Willy

Willy
Jailers Scientists
A soldier equipped with a shield, a bulletproof suit and a stun gun. Skin "Dr. Lilly" was inspired by SKELETAL
Main Stats
Type	Heavyweight
Rarity	Common
Health 60 Ranged Damage 2 Melee Damage 10
Crit. Chance	0%
Crit. Damage	10%
Speed	6
Prepare Time	20
Courage Cost	35
Behavior Stats
Agility	60
Aggression	100
Detection Range	170
Agility Penalty	50%
Aggression Penalty	50%
Morale Stats
Charisma	350
Valor	600
Charisma Radius	120
Abilities
Perks
Knockback Strength	5
Stun Duration	0.8s
Shield Points	20 (base) 20 + 50% of Willy's HP (SA)
Special Ability	Shield is increased by 50% of Health
Ranged Data
Ammo Capacity	3
Firing Period	2.4s (with shield) 1.5s (without shield)
Reloading Period	0.7s
Range	26
Bullet Spread	25°
Resistances
Bullet	90%
Knockback	100%
Unlock Requirements
Price	10,000
Player Level	11

Willy is a prison guard specializing in close-range crowd control. He is armed with a riot shield and a stun gun and is dressed in a khaki long sleeve prison guard uniform, a bulletproof suit, black pants, and a black prison guard's helmet with a transparent visor.

Dr. Lilly is Willy's first exclusive skin. She is seen wearing a hazmat suit with a gasmask, wearing blue latex gloves, and wearing a bullet proof armor, as well as carrying a shield and a stun gun.

He can be unlocked for 10,000 coins after reaching player level 11.

Overview

Willy is a ranged Heavyweight that fights in close quarters. He has relatively low health and damage for his class, along with higher-than-average courage cost. Meanwhile, his preparation time is overall relatively short.

Willy uses a taser that can zap enemies up to three times, and will switch to melee attacks should enemies get even closer to him. His behavior depends on whether he has his shield up or not. With it, he "reloads" his weapon by dropping the current taser and taking out a new one, and bashes enemies with a shield for the melee attack. Without the shield, Willy fires the taser a little faster, and won't reload it, instead taking a pause before continuing. His melee attack will also switch to kicks.

Unlike other ranged units, Willy is able to damage the barricade with his melee attack. He can be pounced on by Insectoids.

Taser shots apply guaranteed stuns on Willy's target, and deal true damage. His melee attacks have guaranteed knockback. He spawns with a few shield points, and will change his behavior once they are depleted.

Willy is immune to knockback, and has 90% resistance to bullet damage. Some time after dying, he turns into a Crooked.

Special Ability

Willy's special ability grants him additional SP equivalent to 50% of his HP, rounded up. These points are added to Willy's starting amount of 20, guaranteeing he will have a minimum of 124 SP.

This ability is useful in theory, but fails to live up to it because of Willy's health being too low to take full advantage of it. It doesn't help that it can't improve any of his other lackluster aspects, leading to it being a questionable investment at best. It's recommended to save this ability for last, should you ever decide to max out every unit.

Gameplay

Main Campaign

Willy's stun perk makes every shot temporarily stops his target in place, making him a useful unit for dealing with certain dangerous zombies who can quickly reach the bus or have high health and/or bothersome resistances. This somewhat compensates for his low damage. His knockback perk helps keep enemies from getting close enough to retaliate and to put them back in Willy's stun gun range again. However, this won't work against knockback-resistant enemies who may force Willy to use his weaker melee attack once they manage to get close enough while his gun is used up, leaving him at his most vulnerable and without his most damaging attack.

Technically, he supersedes his fellow prison guard, Jailer, as he is guaranteed to stun his enemies with every hit of his main weapon as well as having it be a ranged attack, extra protection above his high base health, and a very small knockback ability to keep dangerous enemies back. Although these strengths are countered by his very slow movement speed and very high courage cost.

Despite his theoretical usefulness and support capabilities, Willy is a terrible unit in practice, mostly due to his slow movement speed and extreme courage cost, making it hard to utilize him effectively. His attack range is very short, allowing faster enemies to approach him while he is reloading, a particular example is Blue Runners, who are common throughout the stage 7 and 8. Due to this, Willy can only be used effectively in extreme situations where bullet-damage-related strategies are ineffective, which comes down to just a few missions in aforementioned end-game stages. These usually involve stacking copies of him on sleeping Eggs, or using electricity against someone with extreme health and bullet resistance, like SWATs and Twins.

Skirmish

In League, ever since introduction of melee rushdowns meta as well as the Tactical set, Willy is completely useless. Not only does he severely hurt the team setup with his extreme cost, his very slow movement speed, very short attack range, and the recklessness to use his melee attacks too early make him too weak on his own and an unreliability overall. Although his Shield Points and bullet resistance do increase his survivability, enemy ranged units with high rate of fire and, more commonly, Snipers, can easily chip his health away and eventually kill him. The teams that utilize Willy have now become too weak to be used, especially in mid-level Skirmishes and above. The only way he may get use is in decks centering around protecting Builder Abby, but Soldier and Juggernaut both preform this task better and have more health. Overall, Willy cannot be utilized effectively in any team and should not be used for skirmishing.

Item Sets

Due to his poor range, Willy is best paired with Military for extra damage, even if its upside is tied to RNG. While Ice Breaker sounds appealing, his stun debuff lasts about as long as it takes for him to land the next shot, which essentially makes him unable to activate the set bonus by himself. Trying to pair Willy with other stunners or spawning more copies of himself tends to be impractical because of his courage cost. SwissMade is the only viable alternative that's wholly consistent.

While it might seem like a gimmick strategy, equipping Willy with Startup can prove useful, as it makes him able to respond to critical situations much quicker, at minimum improving his role as a tank. Obviously, this set will keep Willy significantly underpowered, so it should only be considered by players willing to try out more unorthodox options. If you decide to use this strategy, then it's important to pursue cups, watches, and books specifically, with the knife being legendary. In case Willy's health matters more than damage, it's acceptable to pursue a legendary cup instead.

Flat bonuses work best for Willy, though +% health buffs are valid at his higher levels. Despite his short preparation time, he still gets more from watches that decrease it, as being limited to 20 seconds cripples Willy's already low playability. Any cost reduction is also worth pursuing given how expensive he is. It's acceptable to give Willy crit. chance books if you want to focus on dealing damage with him. However, this requires pursuing crit. damage buffs, which limits how far you can boost his other parameters. +% Health books work as an all-around viable alternative.

Skins and Synergies

Willy, along with his respective skins, is a part of several teams: Jailers, and Scientists.

Name	Willy	Dr. Lilly
Skin
Unlock Req.	–	300 money
Team	Jailers	Scientists

Willy's overall inadequacy makes him a bad choice for any team.

In Jailers, Willy is generally too expensive to be used, even as filler for the 2/2 power. Meanwhile, the 3/3 can only affect his melee, as his ranged attack already stuns. 5/5 power doesn't mean much for him either, as fast prepratiom time is nullified on him because of extreme courage cost.

In Scientists, he is similarly useless. For either the 2/2 or 3/3, Dr. Kane, Dr. Norman, Liquidator and Dr. Sanchez are better fillers due to their utility, with Norman's ranged attack often providing far better support. Since he isn't great at dealing damage either, the 5/5 power also has no meaningful effects, since its impact will show itself better on other units.

Trivia

• In the past, Willy's shield used to upgrade alongside his health.
• As of update 2.8.1, Willy's stun gun will shoot a thin conducting wire while his shield is active. However, the wires will not appear if he does not have his shield. Prior to the update, his shots looked like a ray of white light.
• Willy dropping his gun and pulling out another may reference the New York reload, a technique in which police officers would carry a backup gun and draw them out the moment their current weapon runs out of bullets or gets jammed as opposed to reloading them for a speed advantage.
• In the past, Willy was the only unit to always show his health bar, thanks to shield points meter making it visible.
• The shield Willy has isn’t realistic to what real life American prisons and police forces are equipped with, but rather shares similarities with ones from Russian law enforcement.
• Willy is the only unit to be given a male and a female skin, as Dr. Lilly is implied to be a female variant of Willy.
  • Dr. Lilly's name is a reference to an animation created by reddit user u/Volt_Jolt, featuring a female version of Willy that they named Lilly.

Gallery

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  Willy losing his shield.