Welder

Welder
Regular Christmas
A garage welding kit comes in handy even in the apocalypse.
Main Stats
Type	Support
Rarity	Common
Health 8 Melee Damage 20
Fire Damage	5 (fire pool)
Explosive Damage	75 (on-death explosion)
Crit. Chance	1%
Crit. Damage	10%
Speed	20
Prepare Time	90
Rage Cost	50
Special	Repair bus: 5% of its max health Repair Generator and Turret: 30% of their max health
Behavior Stats
Agility	60
Aggression	100
Detection Range	200
Agility Penalty	50%
Aggression Penalty	50%
Morale Stats
Charisma	750
Valor	800
Charisma Radius	80
Abilities
Perks
Special Ability	Anything repaired by Welder gets shield points equal to 30% of Welder's health.
Resistances
Fire	100%
Unlock Requirements
Price	3200
Player Level	9

Welder is a handyman armed with a cutting torch attached to a red acetylene tank by a black hose, and dressed in a black t-shirt, brown welding gloves, a blue welding apron, black pants, and a welder's mask. When making repairs, he wields a silver nut wrench in his free hand.

Christmas Welder is Welder's first exclusive skin. He is armed with a cutting torch attached to a red acetylene tank by a candy cane-patterned hose, and dressed in a green and white Christmas elf tunic with white buttons, a black belt with a yellow buckle, yellow pants, brown welding gloves, pointed shoes, and a pointed green hat with a single yellow stripe and a small red feather. When making repairs, he wields a silver nut wrench in his free hand.

He has a unique attacking animation.

He can be unlocked for 3,200 coins after reaching player level 9.

Overview

Welder is a melee Support unit, who provides strictly utility aid. He has extremely high rage cost and preparation time, along with extremely low health, but also very high movement speed.

Welder is unable to attack enemies. Instead, he will weave through them and go straight for the barricade in order to attack it. He can still be targeted and damaged by enemies while running. Fear doesn't affect Welder's frequency of attacking, but it can make him pause when he reaches the barricade.

When sent out of the bus, Welder will heal it and some rage items on field, should they be damaged. He will repair the bus for up to 5% of its maximum health, and Turrets and Generators for 30% of theirs. He will not target any other support items. He repairs objects by running towards them and applying multiple healing pulses during a special animation. Once Welder has tagged all objects he could find, he will then proceed to the barricade. He will not return to items that have already been repaired.

Welder is immune to fire damage. When killed, he does not turn into a zombie. Instead, he explodes immediately, producing an explosion and a fire pool.

Special Ability

Welder's special ability allows him to apply shield points equal to 30% of his health to all Turrets and Generators repaired by him.

Since Welder's own health is rather poor to begin with, this only serves as a one-off protection for damaged Turrets so they can absorb an extra hit from a Demon, Charged Zombie, Insectoid, or miscellaneous threats. Despite the extra layer of protection maybe proving to be useful, this perk simply doesn't improve Welder enough to be a good investment.

Gameplay

Main Campaign

While Welder's unique abilities may sound promising, he has some significant problems that make him an almost unusable unit. His 90 second preparation time means usually no more than one Welder can be deployed per mission, and when you do, his high cost of 50 rage makes it difficult to send him. Should you struggle with securing a 3-star completion, 2/2 Mechanic synergy is a much easier option to use, as it heals the bus by 5% every time a mechanic is spawned and usually runs the spammable Redneck. It doesn't help that Turrets and Generators, the very objects Welder tries to support, are also expensive, meaning he competes for the rage pool with them, and you have better means of supporting them anyways.

However, should you decide to fully commit to him, it is possible to get something out of Welder's abilities. He can be efficiently utilized in some missions by making sure that ranged units cover him, and that he is protected with barrels in front of him to stall approaching enemies. He can also be very useful in supply runs that generate enough rage to field him as he can tear down the supply stack before the wave is even killed. In the case where you have no other units to deal damage, the fact he sprints ahead of everyone else means only other sprinting threats from the left can attack him if they spawn in the right place, giving him more than enough time to finish the job. It’s recommended to use 4 items with -2 cost to ensure you can use him reliably. Also his guaranteed turret if you bring two other mechanics can really help as well. Precise positioning is required, else Welder will get killed or enemies will ignore it. Unsurprisingly, both Turret and Generator are even better options for cover, but they are also the most expensive, which means that Welder should be sent out when the rage meter is practically full. Using Fury is a good idea, as it can make his output higher.

Despite this, Welder's usability is bound to taper off, as his overall poor disposability makes him nigh impossible to use. Even cheaper, more disposable units could do much greater damage. The likes of Energy Spheres completely invalidate his effectiveness.

Welder does get some use in Supply Runs however, provided Energy Spheres are not present, as in most cases there will be few enemies for Welder to avoid, making him practically guaranteed to reach the barricade. He also has the benefit of the unique AI relating to Supply Runs, as ranged and possibly melee units will cover him. As much as the circumstances of Supply Runs are beneficial to him, he is still not quite ideal to bring along, as any Ranged unit will also be able to damage the barricade, making it practically meaningless for players to bring along melee units, Welder included.

Skirmish

Considering that he can't attack anyone directly, when put into a League fight Welder will just run straight into the enemy team. This effectively makes him a suicide bomber with an unreliable success rate. While this strategy can be used for gimmicky setups, it's hard to ignore Welder's very high cost crippling formations, even if his gimmicky quirks could potentially distract Shooters, Shotgunners or Snipers because of his high movement speed he would certainly pose as a good distraction, the fact alone that it is unreliable makes Welder mostly bad in PvP.

One notable but costly strategy is using Welder to distract Builder Abby. Provided he can get past her unarmed, Abby will waste her valuable firing period facing the opposite way from a player's team attempting to fire at Welder, rendering her essentially useless.

Item Sets

Because of him only attacking the barricade, majority of item sets have no effect on Welder's gameplay. Surprisingly, the best option for him is Hunter as it provides a massive ~40% boost to damage against barricade due to its center being located far away from its point of impact. SwissMade is a serviceable alternative but not nearly as good. For mid-game, Builder is one of the better options, as it offers Welder some protection, even though it's tied to RNG. Chef works too, though it requires Welder to fix some items on his way to have any meaningful impact.

Even though upgrading Welder's stats might sound hopeless, they still shouldn't be neglected if you are planning to continuously use him, at least as a member of Mechanics. Flat boosts to health are the most valuable of all bonuses, and +% melee dmg. becomes very useful at Welder's higher levels too. Among books, +% melee is the best option. Prep. time watches are the go-to choice for an obvious reason.

When it comes to events, Welder's priorities shift towards his support abilities, therefore making upgrades to melee damage redundant. The best set for Harvest Day is Lucky Guy, as it allows Welder to survive a lightning charge, should it hit him. It's also recommended to raise his health above 100 for this event, as this is the maximum amount of damage a single lightning can deal to him. This way you rely less on Lucky Guy's bonus to keep the generator running, and can instead support Welder with Medkits. Because of this detail, +% health books are the best option for him in this event, meanwhile flat boosts to health become even more important.

In case of Wall Mart, it's safe to completely ignore item sets, as the only stat that matters for Welder in this event is prep. time reduction. Pursuing it through extra buffs is highly recommended. In case you want to use a set anyway, then Chef is a valid option, since Welder is bound to stay on field for a long time because of all the Turrets and Generators.

Gentleman set is unusable on Welder due to the way his criticals work. See trivia section for more info.

Skins and Synergies

Welder is a part of Mechanic team.

Name	Welder	Christmas Welder
Skin
Unlock Req.	–	Obtain via gacha during Christmas Event
Team	Mechanic	–

Since Mechanics' 3/3 power is directly tied to Welder (100% chance to produce a Turret on spawn), he is recommended to be used for this synergy alongside Mechanic Diaz and Nomad Polina. The best way to utilize it is to keep one of the ranged units alive on the field, and then, when you need to spawn a Turret, send out a melee unit like Hillbilly or Mechanic, and immediately follow them up with Welder.

It must be said, though, that Welder's own downsides tend to bring Mechanics' performance down, as his aid usually borders on a winmore status for them, especially in relation to bus repairs. It doesn't help that spamming Hillbilly can prove to be a better way of spamming Turrets, if you use him with both Polina and Diaz. It's better to only occasionally bring Welder, as otherwise his suicidal behavior does more harm than good and can outweigh the benefits of his guaranteed Turret.

Bugs

• If Welder is knocked back while performing repairs, he will continue to repair the object as normal despite being displaced.

Trivia

• Despite having statistics relating to crit. chance and damage, Welder is unable to trigger critical attacks at all. If you equip him with the Gentleman set, he will never be able to activate its damage buff.
• Welder is tied with Turbo for having the fastest movement speed in the game among all units.
• Welder has the lowest base health among all units in the game.
• Before obtaining the ability to repair things, Welder had a different sprite.
• In Dead Ahead: Quarantine, Welder used to be available earlier on at rank 7.
• The Christmas Welder skin in-game ended up looking different from its appearance in the update banner where it was first shown.

Gallery

• 

  Welder's sprite prior to update 2.8.1

• 

  Christmas Welder, as seen in the 3.0.0 update banner.

• 

  2024 New Year artwork with Christmas Mechanic, Christmas Welder and Christmas Cashier.

• 

  Welder repairing the generator in Harvest Day.