his role as a ranged tank by giving him shield points, and the 5/5 synergy boosts him with Fury, dramatically increasing the amount of fire he could deliver.

Bugs

• If Diaz runs out ammo and and an enemy manages to get inside of his hitbox, he will stand still and do absolutely nothing, occasionally saying lines relating to low agility.
  • This issue is related to an old bug where he would repeatedly perform his alternate reload animation without firing, due to not loading any shells in the magazine. In a hotfix leading up to the release of 3.9.0, this was "patched" but instead resulted in the bug in its current state.

Trivia

• Diaz's quick reload is technically his melee attack – on the code level, it's performed by the same function that handles universal melee attack logic.
• Policeman Diaz was initially referred to as just "Policeman" and his name wasn't given until much later on.
• Before obtaining melee resistance, Policeman had a different sprite. His attack rate was much slower, and he had a very weak melee attack that dealt 2 damage.
• Desperado skin had a bug that caused Diaz to reload only one shell, yet be able to fire four shots as normal, effectively decreasing his reload time by 75%. This was fixed in update 3.9.4.
  • Oddly, this bug was fixed in a patch after its introduction, but returned in the very next update.
• It is likely that Policeman is using a Mossberg 590 Nightstick, due to the wooden stock and pump of his weapon. While the Remington 870 TAC-14 Hardwood is another possibility, the Mossberg is a more likely choice as it is the only pump-action shotgun to pass the military’s Mil-Spec 3443E test.
• Due to him being a ranged unit without melee attacks, Policeman Diaz is currently the only heavyweight without the knockback perk.
• Diaz used to have a unique Quotes before update 4.0.0, while his health was below a certain percentage he would repeatedly say "!@!#?"

Gallery

• 

  Policeman's sprite prior to update 2.4.0

• 

  Policeman's old melee attack.