Firefighter

He fought fire - now he fights zombies.

 **Firefighter** is a fireman whose grudge now lies with zombies. He is armed with a fire ax and dressed in a yellow firefighter suit with white reflective strips, a red firefighter's helmet, and a firefighter's open-circuit SCBA full-face mask and air cylinder.

He can be unlocked for 480 coins after reaching player level 5.

## Functionality

### Basics

Firefighter is a damager, meaning he will attack enemies and the barricade at close range while excelling at inflicting large amounts of raw damage to high health targets.

He has a moderate amount of damage and walking speed, meanwhile his attacks, especially critical, are slow.

When killed, Firefighter has a 50% chance to explode immediately and leaves behind a fire pool. If he does not, he turns into his namesake zombie after a while.

### Perks and Abilities

Firefighter is immune to poison, fire and resists half of the damage from explosions.

He has a special AI script where if there is a Fat Zombie near him and he isn't currently fighting anything, he will target it and ignore other zombies.

As mentioned before, Firefighter's death explosion grants him a chance not to be zombified on death. Unlike all other units who actually possess the necessary perk, however, he is true to its description as the explosion is never guaranteed, whereas all others never turn into zombies when killed.

Upon reaching level 13, Firefighter's special ability can be unlocked, granting him chance to throw a Molotov in an area ahead of him shortly after death. It's always thrown in the direction towards the barricade. While it sounds promising, this is greatly diminished by the occurrence of his death explosion which bars him from doing so. The usefulness of this ability ultimately depends on RNG and is fairly situational, highly relying on the mission Firefighter is used in. Similarly to his usual on-death explosion, his special ability can be just as disadvantageous to Firefighter's teammates, especially if they happen to be either slightly ahead or behind of him. Its only practical use is in Skirmish, where a well-thrown Molotov can hit and kill an enemy Sniper, and even then it gets outclassed by Grenadier's special ability due to its short range.

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

In general, Firefighter is best treated as a purely specialist melee unit. Due to the combination of all his resistances, he excels in fighting specific enemies (such as Paramedic/Fat Zombie/Slob/Rebel/Epidemiologist/his namesake zombie), but rather average against others. Because his attacks are slow and he only performs at his best in specific situations, other damagers will outclass him when his abilities aren't needed. As such, spending much of the player's resources to upgrade Firefighter will simply prove to be unwise. His only saving grace is that he does the job just as well as his more expensive equivalents.

However, if the player takes the time to invest in Firefighters stats and levels them accordingly, Firefighter can be a very decent unit up to Location 7, where he then falls off due to his combined resistances being useless in the face of punishing zombies such as Big Blue or Energy Sphere. With the large presence of Rebels in Location 6, he can prove to be essential in situations where weaker spam units such as Redneck or Private Rodriguez would be ineffective, provided his Agility is high enough to make up for the knockback heavy enemies in that Location.

### Skirmish

In League, Firefighter fares well enough in early low-level skirmishing as his high base health can allow him to take several hits from low-level ranged enemy units. He is also capable of countering Flamethrower, Grenadier and Queen's explosives as well as walking through fire pools. However, in later levels of Skirmish his weaknesses become all too prominent. His lack of bullet resistance and slow attack speed make him unviable, combined with his special ability and explosive death being unreliable at times, and capable of causing great harm towards friendly units. In higher ranks of Skirmish, Firefighter sees little use, unless the enemy is heavily reliant on units countered easily by him.

### Item Sets

Because of his narrow usage, combined with poor attack speed, Firefighter is unable to get a good use out of any specialized sets. He is one of the few units for whom SwissMade is the best option, since nothing else manages to meaningfully benefit him. Fitness may be a good option to focus on reducing his preparation instead, or even Scout to increase his overall survivability, making him less likely to blow up on top of friendly units. Fast food is also an acceptable option if he is used as a stall unit to protect others.

Firefighter can take advantage of both preparation time and agility watches, since he isn't required to be constantly present on field. +% Melee books are more preferable to him, as they allow Firefighter to deal with his main targets easier.

## Skins and Synergies

Firefighter is a part of Emergency team.

 Team

Firefighter is a strange choice, as he cannot benefit from the 2/2 power due to his fire immunity, and the others don't mesh well either. However, he still sees use, as he is one of the only proper attackers on the team.

## Trivia

* Before update 2.8.2, Firefighter used to be the only unit in the entire game with explosion immunity.
	+ Firefighter is now the only *human* unit with explosion immunity. Unlike other units which resist explosions (most of which are support items like Red Barrel and Turret), Firefighter is also immune to blood blasts created by Fat Zombie, Slob and Putrid.
	+ The TMF 2/2 team power appears to reuse this effect from the Firefighter, granting a 50% chance to avoid damage from an explosion.
* Although Firefighter has explosion resistance, his infected form does not.
* Firefighter's death explosion makes him the only fire-immune unit who can be reduced to ashes.
* Since his infected form is described to carry an oxygen tank, it can be assumed he also has one. Seeing oxygen's combustive properties, it does make his death explosion more accurate, despite deviating from normal compressed air tanks used by real firefighters.
* Firefighter is 1 of 3 base-game characters that do not have the skin, the others being Lionheart and Guard.

 Humans
 TMF Squad