Pepper

* Regular
* Police
* Builder

She was featured in the hit 2016 animated movie "Zootopia"

* Pepper
* Officer Pepper
* Carpenter Pepper

 **Pepper** is an IF road traffic patrol officer who was bullied by her colleagues. She is armed with a handgun and dressed in a light blue long-sleeved shirt with light gray highlights, gray body armor, blue pants, knee pads, a duty belt, and a blue IF cap. Some of her hair is kept in a short ponytail.

 **Officer Pepper** is Pepper's first exclusive skin. She is armed with a handgun and dressed in a policewoman's uniform with a police badge, black pants with yellow highlights, a brown belt with a yellow buckle, and a black officer's cap. Her hair is now black in color.

 **Carpenter Pepper** is Pepper's second exclusive skin. She is armed with a red nail gun and dressed in a dark gray T-shirt under a yellow safety vest, yellow pants, a brown tool belt with blue tools, and a red, blue, and white cap. Some of her hair is kept in a short ponytail and is now brown in color.

Carpenter Pepper has a different shooting sound.

She is a star reward, obtained for free when players collect 25 stars.

## Functionality

### Basics

Pepper is a **support**, meaning that she provides assistance to her teammates with special abilities and/or by dealing extra damage.

Pepper's health and bullet damage are both low, but she has fast movement speed. She costs a medium amount of courage and has a moderate preparation time.

She fires a semi-automatic pistol at a decent rate. She can fire 10 shots before having to perform a fast reload. If she gets into close quarters combat, Pepper does a slow, weak melee attack that can crit. It’s also noteworthy that, unlike most other ranged units who keep on firing at point blank range until they run out of ammo, Pepper prioritizes using her melee over shooting.

Some time after dying, Pepper will turn into Girl.

### Perks and Abilities

Pepper is able to dodge. When any enemy gets too close or tries to land a melee attack on her, she has a chance to perform a backward dodge roll that covers a far distance. If there is a fire pool behind her, Pepper will still roll into it, causing her to take fire damage.

Enemies struck by Pepper's melee attack will always be knocked back.

Undocumented, Pepper possesses a small level of fear resistance. Slightly more enemies have to be nearby to affect her performance.

At level 13, unlocking Pepper's special grants her the ability to give everyone on the battlefield the inspiration buff. Once she exits the bus, Pepper will blow a kiss. At the end of this animation, all other units will get inspired. This ability essentially makes Pepper an accessible version of Cap. It helps to extend her role as a support unit and improves her versatility to almost the same degree as Cap himself, but it still doesn't save Pepper from being a rather weak ranged unit herself. Unlike Cap however, her ability only activates once.

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

Pepper is a serviceable unit for early missions as she can provide damage support for other units. Thanks to her perks, she generally has a longer lifespan, equating to a longer time spent fighting on the battlefield. However, since she prefers avoiding damage rather than taking it, she may have problems fighting against waves of fast enemies which can overrun her. Her knockback perk can push enemies back only for a short distance and fast enemies can quickly close the gap she makes with either that attack or her dodge roll, which can force Pepper to the back of the battlefield and potentially leaving busy melee units ahead without support. In later stages, she will feel less viable due to her low health and low DPS, making it essential to replace her for stronger units unless the player aims to only use her for the inspiration buff. If that's the case, she's best used with at least two other ranged units for completion of slower missions.

### Skirmish

In League, Pepper is not a good choice for most levels as she will often find herself overwhelmed in battle due to lacking high DPS and bullet resistance. Her dodge roll can quickly save her from an enemy melee attack, but once she reaches near the edge of the field she will find herself cornered. Even with knockback, the high agility of most units in Skirmish will prove to be too much for her slow melee animation.

Despite all this, once her special ability is unlocked, she may prove herself to be a decent addition to any team composition as the inspiration buff can help her allies get the upper hand in the fight. Much like Cap, since she must go through the whole animation of her boosting her team, it's recommended that she's placed in the backlines, for her to apply the buff without being cut off short. While she does not have the same DPS or the bullet resistance that Cap does, Pepper is a more cost-effective alternative to him which can potentially allows room for other units.

### Item Sets

Being a damage oriented support, Pepper can be useful for her team with both passive sets, and the likes of Hunter. Generally, this ends up being the best option for an offensive Pepper setup, as it often happens with all other ranged units. Purely supportive Pepper can instead find use in Chef, which is only accentuated once her special is unlocked. For obvious reasons, Boss is not as efficient, since it's difficult to bring Pepper's preparation time to lower than 15 seconds.

Like the majority of ranged units, Pepper benefits most from preparation time watches and +% health and crit. chance books. She is also one of the few gunners who benefits from melee bonuses on items, since her kick comes into play often, though do not invest heavily into the stat.

## Skins and Synergies

Pepper, along with her respective skins, is a part of several teams: Internal Forces, Police, and Builders.

 Team

In all of the above teams, Pepper is a solid option. In the IF team, Pepper is more of an all-around good choice as she is one of the better units available in rotation. However, she doesn't benefit much from the abilities besides getting healing every now and then. As a builder, she can be used in synergy with the 2/2 power as freshly spawned extra units will get inspired by her kiss too. Same works the other way around, should the power create a free Carpenter. Police team benefits Pepper the most, making her much stronger than before by providing extended firing time, an extra layer of protection, and a way to increase her otherwise lacking damage.

## Trivia

* She's one of the four Internal Forces members, with the others being Ranger, Grenadier, and Light Soldier.
* Pepper as a whole was inspired by Judy Hopps from the animated feature film *Zootopia*. Her appearance resembles that of Judy, her deleted backstory is very similar to the plot of the movie, and she is referred to as "Judi" and "Judy" in the game files for her various skins.
	+ Before update 2.8.2, the Officer Pepper skin used to be called "Policeman Judi."
* Pepper and Private Rodriguez are the only two units to receive newly unique animations for their Special Abilities.
	+ Pepper's special ability animation of her blowing a kiss is directly copied from one of her iMessage stickers.
* Pepper, Sonya, and Specops all have the distinction of being the only three ranged units in the game who prioritize using their melee attack in close quarters combat, as other ranged units will fire at point blank range, only using their melee if approached very suddenly, or if they run out of ammo. This was likely done since all three of them have knockback on their melee attacks, and they wouldn't be getting good use out of the perk if they acted like any other ranged unit.
* Before update 2.7.0, Pepper had to be purchased with coins. The bus had to be level 3, and her price was 150 coins.
* In German localization, Pepper's info text explains that she was actually *demoted* to road patrol.
* In update 3.2.0.295 or Team Powers update, Pepper's sprite has been changed to replace police star on their cap with IF.

## Gallery

Pepper's old sprite. (Before the Team Powers update)Pepper performing her special ability.Pepper's dodging animationOfficer Pepper performing her special ability.Officer Pepper's dodging animation

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