Willy

* Regular
* Dr. Lilly

A soldier equipped with a shield, a bulletproof suit and a stun gun.
Skin "Dr. Lilly" was inspired by SKELETAL

### Basics

Willy is a heavyweight, meaning he is a slow but strong unit with high health and knockback resistance. He is also a support unit, meaning that he provides assistance to his teammates with special abilities and/or by dealing extra damage.

Willy is a defensive unit, albeit one with surprisingly low health, and low ranged damage. He has an unusually short preparation time for a ranged unit. However, this is compensated by his incredibly high courage cost.

He shoots his weapon and performs his melee attack differently depending on whether if he has his shield or not. With shield, he fires his weapon at a slow rate up to 3 times before performing a quick reload by dropping the weapon before taking out another one from his back pouch. When being approached suddenly, he will bash an enemy with his shield. Should he lose his shield, he will fire his stun gun much quicker, and does a kick. However, his melee attacks are functionally identical despite the animation difference.

Some time after dying, Willy will turn into Crooked.

Despite using a gun, Willy's short weapon range allows him to use his melee attacks on the barricade.

Since Willy is primarily a ranged unit, he will be targeted by Insectoid and be pounced on.

### Perks and Abilities

Willy is immune to knockback, and has 90% resistance to bullet damage.

Willy comes with 20 shield points by default, which can negate excess damage done to him in a single hit but cannot be recovered. Once he loses all his shield points, his ranged attacks occur more frequently.

His melee attacks knock enemies back. His ranged attacks can ignore most types of enemy resistances, but cannot bypass Egg's bullet immunity during its inactive state.

Undocumented, his fear resistance is decent, meaning more amount of enemies are required to put him to Fear debuff.

At level 13, Willy unlocks his special ability which is almost exactly the same as Soldier's, giving 50% of his maximum HP as additional SP. His level 13 base health is 173, so Willy will gain 87 more SP for a total of 107. Although by no means the worst ability, there's no point in purchasing it as Willy's health is too low to begin with compared to all other heavyweights, and in most cases does not improve his performance.

## 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 compensated 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 largely unviable. 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. Overall, Willy cannot be utilized effectively in any team and should not be used for skirmishing.

### Item Sets

Due to Willy's close-range nature, the best set for him is Military, as it provides him at least some form of a major damage increase. While Ice Breaker might sound like a perfect option, it's actually a bad choice because of how Willy's stuns work. They last for roughly the same amount of frames it takes him to land the next shot, which means he is unable to receive the damage buff by himself. The only way to see Ice Breaker's set in effect on Willy is if two copies of him attack the same enemy, which rarely ever happens.

Like the majority of ranged units, Willy benefits most from flat buffs to stats, and +% Health books. Uniquely, an agility watch is an acceptable choice for him, since he already has moderate preparation time. However, going with the usual approach of getting a prep. time watch and acquiring agility through extra buffs might prove more effective. Pursuing cost reduction is always appreciated for Willy, but in the long run it only makes a small difference, even if you manage to provide him with -7 to -8 reduction.

## Skins and Synergies

Willy is a part of Jailers and Scientists teams.

 Team

Willy's overall inadequacy makes him a bad choice for any team, with none of the powers being able to aid him in any way. In Jailers, he does not benefit from the 3/3 power since it only boosts his melee while his ranged attack already stuns, and his preparation time is way too fast for 5/5 to matter, not to mention he is still a very bad filler for 2/2. In Scientists, he is similarly useless, as again there are better fillers for 2/2 or 3/3, and he isn't actually great at dealing damage for your investment.

## Trivia

* In the past, Willy's shield used to act as a separate health bar. As SP used to increase along with Willy's health upgrades, much more damage could be sustained by the shield before breaking, including DoT status debuffs. Now, SP stays the same with each level upgrade, and only increases after his special ability is purchased.
* Willy is one of the five Jailers, the others being Gunslinger, Sniper Polina, Guard, and Jailer.
* As of update 2.8.1, Willy's stun gun will shoot a thin conducting wire while his shield is active, fitting more in line with real-world stun guns. However, the wires will not appear if he does not have his shield.
* After firing three shots with the shield still equipped, Willy will drop his stun gun on the ground and take another one out from a back pouch. Oddly, when he fires three shots without the shield equipped, he'll simply take a deep breath before firing again without any explicit action showing that the stun gun was reloaded, indicating that it can be used more than three times with a very short cooldown in between bursts.
	+ Willy dropping his gun and pulling out another may also 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 during combat.
* In the past, Willy was the only unit to always show his health bar. Much like zombies who are given SP by Medic (Zombie), they will display both bars without having to take damage and revert back to not showing any bars after losing the extra defensive layer. Willy's health bar would always be visible even if he was at full health.
* Willy, as a heavyweight, has knockback resistance. Oddly, his infected form loses that knockback resistance.
* Despite his Dr. Lily skin having full body protection, it somehow does not protect the unit from poison.
* Willy and Soldier are the only units with riot shields. However, while Willy's shield is part of his SP and is dropped when it is lost, Soldier's shield is always attached to him regardless if he has SP or not.
* 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.

## Gallery

Willy losing his shield.

 Humans
 TMF Squad