Ranger

* Regular
* Marines

A fearless warrior that fights for honor and glory! But with a shotgun.

* Ranger
* Tactical Ranger

 **Ranger** is an IF member that fights for honor and glory. He is armed with a SPAS-12 combat shotgun and dressed in an urban camo T-shirt with a blue arm patch, a black armored vest, urban camo pants with several pouches, light gray gloves, a black balaclava, and a blue IF combat helmet.

 **Tactical Ranger** is Ranger's first exclusive skin. He is armed with a SPAS-12 combat shotgun and dressed in a grey shirt with a blue patch underneath a black tactical vest with pouches, a tactical belt with pouches, urban camo pants, blue gloves, a black balaclava, and a black combat helmet with raised ballistic goggles hidden under a black goggle cover sleeve.

He can be unlocked for 15,000 coins after reaching player level 10.

## Functionality

### Basics

Ranger is a **shotgunner**, meaning he will launch a cone of damage upon firing and excels at dealing with weak hordes and single tanky enemies up close.

Ranger is an advanced ranged unit with a fast movement speed with both moderate bullet damage and preparation time compared to other ranged units. His health remains quite low and has a moderately high courage cost.

Ranger fires semi-automatically at a fast speed, launching a cone of four pellets per shot. He can fire four times before preforming a relatively slow reload. If approached suddenly or while out of ammo, Ranger does a quick but extremely weak melee attack that can crit, before immediately dodging back and trying to reload.

Some time after dying, Ranger will turn into sergeant.

### Perks and abilities

Ranger is able to backstep and completely avoid melee damage in close quarters, albeit when compared to Pepper with the same perk, who dodges all the time, Ranger rarely ever performs his own dodge.

Ranger has 90% resistance to bullet damage and partial knockback resistance.

He also has a great level of fear resistance and more enemies must be around to negatively impact his performance.

Upon reaching level 13, Ranger's special ability can be unlocked, guaranteeing knockback on all of his ranged attacks. Since knockback also briefly stuns the enemy, it allows him to frequently stall them. However, Ranger's use isn't expanded upon, as many enemies he can knockback will often be eliminated immediately with the right upgrades, and those that are not easily killed may also be immune to his knockback. It also doesn't help that knocking enemies back can put them out of other units' range. His attacks could work on the likes of Twins and SWAT, pinning these slow enemies entirely while trivializing their bullet resistance, but overall it is of little use.

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

Implied to supersede the rest of shotgun users, Ranger generally fails at this due to his relatively low health. Instead, he acts more like a quicker, more offensive alternative to Policeman Diaz as his gun fires faster and reloads at about the same rate, granting him a better DPS. However, his bullet resistance doesn't matter due to his massive price tag, by then which most ranged enemies are of no relevance. On the other hand, Policeman has a much more useful melee resistance against zombies and is unlocked early for 1250 coins. He is even capable of tanking a Charged Zombie's charge attack safely, not to mention the potential of healing sources with him. As a result, Ranger must be supported with other ranged units in order to utilize him effectively. The more recent courage swap with Diaz does gives him some ground in this competition, but it's still not enough.

### Skirmish

In League, Ranger is a fairly strong unit to use. As a shotgunner, he's effective at taking out groups of vulnerable enemy units at once with spread damage, and his bullet resistance allows him to withstand enemy ranged attacks better. However, his dodge perk rarely saves his life, if he ever performs it, making it very ineffective in almost all cases. While he does do decent chip damage against bullet-resistant enemy melee units up close, he's still fairly vulnerable to them. Since knockback is disabled, his ability doesn't work either.

### Item Sets

Like most shotgunners, Ranger can meaningfully benefit from every ranged-damage oriented item set, be it Hunter or Military, with the latter being especially useful if you want to accentuate his crowd control capabilities. Fitness is also a good option if you want Ranger to not have any delays in his attack as he tends to be confused when targeting multiple enemies at once which can result in him dying as a result. If you are planning to use him in Skirmish, though, then the best choice is Tactical.

Like most ranged units, Ranger benefits most from +% Health books, which is accentuated by his squishiness. However, it's possible to achieve good results by giving him +% Crit. chance / +% Ranged damage instead, since he has one of the highest base damage stats among shotgunners. It must be said, though, that the latter works best only when Ranger is close to being maxed out.

Ranger benefits most from flat extra buffs, with health being the most desirable one. Preparation time watches are the better option as usual, especially since Ranger has high base agility.

## Skins and Synergies

Ranger, along with his respective skins, is a member of the following teams: Internal Forces (IF) and Marines teams.

 Team

In the both teams above, Ranger is never a bad option. He is a good choice for any synergy thanks to his speed, attacks, overall damage output and a moderate preparation time. In IF team, Ranger is the most efficient ranged unit for any synergy when compared to Pepper and Medic (IF skin), being able to get the full use out of the 2/2 and 3/3 powers which circumvent his somewhat lacking survivability and allowing him to provide actually meaningful support. This notably has synergies with the likes of Grenadier and Light Soldier, prolonging their lifespan. While the 5/5 power is largely inefficient, this is mostly attributable to the terrible team rotation.

Meanwhile, in Marines team, Ranger is a good filler to activate the 2/2 Team power and benefit Private Rodriguez, if players prefer to have a shotgunner over shooters or snipers like Sonya and Sniper Polina in the deck. Although he is unable to get the full use of the 3/3 and 5/5 powers, this is rather the fault of the synergies themselves and it doesn't impact his use as much.

## Trivia

* Ranger is one of the four Internal Forces members, the others being Grenadier, Light Soldier, and Pepper.
* In the game files, Ranger is referred to as "Hero."

## Gallery

Ranger's dodging animation

 Humans
 TMF Squad